Finding Home in Europe: Chronicles of Global Migrants 9781800738515

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION Bringing the Migrants’ Voices to the Home–Mobility Nexus
PART I Searching for Home
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 ‘Moved by the Hand of God’ Lucho, a Peruvian Religious Minister in Manchester
CHAPTER 2 One Essential Home (‘Ecuador’), Another Existential Home (‘with My Mother’), Many Houses In-Between: The Story of Miriam
CHAPTER 3 Priya: Homing in the Global Job Market – the Life Story of an Indian Woman in the Netherlands
PART II Struggles at Home
Introduction
CHAPTER 4 Once We Relax, the Door of Trauma Is Open: Aaron’s Life Story
CHAPTER 5 A Story of Accumulated Homelessness: Mateos, an Eritrean Refugee in Rome
CHAPTER 6 Yolanda: A Peruvian Care Worker on the Spanish Frontline
PART III Tastes of Home
Introduction
CHAPTER 7 Cooking Multiple Homes by Revisiting Eritrean Food in London: The Story of Makda
CHAPTER 8 Sumant: The Home Recipe to Make a Move – the Life Story of a Sikh Man in Britain
CHAPTER 9 Paola: Performing Memory and Reproducing Food Cultures
AFTERWORD Home as a Trope of Inequality
Index

Citation preview

FINDING HOME IN EUROPE

Worlds in Motion Edited by Noel B. Salazar, University of Leuven, in collaboration with AnthroMob, the EASA Anthropology and Mobility Network. This transdisciplinary book series features empirically grounded studies from around the world that disentangle how people, objects and ideas move across the planet. With a special focus on advancing theory as well as methodology, the series considers movement as both an object and a method of study. Volume 13 FINDING HOME IN EUROPE Chronicles of Global Migrants Edited by Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia and Sara Bonfanti

Volume 8 PACING MOBILITIES Timing, Intensity, Tempo and Duration of Human Movements Edited by Vered Amit and Noel B. Salazar

Volume 12 TANGLED MOBILITIES Places, Affects, and Personhood across Social Spheres in Asian Migration Edited by Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot and Gracia Liu-Farrer

Volume 7 FINDING WAYS THROUGH EUROSPACE West African Movers Re-viewing Europe from the Inside Joris Schapendonk

Volume 11 MIGRATION IN THE MAKING OF THE GULF SPACE Social, Political, and Cultural Dimensions Edited by Antia Mato Bouzas and Lorenzo Casini Volume 10 WE ARE ALL AFRICANS HERE Race, Mobilities, and West Africans in Europe Kristín Loftsdóttir Volume 9 LIMINAL MOVES Traveling along Places, Meanings, and Times Flavia Cangià

Volume 6 BOURDIEU AND SOCIAL SPACE Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements Deborah Reed-Danahay Volume 5 HEALTHCARE IN MOTION Immobilities in Health Service Delivery and Access Edited by Cecilia Vindrola-Padros, Ginger A. Johnson and Anne E. Pfister Volume 4 MOMENTOUS MOBILITIES Anthropological Musings on the Meanings of Travel Noel B. Salazar

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/worlds-in-motion

Finding Home in Europe

Chronicles of Global Migrants Edited by

Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia and Sara Bonfanti

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia and Sara Bonfanti All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pérez Murcia, Luis Eduardo, editor. | Bonfanti, Sara, editor. Title: Finding home in Europe : chronicles of global migrants / edited by Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia and Sara Bonfanti. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Worlds in motion ; Volume 13 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022036409 (print) | LCCN 2022036410 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800738508 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800738515 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Immigrants--Europe--Social conditions. | Immigrants--Europe--Interviews. | Immigrants--Europe--Biography. | Immigrants--Cultural assimilation--Europe. | Home--Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC JV7590 .F54 2023 (print) | LCC JV7590 (ebook) | DDC 325.4--dc23/eng/20221109 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036409 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036410 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-850-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-851-5 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800738508

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgements viii Introduction  Bringing the Migrants’ Voices to the Home–Mobility Nexus Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia Part I. Searching for Home Paolo Boccagni Chapter 1. ‘Moved by the Hand of God’: Lucho, a Peruvian Religious Minister in Manchester Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia Chapter 2. One Essential Home (‘Ecuador’), Another Existential Home (‘with My Mother’), Many Houses In-Between: The Story of Miriam Paolo Boccagni Chapter 3. Priya: Homing in the Global Job Market – the Life Story of an Indian Woman in the Netherlands Sara Bonfanti Part II. Struggles at Home Sara Bonfanti

1 37

43

62

79 97

Chapter 4. Once We Relax, the Door of Trauma Is Open: Aaron’s Life Story Milena Belloni

105

Chapter 5. A Story of Accumulated Homelessness: Mateos, an Eritrean Refugee in Rome Aurora Massa and Milena Belloni

121

vi    Contents

Chapter 6. Yolanda: A Peruvian Care Worker on the Spanish Frontline Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia Part III. Tastes of Home Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

138 157

Chapter 7. Cooking Multiple Homes by Revisiting Eritrean Food in London: The Story of Makda Aurora Massa

163

Chapter 8. Sumant: The Home Recipe to Make a Move – the Life Story of a Sikh Man in Britain Sara Bonfanti

179

Chapter 9. Paola: Performing Memory and Reproducing Food Cultures Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

197

Afterword Home as a Trope of Inequality Russell King

214

Index 221

Illustrations

Figure 1.1. Sharing one’s faith, Manchester. Photo by Hannah Beatrice.

44

Figure 1.2. Biblical studies. Photo by Hannah Beatrice.

55

Figure 2.1. Miriam. Photo by Miriam.

63

Figure 2.2. Miriam. Photo by Miriam.

66

Figure 3.1. Celebrating Diwali in Amstelveen. Photo by Sara Bonfanti (2019).

91

Figure 5.1. ‘Comunità La Pace’ in Ponte Mammolo, Rome. Photo by Milena Belloni.

129

Figure 5.2. The eviction of Piazza Indipendenza, Rome, 2017. Photo by Aurora Massa.

132

Figure 6.1. Yolanda at work. Photo by Maria del Pilar Bohada Rodriguez. 139 Figure 6.2. Feeding a patient. Photo by Yolanda.

148

Figure 7.1. An injera taco, London, 2017. Photo by Aurora Massa.

167

Figure 7.2. Lemlem Kitchen’s stall, London, 2017. Photo by Aurora Massa.

173

Figure 8.1. The ancestors’ cupboard in Southall. Photo by Sara Bonfanti (2018).

191

Figure 9.1. Picnic at Whitworth Park. Photo by Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia.

206

Figure 9.2. Displaying patriotism. Photo by Paola.

208

Acknowledgements

This book is the outcome of a rich collaboration between its authors and their research participants. It all started when the first and then the second cohort of postdoctoral fellows were hired at the University of Trento, in 2017 and 2018, under the EU-funded HOMInG Project led by Professor Paolo Boccagni (ERC StG 678456 – HOMInG [2016-21]). All authors and editors of this volume wish to express their sincere thanks to the principal investigator for his tireless support and advice throughout the years, as well as to our fellow colleagues at the University of Trento and the partner institutes across Europe where each of us has collaborated. We are especially grateful to Professor Nick Harney, who kindly proofread the entire manuscript before submission. We would also like to extend our thanks to our families for their patience in bearing with us during the highs and lows of intellectual labour. Given the nature of life history research, this volume was made possible only thanks to the kind engagement of informants in our ethnographic work: we are grateful for their time, commitment and trust, as well as being grateful to them for providing personal narratives for public dissemination. It is to the generosity of our interlocutors who shared with us their experiences of home and mobility that this edited collection of life stories is dedicated.

INTRODUCTION

Bringing the Migrants’ Voices to the Home–Mobility Nexus Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

This book looks at how people on the move, in particular migrants and refugees, experience home or the lack of it, and attempt to transform their everyday dwellings into meaningful places for living. Mimi Sheller and John Urry’s (2006) invitation to appreciate a multiplicity of mobilities in order to better understand today’s world informs our conceptual engagement with different ideas of home and more specifically our interest in investigating migrants’ experiences of home on the move. The ‘new mobilities paradigm’ provides a conceptual lens through which to consider not only the physical movement of people and goods (Cresswell 2011; Sheller and Urry 2016), but also the multiple ways in which social and cultural notions and practices travel across places, not least the connection between social and spatial mobility. Embracing the mobilities paradigm does not mean, however, that we can ignore how motility – that is, the capability for moving (Kaufmann et al. 2004) – is just an ambition or a necessity that is out of reach for many, as opposed to real capital for setting one’s life in motion. The millions of migrants and displaced people embarking on perilous journeys (Burrel and Hörschelmann 2019) to find better economic opportunities and seek sanctuary remind us that the very act of mobility is not open to all, or at least it is conditional for most (Kallius, Monterescu and Rajaram 2016). People’s mobility is often restricted by national and international regulations and migration policies (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). The recent global health crisis further reminds us that travelling and moving across borders cannot be taken for granted, even for those

2    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

who used to enjoy relatively unrestricted freedom of movement (Adey et al. 2021). As Tim Cresswell (2021: 52, 59) stresses, Covid-19 has put mobility ‘under siege’ and ‘invigorated localism’. Our understanding and conceptualization of home are also inspired by extending the idea of mobilities (Urry 2000) to scholarship on home and migration (Ralph and Staeheli 2011; Boccagni 2017; Miranda-Nieto, Massa and Bonfanti 2020). Urry’s (2000) invitation to challenge the understanding of societies as spatially bounded entities, and Liisa Malkki’s (1995) and James Clifford’s (1997) call that we look at culture beyond the idea of ‘roots’, notably complicate the rooting of home in a particular place or space. Instead, home can be ‘routed’ elsewhere: it can be, and sometimes it has to be, re-imagined and renegotiated on the move (Rapport and Dawson 1998; Ahmed et al. 2003; Boccagni et al. 2020). It does not always follow that migrants and refugees can experience an effective (re)making of home across different places and spaces. In fact, as the life stories gathered in this book demonstrate, struggle is a common feature of the ways those on the move understand and experience home (Jansen and Löfving 2011). But what do we mean by home? Although every chapter in this book approaches home from a specific conceptual angle and engages with different corpora of research, it is worth highlighting that our conceptualization of home is informed by a wide range of disciplines, including environmental psychology (Hayward 1997; Moore 2000); phenomenological scholarship on the perceptions of home (Dovey 1985; Kusenbach and Paulsen 2013); critical geography (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Brickell 2012); social and cultural anthropology (Hage 1997; Miller 2001; Cieraad 2006; Lenhard and Samanani 2020); sociology (Mallett 2004; Boccagni and Kusenbach 2020), and urban and housing studies (Jacob and Malpas 2013; Hadjiyanni 2019). These accounts have variously unpacked the critical dimensions of the home, and the relationalities embedded therein. Some have stressed the entanglement of the material and the symbolic in recovering the emotions that any person’s home displays and conveys (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik 2013). Others have contended that home entails the interrelated feelings of security, familiarity and control (Boccagni 2017), but also the feeling of community and a sense of possibility (Hage 1997). Finally, many have emphasized the significance of multiple scales – that is, the private and the semi-public, the national and the transnational – in investigating people’s meanings and practices of home (Al-Ali and Koser 2002; Walsh and Näre 2016). Last but not least, for ethnographers like the authors of this volume, home can become a fruitful research setting for attempting an exercise in social knowledge in which the distance between hosts and guest, informants and



Introduction    3

researcher can reveal the microphysics of power that any domestic space contains and conceals (Boccagni and Bonfanti 2023).

