As a member of the Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing (ASSA) research project, I am doing fieldwork among migrants working in Santiago de Chile. Among the many diverse migrants who live in this city, I chose to work with Peruvian migrants. Peruvians are the largest immigrant group in Chile: they represent 25.2% of the migrant population, according to the 2017 census. Many of them have been living in this country for over fifteen or more years, and most of them live in Santiago (65.2% of migrants live in the Metropolitan Region).

During the first weeks of my fieldwork, I asked a Peruvian colleague –who was also living far away from his country– on advice about meeting his countrymen here in Chile. He advised me to approach Christian confraternities. Confraternities –in this case Peruvian– are groups of people who honor their local Catholic devotions. I started then to frequent a catholic church in the centre of the city, which is famous for being welcoming and supportive of migrants. There I met Peruvians belonging to several different confraternities. Some of these confraternities honor Peruvian Marian devotions, such as the Virgin of Chapi, from the southern city of Arequipa, or the Virgin of La Puerta, from the northern city of Otuzco. Others honor Peruvian saints such as San Martin de Porres or Santa Rosa de Lima. All of them were as proud of their devotions as welcoming to my ethnography.

Among all of the confraternities, I decided to join the most diverse in terms of regional origin, including even non-Peruvians: the Hermandad del Señor de los Milagros (Confraternity of the Bearers of The Lord of Miracles). This devotion originates in Lima in the seventeenth century and, although the largest confraternity can be found in the capital city of Peru, there are local confraternities –such as the one I joined in Santiago– all over the world, from São Paulo to New York (even in Hamamatsu, Japan). “Wherever there is a Peruvian there is the Lord of Miracles”, so I’ve heard them quote of Monseñor Hidalgo, the spiritual guide of the main confraternity at the Nazarenas church in Lima.

The brothers and sisters have been very kind to me and have allowed me to join them in several activities along the year, such as regular meetings, spiritual retreats and ‘polladas’ (traditional funding events where chicken dishes are sold). The biggest event of the year is the Lord of Miracle’s procession at the end of October, called the purple month, due to the typical color that identifies this devotion as seen at a number of activities (shorter processions, masses, retreats, etc). The main procession, lasting eight hours, takes place on the last Sunday of October. As a sign of the place of Peruvians in Chile, the procession goes from the Cathedral of Santiago to the migrants’ church, gathering thousands of devotees. I was invited to join one of the groups of thirty people carrying the 1.5 tons image. ‘Carrying’ is not only a body technique one needs to master (the hands at a certain position, the steps following the music) but also an honor. Besides, ‘carrying’ is a complex concept whose meaning linked to faith and community I am just starting to grasp.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most of the miracles I have been told about are in fact related to health: a surgery that went well, a disease that was beaten against all odds, a tumor that turned out to be benign. As far as I can understand, prayers and processions do not substitute medical procedures. I see in the chains of prayers, the dedication of a procession stages, and the participation in funding activities a sense of community, a display of collective care. What is interesting for our study in the ASSA project, is that this particular devotion is not only an expression of belonging, of tradition continued abroad, but it also opens the door to the study of the relation between faith and health.

References

Institituo Nacional de Estadísticas Chile. 2018. Síntesis resultados Censo 2017. Santiago: Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas Junio / 2018.

 

 

 

Conversations between people meeting for the first time are often marked by the question “where are you from?”. In some cases, this may be the natural utterance of, say, a curious neighbour, while in other contexts the question may be positioned and/or received as a significant political issue. Here in Milan, questions of roots and routes (Clifford 1997) have characterised many of my daily conversations with people. On the one hand this is perhaps not surprising, since I have chosen to conduct research within a ‘superdiverse’ (Vertovec 2007) neighbourhood, where identities blur, bend, and bounce in a myriad of compelling ways. In another sense, this can also be put down to my own presence here: the ethnographer with a not-so clear nationality, with a first name that sounds foreign for some, but familiar to others. This predicament of being myself una straniera (a foreigner) is proving a socially rich point of contact and connection with all kinds of people in this part of the city, particularly within the different activities I am involved in as a ‘participant-observer’, such as attending and assisting in Italian language classes for foreigners. But there is a deeper, historical facet to questions of origins in northern Italy that is a core facet of my ethnographic research.

Many people here in Milan can be regarded in one way or another as a migrant – including Italians from the south of the country, many of whom came during the economic boom of the 1950s and 60s. In his film Rocco and His Brothers (1960),
Luchino Visconti, a pioneer of the socially conscious Italian Neorealist cinema of the post-war period, shows how migrants and their families from the south faced significant social challenges in adjusting to the different experience and pace of urban, industrial life in the north – alongside the pain and nostalgia of missing or losing one’s home.

Throughout the course of the film, the Parondi family, recently moved to Milan, struggle between their traditional values – of family duty and honour – and the more individualistic society creating its vision of a modern lifestyle in the big city (Bondanella 2001: 196-199). Ultimately, the family unravels at the seams, highlighting, among other issues, the difficulties of integration.

In reality, over time, the majority of internal Italian migrants settled, secured jobs, got married, and begot future generations. Today, these are the elderly Italians that I meet, and who live side-by-side with newer generations of foreign migrants, who have themselves come to Milan in recent decades seeking work, following their families, and pursing economic stability.

In several instances in everyday life, such as at the local Friday market, all of these peoples can be seen sharing economic and social space, while in the political sphere, questions of identity continue to divide groups and foster allegiances.

This history of various mobilities has been described to me here as follows: “there is no Milanese – we are all foreigners!” Or, a similar sentiment put in the reverse sense, “no one is a foreigner” (see image below).

These expressions appear to emphasise the community’s general attitude of respect for the co-existence of many cultural and ethnic groups here. Their term ‘Milanese’ however is clearly not the same reference point as it is, say, for the wealthier, noble families who have been part of the city’s political and cultural life for centuries – including the family of Luchino Visconti. So while the framework of my study might have been positioned to compare the experiences of Italians with migrants, in effect I am unearthing the deeper historical issues of rupture and rearranged family structures, as well as the wider interplay between mobile phones and mobility, that affect all of these populations. The task, therefore, is to explore and illustrate precisely how these processes have as much to do with the different historical experiences of the various Italian populations, as they do between Italian and foreign others.

References

Bondanella, P. (2001). Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, 3^rd edition, Bloomsbury.

Clifford, J. (1997). Roots: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Harvard Universtiy Press.

Vertovec, S. (2007). ‘Superdiversity and its Implications’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 30, Issue 6: New Directions in the Anthropology of Migration and Multiculturalism.