Discover the different research projects contributing to Amsterdam Diaries
Oral history project: the first Amsterdam -Turkish Student Union (founded 1988)
Laura van Hasselt
From the beginning of the 1960s, over 65,000 so-called ‘guest workers’ migrated from Turkey to the Netherlands. Many of them came to live and work in Amsterdam and eventually decided to stay. Thus their children grew up in a completely different and for a long time unfamiliar environment. As important as traditions from home were, the lives of these children would be very different from those of their parents. In 1988, the first Turkish Student Union was founded in Amsterdam. It was called TSV: Turkse Studenten Vereniging and was meant for students at HBO and university. What started out as an Amsterdam initiative soon became a national association for students from comparable backgrounds.
TSV organized conferences and study trips to Turkey, amongst other activities, but its purpose was mainly social. In this oral history project, founders and Amsterdam members of the first years are interviewed about TSV and Amsterdam in the 1980s and 1990s. Why did they join this society, based on a shared ethnic background? But also: what did the city of Amsterdam mean
to them? Where did they live and study, what were their favourite places to meet and go out? Where did they most feel at home and reversely, which parts of the city did they try to avoid? The history of these students is intertwined with that of their parents. In what sense was Amsterdam a different place to these students than to their parents? Eventually this oral history project is about crossing borders and finding your own way. What did it mean to live in between worlds: not only between Amsterdam and Turkey, but also to be the first in the family to be a student of higher education?