Global Networks 11, 1 (2011) 1–23. ISSN 1470–2266. © 2010 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd & Global Networks Partnership 1
‘We took a bath with the chickens’:
memories of childhood visits to the
homeland by second-generation Greek
and Greek Cypriot ‘returnees’
RUSSELL KING,*
ANASTASIA CHRISTOU AND JANINE TEERLING
Sussex Centre for Migration Research, School of Global Studies,
University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9SJ, UK
*
Corresponding author: r.king@sussex.ac.uk
Abstract Drawing on a wider study of 90 second-generation Greeks and Greek
Cypriots who have relocated to their ancestral homeland, in this article we focus on
the significance of childhood visits to the homeland. Freedom – how children were
allowed to roam free and stay up late – is the key trope of such memories, in contrast
with the strict spatio-temporal parenting they received in the host country. Different,
sometimes less pleasant memories, however, emerge when the visits took place during
later, teenage years. We explore the connections between childhood visits and adult
relocation. Adult returnees find that settlement in the homeland produces a new set of
challenges and reactions that differ markedly from childhood experiences and
memories. They engage a second narrative trope, nostalgia, reflecting on the loss of
the ‘authentic’ nature of the homeland and its customs and values. Instead, they
highlight the materialism and xenophobia of Greek and Cypriot society nowadays.
However, they see the ‘homeland’ as a safer place in which to raise their own children.
Keywords SECOND GENERATION, RETURN MIGRATION, CHILDHOOD, MEMORY,
TRANSNATIONALISM, GREECE, CYPRUS
Relatively little has been written about the transnational links of the second
generation with their parents’ country of origin, and even less on their experiences of
childhood visits to the parental ‘homeland’. In this article we aim to explore these
childhood transnational visits, taking as our empirical frame a comparative study of
three second-generation groups – US-born Greeks, German-born Greeks and Britishborn
Greek Cypriots – now living in the ‘homeland’, Greece or Cyprus, where most
of them have moved as young adults. We explore their memories of childhood visits
to their respective ‘homelands’, including the role these visits had on their later-life
decisions to relocate to Greece or Cyprus in the longer term.
Russell King, Anastasia Christou and Janine Teerling
2 © 2010 The Author(s)
The extensive literature that now exists on return migration and transnationalism
for the most part is resolutely focused on the first generation (King and Christou
2008: 9–12). For return migration this might be semantically justified because the
second generation does not ‘return’ to a place from which it never came (in terms of
birthplace statistics). On the other hand, the affective connection to what is often
regarded as the ‘home country’ may be very strong, so that the ‘return’ has
ontological meaning even if it contravenes the logic of migration statistics.
For transnationalism, the explanatory excuse might be that the migration is so
recent that the second generation does not yet exist, or that migrants who have
children have left them behind in the care of spouses or other family members,
sustained by migrant remittances. While these demographic arrangements of
transnational migration are undoubtedly widespread, it is evident from the postwar
immigration histories of western Europe and North America that migrations of family
settlement have occurred on a very large scale, with substantial host-country-born
second (and now third) generations. It is also true that these second generationers are
being intensively studied, but this research focus is normatively guided by their
progress along the path of integration or assimilation into the host society.
Scholars are now beginning to challenge this last statement. Several chapters in
Levitt and Waters’s (2002) edited book on the transnational lives of the second
generation in the USA describe visits to various ‘homelands’ by older teenagers and
young adults (but not by younger children). In their ‘ethnographies of the new second
generation’ in New York, Kasinitz et al. (2004: 6) acknowledge that ‘in every group
we talked to [Caribbeans, Chinese, Latinos and Russian Jews] there are at least some
second-generation people who are strongly tied to their parents’ homelands. They
visit annually, send money, and even contemplate settling there.’ Other significant
studies on second-generation transnationalism include Robert Smith’s (2006)
acclaimed ethnography of ‘Mexican New York’, Tsuda’s (2003) equally original
multi-sited ethnography of Japanese Brazilian nikkeijin, and a raft of recent papers on
second-generation returnees to Barbados by Phillips and Potter (2005, 2009) and
Potter and Phillips (2006a, 2006b, 2008). Also worth noting are two recently edited
collections, one on ‘ethnic return migration’ where generational specificity is often
blurred or ignored (Tsuda 2009), and the other on the return of the ‘next generations’
(Conway and Potter 2009), which includes case studies of both second-generation and
other ‘youthful’ returns. Susanne Wessendorf’s research on ‘secondos’, secondgeneration
Swiss Italians and their links to their southern Italian towns and villages of
parental origin (see especially Wessendorf 2007, 2009), is geographically closer to
our work. So too are studies of the Greek ‘overseas’ diaspora in North America and
Australia that touch directly or indirectly on second-generation transnational links and
‘return’ moves (Panagakos 2003, 2004; Tsolidis 2009).
Peggy Levitt’s (2009) latest contribution to this debate reasserts a focus on
homeland influences and includes references to Boston-based young persons’
homeland visits to India, Pakistan, Brazil and Ireland. Her conclusion, namely that the
second generation is situated among competing generational, ideological and moral
reference paths, including those of their parents, grandparents, as well as their own
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© 2010 The Author(s) 3
real and imagined perspectives on their multiple homelands, helped to inspire our
study. Our core methodology has been the collection of life narratives from secondgeneration
Greek Americans, Greek Germans and Greek Cypriots who had relocated
to their parental home countries.
We see the homeland visit as a performative act of belonging and (potentially) of
researching and discovering one’s roots (cf. Fortier 2000: 3–5). The ‘roots’ metaphor
has powerful resonance in studies of diaspora and of tourism directed to real or
imagined homelands (Wessendorf 2007). For Basu (2005), who did fieldwork in the
Scottish highlands and islands, ‘roots return’ is both actual physical mobility –
expressed through visits to ancestral and heritage locations – and a more collective
general project of (re)connection to the homeland. For Baldassar (2001), studying
Italo-Australians visiting their ancestral villages, these long-distance returns have the
character of a secular pilgrimage. For childhood visits, individual agency will vary
according to the age of the child and whether their parents ‘took’ them or they
travelled independently as older individuals, such as college students.
This article, then, is about childhood, memory, multiple notions of home and
eventual relocation to the ancestral homeland. While all these aspects are potentially
interconnected, none is straightforward or simple. With childhood, the age boundary
is blurred and we hear different interpretations of homeland visits in the narratives as
the child matures into adolescence and adulthood. We use this biographical timeline
to structure the article, which – following a section on methodology – is in three parts.
