Communicating Mobile Borders: Urban Conviviality and More-Than National Belonging in Trieste’s Interethnic Friendships

Abstract

This article analyzes communicative practices of interethnic conviviality in Trieste, which make this frontier city the epitome of multiculture in Europe. My in-depth interviews with an ethnographic component explore friendships among Italians and people from neighboring ex-Yugoslav countries. Largely ignorant of official minority frameworks, they negotiate togetherness by self-identifying as Triestines, performing the city in everyday life as a cultural “marketplace”—Trieste’s ancient name—where they work out informal cooperation and joke about inherited cultural opposites (Roman/capitalist vs. Slavic/ex-socialist). In interpreting these communicative alliances, I draw analogies to Yugoslav interethnic solidarities of “raja,” where conviviality depended on both spatial proximity and the positive confrontation of difference. Trieste’s Italo-Yugo networks similarly rehearse what I term “more-than-national” or “elastic” belonging, resulting from their routine combining of embodied and digital communication as complementary forms of movement, whether through socializing in taverns and online groups or traversing nearby national borders.