Identifications of Albanian-origin teenagers in Thessaloniki and the role of ethnicity: A multi-scalar perspective

Abstract

The literature on ‘second-generation migrants’ has widely viewed ethnicity as the key marker of identity formation. This article explores the identification processes of Albanian-origin teenagers in Thessaloniki, investigating whether, when and why ethnicity plays a role in these processes. The paper draws upon data from 28 in-depth interviews and one focus group with teenagers, alongside participant observation involving families, schools and immigrant organisations. The findings show that youth of migrant origin construct their identities within intersecting simultaneous transnational, national and local dynamics and alongside a public–private divide. More specifically, youth culture, a city/urban identity, and emotional ties that bind peer groups and family and kin within and across the national borders provide important sources of identification. These strategies are partly indicative of a weak ethnic agency – the ability of people to change the conditions around them by relying on the belief in a shared common past and common destiny with co-ethnics, and the assertiveness that comes with this belief. Nonetheless, in the local, multi-scalar forms of political and cultural power intersect within people’s daily lives, while this multiplicity of sources of identification calls for a closer look at the linkages between the local, the national and the global.

Introduction

A vast literature exists that sees ethnicity as significant in shaping migrants’ interaction with host societies (e.g. Alba and Nee, 2003). These studies delineate some of the cultural, social and structural barriers that migrants and their descendants face, which lead to the persistence, strengthening, or reclaiming of ethnic and diasporic identities. However, there is a need to explore the diversity of migrants’ identities, examine the diverse intersections between multiple identities (Berg and Sigona, 2013; Glick Schiller, 2012) and the daily life and conviviality of people of migrant background in urban places (Nowicka and Vertovec, 2014).

A growing body of research explores ethnic persistence among ‘second generation’ migrants but, with a few exceptions (e.g. Knörr, 2005), adolescent youth rarely have been the focus of these studies, reflecting a more general failure of migration researchers to focus on children (Dobson, 2009). Furthermore, the literature on the ‘second generation’ has widely considered ethnicity as the issue to be addressed in exploring the identity and social emplacement of such youth. Applying this ‘ethnic lens’ (Glick Schiller and Çağlar, 2009), the ‘second generation’ is seen as a homogeneous category in which individuals are categorised primarily by the ethnicity of their origins. Recent years have seen a burgeoning of literature on child migration that focus on their transnational lives (White et al., 2011). However, the concept of ‘second generation’ remains relevant in recently diversifying contexts in which a specific immigrant group consists of the largest in the country, such as Albanians in Greece.

This article begins by exploring conceptualizations about the ethnicity and identity, paying special attention to factors that are significant to the ‘second generation’, in the context of research on ethnicities and sociabilities of teenagers of Albanian descent in Thessaloniki, Greece. Considering the significance of the simultaneous intersections of the national and local in understanding the experiences of the second generation and their transnationality, I provide a contextual section on Greece and Thessaloniki where fieldwork was conducted in the pre-crisis period in Greece, March-June 2008.

These sections show how, drawing from their different sources of identification, teenagers of migrant origin, were publicly silent about their homeland networks and identity, while articulating multiple other identities and engaging in social interactions not constrained by ethnic or national identity categories. The multiplicity and simultaneity of their intersecting transnational, national and local identities is experienced alongside a significant public–private divide as part of their narratives and everyday sociabilities.

Ethnicity, identity and the second generation

Past as well as contemporary research on the second generation has been dominated by a concern with the ethnic or ‘diasporic’ identification of people of migrant background (Gans, 1979; Mollenkopf, 2014; Portes and Rumbaut, 2001). Following Barth (1969), ethnic identity was approached as a combination of the view one has of oneself and the views of others about one’s ethnicity. External categorisation features as an important factor in shaping ethnicity, and as the element through which power differentiations are expressed and materialised (Jenkins, 1997). However, much of the post-Barthian literature overlooked the importance of nation-state building processes. Those populations not thought to represent the ‘national culture’ have found themselves marked as racially and culturally different, even when they felt quite ‘at home’ in the country to which they or their ancestors have migrated.

