Migrant Families: Identity and Sense of Belonging

Abstract

In this article we have tried to establish the articulation between familial ties, social relations and identity construction, in the case of worker immigrant groups living in the peripherical suburbs of Tarragona. The main point of our work is the analysts of the mechanisms bu which symbolic universes, which support individual and collective identity, are re produced and transformed in a close rehtionship of dependence towards the social ties that the immigrants settle in their process of insertion into the receiving society. The conditions of extreme poverty within the social groups that we have studied provoke during the first years of adaptation to the new urban life, a situation of personal and familial crisis. In these conditions of reproductive difficulty, a tendency to the fusion of parental structures is generated in order to construct what we have called familial conglomerates. The neighborhood and fellowship relations act also as a filter to temper the difficulties by which individuals came through, in the economical, working, relational and symbolic-cultural contexts.