The dilemma of the past

This chapter examines collective memory as a key temporal dimension shaping migrant groups, focusing on how new mnemonic communities emerge among participants originally lacking a shared social past to enable engagement and mobilization. Shifting the analytical lens from individual biographies to the meso-level of collective memory, the chapter first explores the different types of archives available to migrant groups and then investigates the practices of memory work through which a common past is actively produced and maintained. Migrants’ archives include biographical narratives, pre-existing group histories, and political practices that reproduce past modes of action in the present. These archives are not incorporated into collective memory in their entirety; rather, they are selectively activated through processes that foreground certain elements while silencing others. Collective memory is partly embedded in implicit practices – such as routinized political actions – that function as procedural memories, carrying past legacies forward through everyday forms of activism. Other elements are explicitly recollected and articulated as the group&s;s past, with established collective memories often overriding individual biographies. Rather than a simple aggregation of singular memories, collective memory represents the outcome of hierarchical and value-laden filtering processes shaped by ideological orientations, organizational histories and stronger or weaker ties to broader movement areas. The chapter adopts a relational understanding of memory, emphasizing its emotional, interactive and affective dimensions. Collective memory is generated through relations among participants and fostered through practices of memory work, including the recursive sharing of stories, the construction of founding myths, references to past struggles and the circulation of shared everyday experiences such as racism and discrimination. Examining memory work highlights important differences between newly formed groups, which allow greater space for biographical archives to become collectively shared, and more consolidated groups, where collective memory is stable and more resistant to transformation.