Recently researchers argued that this analysis of politicised social categories (e.g. ethnicity) and the critique of a methodological nationalist orientation does little to explain variations across national space and through time, and the growth of local and urban, rather than national identities, among people of migrant background (Berg and Sigona, 2013; Çağlar and Glick Schiller, 2011). Focusing on the nation-state as the spatial ‘unit’ of analysis for understanding integration, until recently researchers on the identities and sociabilities of people of migrant background paid little attention to cities and urban spaces. The urban studies that countered this trend were focused solely on those cities designated as ‘global’ (Glick Schiller and Çağlar, 2009). But settlement in different cities and various localities within cities differentially affect the identifications and daily social relations of migrants (Vathi, 2012). This differential impact relates not only to structural differences between and within cities, but also to a city’s ethos and its local politics since the discourse of city leaderships may differ dramatically from the discourse of national politicians. In relationship to this difference, a growing numbers of studies of second-generation youth report that the youth identify with the city in which they reside, rather than espousing the national identity of the nation-state where they have lived all their life (Soysal, 2001).

At the same time, it is necessary to assess the impact of continuing structures of social categorisation, differentiation, and racialisation that operate beyond the borders of a single nation-state. If people of migrant background shape their identities and social networks as they experience and reconstitute multiple structures of power, then these structures must be understood to be simultaneous in their effects, operating locally, nationally, internationally, and transnationally (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004). Moreover, the analysis of such processes must take into account historical particularities and the effect of time (Berg and Sigona, 2013; Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013) because neighbourhood, city and national politics vary with changing political and economic conditions and opportunity structures.

Nonetheless, the growing sophistication of theorizations about ethnicity with its understandings of time, space, multiplicities, intersections, and simultaneities has generally not influenced work on the conceptualisation of the second generation – a concept derived from US assimilation theory in its 20th and 21st century iterations (Alba and Nee, 2003). The original term ‘second generation’ reflected the view that the identities and ethnic and transnational ties of people of migrant background weaken over time. Responding to the evidence of continuing segregation and institutional racism in US inner cities, Portes and Zhou (1993) proposed a segmented model of assimilation in which impoverished youth of migrant background adopt the racialized pan-ethnic culture of their impoverished inner city peers. Other researchers including new assimilationists such as Alba and Nee (2003) have argued, meanwhile, that ethnicity ‘decreases’ over time for second and subsequent generations. They have used terms such as ‘optional’ (Waters, 1990) and ‘symbolic’ ethnicity (Gans, 1979), referring to empirical evidence from the third and fourth generation of immigrants in the United States.

However, recently Gans (2014) and Mollenkopf (2014) called for further investigation of the persistence of ethnic identity, culture, and institutions into the fourth generation for descendants of European immigrants. Within a re-emergent politics that saw immigrants as threatening, concepts of assimilation in the United States have been revitalised to address the second generation, even though theories about migrant connections and identities reflect and act upon specific and changing political milieus. This new emphasis on ethnicity takes place alongside literature that is posing a critique to the concept of the second generation, not least because of the evidence on separated and mobile migrant families and the diversity of legal statuses within the same generation of children of immigrants, and the mobile and cosmopolitan outlook of youth of immigrant origin (e.g. Menjivar and Abrego, 2009; Vathi, 2013).

A scholarship of the second generation has now emerged in Europe, some of it opposed to a groupism approach (Çağlar and Glick Schiller, 2011) but much of it organised around the study of ethnic persistence. The institutionalists argue that the probability of underclass formation among the descendants of immigrants is directly linked to the opportunities that national institutional arrangements for educational and labour market transition offer to the ‘second generation’ (Crul and Vermeulen, 2003). Thus, methodological nationalism and spatial and temporal essentialism have been problematic features of the ‘second generation’ literature, but there is also a sense that children of migrants are contributing to changing urban cultures.

