Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity, Politics, and Community

Immigrant Worlds' Digital Harbors

1 Santiago Ibarra was born in Bilbao in the Basque province of Bizkaia in 1899, and at the early age of fifteen immigrated to Argentina with his seventeen-year-old brother. The chapter epigraph recounts his first day in Buenos Aires, according to a 1954 autobiography. It addresses his loneliness , nostalgia, and the overall impossibility of communicating with the loved ones who remained at home. In a sense, according to Grinberg and Grinberg, “migration requires a person to recreate the basic things he thought were already settled; he must recreate another work environment, establish affective relations with other people, reform a circle of friends, set up a new house that will not be an overnight tent but a home, and so on. These activities demand great physic effort, sacrifice, and acceptance of many changes in a short time. But to be able to carry them out gives one a sense of inner strength, an ability to dream, a capacity to build, a capacity for love” (1989, 176). One can only wonder how different it would have been for Santiago or any pre–information society immigrants, refugees or exiles, if they had had the possibility of connecting to the Internet and The Immigrant Worlds’ Digital Harbors An Introduction andoni alonso and pedro j. oiarzabal I couldn’t take it anymore when we found ourselves alone in that small boardinghouse without love, or any friend to talk to, and release my pain. —s a n t i a g o i ba r r a (1954), quoted inSantiago Ibarra: Historia de un inmigrante vasco, by Ángeles de Dios de Martina 2 d i a s p o r a s i n t h e n e w m e d i a a g e establishing not only instantaneous communication with parents, family members, and friends but also a digital network social world shared with others of common affinities. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936,poet Antonio Machado defined Madrid as “the breakwater of all the Spains”—as the final destination of the incessant waves of refugees seeking protection as well as a solid barrier to repel attacks by Generalisimo Francisco Franco’s fascist troops. In contrast to historical points of entry for immigrants, such as the emblematic Ellis Island in the United States, the Internet (along with satellite television and cellular phones and other mobile devices) is becoming the new harbor for contemporary immigrants. For many, the Internet is the first window or point of informational entry into their new destinations, prior to physical arrival, as well as a new interactive link back to their homelands. Even more, cyberspace—the communal space digitally created by the interconnection of millions of computerized machines and people—has become the virtual home for many diverse and dispersed communities across the globe. It is another space to reconnect with fellow natives around the world as well as with those remaining at home. It is a new space of hopes, desires, dreams, frustrations, and beginnings. To appreciate the significance of diaspora creation and diaspora interaction with information and communication technologies, it is necessary to consider the spectrum of meanings of the term diaspora, the extent of the diaspora phenomenon, especially its political dimension, and the different ways that diasporas interact with technologies. contested diasporas In general, the Greek term for diaspora (diaspeirein, “to sow” or “to scatter ”) refers to the dispersal of any population from its original land and its settlement in one or various territories. This definition originally had a positive connotation but was later redefined to include the collective expulsion of Jews from the Holy Land. The diaspora concept thus gained a negative meaning in relation to the destiny of Jewish people. According to Tölölyan (1996), the defining elements of the Jewish diaspora conceptualization entailed the destruction of the homeland or the collective expulsion from it or both, a homeland-return movement, traumatic and coerced departure and collective trauma (victimization), a clear identity in the homeland and collective memory, and the maintenance of communications with the homeland and with coethnic members in host societies. These common elements were then applied to other realities, such as dispersed i n t r o d u c t i o n 3 African populations as the result of slavery and Armenians as the result of genocide in 1911, constituting along with the Greeks the so-called classical diasporas...