The previous youth portraits represent examples of nationally and ethnically founded identity formation. The narratives of the young people, as different as they are, represent processes of identity formation between adaptation and emancipation within the own culture of the majority. Such majority cultures can also develop minorities if they constitute majorities over other minorities. And unfortunately, minorities are not so easily able to learn from their own experiences of suppression when they face other minorities or minorities within minorities as majorities.

What applies to South Tyrol, which Italy annexed in 1918/19, is what the feminist theorist Judith Butler in conversation with the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as the perfidy of the nation-state. The nation-state forces the suppressed and/or marginalized minorities into the ethnicization rejected simultaneously through the nationalization of its policies (cf. Butler and Spivak 2007, pp. 30 ff.). The national assimilation pressure with bans on language and culture forces minorities to narrow down their political articulation to national defensive struggles, to constitute themselves as a homogeneous ethnic subject and thereby suppress inner diversity, social, gender, sexual, and/or other differences. The cultural unity thus produced gains the strength of a protective armor over other groups.

The attribution of being different due to a few features that are not intended for it, such as language, origin, or religion, leads on the one hand to a discriminatory external ethnicization, which Mecheril (2002, p. 107) tries to grasp with the concept of Migrationsandere (migration-others). The term should express that immigrants are not different per se but made discursively into others through the perception of migration. At the same time, this external ethnicization can interact with practices of self-ethnicization, with which minorities form communities and—both personal and political–attempts to become subject matter. In this way, ethnicization has an ambivalence between discrimination and empowerment, particularly in tension between foreign and self-ethnicization.

Suppose ethnicity is understood on the one hand as a deviation from a discursively claimed form (foreign vs. domestic, black vs. white, Turkish vs. German) and devalued accordingly. In that case, the corresponding exclusion goes hand in hand with the generation of belonging. Thus ethnicization offered the German-speaking South Tyroleans, who had been severely discriminated against as a linguistic minority in Italy for decades, the opportunity to form themselves as an ethnic minority. In this way, they became a political subject (at the price of external demarcation and internal homogenization). Similarly, the discriminatory exclusion also stimulates migration groups and diaspora communities to define themselves as “Turks” in Germany or “Bosnians” in Austria and offer their compatriots appropriate affiliation, even if only to a disadvantaged and – negatively connoted—group by the dominant majority. Ethnization ultimately expresses itself as a counteraction to tendencies towards assimilation, i.e., becoming as similar as possible to the dominant majority in the target country (cf. Peterlini H.K. 2017b).

For migrants who come to South Tyrol, this problem arises even more complex. In supposedly homogeneous national societies, “due to different characteristics—external or linguistic – a different ethnic background is attributed to them” (Huxel 2014, p. 71). In a majority-minority area like South Tyrol, the normality umbrella is now without national uniqueness, with which alignment or delimitation can/must be carried out. People who immigrate to South Tyrol sometimes only gradually realize that they have arrived in an ethnically divided reality—on the one hand, Italy with its state structures, on the other hand, the Autonomous Province of Bolzano South Tyrol with a division of almost all public areas by language groups, namely German, Italian and in the two Dolomite valleys also Ladin. Kindergartens and schools are separated by language (e.g., the German school with Italian as a second language and vice versa), public offices are allocated according to an ethnic distribution key, the funds for social housing are also balanced according to language groups (Peterlini H.K. 2017b, p. 156f). The formation of identities among young people is thus ethnically established. Young people find it difficult to evade the pull of ethnic separation in forming circles of friends and selecting assignments (cf. Chisholm and Peterlini 2012).

For new arrivals, this means not only having to move between pressure to adaption and ethnicization but also having to perform a tricky balancing act between the two dominant groups (German-Italian). Migrants generally have to choose between German and Italian to access schools, public bodies, and grants. With the legally required declaration of language group membership, you can—like people from bilingual families—first select the collection category “other” to declare yourself as one of the three official language groups in the next step to distribute jobs and funds. Beyond the formal act, this also has more subtle effects for bilingual and migrant families: “The wealth of experience of the people in between is therefore not publicly recognized and finds no language. […] They are pushed into the anonymity of private retreat worlds or are drawn into the pull of the dominant population groups.” (Peterlini H.K. 2016b, p. 159). The structural divisions propagate into membership opportunities and identity offers.