Nonetheless, with the exception of a few US studies (Kasinitz et al., 2006; Portes and Rumbaut, 2001) until recently minors have been largely overlooked in migration research. When they have been part of research, children of immigrant-origin have been mostly portrayed as inherently different from their native counterparts. The focus of the literature has been on the children’s current or future integration in the host society as a whole, ignoring their wider experiences (White et al., 2011). The second-generation research has also overlooked the role of place and locality in minors’ everyday life, although research on children and youth outside of migration research has provided evidence of the significance of specific urban spaces in the development of local youth cultures of the city (Kroger, 2007).

Those who study children and adolescents’ identifications emphasise that adolescence is a stage in life in which different forms of social identity become evident. In this body of research ethnic identity is viewed as closely related to and affected by various social relationships, and as a construct that is not the same for all ethnic minority youth. Other researchers have criticised the operationalisation of ethnic identity as a stable and enduring construct. Significant in this respect is also the evidence from longitudinal studies, which points to differences between teenagers and adults in their identifications, and ‘within-group’ differences among adolescents, with ethnic identity being more stable in late adolescence (Meeus, 2011).

Yet in the face of systems of national categorisation and racialisation, it is important to examine the intersecting simultaneous transnational, national, and local dynamics within which people of migrant background and across the generations identify with or reject certain identity groupings. These spaces for study and analysis are needed to examine not only narrated identities, but the silences through which the multiplicities of identities and transnational social fields of the second generation are not verbalised.

Immigration and ethnic relations in Greece and Thessaloniki

Greece became host to a large number of immigrants after 1989, receiving a high number of immigrants from the former communist states including Albania. By 2007, the number of immigrants was reported to have reached 1.2 million, or 10% of the total population and 12% of the labour force, making for one of the highest percentages of immigrants within the European Union (EU) (Gropas and Triandafyllidou, 2007). Albanians in Greece constitute both the biggest Albanian migrant community in Europe (600,000) and the biggest immigrant group in the country. Albanian migration to Greece was triggered by the collapse of the communist regime in 1990. The majority of Albanian migrants in Greece are low educated, while the highly skilled experienced de-skilling on a large scale; regardless of their education in Albania, women took up jobs in the domestic sector, while the majority of men worked in construction (King, 2003). Pupils of immigrant background make up 9% of the school population in Greece, with Albanians being 72% of foreign pupils in 2004–2005. By 2008, from 120,000 non-Greek residents of all ages born in Greece, the biggest group – of 110,000 – were of Albanian origin (Baldwin-Edwards and Kolio, 2008).

Migration policy in Greece has been characterised not only by a lack of legal migration channels but also by a fragmentation of measures instituted to deter illegal entry, settlement, and work. There have been only minimal efforts to integrate immigrants, and these attempts focus on assimilation into Greek national life, ignoring the increasing diversity of Greek society. The nature of these efforts, as well as the general lack of an integration policy, reflect the contemporary fiercely ethno-cultural definition of Greek identity, nationality and citizenship. A triple boundary distinguishes Greek ethnics from those belonging to other nations on the basis of common ancestry, cultural traditions and religion, with religion a key component of identity (Gropas and Triandafyllidou, 2007). Tzanelli (2006), moreover, points to the conflation of the discourse on Greek national identity with that of race. The naturalisation of ethnic notions of identity creates the potential for ethnic identity to assume racial connotations. Nevertheless, after the initial ‘fetishisation’ of Greekness during the 1990s against the threats posed by the new immigration as well as by international political affairs, a more flexible notion of being Greek based on civic elements began to emerge (Gropas and Triandafyllidou, 2007).

