The Next-Door Migrant: Autoethnography of Everyday Home Encounters across Difference

Abstract

Homemaking as a process can involve different generations of migrants, connecting multiple stories and scales of mobility: local, national, transnational. This is the case of many tenement houses in Porta Palazzo, a neighbourhood of Turin (Italy) characterized by long standing immigration and cultural diversity. The “biography” of these migrant houses is articulated by the memories of negotiations, conflicts and misunderstandings that have arisen year after year about the various dimensions of shared living. In this chapter, starting from an auto-ethnographic approach, I follow the network of relationships I have established through the everyday encounters with immigrant and native next-door neighbours. The self-reflection about the challenges of reciprocal hospitality is the starting point for an exploration of the formal and informal activities that the tenants organize in the large courtyard of the building, on the threshold between the external, public space of the city and the internal, private space of the building. The liminality of the courtyard offers the chance to make it a transversal space for initiatives that support conviviality, interaction and solidarity, fostering the aspiration to live together across difference.