On the one hand, this increases the complexity of the processes between adaptation and distinction. It requires an assignment to an (alleged) cultural normality, divided into closed societies. On the other hand, the foil of normalcy to which adaptation is demanded is also more diverse due to this division and perhaps enables more diverse hybrid creative solutions.

Migrant, Black, & Tyrolean Rifleman: Story of Painful and Determined Integration

This system of shared inclusion and exclusion dynamics has experienced a pointed exaggeration, and personal resolution in the case of a young man one-sidedly hyped up in the media. John Christopher Valdez was born in the Dominican Republic in 1994 and came to South Tyrol in 2000 when he was six. After the separation from his father, the mother initially emigrated alone, leaving her son with her grandmother in the Dominican Republic. Then the grandma followed with John Christopher. In the meantime, the mother had found a South Tyrolean life partner who loved the young boy.

On the other hand, John Christopher essentially lost contact with his father, who, meanwhile, had died in the Dominican Republic. In his only detailed interview so far (Peterlini H.K. 2020a, the interview is from 2017), he named the South Tyrolean father alternately in English as the dad (in English), stepdad, or Tata in Tyrolean (ibid, p. 209. It is the story of a hard-won affiliation, with experiences of exclusion and discrimination in middle school after he had easily passed through elementary school in his memory.

“In middle school, I started getting the first beatings because of the skin color and so on. Until then, I didn’t even know there was anything like racism and that shit. Children do not worry about whether one is black, it is more likely, sorry, for malformations and such, but they do not ask about skin color or origin. They are interested in whether they can play.th you, and if that fits, they don’t ask, at most once, ‘why are you black’, but only out of curiosity, that is not racism,’…]. Then in middle school, I felt it massively that they ran after me, pus, hed me around, broke everything. I often went to the teachers, but they couldn’t do much. My dad, above all, stood by me. He also told me that if things go on like this. Hell organize a few people – that’s the South Tyrolean dad who married my mom here, who stood by me.” (ibid).

He begins to fight back with the “growth spurt” (ibid). In the narrative of his attempted assertions “in serious games of competition” (Huxel 2014, p. 69), there are unmistakable traits of male struggles for superordination and subordination, as described by Katrin Huxel based on Pierre Bourdieu (2002) and his studies on “gendered and gendering habitus” (Huxel 2014, p. 69). Domination struggles can therefore be understood as “instruments of positioning as a man or boy,” which, in conjunction with attributed and/or assumed ethnicity, can at the same time become orchestration of ethnicity or demarcation (cf. ibid, p. 71) – and therefore moments of empowerment as well.

“There was a fight, and I suddenly realized what strength I have. Then I actually started revenge. I looked for the people one by one, the whole second and third middle school, one after the other. I still missed two of them. I don’t know where one of them is anymore, I met the other one, but a lot of time had passed, he changed, we had a beer, and he apologized. For me, it is like this, if you have a problem with me and then have a beer with me … then it fits.” (Peterlini H.K. 2020a., p. 209).

Through sport, John Christopher not only found non-violent ways to test himself against others but also – for the first time visiting the German school – made friends with Italian speakers. In sports, the separation of language groups is primarily eliminated; the country’s leading football club, FC Südtirol, for example, is just as multilingual as the top handball club SSV Bozen (Peterlini H.K. 2016c, p. 292). John Christopher learns to speak Italian fluently, which is hard to do in school (cf. Abel and Vettori 2017), and receives better grades in the second language than in German. He accentuates that the Italian circle of friends, in contrast to the German milieu in which he operates, comes from a higher educational level. “The Italian friends all went to high school. They had a much larger vocabulary – that was not the case in my school. And you only speak High German at school. Otherwise, you only use a dialect, logically.” (Peterlini H.K. 2020a, p. 206) As an adolescent, John Christopher is in contact with South Tyrolean language worlds and different socioeconomic milieus. Perhaps the effortlessly thriving membership in the Italian circle of friends is not burdened by painful previous experiences, which encourages him to approach German clubs step by step.