The Book’s Approach: What’s Distinctive about Using Life Stories as a Method for Research and Dissemination? As Charles W. Mills argued (1959: 3): ‘No social study that doesn’t come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersection within a society, has completed its intellectual journey.’ Towards the end of long-term team ethnography, the authors of this volume were drawn to the use of life stories as a research method, a method we found invaluable in making our research available to the public. First collected in biographical interviews, then interpreted through textual analysis, the life stories presented herein rely on a narrative approach to qualitative research and the communication of the results. While the archaeology of life storytelling has a long history (Erben 1998), we subscribe to Renato Rosaldo’s (1989: 11) view that ‘stories are inherently analytic, and … in the sequence of reasoning, analysis has narrative form’. The telling or narration of a life story involves nuance, depth and feeling that other modes of representation lack. However, storytelling’s theoretical potentials are not neutral: they are important conceptually and cognitively, and always need to be situated in specific cultural and political contexts. As Hayden White (1980: 9) reminds us: ‘narrative is an expression in discourse of a distinct mode of experiencing and thinking about the world, its structures, and its processes.’ Furthermore, life stories like those in this volume are twice-told narratives, which dwell in between data collection and analysis. Reviewing the field ‘from a continental view’ (which also informed the work of the authors based in Europe), Daniel Bertaux and Martin Kohli (1984) contrasted two trends in writing life stories on the basis of the collection of oral autobiographical narratives. The first, widespread in German and Anglo-Saxon academia, focused on the symbolic in social life and meaning in individual lives. The second, more common in Romances language-speaking countries, considered interviewees as informants, whose life trajectories might uncover patterns of social processes. This edited volume offers a combination of both approaches, which were developed in situ by each ethnographer with their informant(s), and afterwards by each author, in conjunction with their own analytical skills, to understand and re-narrate another’s biography. Given the variation in basic theoretical orientations and substantive issues, rather than concentrating on unattainable singular standards, in the next section, we make explicit the disciplinary contributions that

4    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

provided a theoretical base for our grounded explorations in the field and the life accounts provided by our interlocutors. While it is focused on the lived experience of an individual through the life course and across spaces (from transnational journeys to commutes in the city), Finding Home in Europe: Chronicles of Global Migrants turns the informative into the narrative, the everyday into an epic, and invites the readers to appreciate the diversity of perspectives within the singularity of experience. Because of their particularity, we find that these life stories are profoundly evocative of the human condition. Like Walter Benjamin forewarned (1968: 90): ‘A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.’

Building on Oral History As Margaretta Jolly informs us (2012), a logic of convergence between oral history and life-story sociology had been mounting in the twentieth century. Citing historian Paul Thomson and sociologist Norman Denzin, Jolly maintains that four paradigmatic revolutions have occurred in the conception of biographical narrative over the past fifty years across the humanities. The key terms of her temporalization – that is, memory, subjectivity, interpretation and digitalization – are inscribed in a deeper genealogy of how collective remembrance is formed, preserved and reproduced through the circulation of (auto)biographical memoirs: recalling one’s life or recollecting another’s, with spoken words being put on written paper (Maines 2001). As anticipated above, we maintain a distinction between life history and life story throughout this volume. Life history and life writing research use life story, whether in the form of oral history, personal narrative, autobiography or biography, as a primary source for the study of history and culture (Abrams 2016). As Brian Roberts (2002) put it more simply: the life story is the narrated story by the author/teller, whereas the life history is the later interpretive, presentational work of the researcher. Life stories capture the relation between the individual and society, the public and private experience, the local and the national, and the past and the present. Unlike tales, therefore, life stories provide us with the opportunity to understand how individuals position themselves in broader social and cultural realms (see Kothari and Hulme 2004). Although we, as authors, did intervene through editing the autobiographical accounts of the people we interviewed, and selecting excerpts to rebuild a coherent narrative (Wilmsen 2001), we tried to maintain our ‘listening attitude’ (Back 2007) in the chapters that follow. In most of the cases, we re-engaged our interlocutors by asking them to



Introduction    5

read and approve the final manuscript (Shopes 2003). If history at large considers events in chronological order, life history sees the passages that a person goes through in their life course in relation to the surrounding culture. Life stories challenge our received notion of authenticity and subjectivity: where is the boundary, if there is one, between fact and fiction? In order to appreciate how this blurry distinction between life history and life story operates within a constructivist and collaborative approach (Chappell and Parsons 2020), the next section follows the itinerary that took us from oral data collection in the field to assembling this volume. Through an interdisciplinary literature review, we reconstruct our theoretical itinerary, focusing on three successive moments: the naissance of oral history, the development of life writing across the social sciences, and the interpretive turn in anthropology. Our choices are partial and partisan (as well as being based on individual expertise and preferences), but they establish the necessary context for understanding the methodology behind our collection and co-writing of the life stories collated here.

Collective Memory and (Auto-)Biography Throughout this book, we conceive of life stories as a method and a result of ethnographic research, seeing them as a process and a product of the collaborative generation of knowledge and the dissemination of this knowledge. In a general sense, oral history provides a means of inviting someone to tell their story of their past, a past time, a past event and so on. However, one’s individual story is always intimately connected to historical conditions and thus extends beyond one’s own experience. Following Alessandro Portelli (1998), we argue that what makes oral history special in comparison with other forms of qualitative interviews is the archaeology of the genre and the inherent tension between individual memory and collective history. While the physiological functions of memory are proper to the cognitive sciences, the mechanism of filtering and interpreting past events is at the heart of the discipline of history. The term ‘history’ itself derives from the Greek and can be loosely translated as ‘enquiry’: nothing is plain or taken for granted in the act of remembrance. Herodotus and Thucydides are credited as being the first historians because of their chronicles of the wars that raged through Athens in the fifth century bc. With different styles and political stances, both authors produced written accounts of those military and political events based on a variety of sources, with a heavy reliance on oral testimonies. According to Maurice Halbwachs (1997 [1925]), the goal of history is to provide a comprehensive, accurate and fair portrayal of past events, which allows for the representation and comparison of multiple perspectives, integrated

6    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

within an encompassing account. In contrast, collective memory focuses on a single perspective that is peculiar to one social group, nation or community. Consequently, a person’s life history describes past events that were lived by that person but that are also associated with the values and biases specific to the group(s) to which the person belongs. Oral history contains this tension between the singularity of voice and the plurality of experience, as well as the dilemmas that have besieged historiography as a result of the rise of the nouvelle histoire (Burke 1990). Since then, history has integrated the approaches of the nascent social sciences in analysing the past, enquiring through documents to discover the mundane material conditions as well as the ordinary practices and the imaginary shared by people in certain places and times (Braudel 1981). The attention to small scales and minor subjects, the settings and authors of those petits récits (small narratives, as opposed to the grand narrative of heroes and immanent political forces) that the microhistory movement brought to light in the 1970s (Ginzburg 2014), have sealed the gap between history and sociology, and found their convergence in the biographical approach to understanding the past as well as the present. Acknowledging their interdisciplinary appeal, we see life stories at the crossroads of the humanities and social sciences: history to begin with, sociology and anthropology to follow.

Oral History, Life Writing and the Social Sciences Since the late nineteenth century, anthropological research has sought to archive history by means of the recording of personal stories: A.L. Kroeber, Franz Boas and their disciples engaged in what was then known (with a patronizing call for preservation) as ‘salvage ethnography’, that is, taking stock of the practices and folklore of Native American cultures threatened with ‘cultural extinction’, often as a result of modernization (Clifford 1989). Pioneering audiovisual reproduction techniques were employed for the first time, with the aim of heritage conservation: namely, early photographic cameras and Dictaphones (a machine trademarked by Alexander Graham Bell and used to record speech for playback or to be typed, a predecessor to the tape recorder). We can find evidence of the same urge to memorialize the past, and keep history alive for the benefit of future generations, in the countless ‘mass archives’ that have sprung up worldwide since the First World War (Ritchie 2014). Likewise, in the early twentieth century, a range of academic work focused on the lives of people at the margins of Western industrial society and on the different means by which these lives could be explored, highlighting the interpenetration of biographies and the sociological

Introduction    7



imagination (Thomas and Znaniecki 1918; Mills 1959). Michael Erben (1998) noted that this was the emergent breakthrough within the Chicago School (and the oral history studies in ‘cultures of poverty’, as devised by Lewis 1961), which was followed by key works such as Documents of Life 2 (Plummer 2001 [1983]) and Time and Narrative (Ricœur 1984) that invited a new generation of scholars to commit themselves to understanding lives as recounted by the subjects themselves (whether in narratives, diaries or correspondence). As Liz Stanley (1993: 2) argues: Lives are an interesting place to be, partly because there are so few areas of work in the social sciences and humanities which do not involve auto/biography in one form or another, but perhaps mainly because life writing … mounts a principled and concerted attack on conventional views that science can be objective.

Life stories contributed to an epistemological revolution within the social sciences that gives back legitimacy to the subjective and authorship to the narrating self (Ellis and Flaherty 1992). Being personal and social, we recognize the uniqueness of an individual’s life story, as it is given by that individual in relation to both him- or herself and their audience: this may result in an account that is ‘partial’ (like any other, to different degrees) but nonetheless valid in representing what is valuable to the individual. Moving away from the deceptive pretence of illustrating ‘exemplary lives’, life stories reveal how people understand the lives they conduct, their notions of self and the implications that arise from the interaction with the ethnographer, who is actively engaged in the textual co-production (Shopes 2003). Two concurrent breakthroughs contributed to this new epistemological horizon and its political ramifications (and linkages with literature): the so-called ‘interpretive turn’ in anthropology and the second wave of feminism between the 1970s and 1980s.

Interpretive Anthropology and Life Stories In the aforementioned Time and Narrative (1984: 75), Paul Ricœur affirms that living practice precedes narratives: ‘the story “happens to” someone before anyone tells it.’ Still, experience can be comprehended and communicated only once it is storied. Following Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, Ricœur advocates for an ‘existential analysis of human beings as entangled in stories’ and talks about ‘a potential story or (as yet) untold story’ to account for the ‘pre-narrative quality of experience’. The narratological approach to the human experience resonated with the paradigmatic change that swept through cultural anthropology in the 1970s.

8    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

Influenced by Max Weber and Ricœur himself, Clifford Geertz, in his seminal work The Interpretation of Cultures (1973: 5), poignantly argues that ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’ and that any culture is a complex assemblage of texts that constitutes a web of meanings. These meanings are enacted by actors themselves (the ‘natives’) and then interpreted by anthropologists in the same way as a text is read by literary critics: incorporating into the analysis the many contexts that make meaning possible (and different) for everyone involved. Rather than the prevalent ethnographic practice of observation from afar, Geertz encouraged the engagement of the anthropologist in their ethnographic account. If culture is ‘an ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves’ (Geertz 1980: 121), no other technique could be more fitting in this collaborative quest for meaning than eliciting life stories from informants. The interpretive turn in anthropology became mainstream with the publication of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), in which the editors applied literary theory to textualize ethnographic fieldwork, while making explicit the political implications that any social encounter and cultural product entailed. Along with an expansion of the idea of literary text (to include cultural ‘minorities’ and postcolonial literatures), women’s genres of writing and various forms of personal narrative started to be recognized as legitimate modes of research. At that time, the second wave of feminist initiatives (which mushroomed in the United States and then spread across the Atlantic and worldwide; Hokulani, Erickson and Pierce 2007) paved the way for women’s liberation from multifaceted social oppression by giving legitimacy to their self-narratives. Life stories began to be seen as appropriate techniques for theory-building in the social sciences, as well as effective tools for the political claims made by their tellers, in their marginal voices (Maynes, Pierce and Laslett 2008). The intersubjective sharing of personal accounts in women’s circles strengthened their gendered contestation, with arguments based on authenticity and struggle (like their manifesto Sisterhood Is Powerful, Morgan 1970). Even so, considering life stories as primary sources for the exploration of women’s lives made life history research a feminist method for the broader and deeper understanding of gender consciousness, historically and in the present (Geiger 1986). The narrative approach that coincided with the public rise of multiculturalism and feminism was further transformed by gender and queer studies from the 1990s, in particular by sexual minorities who contested their public invisibility by literally ‘coming out’ through narratives (Edwards 2012; Gorman-Murray 2009). Furthermore, the revolution of those pioneering feminist auto/biographies did not remain confined to women’s spaces. New currents in sociology and anthropology (Bertaux 1981;



Introduction    9

Tedlock 1991) were bolstered by those ‘personal thus political’ experimentations that viewed life stories as a unique challenge to debate key themes within the method of oral history that are far from having been solved. These ongoing methodological challenges include, for example, the reliability of biographic accounts, the reflexivity of the researchers, the adequacy of narrative knowledge and the representativeness of personal cases. In his comparative overview of the genre, Vincent Crapanzano (1984: 954) provides a succinct closing statement: The life history is more ‘literary’ than ‘scientific’ – and yet more ‘scientific’ than ‘literary’. It mediates, not too successfully, the tension between the intimate field experience and the essentially impersonal process of anthropological analysis and ethnographic presentation.

