Consumption of Culture by Young Migrants

This study, with young migrants as its object, aims to examine the field of consumption of culture. Our attention focused on a wide range of cultural consumption, from reading to music, from cinema to use of various technological devices. The picture we will show is drawn from the actual corpus of semistructured interviews carried out with members of Messina’s Chinese, Sri Lankan, and Filipino communities in the context of an ongoing research project. Part of our field study was dedicated to cultural consumption by young people who are children of migrants resident in Messina, both those born in Italy or those who came here to join their family. The hypothesis would be that fashions, rituals, and consumption filter down, at least in part, from the particularly receptive category that teenagers form to their immigrant contemporaries, who, in turn, are made permeable by the desire for integration they experience in addition to the typical characteristics of the age group.