In the first, we explore the key themes that emerged from narrative memories of
childhood visits. These are keen anticipation, fun, freedom, human and climatic
warmth, nostalgia and, for older children, boredom and family pressure. In the second
part, we link childhood visits to return migration as adults. In the final section, the
participants reflect on their relocation and draw contrasts between their childhood
experiences and their lives now.
Methods
Our key research instrument is the life narrative, collected from quota samples of
three returnee groups (30 in each). Most interviews were carried out during 2008, but
fieldwork also comprised pilot studies in 2007 and follow-up contact with many
participants in 2009.1
Roughly equal numbers of men and women were interviewed.
There are no official figures on second-generation returnees in Greece and Cyprus, for
they are a hidden group in censuses and population statistics. Our a priori belief that
working-age returnees would be mainly concentrated in urban areas, for employment
and social reasons, led us to focus our fieldwork in four main urban centres – Athens
and Thessaloniki in Greece, and Nicosia and Limassol in Cyprus – but we also
interviewed some respondents in smaller towns and villages.
Given that this is an ‘unknown’ population, the choice of participants could not be
a random sample. The researchers’ personal networks offered one entry into the
recruitment process, but we resisted the temptation of easy snowballing and aimed to
ensure a diversity of participants by careful use of intermediaries and other contact
Russell King, Anastasia Christou and Janine Teerling
4 © 2010 The Author(s)
strategies (Christou 2009). That so many participants spoke about childhood visits in
the same way and with the same themes emerging encourages confidence in our
findings and compensates, to some extent, for the lack of a rigorous sample frame.
While we recorded a few narratives at the first meeting, most occurred after a
preliminary meeting had taken place to brief the participant and deal with ethical
issues. In most cases, we also arranged follow-up meetings to clarify and discuss
findings. Typically, each ‘narrative performance’ lasted for one to two hours, but
there were quite wide variations, especially where we recorded two or more sessions
with the same participant.
2
The narratives were participant driven: minimal interrogation and something
approaching a ‘vow of silence’ were our operational guidelines. This does not mean
that the interviews were unstructured. Given the life histories of the participants as
second-generation Greek or Greek Cypriot ‘returnees’, and the pre-announced theme
of the research, most participants’ ‘narrative maps’ were built around mobility, as
well as around issues of identity and belonging, which are always acute among
diasporic people (Chamberlain and Leydesdorff 2004: 233).
Our narrative-based approach draws both on an established tradition of oral
history research in migration (Thompson 1978; Thomson 1999) and on recent
arguments that we now live in an age of ‘small’ or individual (as opposed to ‘grand’)
narratives (Goodson 2006). Narrative theorists such as Mishler (1991) see narratives
as a central device of self-identification and of how we give meaning to our lives. The
social and spatial contexts in which narratives are set are, however, equally important.
The bridge between personal biography and cultural history connects the internal
world to the external world. Life narratives work their way outward through a series
of onion-like circles – self, family, others, community and the whole society
(Plummer 2001: 243).
As Chamberlain and Leydesdorff (2004: 228) point out, while migrants’ memories
are not part of the standard scientific toolkit for studying mobility, they remain a
uniquely insightful way of accessing migrant experience, sensitivities and identities.
The inevitable question arises: if verbalizing memories is an act of representation (and
of performance in the interview setting), then what is the relationship to fact? Are
such retrospective narratives ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ reconstructions of self, home and
the past? But are these the right questions to ask? Memories are often more than mere
repositories of fact: they are an act of remembering that can create new meanings and
understandings, both of past and present; they can ignite our imaginations and enable
us vividly to recreate our reflections of home as a haven filled with nostalgia, longing
and desire (Agnew 2005: 10). Let us see how this powerful statement resonates with
our second-generation returnee participants, whose feelings of home are likely to be
unusually fluid and ambivalent.
Key themes in memories of childhood visits
First, we need to make an important point about the timing of the three emigration
streams that underpin the second generation. Greek Cypriot migration to Britain
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was largely a phenomenon of the 1950s and 1960s. Greek migration to (West)
Germany was roughly contemporaneous, except that it started a bit later: its heyday
was the 1960s and early 1970s. Greek migration to the United States has a much
longer history, starting more than a hundred years ago and continuing, with
interruptions during the two world wars and the Great Depression, until the 1960s.
These different historical phasings have implications for the appearance of
generational cohorts. For Greek Cypriots and Greek Germans, second-generation
returnees tend to be aged between their late twenties and early forties and to have
returned within the last 20 years. Greek-Americans, on the other hand, embrace a
wider age range, including some who returned several decades ago and who are now
quite elderly, as well as young returnees who are the progeny of Greek migrants to the
USA in the 1960s. The age of the interviewee is important as this will closely govern
the historical time (the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s) at which childhood occurred, and
therefore the stage of ‘development’ that Greece and Cyprus were in when childhood
visits took place.
‘Every summer we would go to Greece’: on frequency of visits, and the journey
Given distance and cost, returns were more frequent and regular from Britain and
Germany than they were from the United States. Most Greek Cypriot and Greek
German respondents remember returning every year, for the summer break of a month
or so. For some it was twice a year, adding a second trip at Easter or Christmas. Here
are some typical brief quotes.
3
Every summer we would go to Greece, every summer, for about a month.
(Thomas, 29, Greek German)
As we were growing up, every summer, every summer, my father would bring
us over to Cyprus. (Alexandra, 37, Greek Cypriot)
My father used to bring us on holiday twice a year to Cyprus to keep the
Cypriot culture. (Angela, 41, Greek Cypriot)
Note the patriarchy evident in two of these quotes (‘father would bring us to Cyprus’)
– a theme to which we shall return later.
For most Greek Americans, returns were less regular, above all because of the
extra cost:
We would come to Greece like every two or three years in summer. … They
[parents] would really save up – it was a big thing and they geared everything
towards, like they wouldn’t buy us designer clothes and things like that
because they were saving for a trip to Greece.
(Anna, 34, Greek American)
Russell King, Anastasia Christou and Janine Teerling
6 © 2010 The Author(s)
For the USA and the UK, at least since the 1970s, returns were by air, which meant
that for older interviewees, regular childhood returns would have been unlikely. Mike
(57, Greek Cypriot) remarked that, when he was a child in London, family holidays
were to Brighton and Hastings, not to Cyprus. Return visits from Germany, on the
other hand, were usually overland, by car – which brought its own challenges. The
following quote is a nice evocation of the performativity of the annual trip down to
Greece, as well as of its materiality – the ‘exchange’ of high-quality Germanmanufactured
consumer goods with the Greek products of the soil:
Every summer vacation, six to eight weeks, by car. Actually, it’s a traditional
Greek-German vacation, by car, so you can carry all the things you want to
carry. This is the nightmare of everybody, three days in a car, with all that
stuff. … I remember, like, in the beginning [laughs], it was like vacuum
cleaners and televisions … there was a time in Greece thinking that everything
that has a German brand name is better. … So you were carrying all that stuff
back and you were putting all the Greek stuff in the car and bringing it back to
Germany. It’s like litres of olive oil, of wine and cheese and God knows what,
that you cannot put on a plane.
