Towards a genealogy of migrant struggles and rescue. The memory of solidarity at the Alpine border

This article advances a genealogy of migrant struggles and citizens solidarity practices, with a focus on the French-Italian migrant passage. It contends that scholarship has mainly mobilised a spatial approach to migrant struggles, while the temporality of solidarity and the collective memory of struggles have remained under-theorised. Then, the article moves on by focusing on the French-Italian Alpine border and it analyses the longstanding history of migrants’ passages there and, jointly, the mobilisations that took place in that area over the last decades exploring how these sedimented a citizen collective memory of solidarity practices. The final section deals with the history of mountain rescue at the French-Italian Alpine border and shows how migrants were saved by volunteers. The piece concludes by arguing that an insight into the memory of migrant struggles and solidarity practices enables foregrounding the transversal alliances which have been built between migrants and citizens and unsettling binary opposition between the former and the latter.