Page - 40 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

40 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Arnd Schneider | An anthropology of sea voyage sun, which had been on one side of the ship was on the other. So I thought that the ship must have turned around. And in fact it had got a message to help the shipwrecked from the Principessa Mafalda and we took almost 200 of the shipwrecked to Brazil. I got my suitcase stolen by them. Some came on life boats and some just swam [to our ship] and they went to sleep in the cabins wherever they could find a place. I did not travel first class, but in the ‘ordinary’ class. I was lucky to have some things stored in the hold. [In Buenos Aires] I disembarked and spent the night in the ‘Immigrant hotel’(Hotel de los Inmigrantes) and then went to the city centre. I could not get in touch with the relatives of my grandfather because they lived far away, up north in the provinces of Tucumán and Salta. ” (Schneider 2000:130) The following account, full of melodrama and deserving to be reproduced here at some length, I heard from Marta Zanone in Buenos Aires in 1989. here we find Stefania Devoto, Marta’s mother, liberating herself from oppressive circumstances in early 20th century Genoa. The mother’s ‘escape’ from Genoa in 1925, the meeting of her future husband and founder of the later family business on the ship, and the take-over of responsibilities as director of the company after his death in 1949, are the main themes. “As time went by, my mother felt suffocated or oppressed in the environment of the family which was too closed for her – the lack of freedom, the impossibility of having male and female friends and going dancing. My uncle did not want her [to go dancing] and that was the custom of the time. … for example, when my mother liked to go dancing on Saturday or Sunday, my uncle waited for her at the exit of the ballroom and dragged her home like a sheep. As the situation got worse, she started thinking about emigrating … Unbeknown to my uncle, she started to fill in immigration forms because she had some relatives living in Argentina. She had some cousins and uncles in Argentina, but I do not know from which side. They lived in the barrio of La Boca, where all the genovesi live, but I do not know where exactly. hence she started writing to these relatives. And these relatives answered her that, yes, she should come to Argentina, that here she could start a new life … I often asked my mother: ‘Why, instead of coming here to Argentina, didn’t you go to Milan, to Rome, or to Austria?’ But she thought that her brother would have had ‘long arms’ to hold her back, since she was still a minor of 20 or 21 years old. On the other hand, by putting an ocean in between [them], it would be more difficult. Thus, quietly she started to fill in the immigration forms, with the hidden approval of my grandmother and my other uncles and aunts. All knew that she would go, except Giuseppe Lombardo[her brother]. he didn’t know anything. And thus my mother went from Italy with a suitcase as small as this [makes a ges- ture with her hands] with just a few things, so that my uncle couldn’t find out. Not only did my uncle not find out till the last moment, but he only found out after the ship had departed. It was all part of the plot. I don’t know exactly which year that was, but it is certain that my mother suffered tremendously when she had to say good-bye to her mother and her broth- ers, without knowing if she would ever see them again. She was all on her own, travelling to such a far-away country. Nowadays it’s different going by plane: one arrives in 12 or 13 hours. Then, it was a month by ship without knowing what she would find over here or what kind of people. My mother just had incredible courage for the times. Nowadays, a young woman