(Rebecca, 41, Greek German)
‘Like a big playground’: of sun, fun, beaches and freedom
Childhood memories of visits were almost always very positive, especially during the
pre-teen years. There was the obvious feeling of being on holiday (but on a rather
different type of holiday than for children from a non-migrant background), with
frequent references to sun, sea, beaches, idyllic villages, nature and the countryside,
and a warm welcome from family members (cf. also Wessendorf 2007: 1087 on
Swiss-Italian children’s holiday returns). One word stood out in the narratives of all
these summer holiday visits – freedom. Children saw themselves as allowed much
more freedom to run about without supervision, to stay out late, and to do things that
were forbidden in their ‘host’ countries. This was especially noticeable in the GreekCypriot
narratives, which suggests that the contrast between the ‘safeness’ of Cyprus
and the ‘mean streets’ of London (or other big cities) was sharper than between
Greece on the one hand and Germany and the USA on the other. The contrast
between freedom in Cyprus (and Greece) and restrictions in the host country was
most striking for the female interviewees, reflecting the powerful gender dynamic of
Greek and Cypriot family life.
Where, exactly, did the childhood visits take place? The narratives reveal quite a
complex geography of types of place. Some parents (first-generation migrants) had
bought flats or houses by the sea, so holidays were divided between the coast and
staying with relatives inland. Both in Cyprus and Greece, most emigrants leaving in
the 1950s and 1960s came from villages and small towns, as both countries had
mainly rural, agricultural economies at that time. Other emigrants came from the
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Greek islands. Hence, the holiday returns could be to any of these kinds of location.
That is not the full story, however, because while emigration was taking place other
family members (especially the emigrants’ brothers and sisters) were migrating
internally, to Athens, Thessaloniki or Nicosia. These places might also therefore
feature on the return-visit itineraries, except that in the summer peak these cities
empty out as people go back to their villages or decamp to the coast. Either way,
beaches and the seaside, and villages and the countryside, are the two most frequently
mentioned topoi – inevitably in idyllic terms.
We would come to Athens for maybe a week, maximum two weeks and stay
with my aunt, and then we would go to the village and spend time by the beach
and, you know, play in the water … as a child it was like a play time … it felt
like my big playground.
(Demetra, 34, Greek American)
When I was very small [and visiting Cyprus] I used to go to the shops in
[names village] and ask for things and walk down there, be a Cypriot. And my
father, he was someone of, not importance, but someone of recognition in the
village, and they always knew who I was and said hello to me, so I felt a big
part of all that was going on. My father would invite all his friends back to the
house and we’d have big barbeques and meet all his family, his friends, and
really have a nice [time] and the music, a lot of music everywhere, yeah, and I
enjoyed it. … I learnt more about my parents on holiday than I ever did living
with them 11 months of the year in the UK!
(Maya, 42, Greek Cypriot)
This friendliness and sense of community, especially in the villages, links closely
to the main trope of the childhood narratives, freedom. From dozens of examples,
here are two descriptions taken from British Cypriots, whose interview material is
particularly rich on this theme. Note how often the holiday visit to Cyprus is
associated with a significant childhood or adolescent event, like learning to ride a bike
or going out to a disco for the first time. And note how relationships with Cyprusbased
cousins are so important, both in accessing ‘freedom’ and acting as ‘protectors’;
in other words, ‘it’s all right as long as you are with your cousins.’ The first extract is
from Theodora (28) and is in two parts: first, she describes her upbringing in London;
then she switches to holidays in Cyprus.
Growing up in London was … when you’re like me, my generation – like you
said, second-generation, our parents, because they were fresh from Cyprus and
they came to a strange land, they stuck with their communities a lot. We lived
in Palmers Green, which was a very Greek area. I was brought up quite
strictly, because I was a girl. My brother could go out, he could play, do
whatever he wanted but I had to stay at home. I had to be escorted by my
brother while I was going out, stuff like that. … My parents brought me up, or
Russell King, Anastasia Christou and Janine Teerling
8 © 2010 The Author(s)
tried to bring me up, within our culture. I had it embedded in me that I was
Greek, that I was Greek Cypriot. … I had friends in school, but I wouldn’t go
round to their houses. I really socialized more with my cousins than I did with
my friends. And, if I had a friend from school they’d have to be approved by
my parents … my mother’d have to meet the parents. … She was just so
worried. … She’d always say to me, you know, ‘not that I don’t trust you, it’s
just that I don’t trust everybody else.’ … I was driven to school, to my
embarrassment, up to the age of 15 [laughs out loud] in a battered Mazda, oh it
was really embarrassing. … Whereas my brother could go on his own … and I,
er, was encouraged to do chores around the house, whereas my brother didn’t
have to do it ’cause he’s a boy and I’m a girl, and I’m supposed to know how
to do it, ’cause I’m gonna be a housewife, and all that kind of rubbish … and
that’s it. … Oh yeah, slumber parties, I wasn’t allowed to do that, ’cause I
wasn’t allowed to stay at somebody else’s house overnight, my mum didn’t
trust like an English family or whatever.
…
And the funny thing was that when I was on holiday here in ’95, you know 15,
mid-teens or whatever, the first time I went out was actually in Cyprus. … My
cousins here – this is when I found out ‘wow, we really are so different’ – so
we were like ‘yeah, we’re going out’, and for some reason, as strict as my
mum was in England, she would let me do whatever I wanted in Cyprus, it was
so bizarre. … And, you know, she was different … in England if I wanted to
go down to the shop I wasn’t allowed, but here I could just roam around and
do whatever I wanted … so I kinda enjoyed the freedom of the holidays. And
my cousin was going to take me out, and my mum was like ‘all right as long as
your cousin looks after you’; even though she was three months younger than
me [laughs] she was looking after me, ’cause I was from England and I didn’t
know my way around [laughs]. And that was the first time I went clubbing. It
was in the tourist district [of Limassol], it was really funny. I just wore
something normal, you know, not super-trendy, just something to go out in.