Chance is on his side as well. 2011 – John Christopher was 17 years old at the time – he and his stepfather were sitting in an ice cream parlor when a fire broke out. He bravely takes the fire extinguisher and fights the flames with his stepfather. When the fire brigade arrives, the fire is extinguished, the fire brigade thanks them for the prompt deployment. (Ibid) The next step is a vivid example of how empowerment processes neither originate from a subject that is thought to be autonomous, nor are they only externally determined, but rather take place as a response between phatic impulses and individual response (cf. ibid, p. 321).

So the lived experience with the fire was the (encouraging) impetus for John Christopher to call the volunteer fire brigade commander in his village and apply for the fire brigade. “He said yes, you can come by once. And that’s where I went. He later told me, ‘I never thought that a black man would come through the door.’ But they took me.” (Ibid, p. 210) The volunteer fire brigade is an association that substitutes the professional fire brigade throughout the country, except in the cities. As it has emerged from the South Tyrolean tradition, it has long been impossible for Italian-speaking South Tyroleans, and it is still difficult to become an active member. Thanks to his broad South Tyrolean dialect, which identified him on the phone as a “genuine South Tyrolean,” John Christopher became the first black firefighter in South Tyrol. The next thing he did was register with the White Cross and voluntary emergency service, which in South Tyrol is on an equal footing with the predominantly Italian Red Cross and has long been considered a German emergency service – here, too, a German-Italian dichotomy.

John Christopher learns to move in the village-like, predominantly German-speaking ethnic groups. He intercepts racist hints: “Negro jokes are sometimes made, but I tell the best Negro jokes myself. It depends on how someone tells a joke. You can feel whether it’s hate speech or racism. Then I take someone aside and say that you are going too far for me. Most of them will understand that too.” (Ibid, p. 210 f).

Right in the heart center of the South Tyrolean ethnocentric culture, the boldest step is his membership with the riflemen in his place of residence. The inclusion of a black person is a media case, on the one hand, praised crudely as a signal of opening (“skin color of the riflemen is becoming more colorful,” Südtirol News 2013, Ein Tirol 2013). At the same time, it reveals as an expression of hidden racism, if it is a sign of openness to accept someone who differs from other South Tyroleans based on nothing but skin color. On the other hand, the question of whether a dark-skinned man can defend the Tyrolean Heimat also triggers open racist spikes. The right-wing patriotic Facebook page “Ein Tirol” (One Tyrol) spoke, concerning the cited Südtirol News article, of a “loss of identity” (Ein Tirol 2013). The company that had admitted John Christopher had several withdrawals. (Peterlini H.K. 2020a, p. 211).

“There, I was wiped out by the population, by my own people, from all of Tyrol and, yes, by the Italian media. Media, newspapers, Facebook, I actually had… thoughts of suicide. You can’t imagine that. People can be brutal. The company stood by me, except for a few. I simply never show a photo of myself in costume for the sake of the riflemen.” (Ibid).

The irritation that occurred when the first and so far only black man was admitted to the riflemen association corresponds to the processes that Bhabha (1996, p. 58) sees in adaptations. These constantly change parts of the society to which migrants adapt or challenge their self-image. By previous media visibility – the mentioned Südtirol News article has been removed from the Internet and is only present in the reproduction of the Ein Tirol Facebook page – the excitement was quickly calmed down. However, new questions arose just for the discourse about Tyrolean identity nevertheless.

“Someone said I am not a genuine Tyrolean. Then I said to him: ‘Good, fits. But now I ask you: could you choose where you were born?’ He said: ‘No.’ ‘And could you choose your skin color?’ He said: ‘No.’ I said: ‘If I could have chosen it, I would have decided to be born here and become white. I couldn’t decide that. So you can’t judge me by what I can’t decide. You can hate me for what I decide, but not for what I can’t change.’” (Ibid, p. 211).

What is interesting about the argument is that, on the one hand, it de-races being Tyrolean, which in turn indicates how much racist ideas are always associated with ethnic or cultural affiliation (cf. Radtke 2013). For Leiprecht (1992, p. 102), ethnicity is often a “language hiding place for a race.”

