Slovenian Migrants in Transnational Social Spaces: Exploring Multilayered Identifications and Ambivalent Belongings

Abstract

The paper explores the complexity of identifications among Slovenian migrants coming from Argentina. The focus is on migrants who had emigrated from Slovenia and have now returned or who were born in Slovenian communities abroad and recently came to live in Slovenia. The primary aim is to shed light on the complexity of their feelings of belonging that emerged as a result of contemporary migration processes. The perspective that attempts to reveal the variety of their identifications presents a concept of home, yet this may denote a house, a family, a locus of belonging or imagined community. Considering migrants as a part of transnational diaspora stretched between Slovenia and Argentina, the intention is to represent the understandings of belongings that reflect the experience of having lived in social worlds that span two distant countries and how de-centred and multiple attachments and feelings of belonging to more than one place developed.