As we transit from a review of the literature that informed the genesis of this book to the methodology that resulted in the present collection of migrant life stories, we follow in the footsteps of those pivotal works and acknowledge that the use of life history has become ever more common, even in adjoining fields such as the geography of migrations, challenging any set notion of mobility and fixity (Rogaly 2015). Not only can personal narratives be navigated as ‘interactive texts’ that provide the coordinates for retracing people’s itineraries in time and across spaces (Miles and Crush 1993); migrant stories themselves appear to be moving, shifting our understanding of events and mobilizing other senses and sensibilities (Thomson 2011). As we acknowledge that oral history is a process and product, and that the personal comes out as political, this volume emphasizes that life stories are powerfully and irreducibly en-gendered: any auto/biographical form is narrated and composed via an articulation of gender as embodied and experienced by tellers and writers. In following these tenets, we not only pay homage to the theorization of feminist writing as a means of liberation for women (Gluck and Patai 1991); we also take inspiration from the crucial encounter with the racialized difference of Black feminism, in which, ‘historically, black women have resisted white supremacist domination by working to establish homeplace’ (hooks 1990: 385). Throughout this book, ‘home’, in its many manifestations, is often the place where life stories are delivered, but it is also a metaphor for one’s existential mobility: in the passing of time during one’s life course and in one’s shifting location as a gendered subject within relations of nurturing and/or constraints. As critical geographers have amply explored (see Brickell 2012 and 2020), whatever its realization, in private or public space, home is always a place for some to control and for others to resist. A more conceptual discussion of the importance of gender in the life stories collated in this volume is

10    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

given in the short introduction to Part II. However, the gendered nature of ‘domopolitics’ (Lonergan 2018) runs across all chapters, criss-crossing with other social axes of difference as these became salient in the lives (and chronicles) of global migrants trying to find a home in Europe.

Writing Life Stories of Home and Mobility Given the conceptual and methodological background provided in the previous sections, how did we transition from life story as a process of doing narrative fieldwork with our participants to a product that rendered and interpreted the biographical accounts received? Before appearing in the form of a written text drafted by the researchers, life stories have been told by the social actors themselves within the interview frame; thus, their realization is comprised of two successive moments, intimately interwoven and yet distinguishable in time and manner (Plummer 2004; Abrams 2016; Kulick 2017). To discuss how our interlocutors experienced (and communicated) their efforts at homemaking in various conditions of mobility, we need to step back and look at the ethnographic production of those life stories. First, we must consider the oral exchange that permits a sufficiently trustful sharing of knowledge between enquirer and respondent, listener and teller (Anderson and Jack 1991; Back 2007). Then, we account for the writing endeavour that strives to maintain the authenticity of others’ spoken words while delivering them in a communicable format to a reader (Wilmsen 2001; Fernandes 2017). Reconstructing the interactional practices behind the textual product reveals the complexity of biographical accounts. As it is repeatedly reiterated, this book subscribes to the story-focused rather than life-focused approach in using biographical narratives as the core of ethnographic work. Following James L. Peacock and Dorothy C. Holland (1993: 368): Rather than ‘life-history’, we prefer the term ‘life story’. By ‘life story’ is meant simply the story of someone’s life. For our purposes, ‘story’ is preferable to ‘history’ because it does not connote that the narration is true, that the events narrated necessarily happened, or that it matters whether they did or not.

Life stories are not equated with narrative as fiction, but the spaces of subjectivity and imagination that articulate life writing are hinted at (Portelli 1998; Jolly 2012, Chappell and Parsons 2020). Who holds narrative accountability in our work then? As argued in the next section, the chronicles of home and mobilities included in this volume emerged thanks to the mutual engagement of the ethnographers and their informants, of



Introduction    11

interviewers and interviewed. While both parties had their own stances, interests, modes and aims of narration, as each chapter shows, all the authors shared the risks and responsibilities of ‘storying experience’ (Schiff, McKim and Patron 2017). Although we recognize that our informants were the more vulnerable in going public (Seligman 2000), it is on the basis of this reciprocal trustworthiness that our work proceeded, in a pact of trust that we invite the readers to enter (Russell 2002).

The Narrative Event and Degrees of Collaboration ‘What is an event?’ Robin Wagner-Pacifici (2017) asks, analysing the ‘political semiosis’ of happenings that disrupt the everyday and resonate in a mediatized form, be it as a picture, a piece of news in the press or any other narrative that frames the occurrence within a discourse. Building upon Michel Foucault’s theorization (see Revel 2002), a historical event is recognized as such once it is shaped into a discursive element: part of a communication process in which the meanings and the import of incidences are made, contested, amended and transmitted. Several scholars have debated the circularity of historical and discursive events, and the subtle power stakes that render a lived episode relatable, transforming experience into a narration. In particular, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the forerunner of ethnomethodology Harold Garfinkel contributed to our conceptualization of life stories and our appreciation of how our participants reflect on home. Wittgenstein focused on language performance as the foundation of social constructivism: how we use language in everyday interactions informs our understanding of reality (Wittgenstein 1953). Garfinkel elucidated the notion of ‘ac-countability’: individuals subscribe to shared interactional codes to make their actions intelligible in the context in which they participate (Garfinkel 1967). Both authors converge on the general view that, if one’s life events assume a significance when emplotted, inserted in a narrative frame, the story becomes a story when conveyed to others. It is on this passage from historical to discursive and then narrative events that we wish to focus our attention. With the development of sociolinguistics, and its application in folklore studies, the ethnography of communication, and particularly of speaking, started to consider the specific narrative event of biographical interviews. Following Dell Hymes (1974: 69): ‘an oral history interview is a communicative event, not comprehensible apart from social interaction, and intimately bound up with the changing values and institutions of a changing society.’ More precisely, according to Hymes, an ethnographic interview is

12    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

a ‘speech situation’ (codified within the fieldwork itself) that sets the coordinates for a ‘speech event’ to take place: for the ethnographer to ask and the informant to respond, for the former to elicit, the latter to narrate. As Crapanzano (1984: 955–56) argued: Life history is the result of a complex self-constituting negotiation. It is the product (at least, from the subject’s point of view) of an arbitrary and peculiar demand from another subject – the anthropologist. … The interplay of demand and desire governs much of the content of the life history.

While the politics of interviewing is inherently replete with inequality in oral history research (insofar as one logs the other’s accounts), analysing the performance of a biographical interview also necessitates a consideration of the gestures, mimicry and modes of narration that make every single collection of life stories unique (Di Leonardo 1987). As Lynn Abrams (2016: 1) clearly puts it: ‘Oral history interview is an event of communication which demands that we find ways of comprehending not just what is said, but also how it is said, why it is said and what it means.’ Appreciating life history as a multi-layered research technique that starts with an oral interaction and culminates in a written text, we are drawn to question the degrees of collaboration, authorship and even dialogism that this method entails (Kulick 2017). In the wake of Mikhail Bakhtin and language semiotics, all discourse and social life tend to be seen as inherently dialogical: no speaker speaks alone because our words are always partly shaped by our interactions with others, past and present. Furthermore, life writing requires a triangulation of voices and points of view, combining aural and textual proceedings. Our interlocutors’ personal accounts were themselves based on interpersonal happenings and culturally biased modes of speech (Franceschi 2006). To what extent our skills of questioning and listening (Back 2007) culminated in an ability to recast our interlocutors’ life tales in an interpretive narration has yet to be judged by our readers. As part and parcel of what ethnography is – literally the writing of another culture – life storying took the contributors to this volume from the field to the desk. This is where the life stories we collected took shape as chapters: told by our participants and then compiled by us, amid a multiplication of authorial perspectives (Clemente 2012).

From Orality to Text: Tale-Telling between Fact and Fiction In the passage from the biographical interview to its rendition as a life story, from a recorded transcription to an interpretative analysis, the ethnographer is required to both edit the transcripts and curate the life accounts



Introduction    13

of which the ethnographer has been the recipient (and trusted custodian). In relation to depositing oral history interviews in archives, Carl Wilmsen (2001: 65) debates how problematic ‘accuracy’ may be: Accuracy is perhaps the central goal of editing oral history transcripts … The assumption is that if we are faithful to recordings, we will convey the narrator’s meaning fully and accurately. And yet how does editing affect the meaning that is ultimately produced in the interview transcript?

The original motivations of the narrator might be challenged not only by editing transcripts for the sake of understanding beyond the mystery of the narrative event (oftentimes translating into English to communicate to a broader audience; Ricœur 1984), but also by pulling out excerpts from longer quotes. Besides, while our collection of recorded interviews (including audio recordings, verbatim transcripts and photographs) was stored in the project’s digital archive, recasting our informants’ life narratives required an even greater assumption of risks and responsibilities on our part (Schiff, McKim and Patron 2017). As Sujatha Fernandes (2017) argued, observing the rise in contemporary modes of digital storytelling, ‘curated stories’ are often harrowing accounts of injustice that may move us deeply and serve utilitarian purposes as well as being part of advocacy projects. While Fernandes is concerned with how we might reclaim storytelling for the purposes of transformative social change, she recognizes the foundational moment of retelling life stories as an ethnographic craft that allows for the complexity of individual experience. By using the rhetorical devices of lumping, splitting and recasting one person’s storyline to construct a chapter, all authors tried to deliver both the voice of the first-person narrator and that of their interlocutor, to various extents, depending on multiple factors (such as ethnographic intimacy, mutual language proficiency and contingencies of the interview setting). In the transition from the interview to the life story, not only did we come to terms with a different medium, audience and genre (from oral to textual, listener to readership, life narrative to ethnographic analysis); we also interrogated ourselves in relation to the partiality of life stories and their ultimate aim. In a provocative article, David Zeitlyn (2008) enumerated three different life writing modalities taken up by anthropologists, who may work as ‘ghost-writer, biographer or hagiographer’. These three types of life writing serve as extremes within which sits his life writing, described using a metaphor drawn from visual anthropology: the idea of the silhouette. ‘A silhouette stems from physical optics just as a photograph does. … Such silhouettes have an empirical basis that, unlike photographs, do not disguise or dissemble their artefactuality and incompleteness’ (2008: 158).

14    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

The many conversations that we, the authors, had with our informants in our years of fieldwork might not add up to a conventional life story that goes straight from tape transcripts onto the paper; however, across their variations, our life stories may be described as producing anthropological silhouettes: ‘less complete than a biography, but demonstrably based on an individual, and honest about its limitations and incompleteness’ (Zeitlyn 2008: 168). The biographical snippets composing our chapters serve to reconstruct the life accounts of our interlocutors as much as they allow us to reflect on our research interests: primarily, homemaking as experienced under conditions of mobility. In the following chapters, the reader will meet our interlocutors, but also come to realize the partiality of our storytelling, which could only account for a fragment of the complexity of each biography and for a selection of the arguments we discussed with the interviewees over repeated interactions. The title of this volume contains the ambivalence inherent in the word ‘chronicle’, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as either, 1. A factual written account of important or historical events in the order of their occurrence, or 2. A fictitious work describing in detail a series of events. While the Greek etymology of kronos (lit. ‘time’) is maintained in both meanings, it is the craft of writing such work that lies between factuality and fictionality. The specificity of life stories as a process and output of ethnographic research calls for sharpening our comprehension of facts and fictions, and how these are related to temporality, of lived as much as accounted experience. As Portelli (1998: 23) wrote: ‘Oral sources are credible but with a different credibility. The importance of oral testimony may lie not in its adherence to fact, but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge.’ As a result, the closer the relationship between interviewer and interviewee, the more articulate the communication of feelings, impressions, memories and yearnings. The interviews on which the book is based were framed to follow people’s biographies, from birth to the present day, allowing for the non-linearity of life accounts. Life-course interviews allow us to hear about people’s memories, stories, perspectives and interpretations in their voices, words and styles, offering ‘felt-life’ access to their worlds. ‘Felt life’ is a term borrowed from Henry James that is used to refer to the most authentic understanding of another’s life story, the closest we can get to knowing not just what happened, but also what life felt like for our interlocutor. Following Portelli further (1998: 31), oral history tells us ‘not just what people did, but what they intended to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did’. The biographical interview is an opportunity to travel back in time with the narrator and have them take a look around and describe



Introduction    15

it for those who were not there at that time. As a case in point, when oral data were gathered in people’s homeplaces back in their countries of origin and from the significant others they left behind, travelling to those places actually allowed the ethnographers to experience the sense of having already been there: in the houses and neighbourhoods their informants used to live in and had vividly depicted. Life stories thus bring to the surface experiences that the general public and scholars did not confront first-hand, but can better understand through the secondary interpretation of the subjects’ lived accounts, through those chronicles to which the authors bore witness.