Thessaloniki, one of the oldest cities in Europe, is the second biggest city in Greece with over 1 million inhabitants. Although the city’s history is marked by significant discontinuities, its different pasts (notably the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman periods) have been largely denied in contemporary history. Inspired by nationalist claims, and emphasising the Hellenic past at the expense of other important influences, the city’s claimed history is rather one ‘of forgotten alternatives and wrong choices of identities assumed and discarded’ (Mazower, 2004: 474).

In mid-to-late 2000s when this research was conducted, Thessaloniki was host to a large number of immigrants and is transforming itself into a multicultural metropolis. The immigrants in the city account for 7.2% of the total number of immigrants in Greece, the main group being Albanians (at 75%), followed by Georgians (9%) and Bulgarians (5%). At a city level, these new post-1990 waves of immigrants have uncovered old debates on Thessaloniki’s complex cultural identity (Hatziprokopiou, 2006).

Methodology

Research for this article – comprising interviews, focus groups, and participant observation – included 28 adolescents, 15 parents, 5 teachers and 3 key informants. Interviews were conducted following a snowballing recruitment strategy. The sample of minor interviewees mixed children who had migrated to Greece in a very young age and others who were born in Greece, but the majority of them belonged to the former group and therefore were 1.5 generation (Rumbaut, 1997). The adolescents ranged in age from 12 to 19 (although the average age was 15 years) and the average time spent in Greece was 11 years. The average age of the parents was 37, with ages ranging from 32 to 42, and the time spent in Greece varying from 8 to 17 years.

Informants lived in various parts of Thessaloniki, as immigrants in general – and Albanians especially – are not concentrated in any particular area in the city (Hatziprokopiou, 2006). Interviews lasted about 1 hour and were recorded. Ethical approval was requested from parents or teachers and minor interviewees themselves. Ethical consent forms were prepared in both Albanian and Greek. The teenagers mixed both Albanian and Greek during the interviews, and in some cases also interspersed English into their conversations. All names used in this article are pseudonyms.

When, where and why does ethnicity matter?

A significant finding of this study is that Albanian-origin teenagers have a complex stance towards their ethnicity. They are aware of the significance of their ethnic origin in relation to their positioning and integration within Greek society, generally adopt alternative identities, and may simultaneously within family domains and networks accept an Albanian identity. The process of ‘discovering’ ethnicity for many was coupled with a consciousness of the negative external articulation of ‘Albanianness’ in Greek public discourse, as experienced in the institutional (micro- and meso-level) setting of school life. This stigmatisation appears to have connotations of ‘Albanian’ as ‘different’, the ‘immigrant’, the ‘Muslim’, the ‘Other’, referencing a politicisation of Albanian ethnicity in a broader sense. At the same time, young people may have different experiences in different locations in the same city, and put together their self-identity within their experience of multiple contexts. For example, Blerim (male; 13) said,

Because I was from Albania, they used to insult me ‘You are Albanian!’; they used to beat me up. Everyone was against me. But after that, from the third year onwards, because I have changed three schools after that, some people left, some came, people changed and now they stopped. Now I am the same with the others.

Because of experiences of racialisation and stigmatised difference, many of these teenagers have developed a strong feeling of distancing from their ethnicity, hiding their identity and rejecting anything to do with Albania and Albanians. The general trend of embracing of Greekness points first to a weak ethnic agency – the ability of people to change the conditions around them by relying on the belief in a shared common past and common destiny with co-ethnics, and the assertiveness that comes with this belief. The same absence seems to prevent the creation of a reactive or adverse identity.

