The ethnographic research carried out among Malayali migrants from Kerala in the Italian city of Patti in Sicily, highlights a diasporic transnational community emerging as result of «tangled mobility» (Fresnoza-Flot, Liu-Farrer 2022) and interplaying of different flows of mobility/immobility developed in response to context of crisis (re)producing social inequalities.
By adopting the «new mobilities paradigm» (Sheller, Urry 2006) as conceptual lens, migration appears as a «complex assemblage» (Salazar 2019) of “mobility crossroads”. In other words, migration phenomenon can be seen within a wider framework of mutual crossing and fostering of multiple «regimes of mobility» and immobility (Glick Schiller, Salazar 2013), embedded in contexts of widespread and historically rooted socio-economic crisis.
Sicilian youth migrates to the North Italy and Europe while older generations remain or return, leading to ageing of resident population. This results in a high caregiver demand met by Malayalis, within the existing private welfare system fed by migrant labour force. They move following the power dynamics of the «global market for care» (Ehrenreich, Hochschild 2002), departing from a context, namely Kerala, marked by a well-established «culture of migration» (Cohen 2004) and by remittances from Non-Resident-Indians (NRIs) as pillar of national economy. Malayalis consider themselves “in transit” and “leave behind” their children, practicing a painful transnational form of family “immobility”. They plan to go home once having enough capital to allow their children to move abroad to study, fueling mass migration in higher education that is the hallmark of Kerala.
Finally, the religious matrix of Malayali migration to Sicily and their belonging to the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church promote a cultural process of otherness reduction and «whitening» (Ong 2005). Thus, in the moral economy of care, Malayalis are preferred to Eastern European caregivers and included in subaltern positions in the labour market as part of a process of “ecological succession”.