At Home on the Move: Chronicles of Times and Spaces Notwithstanding the peculiarity of each of the following chapters, they all subscribe to a tradition of collecting migrant life stories that has a long-established pedigree, as Ben Rogaly (2020: 47) contends. Following Alistair Thomson (2011: 25–26): ‘not only do oral testimonies … have the potential to actually challenge the categories and assumptions of official history; they can reshape the ways in which migration is understood as individual migrants and their descendants struggle with labels of identification.’ According to Richard Rodger and Joanna Herbert (2007: 7), while the individual experience is anchored in social history, life stories value the uniqueness of the subject and produce a specific knowledge that is ‘attentive to the diversity of experience’. Although oral history has always provided faces and voices for the grand narratives of migration studies (and tried to compensate for the invisible suffering in refugee studies, cf. Habib 1996; Eastmond 2007; Ghorashi 2008), life stories have been increasingly recognized as a critical source for understanding ‘new mobilities’ without becoming oblivious to older ones (Cresswell 2010). Cultural geography has been particularly fond of exploring migrant life accounts with a view to expanding the discipline’s grasp of movement and locality (Lawson 2000). Within the geography of migration, place has been conceptualized as both a lived locality (Massey 1993a) and a larger imaginative space between mobility and fixity in which people can understand themselves (Burrell and Panayi 2006). The testimonies of lives in the city across time, considering people’s life courses, the household cycle and their group history (Gardner 2002), have been key to revealing the interplay of social class, gender and racialization in a world that is growing more plural (Rogaly and Taylor 2016). New studies on the ‘cosmopolitanization’ of habitus and experiences have also relied significantly on life stories, arguing for the connection between emotions and localities beyond the taken-for-granted equation of home, homeland and a sense of belonging (Jones and Jackson 2014).

16    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

As the life stories collected in this volume demonstrate, our interlocutors constructed their own biographical narratives involving people and places, times and events, notions of identity and ‘alienness’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998; Miranda-Nieto, Massa and Bonfanti 2020). We wish we could argue that this work challenged the exceptionalism of the migrant figure (Dahinden 2016), but we leave this to our narrators, who think of themselves through and beyond categories, alongside the language politics in which everyday lives are embedded. Also, due to our recruiting procedure (based on nationality or ethnicity, via serendipitous snowball sampling), all of our narrators had a migrant background of some kind (either born or raised elsewhere, speakers of a mother tongue other than that of their current place of residence, or part of a group that is officially foreign in their country of residence). However, in contrast to migration-focus studies, our interviews tried to elicit the interlocutors’ reflexivity in relation to their movements and moorings, without necessarily tagging the latter as the equivalent of a certain idea of home that might have been overly sedentarist or westernized (Cieraad 2006; Easthope 2004). Since we conceptualized home as a locus and a trope – that is to say, a lived place and a motif of discussion (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Bonfanti and Massa 2020) – we were open to recording both factual and fictional accounts from our interviewees, who alternatively displaced and emplaced their lives across countries, relations, memories and projections (Ahmed et al. 2003; Bennett and McDowell 2012). As we were interested in how people reflected on the meaning of home and practices of home within a multi-scalar and experiential approach (Noble 2013; Jacobson 2009), our guided questions addressed spatial mobilities as well as housing pathways, interlacing people’s experience of movement and locality but also their shifting in relation to significant others over the life course (Ralph and Staeheli 2011). At the end of the day, in spite of irreducible differences (or perhaps owing to them), all the life stories of home and mobility that feature in this volume allow us to see the auto/biographic side of people’s quest or struggle to put themselves in context (Moore 2000), authoring the plot of their lives so they can be the protagonist of the story they inhabit. It is undeniable that the singularity of each life story as reported in this volume speaks about different migratory experiences and relates to different interpretative frames within the ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006; Cresswell 2011). For a detailed account, we invite the readers to familiarize themselves with each part introduction before turning to the relevant chapters: migrants’ quest for belonging, their vulnerabilities and their sensorial appreciation of home are the three lenses through which we, as authors, viewed the stories we were told.



Introduction    17

Final Remarks: Social Critique in Participants’ Voices ‘It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards’ (Kierkegaard 1843, as in Quist 2002: 80). Taken from the Journals written by the Danish initiator of existentialism, this quote reminds us that storytelling’s ability to help us make sense of our experiences is also based on the promises it makes to help us navigate the present and orient ourselves in relation to the future. Researching lives by listening to people’s stories has proved to be an increasingly broad and rich field in the social sciences, with a proliferation of cases and methodologies (Harrison 2009). In this Introduction, we have given an overview of the studies that resonated most with the biographical approach we developed in the field while doing ethnographic research on home and mobility. From the development of oral history to the ‘interpretative turn’ in anthropology (Plummer 2001; Crapanzano 1984), from the rise of second-wave feminist studies to the political struggles against colonialism and intersectional forms of discrimination (Roberts 1981; McCall 2005), life stories have been increasingly recognized as credible sources of social critique, which are integral to understanding people’s subjectivities as well as the social worlds they inhabit. Following Umut Erel (2007), who argued that biographical methods are particularly suited to shifting the premises of migration research to foreground the agency and subjectivity of migrant women, in this volume we maintain that our editorial work on the life narratives we collected usefully reveals the self-representations of migrant people and the challenges they confront in the search for home. Integrating the biographical approach into our ethnographic studies of homemaking as experienced by different migrant people on an everyday basis, the resulting life stories are wonderfully diverse and are based on the peculiar collaboration established between scholars and participants (Shopes 2003). Without compromising complexity, we hope to have made life-story research accessible to a broad audience and to have provided our informants with a platform for their voices to be heard in the public space of free knowledge production. One critical reflection, stemming from postcolonial theories of representation, needs to be addressed. In deconstructing ‘the Orient’ as portrayed by Western intellectuals, Edward Said (1978: 21) guarded us against any alleged benevolence in representing Others: ‘In any instance of at least written language there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation.’ As much as the authors of this book might aspire to leave the floor to their interviewees as narrators, it is the ethnographers’ writing that ends up speaking on behalf of their informants.

18    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

Gayatri Spivak (1988: 63) reiterates this critical point: ‘It is not a solution, the idea of the disenfranchised speaking for themselves, or the radical critics speaking for them; this question of representation, self-representation, representing others, is a problem.’ While this volume does not specifically build upon Subaltern Studies’ perspectives, we remain aware that a ‘persistent critique’ of the life stories as delivered to us and then re-presented to readers defies simplistic interpretations of ‘voice’ that are void of ideological features. Following Stuart Hall (1997: 6), our approach to a theory of representation is more semiotic than discursive, that is, it is more focused on the poetics than the politics of life storytelling. Nevertheless, as all chapters will make explicit, the reciprocity between participants and researchers, in spite of their unequal positioning, in this oral history project is the only answer we can offer to a naïve understanding of the conundrums of representation, and our well-reasoned antidote to giving any ‘spectacle of the Other’ (Hall 1997: 276). To conclude, this book takes a step forward from the collective work published earlier by the authors, which was grounded in team research lasting almost five years (Belloni et al. 2019). Responding to Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s invitation to consolidate our critical engagement after Ethnographies of Home and Mobility (Miranda-Nieto, Massa and Bonfanti 2020), Chronicles of Global Migrants contends that the segregating discourses that have arisen in Europe (and elsewhere) codify home and nations as sites of exclusion, but it does so by bringing in the voice of (oftentimes marginalized) research participants. Although the constellations of people whom we call migrants may have fewer resources and tenuous claims to home, it is our wish that the life stories collated in this volume function as ‘counter-narratives’ (Andrews 2002) and have the power to oppose otherwise simplistic and oftentimes discriminatory views on the journeys of those who come from afar and ‘pretend’ to live chez nous. Building on the lived accounts of people who are seen as on the move and variously struggle ‘to turn space into their place’ (Boccagni and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2021), this book advocates for the appreciation of stories that travel beyond the personal and provide new frames of reference for tellers, listeners and readers. Although, as authors, we are aware of the ‘critique of empathy’ that the various entitlements to home claimed by our interlocutors may provoke (Shuman 2005), we defend our standpoint by their side in constructing meaningful homes in the places they have reached because we believe that ‘home’ can only be such if it fulfils the promise to include, to remain open to life projects as diverse as theirs may be and to offer an equal welcome to all. If lives can only be understood in recounting the past, we are all accountable for making the future happen.



Introduction    19

The Contribution of the Book The scholarship discussed above informs our understanding of both mobility and home and the intersections between the two. Chronicles of Global Migrants, however, privileges the voices of migrants and refugees to capture the significance of home in their everyday lives and the ways in which they negotiate home in contexts of mobility. Their narratives powerfully illustrate the complexities of moving between the Global South and the Global North, and the difficulties posed by developing a sense of home on the move. Along with the singular contributions of each chapter, Chronicles of Global Migrants contributes to ongoing debates on the home–mobility nexus in a number of ways. To begin with, this anthology provides an ethnographically rich account of the meaning of home. All chapters explore in detail the multiple meanings migrants attach to the idea of home and how those meanings, and the migrants’ experience of home or the lack of it, are negotiated on the move. Research on home, migration and mobility has significantly increased in the last two decades but the meaning of home and how migrants negotiate it on the move are often not engaged with conceptually or are simply taken for granted. As Tom Selwyn and Nicola Frost (2018: 2) rightly point out, ‘the term [home] is in danger of becoming unmoored to specific lived realities’. By looking at the diverse ways in which migrants reflect on home and struggle to turn their places of settlement into a home, the authors are not only showing the interaction between home and closely related concepts such as homeland, belonging and even housing; they are also questioning the use of the term ‘home’ to refer to those analytical categories. The significance of such distinctions for theorizing home can be appreciated in Miriam’s life story (chapter 2). Having Italian nationality does not necessarily result in a feeling of being at home in Italy, and owning a house in Ecuador does not necessarily result in a feeling of being at home in Ecuador. The life experiences of the nine migrants and refugees discussed in this book also call our attention to the need to look at the home–mobility nexus beyond what Malkki (1992) terms the ‘national order of things’. Their accounts illustrate the value of mundane mobilities – that is, moving to a different area of the same city – to better understand how the multiple scales of home are re-negotiated. As illustrated by the life story of Yolanda (chapter 6), moving to a different flat within one’s building can shape an entire family’s sense of home. Being ‘forced’ to temporarily leave one’s room to accommodate an ill father/grandfather can be perceived differently by different family members: as a moral obligation for a mother who wants to accommodate her father and as an act of injustice in the eyes of