In itself courageous and clever, John Christopher’s argumentation has – theoretically seen – also a double-edged side. Behind the statement that he has adapted everything he could, except for the color of his skin, which is difficult to change, there is a commitment to adaptation, which he has successfully achieved. He has done everything he could to adapt. Indeed, if possible, he would ultimately change his skin color or at least wish he was born white. This is comprehensible in John Christopher‘s personal history and shall not be valued here. But it follows from this on an abstract level that the more or less subtle pressure to assimilation in ethnocentric cultures is faded out. This leads to a lack of comprehension towards those who are not able or willing (which often merges) to adapt so successfully.

“Because quite frankly, if a Muslim would come here now and ask if he could be with the riflemen, I would say ‘no’ myself. But not because he’s black, but because his religion doesn’t conform to ours. We are a traditional association built on the Christian faith. If you convert to Christianity, we can talk about it. If you stay Muslim, I’m sorry. You do not belong with the riflemen if you cannot pray with us. I came to the riflemen because I just decided to stand by this country and its tradition, to represent it.” (Peterlini H.K. 2020a, 212).

The statement “to stand by this country and its tradition, to represent it” is almost identical to that of the young rifleman Ingo in 1997–2009, based on the same mythical foundation. “My dad has always told me the stories of Tyrol about Andreas Hofer, how he fought for our country, how the French shot him, that they had to shoot twice until he fell over, that moved me.” (John Christopher in ibid, p. 212) This self-invention based on narratives and identity offers in the country of arrival goes hand in hand with a – loving but decisive – downgrading of one’s home country: “I know little about the Dominican Republic. When I was on vacation there, my biological father always sought and visited me. When he died, I was sad, but I was here at home. My step-tata is my tata. Logically, I still love the country where I come from, but I’m only here at home. In the village, in the mountains, ‘I have protection, I’m fine here.” (Ibid).

Leeways of Survival From Assimilation to Empowerment

Ethnicization shows itself in the interweaving of foreign and self-ethnicization as a possibility of youthful self-constitution, which can be initiated and strengthened by ethnocentric structures of a society. Young people in ethnocentric communities receive strong role models from myth and history. On the one hand, those allow them rebellion (against the ailing modern society and in recourse to heroic deeds and victim stories from the myth) and at the same time convey security in a conservative world order. In this mixture of traditional revolt and social upheaval, ethnicization also enables a form of becoming a subject that does not have to deal with ambivalences. Ethnicization makes it easier to exclude given multiplicity and fragility in favor of sharply cut self-images and worldviews by suppressing all inconsistencies in life and undesired or undeveloped facets of one’s concrete person and/or by projecting them onto them enemy images. In this complex response process, just pointing your finger at the young people, oriented towards offers and differentiation options, is not sufficient from an educational perspective. It is crucial to understand and address the conditions that favor such identity offers – often existential fears, feeling exposed in an increasingly non-solidary society, loss of trust, loss of perspective, threshold experiences before changes with an unknown outcome.

Against this background, it seems understandable that ethnicization serves as a resource for identity formation. It can also cast a spell over young people of migrant origin, whether towards the so-called culture of origin in contrast to the majority society or assimilatory adaptation to it. They take the opportunities they find and respond with the options they have. On his Facebook page, John Christopher also posts photos of car races he participates in, trips to Venice, rescue missions, and – in the time of the “Black lives matter”-protests 2020 – humorous criticism of racism. For example, when a black person wonders why all good things are white and all evil things are black: “The Angel Food cake was the white cake, and the Devil's Food cake was the chocolate cake!”.

To be amazed or to find it strange that a young black man in South Tyrol feels at home in the old customs of Heimat and pretends to be a patriotic South Tyrolean would be to fall into the trap of racialization of culture. It would mean that one would have to be born here to succumb to the temptation of a strong and ethnoculturally conceived home. Simultaneously, it is necessary to consider that John Christopher is not only a South Tyrolean patriot but there are other facets of his way of life and his idea of identity. Otherwise, we would reduce him to that one facet of identity that we take under criticism. The cage of ethnicization is trapping not only their indweller but easily also who is judging from the outside.

However, the hardships and longings behind the magic German word Heimat are neither linguistically, racially, nor culturally justified but have to do with existential issues and living conditions. From a pedagogical perspective, this does not require firm judgments but searching questions.