15th Braga Meetings on Ethics and Political Philosophy 2025, 25th-27th June 2025, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal
When speaking of migration, one generally assumes a separation, between a geographical-cultural place of departure and one of arrival; a temporal succession, between the definition of a border and the movement of people; a verticality, in power relations. But what happens when the lines of space and time do not follow this (supposed) linearity? What narratives arise from threshold places, those where, as Walter Benjamin wrote, cultures coexist in contradiction, bending the universalist narratives of power? Places where discourses, boundaries and hegemonic categories are the ones changing around people, transferring them culturally from one place to another, making people migrants without migration.
This is the case of the Chicane community between Mexico and Texas. Chicanos are the descendant of Indigenous people and Spanish colonisers, ‘Mexican’ until the border was redrawn in 1848, resulting in the annexation of 1.36 million km2 and 100.000 people to the USA. Gloria Anzaldúa has made the perspective of this margin, the stratification of its discriminations and languages, the painful yet creative wound from which develop a different feminist epistemology – a new mestiza. As she writes,
A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.”
Another case is the one of the Meridione, in Italy. South of the global South in the global North – as the “PIGS” (Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece) are described by the hegemonic Western discourse – Meridione represents the crossing point between dynamics of colonialism, colonisation and self-colonialism; immigration, migration and internal migration; of internal and external racism as a reflection of the shifting of an imaginary yet political Western colour line that has seen Italians – and in particular southerners – slide in and out of ‘whiteness’ from the mid-19th century to the present day. In the last decade Italy has seen the blooming of a new anti-meridionalist, decolonial and feminist perspective. Among others, a Manifesto was published in 2024: ‘Femminismo terrone. Per un’alleanza dai margini’ (Claudia Fauzia and Valentina Armenta). Rooted in Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of the questione meridionale (southern question) and his concept of subalternity, as well as in the intersectional approach, ‘Femminismo terrone’ aims to unravel the threads of cross-discriminations and to propose a new political epistemology. This paper aims to highlight such epistemological critiques and political inventions developed from the margin to contribute to a more complex view of the concept of migration.
Photographer: Annika Gordon (2020)
Caterina Diotto 