20    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

her teenage son who was asked to temporarily vacate the only place to which he attached a feeling of home after several months of Covid-19 lockdowns. As Sara Ahmed et al. (2003: 5) contend, ‘the greatest movements often occur within the self, within the home or within the family’. Furthermore, and taking a bottom-up approach, contributors stress the significance of what Jan Wilhelm Duyvendak (2011) calls ‘the politics of home’ for understanding the home–mobility nexus. As discussed in the context of the life story of Mateos (chapter 5), migrants and refugees’ struggle to belong to the places in which they have been settled for years illustrates the tensions between being a ‘local’ and being a ‘migrant’, and the hostility migrants and refugees often have to deal with in making a home on the move (Selwyn and Frost 2018). Even those who have lived most of their lives in countries where they have been granted citizenship tend to emphasize their migratory background to stress the extent to which their belonging in the places in which they are settled is contested by ‘autochthonous’ populations (Duyvendak 2011). Participants’ accounts reveal that citizenship certainly facilitates their settlement, further mobility and the making of a home; however, it is only one of the many structural factors that contribute to transforming one’s dwelling space into a home. More generally, as Cresswell (2021: 53) emphasizes, mobility is ‘entangled in issues of power, politics, and social justice’. Closely related to the former aspect, contributors complicate the idea of ‘domopolitics’. As discussed in Sumant’s life story (chapter 8), Sumant has made himself at home in London through the display of his culinary skills and his food. In this case, however, Sumant is not domesticated by the ‘Empire’; rather, he has been domesticating the demanding palate of British and foreign gastronomes with the flavours, spices and smells of Indian food. Makda’s life story (chapter 7) also shows the power of food in contesting colonial powers and racism. By cooking and selling Eritrean food in London, she is both bringing the flavours of home to London and teaching London foodies to engage with the Black culture she represents. Chronicles of Global Migrants also shows how the tensions between home and mobility/immobility can be appreciated in both the experiences of those who moved and those who stayed put. The narratives of those who migrated and could not bring their families to their countries of settlement remind us of the multiple difficulties transnational families experience in developing a sense of family, a sense of community and ultimately a sense of home on the move. As the life story of Paola (chapter 9) illustrates, this is the case for elderly parents and grandparents who are left behind with a broken promise of family reunification (cf. Walsh and Näre 2016). However, as discussed in many of the contributions, this is not the end of the story. Migrants are often able to recreate their communities and social



Introduction    21

and cultural practices in the societies in which they settle as a strategy for feeling at home in the transnational space. The emotional sides of home are explored further by some of the contributors of this volume. Priya’s life story (chapter 3) not only shows the significance of emotional attachments to culture and family in migrants’ attitudes towards home, but also disrupts how high-skilled migrants’ feelings towards home are portrayed. Her struggles to feel at home abroad question the assumption that highly educated and affluent migrants move from home to home almost seamlessly (cf. Hage 2005). She has the qualifications and financial resources to travel back ‘home’ or move elsewhere but instead remains in the Netherlands, feeling that she is stuck. The emotional sides of home are also explored in Aaron’s life story (chapter 4). His narrative illustrates both how trauma often becomes a feature of the lives of those fleeing conflicts and how experiences of trauma limit refugee opportunities to remake home in the new context in which they settle. The value of migration categories for conceptualizing home is questioned by several contributors. Makda (chapter 7) left her country two years before the end of the Eritrean War of Independence against Ethiopia but did not describe herself as either a forced migrant or a refugee. In fact, her narrative details her cosmopolitan life in New York and London and how she has been relying on ‘Black’ food to create a home on the move. Lucho’s life story (chapter 1) further questions the blurred distinctions between so-called ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ migration and shows how individuals navigate these categories over time. His journeys started when he was forced to leave ‘home’ at an early age and then resumed once again when attending God’s call to support people in need thousands of miles away. Nowadays, such forms of ‘forced’ mobility equipped him and his family with British passports and the opportunity to move as God decides. The role of material cultures in migrant’s homemaking is a common feature in the narratives discussed in this book. Sumant’s practice of remitting Indian food from London to Kuala Lumpur is just one example that highlights the significance of everyday material cultures in sustaining family bonds across the transnational space (chapter 8). By cooking for his brother, Sumant is availing of his Indian cooking skills and reproducing a sense of home within his family’s domestic space in London, as well as bringing a piece of his British Sikh home to his brother. The significance of everyday materialities in homemaking can be also appreciated in the context of those living in informal settlements. Last but not least, this anthology makes an important methodological contribution to the study of home under conditions of mobility. All contributors engaged in longitudinal research to appreciate how migrants and refugees experience home in the places in which they settle and, in some

22    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

cases, in relation to the places from which they have been forced to move. As described in more detail above, the collection of the life stories involved long-term ethnographic engagement with research participants. By following the lives of migrants and even becoming ‘part’ of their lives, not only have we found an extra source of inspiration for exploring the conceptual links between home and mobility; we have also gained a strong sense of what life on the move is about. We hope to encourage scholars in the fields of home, migration, refugees and mobility studies to engage more with life stories as a research technique, as well as encouraging the general public to engage with the lives of these nine ‘people on the move’. We hope their life stories inspire us to consider and listen to the voices of those migrants and refugees who are living around us and perhaps trying to make our communities their home.

A Note on Methods and Ethics Ethnography and Interviewing: A Selective Process This book brings together the voices of nine migrants and refugees, who vividly describe their experiences of home, and the voices of a multi-disciplinary group of researchers (sociologists, social anthropologists and a specialist in development studies), who connect the migrants’ and refugees’ narratives to broader contemporary debates on the home–mobility nexus. Drawing on the life histories of nine individuals, this collection of life stories constitutes a critical account of how home is experienced by those who move or are compelled to move. The life stories of Lucho, Miriam, Priya, Aaron, Mateos, Yolanda, Makda, Sumant and Paola were carefully selected from an archive of over two hundred in-depth interviews that we have collected since 2017 as part of the ERC-HOMInG research project based at the University of Trento. This is a collaborative, qualitative and multi-sited social science investigation that examines the interplay between migration and home for migrants and refugees from South America (Ecuador and Peru), South Asia (India and Pakistan) and the Horn of Africa (Eritrea and Somalia) across major cities in five European countries: Italy, Britain, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands. In the cases of Lucho, Miriam, Mateos, Yolanda and Paola, data were also gathered from family members and friends in their countries of origin. The nine life stories were selected primarily for conceptual reasons. Following a preliminary analysis of the emergent themes from the empirical material gathered by the HOMInG Project, a number of life stories were proposed by members of the research team. Researchers engaged in an individual and collective reflective process (see Vari-Lavoisier et al. 2019) about



Introduction    23

the significance of their empirical material in problematizing questions of home and belonging in the context of migration and mobility. On the basis of an initial, larger selection of life stories, three emerging topics were identified: the migrants and refugees’ search for home on the move; the struggles they often face in making their places of settlement home; and the role of food, and food practices more generally, in the making of a home. The final selection of the life stories was guided by several considerations, including reasons for migration, country of origin, country of settlement, gender, and skills or educational degrees. Both people fleeing war and persecution and people moving in search of better job opportunities and qualifications were considered. The selection included three participants from Eritrea (Aaron, Mateos and Makda), two of whom identified themselves as refugees (Aaron and Mateos); two participants from India (Priya and Sumant), who moved as a result of their qualifications and skills as an ITC programmer and a chef respectively; two participants from Ecuador (Miriam and Paola), one of whom (Miriam) is a school teacher who has mostly done low-skilled jobs in Italy; and two participants from Peru (Lucho and Yolanda), one a Christian religious minister (Lucho) and the other a nurse. Several ethnographic techniques were implemented to collect the life stories. Along with semi-structured interviews, which aimed to capture the participants’ experiences of home before and after migration, the five contributors to the book adopted a varied set of techniques to explore the material and symbolic dimensions of home (Blunt and Dowling 2006) in the contexts of migration and mobility (Ralph and Staeheli 2011). To begin with, ‘home visits’ were conducted in most cases. The domestic space offered a unique opportunity to observe family dynamics, power relationships and the ways migrants and refugees use and appropriate space to transform their dwellings into homes. Furthermore, through visits to their domestic spaces, we were able to gain a better understanding of whether migrants recreate or reproduce ideas or practices from their countries of origin, or the many places they have transited through, in order to feel at home beyond their precarious status of guests in a host environment (Boccagni and Bonfanti 2023). This aspect was significant in understanding the role of objects and material cultures, including housing (chapter 2) and food (chapters 7, 8 and 9), in the ways participants and their relatives circulate ideas and practices of home across the transnational space (ToliaKelly 2006; Pechurina 2020). Beyond the domestic space, the contributors engaged with research participants in a large range of settings, including places of work and worship, ‘temporary’ places of settlement, food and religious festivals, ‘ethnic’ restaurants, cafés and street food markets. By ‘going along’ with participants and sharing time with them in those places, we were able to better

24    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

understand the extent to which they create connections with those places (Kusenbach 2003). In fact, by observing participants in the many places in which they spend a significant part of their everyday lives, we learnt about the significance of place (Massey 1993b; Edensor, Kalandides and Kothari 2020), the people and communities around them, and their feelings and attitudes towards home.

Recording, Transcription, Translation and Analysis After written consent was released by research participants, interviews were arranged and data collection started. With the exceptions of Miriam and Mateos, whose life stories started to be gathered respectively by Paolo Boccagni in 2006 and Aurora Massa and Milena Belloni in 2013, the data collection for this book took place between 2017 and early 2021. All interviews were recorded. Since the collection of the nine life stories involved dozens of interviews and informal conversations, only the material from the main and follow-up interviews was transcribed. The participant’s first language was privileged for data collection when the language matched the researcher’s heritage language or when the researcher was proficient in the language. Following this rationale, Spanish was used for interviews with migrants from Ecuador and Peru. This allowed participants to freely use idioms and metaphors to stress the meanings they attach to the idea of home and the ways in which they experience it in the transnational space. English was used as the lingua franca for the remaining life stories; we acknowledge the complex political issues behind this choice (including the postcolonial conundrum for people from South Asia, who often master English as the result of British imperialism, cf. McArthur 2003). Mateos’s interview represents an exception since it was conducted partly in Italian and partly in Tigrinya. Mateos has been living in Italy for over twelve years, but his command of Italian is too limited to express in detail his feelings about home and how migration has shaped these feelings. As explained by Massa and Belloni in the chapter, their command of Tigrinya was also limited. Consequently, they decided to rely on their long-term ethnographic engagement with him and indirect description to reconstruct his migration and housing trajectories. In some cases, keywords were kept in the original language and a translation was provided to allow readers to appreciate the rich and diverse ways in which participants reflect on their experiences of migration and home. The specific analytical angle and its relevance to ongoing debates on home, migration and mobility are detailed in each chapter and were autonomously decided on by the author(s) of each chapter. However, precise guidelines in terms of content and analysis were agreed upon amongst



Introduction    25

editors and co-authors to ensure that each life story would connect with the scope and aims of the book. All chapters were peer-reviewed by the editors and the general Introduction of the book was peer-reviewed by the principal investigator of the HOMInG Project, Professor Paolo Boccagni. The editors and co-authors of the book are grateful to all participants for contributing their life stories and dedicating significant time to this research and book project. We also thank Professor Nick Harney for proofreading the whole manuscript and providing insightful comments.

Research Ethics Ethnographic and oral history data were gathered in line with the ethical standards currently shared by the academic community and detailed in documents such as the pamphlet ‘Research Ethics in Ethnography/ Anthropology’ (Iphofen 2013), distributed by the European Commission, and the latest EASA 2018 ‘Statement on Data Governance in Ethnographic Projects’. Besides, as the HOMInG Project and its principal investigator are based at the University of Trento, all team members agreed to follow the praxes set by the local Research Ethics Committee, which is also aligned with the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. In keeping with such ethical requirements, informed consent was obtained from all participants before the collection of any data. Participants were invited to use a pseudonym for the interviews. Three out of nine participants opted to use their real names, asking to be given personal recognition for their involvement in the research project. In all cases, data was safely stored on a password-protected University of Trento drive. With some exceptions, the collection of life stories led to enjoyable conversations, often enlivened with food and coffee in either public venues or domestic spaces. The collection of Aaron’s and Mateos’s life stories proved more challenging due to traumatic experiences of displacement, especially in the case of Aaron, and precarious settlement conditions in the case of Mateos. Distress was also observed in some of Yolanda’s interviews, especially when she described the death of her patients and the ways in which the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has affected her family life. All participants gave written consent to their life stories being published in this volume and, with the exception of Mateos (partly for the linguistic reasons outlined above), all participants read and commented on their life stories. As for the photographic material, most of the pictures used in the book were taken by the chapter’s authors, a few others were taken by the interviewees themselves as it is acknowledged chapter by chapter and in the List of Illustrations. All the visual material is published with the participants’ authorization.

