Displaced memories in the Trieste border area

Blog post by Roberta Altin, University of Trieste, Italy
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How do memories, histories and representations of past migrations influence current migration processes in a border region? How do migration processes shape a borderscape, and how are memories interwoven across different historical layers?
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Migration studies have grown significantly over the last two decades, leading to specialization in specific areas. While academic interest in migration has increased since the so-called 'migration crisis', the connection between migration studies and memory studies, especially regarding how perceptions of the past impact immigrant integration, is rare.

It is useful to view migration alongside integration contexts such as cities. My Identities article, ‘Displaced memories in the Trieste border area: a never-ending historical entanglement’, focuses on the Trieste border area, known for its cultural diversity due to the historical presence of different languages and migrations, and intertwined socio-cultural dynamics. Time plays a key role, and public spaces, materials and oral memory sources are also examined. 

Recent migration debates have started to address temporalities, and this paper uses memory studies to analyze collective memory in the lives of refugees and migrants. Based on a long-term ethnographic and qualitative research project, the study explores migration patterns and the intersection between migration and social change in Trieste, a city with a complex cosmopolitan history. Trieste’s identity and prosperity have been shaped by its location as a bridge between central and southern Europe, making it a crossroads for migrants (especially refugees) since World War II.
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My article analyzes four key migration phases in Trieste: the exodus of Italian refugees from Istria and Dalmatia (1945-1960); refugees from the Yugoslav civil war (1991-2005); asylum seekers from the Balkan route (2015-); and displaced persons from Ukraine (2022-). Each phase involves different reception dynamics, social inclusion processes, and interactions with various actors. A comparative approach examines refugee experiences in camps and transit spaces, focusing on the legacies of previous migrations. Comparing different historical phases within the same border context reveals shifts in migration processes: places and objects used by migrants as well as the material, political and symbolic aspects of borders.

My article emphasizes the importance of considering the mobility and immobility of migrants in negotiating their agency within specific contexts. It also explores how memories of the past influence the reception and integration of migrants today. Adopting a migratory stratification approach, combined with a deeper historical vision, is useful to focus on ‘what remains’ and on stratification, rather than on ‘what disappears’. At the same time, it requires us to observe migrations, while keeping together both the lines of continuity and discontinuity in a non-segmented perspective that tends to isolate facts from their socio-historical process (Della Puppa et al. 2024).

While Europe explores its roots through the archaeology of the past to shape a collective identity (Herzfeld 1997migrants in transit are seen as 'foreign' bodies disrupting national order, especially in borderlands. In life and death, their passage often leaves no trace (Wyss and Dahinden 2022). The invisibility of refugees, as members of no 'cultural' group, defines them as transient and potentially dangerous (Yi-Neumann et al. 2022; Douglas 1966).

The visible and sedimented signs of historical migrations, captured through objects, memories and narratives, thus become fundamental tools for analyzing the passages and transformations of the border space of encounters, intertwined with the different subjectivities that have crossed through it. Until now, this research practice has focused on presences, but in the perspective adopted here, absences, invisibilities and silences are also fundamental.

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​Image credit: Objects abandoned by migrants after World War II. Author’s own.

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Read the Identities article:
Altin, R. (2024). Displaced memories in the Trieste border area: a neverending historical entanglement. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.​ DOI: 0.1080/1070289X.2024.2444789

Read further in Identities:

Negotiating one’s own belonging: envisaging the Japanese (Im)migratory stratification through immigrant-origin youths’ narratives

Migratory stratifications: a new analytical tool for investigating social change

Utility workers: religion and the migratory stratification of foreign nurses across generations