Ricerc@Sapienza

This essay analyses the Calabrian diaspora in Argentina and the ways in which these different communities preserve a sense of belonging by organizing festivals and religious processions. This serve to renew a symbolic tie with their place of origin and with those family members left behind in Calabria and to create a sort of alternative space for social, economic, and political ends, allowing the group to maintain its identity within the host-country. Within this process certain elements, more than others, are invested with a precisely defined symbolic value and thereby become veritable symbols for a shared identity. In this sense, the dance of the tarantella within the Argentine context, plays a very important role and contribute to the rhetorical strategies of construction/display of Calabrian identity.