26    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

To conclude, while the authors strived to comply with all procedural requirements to ensure responsible data management, ethics and integrity, we acknowledge that a scientific practice as open-ended, intersubjective and interpretative as ethnography requires that the researcher adopt broad principles to guide their work but also to adapt their efforts on a case-bycase basis (see de Koning et al. 2019). The authors of the chapters thus remain accountable for what is written in the following pages, grounding their credibility not on the pretence that they are speaking on behalf of their informants, but rather on the ethical collaboration that stems from doing oral history with the utmost care and consideration for migrant people and their stories.

The Content of the Book This book comprises three distinct, interconnected parts: ‘Searching for Home’ (Part I), ‘Struggles at Home’ (Part II) and ‘Tastes of Home’ (Part III). Each part includes its own introduction and three life stories. All chapters provide their own endnotes and references. ‘Searching for Home’ focuses on migrant attempts to make a home in the transnational space. Following Boccagni’s introductory essay, the three chapters presented in this part engage with questions of home and migration from three different analytical perspectives. Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia (chapter 1) explores how faith-related migration complicates the interplay between mobility and home. Based on the life story of Lucho, a Peruvian religious minister with a British passport who has been spreading Christian values amongst Muslim communities in Manchester since 2007, the chapter questions distinctions between different forms of human mobility and the assumption that attachment to a place called home is both a universal need and a never-ending search. By mobilizing his faith, Lucho is not seeking a place in which to create ‘roots’. Instead, he is searching for ‘routes’ to propagate the moral values of his community of faith and, in doing so, supports refugees in making Manchester their ‘home’. The chapter concludes by highlighting how, rather than being fixed in a particular building, city or country, home has become a mobile space that Lucho experiences as a ‘journey with God’ as long as his family travels with him. Boccagni (chapter 2) draws on the life story of Miriam, an EcuadorianItalian woman in her mid-forties who has been living in Trento, Italy, for nineteen years. A long-term ethnographic engagement with Miriam’s migratory experience has allowed Boccagni to provide an in-depth analysis of her changing housing, household and dwelling conditions in both Italy and Ecuador. Miriam’s narrative strongly illustrates the intersection



Introduction    27

between ideas of identity and belonging, the built environment, especially the multiple dwellings she has inhabited over years and relates to as home, and the more affective dimension of the built environment. Throughout the migration process, ‘Ecuador’ seems to retain a deeper association with home than ‘Italy’. On an everyday basis, though, home for Miriam has less to do with a place in particular than it does with the people in it – most notably, her mother. As she stresses, ‘My place is home only if my mother is there’. Through the life story of Priya, a 32-year-old Hindu woman living in Amsterdam, Sara Bonfanti (chapter 3) highlights the predicaments faced by high-skilled migrants in making a home on the move. Coming of age with a stronger attachment to her adoptive country and a weaker desire to return to her ‘homeland’ despite her nostalgia, Priya remains in a liminal condition; unable to develop strong bonds with the ‘locals’, she tries to reproduce a sense of home with ‘expat’ peers. The ways in which she arranges her domestic objects and enjoys Indian party culture abroad reveal her mixed attachments to places and people, as well as her understanding of social differences among Dutch people with an Asian background. ‘Struggles at Home’ takes the reflection on the search for home further, recognizing the political issues embedded in both the public and domestic arena. While all people on the move might struggle, to some extent, to feel at home in new locations or under precarious conditions, the contributions in this part explore the critical challenges migrants and refugees experience in transforming their places of dwelling into homes. Following the introductory essay by Bonfanti, who highlights ‘the moral and political calls of the life history’ method (Plummer 2001), three life stories are examined. Belloni (chapter 4) tells the life story of Aaron, an Eritrean man in his forties living in the Netherlands. While recounting the main episodes of Aaron’s life in his own words, the chapter elaborates on the concept of collective ‘trauma’. It shows how the idea of ‘trauma’ provides Aaron with a powerful tool to make sense of his own life story in light of a shared history (i.e. Eritrea’s struggle for independence, conflict, the progressive militarization of society and displacement) and allows him to re-establish the markers of his community symbolically and practically. Aaron’s attempt to establish an ethnic association for Eritrean refugees in the Netherlands is part of his attempt to overcome common traumas collectively. Drawing on the life story of Mateos, a man in his forties who has lived in Italy since 2005, Massa and Belloni (chapter 5) illuminate the different facets of what it means to be homeless. While Mateos is actively looking for stable and decent accommodation after multiple evictions in Rome, his experience in different informal settlements shows the importance of

28    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

a community bond, a feeling of control – agency – and personal realization to the perception of being at home. As the authors stress, Mateos’s homemaking efforts have been fraught with structural factors, such as the lack of housing policies for migrants and refugees in Italy, and individual factors, such as material precariousness, his health and his distance from family members. Pérez Murcia (chapter 6) elaborates on the life story of Yolanda, a Peruvian caregiver with a Spanish passport who has been living in Madrid since 2000, to explore two interrelated questions: whether and how care work constitutes a homemaking practice deployed by migrant care workers and how the ongoing pandemic shapes their experiences of home. In relation to the first question, the chapter shows that by caring for elderly people and newborns in Madrid, Yolanda has been able to reunite her family, educate her children and gain the respect, admiration and appreciation she needs to feel at home. The making of a home in Spain, however, is not free of complexities and negotiations. Working double shifts, Yolanda has often struggled to look after her family and herself and has had to learn to get used to being surrounded by death in her work. In relation to the second question, the chapter shows how practices of compulsive cleaning and social distancing within and beyond the domestic space have disrupted Yolanda’s experience of home within and beyond the domestic space. ‘Tastes of Home’ provides three examples of the potential and limitations of migrants’ food practices in their attempts to make a home in a transnational space. Practices of food preparation and sharing, as well as cooking entrepreneurship, emerged as common features displayed by migrants and refugees in their processes of searching for and making a home. Through food practices, migrants and refugees alleviate their everyday struggles for home and are able to reproduce or even reimagine home on the move. Following Pérez Murcia’s introductory essay, Massa (chapter 7) shows how people not only negotiate and influence the meaning of their life, their home and their selves through food, but also transform and invest those meanings with new connotations. Drawing on the life story of Makda, a woman from Eritrea who manages a street-food restaurant in London, the chapter sheds light on the processual entanglement of food, a sense of home and subjectivity in a biographical trajectory marked by intersecting positionalities and multiple relocations in different countries. Furthermore, Massa discusses how foodways and their routes can become the pivot through which people may challenge postcolonial power relationships in multicultural settings. Focusing on the life story of Sumant, a 44-year-old Sikh man, born in Kashmir, who is a chef in an Indian restaurant and lives in London with his family, Bonfanti (chapter 8) examines foodways that reveal the bifurcation



Introduction    29

in diaspora communities. Part of a disadvantaged minority in his native area, his parents’ lands were expropriated and Sumant and his brother were sent to study hotel management in Bangalore. He practised as a chef for a few years in Delhi, where he met his future wife Manjit. Desirous of a transnational move to the West, he went to Mumbai and passed a cooking trial to be recruited in London. There, he has climbed the restaurant ladder of prestige and achieved social mobility, shifting to superior restaurants and buying a property for his household. While his memories indicate profound homesickness for affective attachments and nostalgia for familiar landscapes, he is proud to partake in the British Indian diaspora by applying his cooking skills to overcome racial and class inequalities inherent in the colonial legacy of the cuisine he serves and consumes. Pérez Murcia (chapter 9) explores the intimate connections between food, mobility and home. Based on the life story of Paola, an Ecuadorian woman living in Manchester, Pérez Murcia shows that by cooking, serving, eating, sharing and selling food, migrants are not only evoking memories of previous homes but also actively transforming their current places of settlement into new homes. His analysis reveals that food practices reproduced in the transnational space are often replete with patriotic symbolism. An everyday recipe shared with family in the domestic space of one’s homeland to ‘simply’ nourish the body may be loaded with enormous symbolism and may even become an expression of national identity and patriotism when cooked and shared among the same people in the public space of one’s host-land. Overall, the chapter illustrates further how the taste and smell of food have the power to connect memories and practices of home across multiple places and make it possible for migrants to simultaneously experience home as both grounded and mobile. The book closes with an afterword authored by Russell King. It connects the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, as a result of which millions of people have been forced to leave their ‘homes’ and are now in the search of sanctuary in neighbouring countries, with the critical themes that emerged from the nine life stories discussed in the book. King not only discusses the multiple inequalities that migrants and refugees can face in their search for home but also how those inequalities shape their daily lives and imaginaries of mobility. Sara Bonfanti is a migration scholar who is an expert on South Asian diasporas. With a background in Cultural Studies, she gained a PhD in Social Anthropology in 2015, conducting multi-site ethnography in Italy and India to analyse generational change among Punjabi transnational families. Keen on participatory approaches, her interests include kinship,

30    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

ethical pluralism and media cultures, seen through intersectionality and visual methods. A visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, she has collaborated in the comparative ERC-HOMInG project based at Trento University since 2017. She has published widely in Italian and English, also co-authoring Ethnographies of Home and Mobility: Shifting Roofs (Routledge, 2020). Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, and has recently finished a three-year postdoc at the HOMInG Project, University of Trento. His research interests include home and homemaking, conflict-induced displacement, migration and mobilities, and ageing. Recent publications include ‘“Physically Sheltered but Existentially Homeless”’ (Migration Studies, 2021), ‘Remaking a Place Called Home Following Displacement’ (in The Routledge Handbook of Place, Routledge, 2020), Thinking Home on the Move (co-authored, Emerald Publishing, 2020), ‘Where the Heart Is and Where It Hurts’ (Refugee Survey Quarterly, 2019) and ‘“My Soul Stills Hurts”: Bringing Death and Funerals into the Ageing-Migration-Home Nexus’ (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2022).

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34    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia 47–62. http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/_data/assets/pdf_file/0008/68273/Chapter-4Working-Papers-Journal-by-Margaretta-Jolly-ISSN-20458304pdf.pdf. Jones, Hannah, and Emma Jackson (eds). 2014. Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging: Emotion and Location. London: Routledge. Kallius, M. Annastiina, Daniel Monterescu and Prem Kumar Rajaram. 2016. ‘Immobilizing Mobility: Border Ethnography, Illiberal Democracy, and the Politics of the “Refugee Crisis” in Hungary’, American Ethnologist 43(1): 25–37. Kaufmann, Vincent, Manfred Max Bergman and Dominique Joye. 2004. ‘Motility: Mobility as Capital’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28(4): 745–56. Kothari, Uma, and David Hulme. 2004. ‘Narratives, Stories and Tales: Understanding Poverty Dynamics Through Life Histories’, ESRC Global Poverty Research Group Working Paper No. 11, University of Manchester. Kulick, Don 2017. ‘Is It Monologic? Is It Dialogic? Does It Matter?’, in M. Tomlinson and J. Millie (eds), The Monological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 81–88. Kusenbach, Margarethe. 2003. ‘Street Phenomenology’, Ethnography 4(3): 455–85. Kusenbach, Margarethe, and Krista Paulsen (eds). 2013. Home: International Perspectives on Culture, Identity and Belonging. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Lawson, Victoria A. 2000. ‘Arguments within Geographies of Movement: The Theoretical Potential of Migrants’ Stories’, Progress in Human Geography 24(2): 173–89. Lenhard, Johannes, and Farhan Samanani (eds). 2020. Home: Ethnographic Encounters. London: Routledge. Lewis, Oscar. 1961. The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family. New York: Random House. Lonergan, Gwyneth. 2018. ‘Reproducing the “National Home”: Gendering Domopolitics’, Citizenship Studies 22(1): 1–18. Maines, David. 2001. ‘Writing the Self versus Writing the Other: Comparing Autobiographical and Life History Data’, Symbolic Interaction 24(1): 105–11. Malkki, Liisa. 1992. ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’, Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 24–44.  . 1995. ‘Refugees and Exile – from Refugee Studies to the National Order of Things’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 495–523. Massey, Doreen. 1993a. ‘Questions of Locality’, Geography, 142–49.  . 1993b. ‘Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’, in J. Bird et al. (eds), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. London: Routledge, pp. 59–69. Maynes, Mary J., Jennifer Pierce and Barbara Laslett (eds). 2008. Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narrative in the Social Sciences and History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McArthur, Tom. 2003. ‘English as an Asian language’, English Today 19(2): 19–22. McCall, Leslie. 2005. ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30(3): 1771–800. Miles, Miranda, and Jonathan Crush. 1993. ‘Personal Narratives as Interactive Texts: Collecting and Interpreting Migrant Life-Histories’, The Professional Geographer 45(1): 84–94.



