“I am Italian Colombian! That is how I feel. I’ve come to realise that there is no need to choose between the two as both are part of who I am”
Adriana has always centred her life, her studies and social commitment on the importance of understanding the reality that surrounds her in all its complexity and facets. Born in Bogotà, she moved to Italy at the age of 11 to reunite with her father and with those who would later become her mother and sister, both of Peruvian origin. Through her grandfather from Bergamo, who emigrated to Colombia in the 1920s, she inherited the Italian passport, which she considers a privilege and that did not, however, prevented her from navigating a complex identity path. In fact, in her early years at school in Turin, she went through a phase of rejection of her Colombian-ness and Latin American-ness’ to be equal to the other children, only to fully embrace it again during her adolescence, this time rejecting her italian-ness. It was only after several years that she was able to embrace and affirm both.
“I am Italian Colombian! That is how I feel. I’ve come to realise that there is no need to choose between the two as both are part of who I am”.
Later, she came to terms with the reality around her. In 2009, she pursued two significant paths, her involvement in the Migrantour project in Turin, and her university career in law. The first, is a project that focuses on creating spaces of intercultural encounters through urban itineraries led by intercultural companions who share their personal perspective of the city shaped by their migratory backgrounds. In law school, however, she encountered a very different reality. From the very first lessons, she realised that what she was going to study was focused on an outdated notion of the state and the law. This, indeed, included only Italian citizens and excluded all those who lived on the Italian territory and did not have citizenship rights, for example. She realised the distance between the academic world and the society she observed and lived in and, “it was as if there were two cities and two communities, intertwined in reality, but separate in theory and rights especially”. She decided to turn to the field of migration and asylum law, and in the meantime, in search of her own path, she approached the world of international cooperation. For two years she worked as an international collaborator, first in Poland with Ukrainian and Chechen asylum seekers, then in Thailand with the Karenni community from Myanmar, who had been refugees in the border area between the two countries for decades. Back in Italy, she turned the project that had shaped her the most into a career, becoming the coordinator of Migrantour and related EU and AICS projects in Genoa. She continued to look for opportunities in the world of cooperation and, not finding what she was looking for, she decided to go back to study.
In 2020, she embarked on a master’s degree in Social Policy and Community Action in Barcelona, the city where she currently lives and to which she has always been very attracted to because of its socially active population. She focused on the study of communities that self-organise to give a collective response to their basic needs given the abandonment they feel from the State. Today, she continues to dedicate herself to research on these issues through a PhD in Public Policies and International Relations focusing on female migration linked to care work. Adriana is part of the generation that witnessed the arrival of many women in Italy, in Turin especially from Peru, to work as carers and this has always aroused curiosity and questions in her.
“I’ve always been intrigued by this phenomenon whereby the woman leaves the people she is theoretically taking care of, as her children and parents, to travel to another country and take care of other people’s parents and children”.
Public policies are generally designed around the ideal of an individual who is solely dedicated to paid work and has no other responsibilities. A design that hardly fits women’s reality as they must usually combine working with their unpaid care work. In addition to trying to eradicate the connection between care work and gender dimensions, Adriana focuses on the conflict that women in general, and migrant women in particular, experience on the one hand, and how social policy can be – or not – a resource on the other. In her research, 80% of the protagonists are migrant women who narrate their difficulties as, often, single mothers with limited resources. Moreover, from the empirical data collected through interviews, the fundamental role of communities in supporting women emerges. Adriana believes that in migration factors such as age, the reasons for moving, the passport one holds or not, and the complex situations experienced during the journey mark people and influence the way they live and behave. Belonging to the same community also brings people together and to express certain common characteristics. Something she witnesses in Barcelona, where the italian community is the largest immigrant community.
“When we are migrants, we follow very similar dynamics. We look for food, music, habits we know, people who speak our language. We look for ways to feel closer to home and in the process, we relate to others”.
In Spain, unlike Italy, she found an academic world that put her at ease, thanks to a more welcoming environment and to the possibility of having an employment contract that safeguards her as a researcher. However, living in Spain as a Latin American person is still different given certain legacies of the colonial era that persist and continue to view Latin American people as products of the civilisation brought by colonisation.
She misses her family, but at the same time she feels a privileged migrant as she can return to Italy often. She misses typical Italian things like the attention to details and space, in Barcelona everything is much tighter. She misses the Peruvian food cooked by her mother, and at the same time, the Colombian Arepas bring her mind and heart back to Colombia, with her grandmother. She loves dancing salsa and listening to those lyrics of social denunciation typical of the eighties but often overshadowed by that rhythm that automatically gets you moving. In short, “the place you’re born and the environment you grow up in shape who you are, they are part of you”.