This finding resonates with anthropological literature that deconstructs agency; according to Mahmood (2001) agency can be understood ‘… as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create’ (p. 203). Informants’ everyday life accounts do show a strong sense of agency at an individual level in the construction of their social identities as young people (even as these identities are far from homogeneous and ‘internally consistent’). Although the ethos of Thessaloniki makes it possible for the second generation to embrace the city in which they live as the main identification grounds, they experience other scales of discourse including that of Greek nationalism and its nation-state building project. As part of Thessaloniki’s history and contemporary life, these discourses emphasise national identity as a primordial aspect of being for natives and migrants alike. This is not to say that a consciousness of identity politics is missing, as Anna (female, 16) tells us below. Indeed, Greekeness is embraced as a claim to equality, coupled with adopting national/ethnic identities to live within the city and Albanian identities to live within the family:

[To feel Greek] is like you feel like a human being. Because you are a human being

first of all. Feeling Greek you feel that they don’t separate you from others, and you

won’t have any problems. If you say that you are … let’s say Albanian … or in

general, if you say that you are from another country lower than Greece, they will see

you as inferior, and you will encounter a different confrontation …

Nevertheless, embracing Greekness does not remove the obstacles to participate equally in the national community, which has implications for the micro-level socialisation processes. Indeed, one of the main identification strategies in ethnic identification for these teenagers consists of distancing themselves from their ethnicity of origin and striving to cross the division between Greeks and non-Greeks, but facing insurmountable difficulties, and thus living at the edge of the boundary. Frustration and an ‘identification limbo’ characterises the narratives of Albanian-origin teenagers who are prone towards assimilation in the public realm (i.e. speaking Greek as a main or only language, and adopting the state religion), but are denied a Greek identity, due to its exclusionary nature. Racialisation in this case is experienced by these teenagers as dehumanising, alienating and disempowering, manifesting itself in the immediate realms of their lived experiences in this particular Greek city. Maria (female, 12) narrates below:

Basically I wouldn’t like to be part of an ethnic group. But often this can’t even happen. Let’s say, I can’t say ‘my country’ … that Greece is my country, that this is the history of my country, and that this is the religion of my country … I can’t say this. This would have been good, but this is not possible. […] Let’s say, the teacher says ‘Now we will do history’. I can’t say ‘Oh, the history of my country’. Because the other children will hear and they will say ‘She went mad! This is not the history of her country. This is the history of my country’

Those scholars concerned with generational differences in ethnicity have argued that ethnic identity changes ‘quantitatively and qualitatively’ over time and across generations. This study raises further issues, reinforcing the observations of those who have noted the significance of multiple identities, situational identities, age, urban context and migration history (Maira, 1999).

In the first place, this study found a difference between teenagers and their siblings, more particularly apparent in the case of younger siblings. Older children (born in the early 1990s), who came with or joined their parents in the first years of migration, tend to have a very developed sense of agency, due to sometimes having to share some of the parenting duties. The expression of an ‘immigrant identity’ (Waters, 1994) – expressed as being self-sufficient, studying harder than the others, being more goal-oriented and prone to succeed and realising as the main goal of their parents’ migration plan ‘a better future for them’ – seems to weaken in the younger siblings. This difference is clearly pointed out by Vilma (female, 16) below:

There are differences between me and my sister because she has become just like the Greeks. She always has to ask my mum about her homework, like ‘Mum, can you have a look on this?’ Greeks don’t do the lessons themselves; they have to be dependent on their parents.

Granted, such differences between siblings may relate to participants being in their teens, as identification patterns and an understanding of ethnic identity can change significantly in adolescence (Meeus, 2011). In the case of the children of immigrants, identity change may also be affected by stronger confrontations at school in adolescence, as some of the participants report. However, the narratives of older siblings (teenagers who accompanied or joined their parents in the first years of immigration in the host country), indicate the inability of parents to help them during childhood and their illiteracy in the Greek language, parents’ continuous absence and lack of social networks, difficulties in starting education in a foreign language, suffering cut ties with family and friends in Albania – all in the context of a stronger stigmatisation of Albanians very evident during the 1990s.

