“So, now I am Eritrean”: Mobility Strategies and Multiple Senses of Belonging between Local Complexity and Global Immobility Osvaldo Costantini and Aurora Massa Some months ago I met Misan in Rome with some Eritrean friends and she introduced herself as an Eritrean refugee like all the others. This morning we were drinking a coffee together and while I was speaking about Shire [an Ethiopian town, in the regional state of Tigray], suddenly she revealed to me she had come from there, that she was not Eritrean but Ethiopian despite having obtained political asylum as an Eritrean. (Fieldnote, 13 May 2012) his excerpt from our ieldnotes leads us into the aim of the article, 1 which is to shed light on some mobility strategies put in place by migrants travelling from Tigray (the northern Ethiopian region at the border with Eritrea) to Italy. Analys- ing their migratory paths, the focus will be on the strategies they employed to over- come the obstacles to mobility and to penetrate the porous wall built all around Europe by handling the intertwining of geopolitical borders and social and insti- tutional boundaries at a local level. he freedom to move and to cross borders is not equally distributed, alt hough the intensity and the speed of contemporary population movements have become a catalyst for rethinking the idea of cultures and nations as discrete spatial units with clear physical delimitations(Appadurai 1996; Malkki 1997). Immobility and borders shape and reinforce new kinds of discrimination and marginality and the multiplication of obstacles to mobility is a major factor in the production of social, economic and political inequalities (Fassin 2011). In this perspective, the multi- 1 | The paper is based on two ethnographic fieldworks which were carried out in Rome, by Osvaldo Costantini, and in Tigray (Ethiopia), by Aurora Massa, among Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants. The multilocal perspective adopted in this chapter allows us to gain a more complete picture of the mi- gratory paths that unfold from northern Ethiopia to Italy. Even though the work is the result of com- mon reflections and analysis, “Introduction”, “Political and historical context”, and “Ruta’s journey”, are written by Aurora Massa; “Eritrean Diaspora between political project and humanitarian reason”, “Misan’s journey”, and “Conclusion”, are written by Osvaldo Costantini. Bereitgestellt von | Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 11.01.17 12:41