And my cousins were with their mini-skirts and they had a full face of makeup
on, they had their highlights, and I was like [mimics shocked expression]
and I felt like a baby actually, I really felt like a child, even though I was 15.
Among many significant interpretive remarks that could be drawn out of this long
interview extract, we highlight the gendered upbringing of sons and daughters within
the Cypriot community in Britain, the multiple social roles of cousins in both London
and Cyprus, and the ‘confrontation’ between models of youth behaviour and ‘growing
up’ in the two places. This ambiguous ‘reverse’ encounter between the ‘traditional’
and the ‘modern’ was raised by other interviewees too, both in the context of
childhood visits and in relation to their current lives in Cyprus (and Greece). The most
common explanation was the ‘inversion’, through migration and its temporal and
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© 2010 The Author(s) 9
generational effects, of the ‘expected’ relationship between the ‘traditional’ (Cyprus
as a poor emigration country and colony of Britain) and the ‘modern’ (Britain as
wealthy, modern and cosmopolitan), but even this interpretation has its twists and
nuances. Theodora again says:
So there was a difference … and whilst I was brought up strictly and thought
that everyone else was like that, the reality was … the Cypriots here looked
down on us, because they saw us as villagers. … I always enjoyed seeing my
cousins over here and stuff, even though I got teased as well – they used to
take the piss out of my Greek [laughs]. They saw us as villagers ’cause we
went, or people left after the war or whatever, and they kept their traditions as
tightly as possible. And most of them were village traditions, because they
were brought over from the village, whereas they [the Cypriots in Cyprus] had
become Europeans, they’d become modern, and progressed, and they see us as
being backwards a bit, which I actually find hilarious, ’cause it’s the other way
round. The thing is that actually we are more open-minded, more worldly, than
they are. … You know, I’m 28 now and I’ve moved over here and have a
career [she works in property development], and I know people my age that
are still getting money from their parents…
Once again, this raises many interesting issues to which we shall return later in the
article. For now, let us hear one more ‘narrative of freedom’. Although female
interviewees like Theodora related the most striking accounts, young males
experienced similar contrasts:
Oh yeah, I remember coming over, my first holiday I remember, I was six.
Cyprus was very different back then. I remember the beach, I remember
staying in the village; we had a house in the village. I remember staying in the
flat here in Limassol. … I remember my cousins, playing with my cousins. I
remember the food of course. Cyprus was brilliant because you got to play
without any restrictions. … You didn’t have to be home by a certain time, my
parents felt safe leaving me out with my cousins, they’d never have to ask
where we were. I remember I learnt to ride a bicycle in Cyprus and as soon as I
learnt, I was out everywhere, whereas in England I wouldn’t have dreamt of
getting a bicycle. I remember I wasn’t allowed to play anywhere apart from
our garden in England, whereas in Cyprus as long as there’s someone that they
knew with me I could be anywhere. … I felt a lot freer as a child in Cyprus.
(Harris, 29, Greek Cypriot)
‘They were gonna marry me off here’: teenage and later experiences
Some, however, during their later teenage years, had more mixed views of Cyprus.
Particularly in the villages and away from the towns and beach-life, Cyprus seemed a
Russell King, Anastasia Christou and Janine Teerling
10 © 2010 The Author(s)
duller place with not much to do. In other cases, interviewees realized that the trips
were a chance for family members to introduce them to a potential marriage partner,
which they generally did not appreciate. ‘I didn’t want to come here when I was older
… because there was pressure from my father’s family that they were gonna marry
me off here’ (Tania, 48, Greek Cypriot).
For Greece, the picture is somewhat different. On the one hand, there seems to be
more continuity of pleasant feelings through the various phases of childhood; and, on
the other hand, we find more young people, particularly in their college and university
years, visiting Greece independently, so the encounter with the homeland may be less
family-oriented. Nevertheless, for many, visiting relatives in villages could be boring:
We got here as fast as we could and my dad would get us out in the
countryside. We spent most of the time just visiting family and you know
having huge feasts … like these long visits to people and their friends … the
relatives … you know often boring visits where we had to wait and wait until
they finished talking and stuff and really dull.
(Anna, 34, Greek American)
And because my mom has so many sisters we met every summer and spent our
time between [names a series of places where various sisters lived]. We spent a
lot of time near Plagiari because it was closer to the beach and there was more
room to stay. Easter-time we’d skewer lambs in the yard, summertime we’d
have lunch all together after the beach, oh, it was just great, wonderful. In
Athens I have [names another aunt and cousins] … and I’d spend half my time
there … we went to the beach … and every evening we’d go out, you know,
when we were younger just for a coffee, juice or a walk, and then as we got
older for a beer or clubbing, this and that. I stopped going to Agrinio [her
mother’s rural village] in high school because it was boring. Can I talk about
my memories [of Agrinio]?
(Magda, 36, Greek American)
‘We took a bath with the chickens’: on tradition, backwardness, authenticity and nostalgia
The question at the very end of the last extract leads into the next key theme from the
childhood narratives, reconstructing what was seen as a traditional and now
disappeared (or fast disappearing) way of life. Magda’s retrospective continues:
My favourite memories of Agrinio are, I guess, culture shock, coming from
San Francisco to a house that had no inner plumbing. … There was a hole in
the ground, with spiders and cockroaches, ants, big ants, I’ve never seen ants
so big, moths at night, mosquitoes, all kinds of creepy-crawly things, and you
had to squat there. It was awful – every time I went in there, there was the
stench and the bugs. That was a bad experience but looking back I think it did
‘We took a bath with the chickens’
© 2010 The Author(s) 11
me good. I don’t know how, but I like it that I have the memory of that. … The
good memories I have from that house is playing in the yard with the chickens,
yeah because the back of the house was a hencoop and I didn’t mind waiting
for the water to heat up on the wood-burning stove and to pour it into the tin
buckets to take to the bath in the hencoop [laughing]. We took a bath with the
chickens! … I remember my grandmother, old lady just in black with long
braids, and I was always kind of afraid of her. She looked scary to me; missing
teeth. I have images of her chasing a chicken round the yard and finally
grabbing it, cutting its head off and that thing running around headless until it
dropped. I had been looking from the window, I was so … mesmerized,
shocked. And I would tell these stories to my friends back in San Francisco
and they thought I was lying. … I remember the taste of the food; it was so
good; the chicken had a different texture and a different smell and some
flavour, and the bread, there is no bread like that … the smell of bread baking
and the wood-burning stove … anything that was cooking just tasted so good. I
was always a stick because I never ate in San Francisco but when I was in
Greece, I always ate and put on a few pounds. I loved the food, the chicken,
the tomatoes, the cheese, the fruit; I remember eating pizzas and ham … and
just getting soaking wet from the juice of the pizza.