Younger children seem more relaxed about language use and visits to the homeland, and show more interest towards Albanian language and television, sometimes developing a stronger hyphenated identity. Although the attitude towards Albania and Albanian ethnic identity is not always positive, the younger siblings show greater capacity in taking a stance towards their ethnicity. These findings also suggest that family’s stage of incorporation can be important and that time should be included as an important variable in the study of integration – and, moreover, that this is true at a social (macro) level as well as at the personal/familial (micro) level. Aggela quoted below bears witness to an ethnic reappraisal that has taken place changing the external categorisation of Albanian identity in Thessaloniki, which is consequential for her self-identification:

… a few years ago the Greeks were very racist towards Albanians. Now their children have Albanian friends and the adults know Albanian people and spend time together, so it is not such a big problem anymore … (Aggela, female, 12)

Therefore, it appears that, relating to the contextual features and salience of ethnicity in the public discourse, there is a significant spill-over of macro policies on to micro-level encounters and boundary-setting processes, as indicated in the narratives of the teenagers. However, as we shall see in the next section, the dynamics of identification at micro- and meso-levels are affected by multiple identity sources that, over time, have buffered the effect of the macro-level exclusionary public discourse.

Beyond ethnicity: peer group, urban identity and youth culture

Although the articulation of primordial ethnicity in the host society is an important factor of identification processes, among Albanian-origin teenagers in Thessaloniki, these processes show complex patterns and seem to be affected by several factors operating at different levels. Multiple identities seem apparent, and, as is shown in the quote below, teenagers tend to define themselves through non-ethnic identity traits, while the urban identities they perform demonstrate the importance of the city scale in their identification processes. To the question how she would describe herself, Orjana (female, 15) answered,

‘At this moment, a teenager. This is the one […] because … Well, OK. I am a teenager, I have my own problems. Everyone thinks that I haven’t grown up yet; they don’t give me that much importance.’

Being a teenager/young person and a student, seems to be of great importance and – and alongside their hobbies and interests – what chiefly characterises the participants as persons. These traits are evident in the way Maria (female, 12) defines herself: ‘I feel like a sister, I feel like a girl. I have my parents and like to play guitar’. Furthermore, love and sexuality are important themes, involving both natives and youth of migrant background as boyfriends or girlfriends. In the face of such emotional developments, many teenagers appear oblivious of ethnicity as part of their everyday lives.

Urban identity is an important feature, too. City as a ground for identification is also related to a certain exclusion from the national body, expressed through feelings of belongingness concerning Thessaloniki as a locality (see also Kasinitz et al., 2006). Vasiliki (female, 16) narrates,

I am a Thesaloniki girl, a teenager … […] Firstly a teenager; I am going through adolescence … OK, fine, Albanian too, because that’s where I was born, but many people [referring to family and minority-origin friends] tell me that I am Greek now because I have lived here all my life … But I would say from Thessaloniki; I wouldn’t say Greek because […] the origin of my parents is there [Albania] …

Belongingness – as a relationship to place established through everyday interactions at the micro-level – emerges here, as sharing domains of commonality because of shared knowledge of the place, presence of friends, instances of conviviality (Nowicka and Vertovec, 2014). Although many teenagers feel constrained because of centrality of ethnicity in the public discourse, they also find space available in terms of their personal development. This is especially true in the case of the girls such as Kejsi (female, 15), who also points to the multiplicity of identities, simultaneity, and the division between the public and familial life:

I am related to Greece because I have my friends here and I am used to living differently, to going out, so I am free here. Whereas in relation to Albania … It is very different there; I have my relatives in Albania, my family home is there, I feel well there, too.

Teenagers thus feel at home in the city and often there is a noticeable downplay of the importance of ethnic categorisation; human values and local sub-cultures are referred to as frameworks shaping identity, such as being ‘a person of all groups’, being ‘a Thessalonikís, because of its good night life’ (Endri, male, 18) and so on.

