young people - some of whom did not return to their villages until they retired - created a lasting exchange system between the valleys of the Grisons and Ticino and the city of Vienna. Emigrants were used to an existence alternating between a tiny Swiss village and a European metropolis such as Vienna. These workers represented a link between two apparently incompatible worlds and acted as intercultural mediators. The chimney-sweepers from the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland who migrated to Vienna in the 18th century taking their families with them may be classified as transnational migrants.
Anne-Lise Head-Konig, Back migrations in the pre-Alpine and
Alpine areas: towards a typology of ambivalences
(17th-20th century)
The concept of homecoming must be defined more accurately in the Swiss
context. The institutional provisions of the citizenship rights put a stop to numerous returns or repatriations, up to the middle of the 19th century: conversely
from World War I onwards, these laws allowed many people to “return” who
had neither been born in their home country nor ever lived there before then.
The typology of migrations has a considerable impact on return opportunities:
moreover, urban migration was utterly different from that (multi-formed) of
rural populations. On the other hand, back migration is no less a mirror of
the conditions prevailing at the start of the outward journey. Did it take place
as a voluntary type of migration or was it dictated by necessity (“involuntary
repatriation”)? There was also a forced (or: enforced) home-coming. Bear in
mind that the First World War meant a significant rift, as well as a notion per
se, for migrant workers returning home.
Patrizia Audenino, Which return migration? Different timings
and meanings of going back home in the Italian Alps, 1800-1900
Migration from the Alps is widely recognized as the prototype of circular migration. But in the past two centuries the timing of the return has changed so much that the same word is now denoting several different meanings. The paper intends to identify and describe different kinds of return, trying to place them
in a chronological sequence. In order to better understand these differences, the