Sights, sounds, smells and tastes all emanate powerfully from this evocative account
tinged with nostalgia on the one hand and more than a hint of scariness on the other –
the toothless grandmother, the headless chicken and the foul-smelling toilet. The
quote resonates closely with Agnew’s (2005: 10) remark about migrant memories
being ‘surrounded by an emotional aura that makes them memorable’. Such reminiscences
repeatedly emerged from the accounts of early visits, especially those of the
older participants whose childhood visits were in the 1960s and 1970s. They
remember the villages, especially, as sites of consumption, gifts, hospitality, plentiful
food and family warmth. Here, ‘our Greek (or Cypriot) cousins’ figure prominently
both because among families of this era they were generally so numerous and because
they were the obvious contemporaries with whom to play and ‘hang out’.
Loads [of family], yeah, they’re like cockroaches. My mother is one of nine
children, so there’s lots of aunts and uncles and cousins, extended family, great
aunts, and even neighbours that we’d call uncle and aunt. … Everybody made
such a fuss of you, all aunts and uncles, pushing money into your hands, that was
always a good thing! [laughs] and eating everywhere you went. In Cyprus you
get that sense of welcome, of hospitality. … You must sit down; you must eat.
(Marcus, 35, Greek Cypriot)
Some expressed nostalgia for a rural way of life that has all but disappeared:
…when we first came here in the 1970s, like Greece was so different. … We
would go to the village … we’d ride donkeys and … it’s not like that any
Russell King, Anastasia Christou and Janine Teerling
12 © 2010 The Author(s)
more. … When you come to Greece [nowadays] you’ve still got beautiful
places, but in the 1970s, for instance there was almost no trash back then.
People didn’t use packaging, like they would reuse it, like the cans that they
put flowers in … it was a different context to the States where we had grown
up [where] there were all these consumer things and the packaging and trash.
(Anna, 34, Greek American)
The sensual experiences of these childhood and earlier-life visits particularly struck
others – the landscape, the smells, heat and so forth. As Mike put it: ‘Every time I got
off the plane and that heat hit you in the face, and the smell of Cyprus, the dust, it was
strange, very strange, I can’t describe, you know, it felt like I’d been away and come
home, instead of the other way round’ (Mike, 57, Greek Cypriot). We shall pick up
these themes of nostalgia for the ‘authentic’ Greece and Cyprus in the final part of the
article. For now, we look at the links between memories of childhood visits and the
subsequent, often much later, decision to relocate to the parental homeland.
Linking childhood visits with adult relocation
With respect to the Caribbean, Duval (2004) has addressed the relationship between
the return visit and return migration, though in the context of first-generation return.
He argues that ‘migrants use such trips both to retain ties to their former homeland
and to aid in their social reintegration upon permanent return.’ They see the return
visit as a ‘conduit’ through which to maintain ‘social visibility’ in their ‘external’
homeland, as well as a ‘transnational exercise, bridging identities’ between the two
poles of the migration (Duval 2004: 51, 54, 62). Two things, however, differentiate
our study from Duval’s and make our research questions inherently more complex.
First, since we are dealing with the second generation, notions of ‘home’, ‘homeland’
and ‘return’ are more fluid and harder to pin down. Second, the connections we are
trying to make are between childhood visits (it was adult visits in Duval’s case) and
return, which takes a lot of the direct agency away from the explicit decision-making
link. In fact, Duval (2004: 52) notes that the return visit, at whatever age it takes
place, may not be explicitly causal, but that it only has an indirect influence on the
decision to return on a long-term basis.
Our narrative evidence fails to give a consistent answer to this question. Sometimes
a direct causal connection is made, but in other cases different factors are at
play, such as how an individual’s return is embedded in wider family dynamics of
migration and return, marriage, relationships (or their break-up), or just serendipity.
Sometimes a sense of ‘home in the homeland’ (Christou 2006) is derived less from
regular childhood visits than from a ‘diaspora’ nurtured sense of ethnic identity.
Mike’s remark at the end of the last quote reveals that, for him, Cyprus has always
been home, despite being brought up in London and not making visits to Cyprus in
his early childhood (in an earlier quote he said he was taken on holiday to English
seaside towns). Mike maintained that he always felt Cypriot and always knew that
one day he would live in Cyprus, though this did not happen until he was 53:
‘We took a bath with the chickens’
© 2010 The Author(s) 13
[Growing up in London] I felt Cypriot in every way, although to listen to me
now I’m very English. … I knew one day I would come to live in Cyprus, it’s
something that’s always been inside, I don’t know how or when but I knew. …
I knew I would eventually settle here.
(Mike, 57, Greek Cypriot)
Other narratives echo Mike’s essentialized view of himself as incontrovertibly
Cypriot and of Cyprus as his natural home. Each, however, reflects different circumstances,
as one would expect. Again, in different ways, each reflects the link between
childhood upbringing (including homeland visits) and subsequent ‘return’. Thomas’s
parents encouraged him to attend the Greek high school in Germany, which preserved
his ‘Greekness’ (especially his competence in the language) and, combined with
regular summer visits, shaped his later decision to move to Greece to attend university
and develop a career:
I had just finished the third year in high school and I had to choose whether or
not to continue with the Greek high school on a regular basis without attending
the German one any longer. I had just had a very nice summer in Greece. My
mother would tell me constantly to continue with the Greek school, for us to
return to Greece, you know the usual things we are told. … And she got her
way, she managed to convince me … I simply wanted to return to my
homeland. Every summer we would go to Greece and during the summer
Greece is always very beautiful with a lot of sun and sea; we were nostalgic for
this when in Germany. I can say that this was the basic reason.
(Thomas, 29, Greek German)
What we see here is a kind of ‘family narrative of return’ – led in Thomas’s case by
his mother – which, together with the idyllic summer visits, nurtured Thomas’s desire
to ‘return’ to Greece, which he did at the age of 19, independently of his parents.
Below is another example, this time from Cyprus:
My father would bring us over, he has eight brothers and sisters, my mum has
six, and most of them were living over here. So he would take us around the
whole of the island, you know, meeting them, making sure we knew our roots,
and knew our family, knew who we were, you know. And that was what did it
[made my mind up about moving to Cyprus]. I never wanted to go back home
[from these visits], never; whenever we were leaving I’d be, like, ‘I don’t want
to go, let’s stay here.’ … So I always wanted to [move to Cyprus] one day,
yeah, yeah, I did. My mum and dad, you know, I think every Cypriot family
over there [in England] always says, you know, ‘once we get ourselves [this or
that], once we get enough [money], once we’re old … we’ll go back’; it’s
always like that, I think it’s inside them somewhere … they always want to go
home.
