Dual Citizenship, Ancestry, and the Racialized Politics of Inclusion in Italy

This paper examines the contested issue of citizenship access for individuals of foreign origin in Italy, a topic central to ongoing national debates on migration and identity, which increasingly reflect exclusionary and ethnic understandings of citizenship and belonging (Aime 2020). These tendencies are evident in the recent tightening of the 1992 citizenship law – which further restricts access for those with Italian ancestry – and in the political resistance to reform, notably the failure of the June 2025 referendum to reduce the residence period required for naturalization. Yet the number of individuals acquiring dual citizenship continues to rise (Strozza et al. 2021). Building on previous research, we focus on young Italo-Brazilian adults in Rome. Data were gathered through ethnographic observations and four focus groups involving participants with diverse background. The mobility practices of the research participants shed further light on the contradictions at the intersection of both the European mobility regime (Ambrosini 2021) and the Italian citizenship framework (Tintori 2009). For many South Americans, ancestry serves as a strategic pathway to pursue transnational mobility (Tedesco and Bertagna 2014; Blanchard 2020). At the same time, individuals’ strategies to navigate and challenge the legal and symbolic boundaries of citizenship reveal the racialized and selective logic that underpins contemporary representations of national belonging in Italy (Hawthorne 2022). Citizenship, far from ensuring full inclusion, functions as a conditional and negotiated status, shaped by individual characteristics such as race, class, and cultural capital. As such, it becomes a site of ongoing contestation between institutional frameworks and lived experiences.