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Miller, Daniel (ed.). 2001. Home Possessions: Material Culture behind Closed Doors. Oxford: Berg. Mills, Charles W. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Miranda-Nieto, Alejandro, Aurora Massa and Sara Bonfanti. 2020. Ethnographies of Home and Mobility: Shifting Roofs. London: Routledge. Moore, Jeanne. 2000. ‘Placing Home in Context’, Journal of Environmental Psychology 20: 207–17. Morgan, Robyn (ed.). 1970. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Vintage Books. Noble, Greg. 2013. ‘It Is Home but It Is Not Home: Habitus, Field and the Migrant’, Journal of Sociology 49(2–3): 341–56. Ochs, Elinor, and Tamar Kremer-Sadlik. 2013. Fast-Forward Family: Home, Work, and Relationships in Middle-Class America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peacock, James L., and Dorothy C. Holland. 1993. ‘The Narrated Self: Life Stories in Process’. Ethos 21(4): 367–83. Pechurina, Anna. 2020. ‘Researching Identities through Material Possessions: The Case of Diasporic Objects’, Current Sociology 68(5): 669–83. Plummer, Ken. 2001 (1983). Documents of Life 2: An Invitation to Critical Humanism. London: Sage.  . 2004. ‘Life History Method’, in M. S. Lewis-Beck, A. Bryman and T. F. Liao (eds), The SAGE Encyclopaedia of Social Science Research Methods. Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, pp. 565–66. Portelli, Alessandro. 1998. ‘Oral History as a Genre’, in Narrative and Genre. London: Routledge, pp. 23–45. Quist, Wenche M. 2002. ‘When Your Past Lies Ahead of You – Kierkegaard and Heidegger on the Concept of Repetition’, Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1: 78–92. Ralph, David, and Lynn A. Staeheli. 2011. ‘Home and Migration: Mobilities, Belongings and Identities’, Geography Compass 5: 517–530. Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson. 1998. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement. Routledge. London. Ritchie, Donald A. 2014. Doing Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, Brian. 2002. Biographical Research. Buckingham: Open University Press. Roberts, Helen (ed.). 1981. Doing Feminist Research. London: Routledge. Rodger, Richard, and Joanna Herbert. 2007. ‘Testimonies of the City: Identity’, in Community and Change in a Contemporary Urban. London: Ashgate. Rogaly, Ben. 2015. ‘Disrupting Migration Stories: Reading Life Histories through the Lens of Mobility and Fixity’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(3): 528–44.  . 2020. Stories from a Migrant City. Living and Working Together in the Shadow of Brexit. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rogaly, Ben, and Becky Taylor. 2016. Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

36    Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Schiff, Brian, Elizabeth McKim and Sylvie Patron (eds). 2017. Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seligman, Adam 2000. The Problem of Trust. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Selwyn, Tom, and Nicola Frost. 2018. ‘Introduction: Home and Homemaking in a Time of Crisis’, in Nicola Frost and Tom Selwyn (eds), Travelling towards Home: Mobilities and Homemaking. London: Berghahn. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38(2): 207–26.  . 2016. ‘Mobilizing the New Mobilities Paradigm’, Applied Mobilities 1(1): 10–25. Shopes, Linda. 2003. ‘Sharing Authority’, The Oral History Review 30(1): 103–10. Shuman, Amy. 2005. Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 271–313. Stanley, Liz. 1993. ‘On Auto/Biography in Sociology’, Sociology 37: 41–52. Tedlock, Barbara. 1991. ‘From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography’, Journal of Anthropological Research 47(1): 69–94. Thomas, William, and Florian Znaniecki. 1918. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Boston, MA: The Gorham Press. Thomson, Alistair. 2011. ‘Moving Stories: Oral History and Migration Studies’. Oral History 27(1): 24–37. Tolia-Kelly, Divya. 2006. ‘Mobility/Stability: British Asian Cultures of “Landscape and Englishness”’, Environment and Planning A 38: 341–58. Urry, John. 2000. Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century. London: Routledge. Vari-Lavoisier, Ilka, et al. 2019. ‘Collective Thinking in the Field: Distributed Cognition in Large-Scale Qualitative Research’, Espaces et Sociétés 3(3): 103–20. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin. 2017. What Is an Event? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walsh, Katie, and Lena Näre (eds). 2016. Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age. London: Routledge. White, Hayden. 1980. ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, Critical Inquiry 7(1): 5–27. Wilmsen, Carl. 2001. ‘For the Record: Editing and the Production of Meaning in Oral History’, Oral History Review 28(1): 65–85. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil-Blackwell. Zeitlyn, David. 2008. ‘Life-History Writing and the Anthropological Silhouette’, Social Anthropology 16(2): 154–71.

PART I

Searching for Home Paolo Boccagni

‘Where is home?’ is a question that leads to conflicting responses. It may be perceived as more or less salient for different people at different stages of their life course. It could sound like an idle academic exercise to all those who do have a place that they see as home or that feels like home, much more so if this overlaps with their dwelling place. However, the answer to the question is not self-evident when neither the context (country or local community) of origin nor the place where one is living at present feel like home. This may well be the case during critical housing or family transitions, or in the economy of highly mobile lifestyles, or, probably more often, in circumstances of social vulnerability or exclusion. The lack of a definite place to call home in one’s day-to-day environments, and the (mostly unreflexive) search for home, are also part and parcel of the social experience of international migration, particularly in its early stages. For people who have recently left their habitual countries of residence, ‘Where is home?’ may be an unsettling question, possibly viewed as not particularly relevant. Yet, the question is likely to emerge again in one way or another, as people on the move negotiate their alignments and future orientations relative to groups, places and institutions located in their countries of origin or elsewhere – potentially in any location along their subsequent migration trajectories. It is also a question that speaks to never fully solved issues of belonging (Davis et al. 2018), given the exclusionary effects of nation statebased citizenship regimes (Anderson and Hughes 2015). For one thing, the lived experience of migration does require new locations and infrastructures to satisfy at least basic housing needs, and then to support new forms of settlement and possibly belonging. To that extent, it is necessarily also a search for home. There is a homology, although not necessarily an overlap, between biographic, migration and housing

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trajectories. However, the notion of home includes and conflates questions of inclusion and recognition, as well as questions of privacy, familiarity and security. These illuminate the emotional and relational foundations of the migration experience, no less than the spatial and material foundations. Whether in a literal or a metaphorical sense, the reading of cross-border human movement as a search for home is not infrequent in mobility, migration and refugee studies, whatever category is used to label migrants (Habib 1996; van der Horst 2004; Liu 2014; Wu and Wilkes 2017; Boccagni 2017). From a phenomenological perspective, furthermore, a search-for-home condition is not a prerogative of migrants or other marginalized or non-sedentary groups. Searching for home may be seen as a need and endeavour inherent to the human condition, as long as home is understood not only as the place or condition of origin, but rather as a potential horizon of full inclusion and self-achievement ahead of us – possibly one that is never fully reached (Tucker 1994; Mathews 2020). The conceptual repertoire and the metaphorical power of ‘homing’ can be fruitfully mobilized along these lines (Boccagni 2022). However, only a minor fraction of the literature on home and migration does attempt to advance the search-for-home perspective one step forward, within the lived experience of migrants themselves. Admittedly, the jargon of home has its own pitfalls in an interview setting, given its burdensome emotional and moral subtext. Nevertheless, there is remarkable potential in revisiting migrant life histories as stories of transition between countries, families, houses and, ultimately, home(s). How is an abstract notion such as search-for-home understood and rephrased in the life circumstances of international migrants through their self-narratives? In all likelihood, this starts from some perceived overlap between home and either the country/local community of origin or the house/dwelling in which people live at present. The everyday materiality of their household and housing conditions, however, can open up to a boundless field of reflection and memory-making about the past, and imaginaries and concerns for the future, from a contingent here-and-now. This reflects a ‘search’ across multiple locations and points of reference, rather than a linear pathway towards a clear and well-defined point of arrival. Home and the search for it operate then as categories that allow people to describe their housing and household conditions, or their domestic lives, but also to articulate needs and claims for acceptance, inclusion, self-expression and ultimately self-achievement (Heller 1987). In the same vein, the search for home or homing is an ongoing endeavour of mobility towards a desired destination and possibly a stable place to live and dwell in. Regardless of the actual outcome, this tends to engender – as is typical of the ‘immigrant drive’ (Portes 2012) – a strong motivational orientation towards



Part I    39

whatever is framed as a better home. Whether this home is expected to correspond, and at last does correspond, to one and the same place, or rather to changing places that are encountered or made anew over time, is an empirical question. In sum, migrant biographies are also, at least implicitly, stories of a search for home and often of encounters with it or of recreations of it over time. What aspects of this search are most vividly illustrated by the three stories that follow? These stories are taken from HOMInG’s fieldwork in three different European countries. They display a remarkable diversity in terms of national background, gender, social class, life-course position and immigrant category. It is worth highlighting some key points, keeping in mind that this entails a threefold abstraction from the ‘real lives’ of the protagonists. One initial abstraction is inherent in the protagonists’ memory-making and narrative production processes. This is followed by the authors’ autonomous reconstruction of such narratives on the basis of a number of themes (Paolo Boccagni – Miriam), housing moves (Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia – Lucho) and biographical steps (Sara Bonfanti – Priya). What are the main conceptual nodes that emerge from these narratives, in my own (third-level) abstraction? In chapter 1, Pérez Murcia introduces us to the story of Lucho, a middle-aged British-Peruvian church minister who has been settled in the United Kingdom for over fifteen years. This story productively connects a person’s biography of migration with the relational and structural circumstances that contributed to shape it. Central to Lucho’s experience of mobility, and in fact his search for home, are religious communities, infrastructures and networks, both locally and transnationally. The story of Lucho illuminates the significance of religion as an infrastructure for local and transnational homemaking. Religion can shape people’s negotiation of a sense of home, as well as their negotiation of better life conditions, while they are on the move. Lucho’s search for home is fundamentally mediated by his active engagement in a Christian missionary congregation. This is as much a source of meanings and motivations as it is of networks of relations that facilitate first his personal and professional growth, then his mobility out of Peru and ultimately his process of settlement – including the possibility of buying his own dwelling – in the United Kingdom. A leitmotiv in Lucho’s narrative, as reconstructed by Pérez Murcia, is the appeal to travel ‘light’ and pursue appropriate routes, those of the ‘journey with God’, as opposed to ephemeral roots. Home, understood as a material condition of safety and stability, is emphatically discarded as a secondary concern. On the one hand, this reads like an invitation to expand the field of migrants’ search for home to do justice to the ‘both visible and invisible “baggage”’ that people carry. Such baggage articulates