(Alexandra, 37, Greek Cypriot)
Russell King, Anastasia Christou and Janine Teerling
14 © 2010 The Author(s)
What is also interesting about the way the parental narrative of return is passed on
is that it often results in the second generation turning it into reality, whereas the
parents themselves do not return, at least not when their children do. Wessendorf
(2009: 9–11) found the same transgenerational syndrome in her Swiss-Italian study:
the immigrant parents transfer the ‘dream of return’ to their children, and only the
latter turn the dream into reality. Research that Tracey Reynolds (2008) carried out in
the Caribbean develops this perspective more explicitly. According to Reynolds, the
family narrative developed around the ‘myth of return’ is integral to the British-based
second generation’s return orientation; these narratives ‘act as important social
resources in sustaining the second generation’s emotional attachment to the family
homeland and in influencing the decision to return’ – alongside, of course, other
practical considerations (Reynolds 2008: 2).
Reflecting on relocation
In the final section of the article, we examine the themes the participants reveal when
they talk about their recent lives in Greece and Cyprus. As this is a broad agenda, we
focus mainly on the contrasts that participants draw when they compare their
experiences of resettlement with their earlier childhood visits. We have already given
some clues on how these comparisons play out: for instance the ways in which Greece
and Cyprus have changed over the intervening period.
‘Now you have to speak Greek’: no longer a visiting child
The change of ‘atmosphere’ among family and friends – less present and welcoming
than remembered from childhood visits – is the first theme we explore. Here is a
typical reaction:
Everyone [in the family] seems very busy and I found out very quickly that it’s
one thing when you’re here on holiday and everyone makes time for you, and a
different thing when you actually move over here, ’cause everyone just kinda
disappears. I didn’t get that help, or I didn’t feel that hospitality that I got when
I was here on holiday, I just felt very, very much alone. And I had no friends,
’cause when I was here [on holiday] I was here with my family, and I didn’t
make any friends. So I was just really really alone.
(Theodora, 28, Greek Cypriot)
Angelo experienced a similar ‘shock’ when he returned to Cyprus, but he shows a
greater awareness of the reasons for the difference (‘I came as an adult, not as a
child’) and even suggests that the lack of a warm family welcome was a good thing as
it acted as a reality check:
The most exciting thing for me was to see all my family. But none of them
showed any interest, and … that was a really big shock; to me it was so
different from my experiences as a child, which I think I was clinging to, as a
‘We took a bath with the chickens’
© 2010 The Author(s) 15
means of making my stay here a rationalized thing, the decision to move to
Cyprus. So that was what changed: I came as an adult, not as a child, which is
very different. … In fact it has been good in a sense that it has killed that
romanticized image of mine, that came from childhood – it has brought me
down to earth.
(Angelo, 36, Greek Cypriot)
Over in Greece, Rebecca, who had relocated from Germany, experienced a
different reaction because she had gone back to her father’s village where she was
made to feel she had to ‘behave’ in a different way – as her father’s daughter and
speaking Greek.
I came out of Germany where I lived a normal teenager life, in a normal
environment as far as I was concerned, into a little village where rules and
regulations … you know, you’re on show when you walk through the
village, and all that stuff. … And the other thing I remember, you might
call it cultural, was this idea that as soon as I was here, as soon as I moved
here … all of a sudden there was this expectation. ‘Now you have to speak
and understand Greek’, because you have to show off as the daughter of
a Greek man that you can be Greek too. … I’ve felt this pressure all the
time.
(Rebecca, 41, Greek German)
This quote brings out the importance of the urban/rural context of the ‘return’ and
how, in particular, it reveals different gender relations. Rebecca’s experience in a
village in Greece resonates with the reactions of young Swiss-Italian women going
back to their parental villages in southern Italy. Here, too, gender relations are still
‘traditional’ and expectations of behaviour and employment roles are highly
constrained. Young single women are unable to (in fact they are forbidden to) live on
their own, so they stay with family members. This makes them ‘feel constantly
controlled by their relatives, and gossip in the villages is suffocating’ (Wessendorf
2007: 1095). On the other hand, our research reveals how gender dynamics can also
work the other way round: some young women look to Greece and a large city there
as an ‘escape’ from the gendered claustrophobia of the family-dominated ethnic
community in the diaspora.
This in turn opens up other debates about how much the ‘homeland’ societies
have changed over the years (often two or three decades) separating childhood
visits from adult relocation. Within this domain, two themes were dominant in the
narratives – immigration and consumerism – and the ‘returnees’ were often harshly
critical of both. These criticisms were sometimes ideological, but often they
expressed surprise and disappointment that globalization had sullied their holiday
experiences or their parents’ collective narratives of a ‘pure, authentic’ Greece or
Cyprus.
Russell King, Anastasia Christou and Janine Teerling
16 © 2010 The Author(s)
‘We too developed xenophobia’: reactions to immigration
Both Greece and Cyprus have passed rapidly from being countries of mass emigration
(until the 1970s) to countries of mass immigration during the 1990s and 2000s.
Nowadays, Greece has more than a million immigrants (in a population of 11 million)
whereas in (Greek) Cyprus there are an estimated 100,000 immigrants in a total
population of 800,000 (Baldwin-Edwards 2004: 4; King and Thomson 2008). For
many interviewees, this ‘migration turnaround’ (King et al. 1997) corresponds to the
period between their childhood visits and their adult return; hence, large numbers of
immigrants and a de facto multi-ethnic society are part of the social setting with
which they have had to come to terms as settled residents. Their responses to this new
and perhaps unanticipated reality are quite mixed and ambivalent. To some extent,
one can see these reactions in the light of their upbringing in their birth countries,
where in nearly all cases they grew up in large or medium-sized urban centres
surrounded by other immigrant nationalities. On the other hand, many of them also
described their upbringing as in a tight Greek or Greek-Cypriot community with little
interaction with other ethnic or migrant groups, or even with the host society outside
school. The reality of large-scale recent immigration to Greece, primarily from
Albania, and to Cyprus, from a diverse mix of East European and Asian countries,
often challenged the participants’ memories of an older, ‘traditional’ Greece or
Cyprus. Yet, they had been living in countries with longstanding immigration
histories and, with the exception of Germany where Greek migrants were invariably
guestworkers or low-class restaurateurs, rather multicultural social models. Here are
some reactions:
We too developed xenophobia, we Greeks changed too, we have become more
suspicious. … It is simply that Greece was not prepared economically and
socially to put up with this [immigration]. … The Germans were ready when
they took this step to bring in foreigners. Greece was not ready and
consequently people have changed.