Nonetheless, ethnic affiliation acts as moderators of peer group attraction, although it is often downplayed, and universal categories such as ‘teenager’ and ‘youth’ are referenced in order to smooth the process of integration. The peer group emerges here as a very important unit and dynamic for the teenagers in feeling that they belong, in line with research indicating peer groups – along with family, schools and neighbourhood activities or city in a broader sense – as an important referent in the identity construction of adolescents (e.g. Kroger, 2007: 76). As Geri (male, 13) explains, ‘(I belong here) because I have some very good friends here. So … I stay with them, play with them, I have been friends with them for all these years …’. The peer group is also one of the most important structures to buffer or relieve the consequences of discrimination.

In addition, processes of peer group socialisation give rise to instances of conviviality. The different ethnic categories that teenagers encounter – Albanian, Russian, Armenian, Pond, Georgian, and at times, Greek – are often part of everyday youth, ‘mischievous’ repertoires. This pattern is particularly evident among boys in mid-to-late adolescence, showing also the relevance of gender to the micro-level identification of youth of migrant background. Politicised in the public discourse, these ethnic categories become ‘labels of bonding’ within peer groups. Integration – belonging and participating in this context – is seen as closely related to the peer group, but also to individual social skills and personal characteristics related to the idea of being a ‘successful youth’. For older teenagers, successful youth relates to the universal ideas of youth and the desired features of body and appearance, individuality, and social and romantic success, which seem to overcome ethnic boundaries between Albanian-origin teenagers and the natives. The sharing of (Western) symbols of childhood through ways of playing, dressing and grooming (Wells, 2009) are, meanwhile, also prerequisites of acceptance in peer groups of native children for younger teenagers.

Urban lifestyle was at times contrasted with parents’ background in rural parts of Albania since identification was also linked to the migration history of the family and that of the teenagers themselves, although they often seemed oblivious of or against an association with a migrant identity. ‘Greekness’ is also, however, desired by the younger teenagers because it is associated with hedonism, consumerism, nightlife and freedom. In contrast to ethnic belongingness, ‘Greekness’ gives opportunities to belong to a universal youth culture without restrictions and scarcity:

I don’t think the Albanian culture is inferior, but I feel more like a Greek boy. And that’s why we have debates with our parents all the time. For example, they reproach me and tell me ‘You are always going out for coffee’, basically things like this that I do, understand? The cultural differences between countries. Here teenagers go out every night to clubs and tavernas … ‘What are these people doing?’ my mum says. ‘How can they go out every night?’ I used to tell her ‘I am coming back at 2–3am’. ‘At 10.15 you should be home!’. But, I used to tell her, my friends return at that time. I still have many problems because of this, not only me but all the children that have come here. Because they have grown up here in another way […]. (Genti, male, 18)

On the other hand, embracing ‘Greekness’ gives the teenagers a feeling of access and belonging to Europe, which is an aspiration closely linked to their aforementioned cosmopolitan tendencies. Engagement with a European identity appears as yet another aspect of these teenagers’ multi-scalar levels of belongingness; it also shows a relation to the context in which these teenagers grew up, as ‘European identity’ has been salient in contemporary Greek public discourse in the 1990s and the 2000s. When asked how she identified, Vilma (female, 16) replied,

European and Greek. Because it’s here I grew up, I have the same way of behaving like the Greeks, way of dressing, style of here; I have lived here most of my life. In Albania I was a little child, I don’t know anything (from there); it’s here I have learnt most of the things. And also European, because now Greece has joined Europe; we behave a bit more differently from before, the foreign languages that have been integrated to communicate with people …

Some teenagers’ ethnic belongingness appears to contain strong emotional nuances. Return visits to Albania enable the cultivation of emotional ties with relatives and place, allowing the children to experience freedom and nature during their holidays (Vathi and King, 2011). These ties are further transformed into symbolic ethnicity, which many teenagers express through the items they collect and keep in their bedroom, such as the Albanian flag, emblems, and bandanas with Albanian national symbols. Furthermore, Albanian commercial music and Internet interaction with cousins and friends in Albania are important in creating an interest in the Albanian language.

