Grown up Youngstairs. New Profiles of Immigrants Girls in Italy

Who are and how do the young daughters of immigration live in Italy today? What are the reference values and the expectations for the future of the girls coming from a foreign family that grow up within the Italians? What attracts them and what do they reject of their lifestyles and of Westerner cultures? What are the major obstacles they meet, within their family and outside, in their path into social integration? What strategies of identity do they enact in order to live with the daily dilemma filled of callings from such different cultures? This paper narrates the final results of the research project Media, mode e amori dei figli dell’immigrazione [Media, fashions and loves of the children of immigration], an investigation that aimed mainly at the questions mentioned above, and that identified in the analysis of cultural costumes, of the expressive styles and of the sentimental relations of the territory, still unknown to Italian literature, useful to penetrate the private sphere of these existences. On the basis of the stories of the 45 young migrants interviewed, all between 17 and 25 years of age, resident in Rome and in the adjacent provinces, the author proposes the recourse to a new social category – that of the adult youths – as an ideal type to synthesizes certain reoccurring traits in the biographies of the young immigrant women in Italy.