(Martha, 30, Greek German)
In Cyprus it has changed quite a lot from a country of out-migration, like our
parents who moved to England; now it has lots of new immigrants. … I like it,
I like it. Um, who am I to say for people not to come into the country – I’m for
everyone to live where they want, and I think multicultural places make it
very, erm … if it weren’t for the crime … ’cause Cypriot people aren’t
criminals. … On the whole there’s no crime in Cyprus, and now where all the
different cultures are coming in, it’s becoming more and more … it’s gonna
spoil it a little bit here.
(Angela, 41, Greek Cypriot)
The second of the above quotes is a perfect illustratration of the kind of
ambiguity that runs through many of the interviewees’ reactions to immigration.
‘We took a bath with the chickens’
© 2010 The Author(s) 17
They clearly understood its inevitability as part of globalization and development
and were at times able to recognize its historical links with earlier phases of
migration to Germany, the UK or North America. They generally welcomed the
advent of a multicultural society, but had reservations about the scale of recent
immigration, the country’s unpreparedness for it, the high rates of ‘illegality’,
cultural difference and its possible link to crime. Note how Angela’s account slips
from multiculturalism to crime. At the same time, some participants were very
critical of the racist attitudes of Greeks and Cypriots towards immigrants from poor
countries. Marcus on the other hand denied Cyprus was truly multicultural and
focused more on trying to ‘explain’ Cypriots’ racism towards foreigners as
unintentional and based on ignorance rather than malice:
… and from a country that’s been ethnically cleansed 35 years ago [referring
to the Turkish partition of the island and the population exchange of 1974], all
these new faces are coming: Nigerians, Cameroonians, Sri Lankans, Indians.
It’s not so much racism [towards them], it’s curiosity and ignorance that
provokes this kind of reaction, it’s not maliciousness. I don’t find Cypriots
particularly vicious in their attitudes, just ignorant of other cultures, because
they’ve been divided and they’ve been kept pure all of this time, and anyone
who has been born in the last 35 years has grown up in this vacuum. It’s not
multicultural, despite the shitloads of immigrants that are in the country, ’cause
they’re second-class citizens, they’re an underworld, they’re the cleaners,
they’re the people that dig up the road, they’re not part of society.
(Marcus, 35, Greek Cypriot)
‘Cypriot girls are so Prada, Gucci, Audi’: on materialism and snobbery
Alongside immigration were woven a series of discourses about globalization,
Europeanization, materialism, consumerism, sharply rising living costs and snobbery.
Let us return to the interview with Marcus.
One of the things I forgot to add to my hate list – ‘What do I hate about
Cyprus?’ – is that the girls, people generally, from their twenties onwards, let’s
say from 20 to 40, I mean Cypriots, are very snobby, uptight. It would be nice
to find a relationship with a Cypriot girl, but some of them are so Prada, Gucci,
Audi, how much money you got. … And they’re nowhere near as friendly as
the English girls, to have a relationship; to be completely cool about
something, to go up to a girl in a bar and say ‘hi, would you like something to
drink?’ She’d be, like, ‘yeah’ and you start chatting away. In Cyprus you don’t
get that; you get this cold, like this [mimics a snobby look], they turn around,
look you up and down, like you’re a piece of crap. This is what I don’t like
about the younger generation in Cyprus. How can a culture that’s so warm and
welcoming come to split away from that? That hospitality that I experienced as
a kid … seems to get less and less.
Russell King, Anastasia Christou and Janine Teerling
18 © 2010 The Author(s)
Part of the context for this has been the transformation of the Cypriot economy since
the first generation emigrated in the 1950s and 1960s. No longer poor and rural,
Cyprus has enjoyed high growth based on a productive mix of light industry,
intensive agriculture, offshore services and tourism. These trends were well in
evidence before Cyprus joined the EU in 2004 (King and Thomson 2008: 283–7).
Meanwhile, second-generation migrants relocating from the expensive UK property
market, especially from London, have been able to enter the Cypriot housing market
at a high level and some are able to use liquidated assets to initiate a small business.
Greece has witnessed a paler version of the trends just outlined for Cyprus. The
economic booster effect of joining the EU took place 20 years earlier, and the Greek
economy has profound structural problems of inefficiency, unemployment and
informality. Moreover, economic life appears to have become much more difficult
since the country adopted the euro in 2002. Peter (73, Greek American), who had
relocated to Greece in the early 1970s, emphasized the dramatic change in the cost of
living during his long period of residence in the country:
[Back then] the style of living was so easy and cheap. That is another big, big
factor … it does not make economic sense to live here any more. …
[Nowadays] Greece is very, very expensive – more expensive than the States
and more expensive than most European countries. … When I lived here in the
1970s, you can’t imagine how cheap it was. I mean, going out to eat was an
everyday occurrence because it was so cheap … and the cost of living was just
so low. … It’s totally changed now.
From a different age group, Theodora (28, Greek Cypriot) mounted a similar
critique of the materialism and rising cost of living in Cyprus in recent years, again
making the historical comparison with the years of their childhood visits.
It’s all about how you look over here, it’s so materialistic, and I don’t know
how they can do it, because it’s so fuckin’ expensive as well, because coming
here on holiday I thought Cyprus was so much cheaper, but actually living
here, and now that the euro has kicked in, it’s really expensive. But everyone
has to have a big house, they have to have their expensive car, they have to
have their labels, they have to have their Louis Vuitton, and their Gucci …
because they think it’s fashionable or they saw someone else with it.
Closing the cycle: from childhood visits to child-rearing
Despite such harsh opinions towards change, they see the general social environment
of Greece and especially Cyprus as favourable for nurturing the next
generation – the children of the second-generation returnees. They thus repeat the
generational migration cycle, with the experiences of one childhood reprised in
bringing up the next.
Theodora, who was so critical of the materialism of Cyprus in the quote above,
‘We took a bath with the chickens’
© 2010 The Author(s) 19
came round, later in her interview, to a much more positive evaluation of the country
as a place in which to bring up children. Like many interviewees, she focused
particularly on the safety angle, but also mentioned the more gregarious social life
and the physical environment, so favourable to outdoor activities:
Don’t get me wrong, I said a lot of bad things about Cyprus, but there is a lot
of good things too. Like the safety … I’ve reached an age where I am like,
28 and I got a serious relationship, a boyfriend, and if I think about having a
life together, about having a family, I’d be … could I raise a family in
London? What life am I gonna give them? I would probably turn into my
mum. As much as I hated that she was so strict with me, I would have even
more reason to be strict with them now … you hear about stabbings and all.