Teenagers’ identities, thus, reflect their feeling of being ‘victims’ of the harsh impact of the first generation’s settlement within a ‘homogeneous’ host society, and as strong agents in the boundary-blurring process. Despite such issues of integration, Albanian teenagers’ presence does, from a bottom-up perspective, ensure a significant contact and exchange between the natives and non-natives, with friendship and love transcending the boundaries:

[…] many of these kids have grown up together; they have attended the same school, they have grown up in the same neighbourhood, they have friendships, they have loves; this is the normal thing when you are 17–18 years old. […] Because when you live with other people, with some you will become friends. (George, Greek teacher, 42)

It appears, thus, that while ethnicity is an important factor that affects teenagers’ identifications, they are active agents in drawing from their standing in different relationships. In turn, their belongingness appears related to place and urban space, and to universal youth culture, and it is clearly evolving over time, along changes in the positioning of immigrants and the articulation of ethnicity in the public discourse.

Discussion and conclusion

Research with Albanian-origin teenagers in Thessaloniki suggests that the ethnicity characteristic of an ethnic group is not the central frame of reference in processes of identification and integration for the ‘second generation’. Rather, the identification of these teenagers takes place within intersecting simultaneous transnational, national and local dynamics. External categorisation of Albanian migrants is based on primordial concepts of ethnicity, as elaborated in the public discourse of the receiving society, which impacts on subjective processes of identification, or, at least, on the situational or instrumental performance of ethnicity among Albanian-origin teenagers. This finding shows that multi-scalar forms of political and cultural power intersect within the daily lives of youth of migrant origin.

Moreover, the findings show that identification should be seen as closely related to the particular historical and institutional contexts explored in the study, such as schools and families, alongside the wider society – and to the call for analysis of the positioning of minorities and immigrants in and across such contexts (Kasinitz et al., 2006). First, the patterns of identification and their temporal aspect relate closely to the history of immigration and settlement of Albanians in Greece, representing the largest immigrant group in a largely ethnically homogeneous society, and the discourse at the national level that this migration induced. These findings are also in line with a central assumption of transnational studies, which points to the nation-states’ insistence on a single loyalty to them by immigrants and minorities, contrasting with the multiple identities characterising the actual lives of migrants and their descendants (Glick Schiller, 2012).

The dispersion of Albanian migrants in Thessaloniki, and the lack of significant segregation in the cities of the ‘new’ immigration countries in Southern Europe (Hatziprokopiou, 2006), is another aspect worth highlighting insofar as it provides for more exposure of ‘second generation’ youth to the natives, and vice versa, giving rise to conviviality. Thus, the change of attitude at the micro-level along the years could well be explained within the framework of socialisation and contact theory (Pettigrew, 1998). Contact between teenagers of different origins at the micro-level creates the prerequisites of peer group socialisation, which furthermore gives rise to affective ties and in-group reappraisal. Against ‘groupism’, ethnicity appears constructed (in interplay with other aspects of identity) through everyday interactions and alongside a public–private divide, while nation-state projects impose primordial definitions of ethnicity on minorities.

Yet, the experience of the children of immigrants in a new immigration city contrasts markedly with the experience of their counterparts in gateway immigration – or ‘majority minority’ – cities (e.g. New York), where immigrants and their descendants are no longer interacting with a homogeneous White majority (Kasinitz et al., 2006). Nonetheless, the findings of this article are in line with research on young people in general that has shown that the emergence of youth as a social category is consonant with Western modernisation. Tendencies towards experimentation, consumption and mobility are considered important markers of teenager identity (Kjeldgaard and Askegaard, 2006), not linked to any specific ethnicity.

In summary, universal youth values, city and urban identity and emotional ties among peers provide important sources of identification among teenagers of migrant origin, calling for a closer look at the linkages between the local, the national, the transnational, and the global.