AMOR E IDENTIDAD. EL CASO DE LA MIGRACIÓN MEXICANA EN ITALIA

Abstract

Seventy- three per cent of Mexican migration to Italy are women (Institute of Mexicans Abroad, 2016) and most of them have fallen in love with an Italian man. They said they had left a job, a house and a family to realize a kind of European dream. Unfortunately, sometimes the dream does not go as planned. Through a detailed analysis of 35 interviews with migrant Mexican women from different Italian regions and by using  an ethnographic approach; this article argues that there is a love migration phenomenon in Italy. This kind of migration, which has not been motivated by a political or economical reason, is out of the Mexican migration studies for its apparently low numerical consistency. As a result, the process of being a woman in another country is most of the times ignored. Hence to work with identity, love and migration some important questions may arise: How is it to be a wife, a mother or a widow when migrating? How does the identity have to change or adapt? What are the cultural heritage patterns that are followed and what are the ones that are lost? The study invites to explore this questions from a interdiscplinary approach to discover another side of the migration phenomenon.