Whereas over here kids have such a wonderful life, they have a better
upbringing – they go to school, half-eight, they finish at midday, they can go
to the beach, they have the mountains, they can be safe, you know, as long as
you mix them with the right people. And you do socialize more here,
although the sun can make you feel a bit lazy … Like now, it’s September,
every night something is going on, someone is coming over, and you can go
on walks, have activities, weekends away, day trips away; we go out more
than I ever did in England.
There are strong parallels between the arguments Theodora raised about Cyprus
and the findings on Caribbean second-generation return migration. Research by
Reynolds (2008: 15–16) and by Phillips and Potter (2009: 244–5) reveals many cases
of second-generation British-born people taking their young children to the Caribbean
to bring them up (or to have children there) in a ‘safer’ environment. Phillips and
Potter (2009) describe this type of return as the ‘lure of the ancestral home’ offering a
better quality of life. Yet, in other respects, this child-oriented pattern of secondgeneration
return embodies a certain irony. As Reynolds (2008: 12) puts it:
It is perhaps a strange paradox that first-generation parents migrated from the
Caribbean to the UK in search of better opportunities and economic success
for themselves and their children. Yet their children are motivated to return
back to their parents’ homeland to achieve those same ambitions for
themselves and their own children.
Moreover, with this return of the second generation, plus their children – are they
third-generation or the second generation of the second generation? – the cycle starts
to repeat itself. These children, born in Greece or Cyprus of returned secondgeneration
Greek or Cypriot parents, will have their own transnational ties back to
their parents’ birth countries (Germany, the USA and the UK); maybe their
grandparents still live there. Evgenia, now aged 54, relocated from her birth-country,
the United States, in 1977 to Greece; she and her family took a holiday back to the
USA in 1994; for the children it was a trip to their ‘other homeland’.
Russell King, Anastasia Christou and Janine Teerling
20 © 2010 The Author(s)
Oh, it was fun. The kids loved it … they really liked it a lot. They considered
Boston fantastic. My son was … because my son is into athletics … when he
saw all those playing fields, the baseball fields [laughs]. … He didn’t want to
leave. No, they like the States a lot. We took them to Disneyland you know,
and of course we went back so they could meet the other side of the family
where I grew up.
Conclusion
Taking Greece and (Greek) Cyprus as homeland countries, in this article we have
examined the discourses and memories of childhood visits paid to these homelands by
second-generation Greeks from Germany and the United States and Greek Cypriots
from Britain. There is little exploration of this topic in the literatures on the second
generation, return migration and transnationalism.
Return trips with parents are generally remembered in glowing terms, for reasons
of climate, time spent by the sea, the warmth of family and above all freedom.
Children were given much more leeway to do things, go to places and stay up late
than their parents would have permitted in the respective immigration countries. The
generally ‘safe’ environment in Greece and Cyprus, and the surrounding network of
cousins and relatives who can be ‘trusted’ to look after the holidaying children is the
usual explanation for this. However, holiday visits are also times of the year when the
normal boundaries of family discipline are relaxed, matching the generally relaxed
mood of parents on vacation.
Teenagers, however, found the visits less enjoyable and more constraining – again
this is often true of teenagers’ views of holidays with parents. Some interviewees
remembered being bored at that age on family holidays, or feeling constantly watched
and judged (see Levitt 2009, referring to Indian Gujarati return visits).
Although some interviewees articulated a more or less direct causal connection
between childhood visits and the subsequent decision to return to live in the homeland
as adults, often such direct links were not evident and the adult return was seen as an
individual project, albeit sometimes beset by family circumstances. Reactions to the
experience of longer-term settlement were rather consistent among second-generation
returnees: the warmth of the ‘family embrace’ fades as the pressures of everyday
living take over and both Greece and Cyprus have ‘moved on’ since the childhood
years. Socially and economically, returnees experience both countries as having
become less ‘authentic’ and more consumer oriented. With varying reactions, they
pinpoint immigration as a significant recent phenomenon. Joining the euro zone
appears to have made both countries much more expensive places in which to live.
Our final point concerns how the ‘returnees’ interpreted this modernization and
Europeanization of Greece and Cyprus. One reaction noted from Cyprus was surprise
at how liberal their Cypriot cousins’ upbringing had become, compared with their
own sheltered childhoods in supposedly more progressive, cosmopolitan societies in
the USA or northern Europe. There are complex processes going on here to do with
rural vs. urban cultures, class and generational differences, and host and homeland
‘We took a bath with the chickens’
© 2010 The Author(s) 21
communities. Most Greek and Cypriot migrants originated from rural areas and left
their homeland at a time of economic stagnation. Since their departure, economic and
cultural globalization has enveloped their homelands, along with EU integration.
Tourism, too, has been a powerful agent of modernization, while rural–urban
migration has drained the traditional character out of village communities.
Meanwhile, the original migrants have clung to their old values, reproducing
microcosms of rural Greece and Cyprus in urban London, Stuttgart or the Greek
districts of New York. Levitt (2009) refers to this propensity of migrants abroad to
hold onto traditional values from the homeland as the ‘ossification effect’, seeing it as
a spatio-temporal disjuncture between emigrants’ and non-migrants’ actual and
metaphorical journeys. This effect accentuates the contradictions and halfway positionalities
of second-generation migrants both when they visit and when they relocate
in the long term; moreover, the relationships can fundamentally change between these
two types of return encounter. All are part of the ‘human dynamics of migrant
transnationalism’ (Carling 2008), within which the second generation, and their visits
home, are an under-researched component.
Acknowledgements
The AHRC funded the research for this article under the ‘Diaspora, Migration and Identities’
programme; our project is entitled ‘Cultural Geographies of Counter-Diasporic Migration:
The Second Generation Returns Home’. The main project is on Greece (Russell King and
Anastasia Christou); an AHRC doctoral studentship held by Janine Teerling supported the
Cyprus case study, which is connected to the main project. Thanks also to two other members
of the project team, Ivor Goodson and Tracey Reynolds, and to three referees for their helpful
comments.
Notes
1. Anastasia Christou carried out the interviews in Greece and Janine Teerling in Cyprus, the
latter as part of her D.Phil. research. See Acknowledgements.
2. One of the authors (Christou 2006) had tried and tested these arrangements in an earlier
study.
3. We annotate each interview extract with a code: pseudonym, age and migrant group.
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