«Es un tema familiar de sangre». Cittadinanza e pratiche famigliari tra i discendenti degli emigrati italiani in Uruguay.

The relationship between Uruguay and Italy has its roots in the migratory flows that began around the middle of the 19th century and continued until after the Second World War, resulting in large numbers of immigrants to the small South American country. Montevideo has a lively community of tanos, no longer children but grandchildren or great-grandchildren, many of whom apply for Italian citizenship based on ius sanguinis. Starting from the life stories of some Italo-Uruguayans, the essay deals with some key themes relating to the construction of their identity: the relationship with Italian food and the Italian language, family ties and the rituals of domestic life, the memory of migration, the journeys made to their ancestors' places of origin in the course of which Italy as an ancestral land is configured above all as a territory of the imagination. All these are spaces in which the terms of individual and family group identity are negotiated, identities that are fluid and changing. Finally, the dialogue with descendants reveals the reasons that led them to apply for Italian citizenship, reasons that are emotional, historical, social, political, and related to justice. From a citizenship point of view, the family practices of the descendants of Italians are configured as strategies of legitimation and the memory of migration in this context becomes a resource activated to act concretely in history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]