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the idiographic weight of one’s own biography and yet it is still embedded in larger structures of opportunities and constraints. In this particular case, the baggage includes the bridging social capital circulated within institutionally driven religious networks that extend to different countries. On the other hand, however, his revisiting of home as an emplaced and ongoing experience of faith is paralleled by a less emphatic, and yet fundamental, recognition: the proximity of his close family members as a necessary condition for any place to qualify as home. The relational bases that support one’s (search for) home are fundamental to Lucho’s life experience, even though they lie in the background. They are actually less visible, in the self-representation Lucho crafts for Pérez Murcia and for the readers of this book, than the values, practices and life choices associated with religion. It may be, as Lucho concludes, that ‘“only God knows” where home for the future is’. It does seem, however, that Lucho himself knows that family life needs to be a part of that for the notion of home to make any sense. It is in the search for family wellbeing, for Lucho and many other protagonists of this book, that the search for home ultimately has its (still necessary) roots. In chapter 2, I engage with the life story of Miriam, an EcuadorianItalian woman who has long been both a friend and a valuable gatekeeper for my fieldwork on transnational living among Ecuadorian migrants. Relative to other narratives in the book, Miriam’s story benefits from a fifteen-year-long relationship between narrator and writer. This might compensate for a lesser degree of detachment between the parties – a two-level abstraction, rather than the threefold one discussed above. What does home mean (both as hogar and casa)? How and why does it matter for a middle-aged immigrant woman who has spent half of her life in Italy, mostly employed as cleaner or care worker for lack of better job opportunities? As her life story shows, home coalesces two remarkably distinct sets of meanings. In terms of identity background, it has to do with the country in which Miriam was born, raised and socialized up to her mid-twenties – Ecuador, or, more precisely, the city, neighbourhood and the house she comes from. As Miriam keeps ruminating about home, however, it becomes clear that there is another fundamental meaning to this notion, which does not necessarily relate to Ecuador: being with her mother, her closest family member, whom she had long left behind and with whom she has recently been able to reunite in Italy. Home is ‘where mum is’, Miriam concludes, including in the small apartment where she currently lives with her husband and his three children. ‘My place’, adds Miriam, ‘is home only if my mother is there.’ Meaningful relationships are the necessary condition for any form of homemaking (as I would call it) to be successful (again, my words). Interestingly, though, her reflection on



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home gains pace, passion and depth only after she travels back in memories across her migration pathways and mentally revisits her dwellings over time. It is by means of engagement with the built environment, including what is missing from it, that home-related views and dreams acquire consistency, or at least keep being nourished. It is through her house in Ecuador – the building she built using her remittances and has left empty since – that Miriam positions herself relative to her country of origin, her fellow nationals and her own future life projects. Lastly, Bonfanti’s chapter presents the story of Priya, a young Indian ‘expat’ currently based in the Netherlands. This story conjugates the personal and family background of a relatively privileged migrant with meaningful hints regarding the internal diversity of large-scale mobilities from Southern Asia to Europe. Priya’s story is informed by continuous balancing acts between her intimate alignment with South Asian values and lifestyles, and her endorsement of the ideals of merit, cross-border circulation and professional self-achievement that circulate within Indian diasporic networks. These contrasting and yet necessarily coexisting references are materialized in Priya’s memories of her childhood home, on the one hand, and in her repeated emphasis on the ‘need for standing out’, on the other hand. Overall, her migration trajectory is nourished by high qualifications and ambitions to leave India. Even so, it seems to combine ‘happenstance and deep motivations’, rather than following a consistent and goal-oriented plan. It is quite remarkable, for a highly skilled migrant woman in her early thirties, that the notion of home remains fundamentally embedded in India. Holland is framed at best as an instrumental home, or a functional equivalent of it. Despite this enduring tension, it seems clear to Priya, as it does for Lucho and Miriam in this part, that home – ‘My God!’, she adds – ‘is about the people, never about the city’ or, we might add, specific locations or material infrastructures alone. If the relational foundations of home operate as a fil rouge throughout these chapters, negotiating these foundations from a distance, or in mobility, remains central to international migrants’ ‘search for home’. Paolo Boccagni is Professor in Sociology (University of Trento) and Principal Investigator of ERC StG HOMInG. He has published in the sociology of migration, home, diversity and social welfare, mostly with a qualitative and ethnographic background. Over the last fifteen years, he has carried out multi-method research on the transnational family life of Ecuadorian migrants in Europe. He is currently conducting comparative fieldwork on the lived experience of home, with a particular focus on asylum seekers in reception facilities. Recent books include Migration and the Search

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for Home (Palgrave, 2017) and Thinking Home on the Move (co-authored; Emerald, 2020). His new edited book, The Edward Elgar Handbook on Home and Migration, is forthcoming in 2023.

References Anderson, B., and V. Hughes (eds). 2015. Citizenship and Its Others. London: Palgrave. Boccagni, P. 2017. Migration and the Search for Home. London: Palgrave.  . 2022. ‘Homing: A Category for Research on Space Appropriation and “HomeOriented” Mobilities’, Mobilities 17(4): 585–601. Davis, K., H. Ghorashi and P. Smets (eds). 2018. Contested Belonging. Spaces, Practices, Biographies. London: Emerald Publishing. Habib, N. 1996. ‘The Search for Home’, Journal of Refugee Studies 9(1): 96–102. Heller, A. 1987. ‘Where Are We at Home?’, Thesis Eleven 41: 1–18. Liu, L.S. 2014. ‘A Search for a Place to Call Home’, Emotion, Space and Society 10: 18–26. Mathews, G. 2020. ‘Metaphors, Ideals and Illusions of Home’, in P. Boccagni et al., Thinking Home on the Move. London: Emerald Publishing. Portes, A. 2012. ‘Tensions That Make a Difference’, Sociological Forum 27(3): 563–78. Tucker, A. 1994. ‘In Search for Home’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 11(2): 181–87. Van der Horst, H. 2004. ‘Living in a Reception Centre’, Housing, Theory and Society 21: 36–46. Wu, C., and R. Wilkes. 2017. ‘International Students’ Post-Graduation Migration Plans and the Search for Home’, Geoforum 80: 123–32.

CHAPTER

1

‘Moved by the Hand of God’ Lucho, a Peruvian Religious Minister in Manchester Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

Jesus was a migrant himself, and we are following God’s signals, so we do not want to root our home anywhere. —Lucho

This chapter is based on three years of ethnographic research with Lucho, a 47-year-old British-Peruvian minister of the Christian and Missionary Alliance who has been living in England since 2005. Lucho’s mobile life and search for home started at an early age, when he moved from his foster family’s house, located in a wealthy area of Lima, to his blood-related family’s plot of land on the periphery of the city. Lucho’s early search for home led to him finding home after what he describes as an ‘encounter with God’. That encounter has shaped his professional pathway, further mobility and attitudes towards home. Several research techniques have been implemented to collect Lucho’s life story. These include interviews, oral history, a housing visit, go-alongs in his neighbourhood and participant observation in a Christian church. Data collection started in May 2018 and since then we have been in regular contact. Informal conversations with refugees who attend the biblical studies sessions in the church and conversations with family and religious ministers back in Peru also inform the analysis and findings of the chapter. With the exception of the conversations with refugees, all the material was gathered in Spanish.

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Figure 1.1. Sharing one’s faith, Manchester. Photo by Hannah Beatrice.

Introduction In ‘“You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant”’, Peggy Levitt (2003) encouraged us to look at ‘religious life across borders’. Since then, the study of the role of religion in transnational migration (Frederiks 2016; Ergin and de Wit 2019; Hillenbrand 2020), migrants’ transnational religious practices (Van Tubergen and Sindradóttir 2011; Akhtar 2014; Dubenská and Souralová 2018; Kwon and McCaffree 2020) and, more specifically for the purposes of this chapter, the links between religion and transnational homemaking (Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2009; Eade 2012; Ponniah 2020; Vijailakshmi 2020) have been the subject of a considerable amount of scholarship. The role of communities of faith in facilitating and sustaining migrants and refugees’ transnational homemaking has not received as much attention. Based on the life story of Lucho, a Peruvian religious minister who has been spreading Christian values amongst Muslim communities in Manchester since 2007, this chapter explores the role of religion as a driver of migration and the role of religion and communities of faith in transnational homemaking. More specifically, the chapter investigates what and where home is for those whose migration is driven by religion and how



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mobility driven by people’s faith and religious service complicates the home–mobility nexus. As discussed below, Lucho’s mobile life has been primarily driven by his religious convictions and the spiritual need to share Christian values with people who profess different faiths. As Gemma T. Cruz (2014) asserts, people on the move bring both visible and invisible ‘baggage’ and faith is a significant part of the latter kind of baggage. By mobilizing his faith, Lucho is not seeking a place to create ‘roots’. Instead, he is searching for ‘routes’ (Gilroy 1993; Gustafson 2001) to propagate the moral values of his community of faith. Rather than being fixed in any particular building, city or country, home in this search has become a mobile space that Lucho experiences as a ‘journey’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998); in fact, he describes it as a ‘journey with God’. As discussed below, with the exception of his early childhood, in all the cities and houses Lucho has inhabited since his journey started in Lima in the early 1990s, he has not seemed to be searching for home. Against scholarship on the home–migration nexus that has long stressed that ‘home is never fully achieved’ (Fortier 2003) but an ‘ongoing aspiration’ (Taylor 2015), Lucho’s search for home seemed to end after his first encounter with God. Interestingly, Lucho devotes most of his time mobilizing his community of faith in Manchester to support asylum seekers and refugees in making the city their home. I contend that the analysis of Lucho’s life story, which is an analysis of the links between religion and transnational homemaking, is important because religion influences migrants’ views and ‘positionalities in the new social context’ (Fiałkowska 2020). It is also important because communities of faith play an active role supporting migrants and refugees’ search for asylum (Gutkowski and Larkin 2021; Rees 2021) and ultimately home (Womack 2015). In fact, Lucho’s life story connects with broader migration processes that facilitate transnational homemaking in two interrelated ways: firstly, there is a special route for the transnational mobility of members of faith communities and their families that potentially allows ‘transnational migrants to expand already global religious institutions and assert their dual memberships in spiritual arenas’ (Levitt 2004: 2). In the context of the United Kingdom, this is evident in the government’s decision to introduce a special visa for ministers of religion in 2008.1 Secondly, Lucho’s life story indirectly tells us about the experiences of home of those who are making asylum claims in the United Kingdom on the grounds of religious freedom. Although Lucho left Peru as he was ‘moved by the hand of God’, his religious ministry is devoted to supporting those who have fled religious persecution and particularly those who want to embrace his faith in their search for home. More broadly, Lucho’s life story provides us with some insights into the very contested ground

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of refugees’ religious conversion (Akcapar 2006; Kéri and Sleiman 2017; Rees 2021; Rose and Given-Wilson 2021). Following a description of the multiple journeys Lucho has undertaken in his search for routes to spread his religious convictions, the chapter discusses how his faith and notably his interest in supporting Muslim refugees to embrace Christianity and make Manchester home inform Lucho’s ideas and attitudes towards home. The chapter ends by highlighting how the experiences of those whose mobilities are primarily driven by faith and the moral obligation to support their Churches in enlarging their communities of faith complicate the home–mobility nexus.

Searching for Routes to Spread Religious Teachings Over the last two decades, Lucho has embarked on several journeys. While his initial journey can be framed as a movement in search of home, his subsequent journeys question the idea of home as a ‘universal’ search (cf. Eyles 1989) and support Ghassan Hage’s (2020: 27) argument that we should dispute the ‘assertion that home is the foremost desire people pursue in daily life’.

Moving Families and Houses in Lima Lucho was nine years old when he left the place he thought was home. He moved from a wealthy area of Lima to an informal settlement on the outskirts of the city. At this early stage of his life, he learnt that he had been living with foster parents. His mother became pregnant with a second child but was struggling to meet the family’s needs and found a job as a live-in domestic worker. Conscious of her difficult material living conditions, her employers offered to foster her child and she accepted. It was expected that Lucho would only learn about being a foster child when he became an adult, but the truth came out after he was called by his blood-related mother’s surname by a schoolteacher who was close to his foster parents. Lucho was told that he was welcome to stay with the people he considered family in the house where he had spent his early childhood, but he opted to move in with his biological mother and sibling. This first movement within the city of Lima was what Noel B. Salazar (2021: 2) terms a ‘meaningful or life-shaping’ movement. This is a movement that entails both physical and existential mobility (Hage 2005). As discussed throughout the chapter, this movement has shaped Lucho’s further mobility and attitudes towards home. He recalled that he moved from a well-developed, secure and aesthetically well-preserved area of Lima to a marginalized neighbourhood

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with badly constructed houses and poor kitchen and toilet facilities. More importantly, as he stressed, he started to live with a mother he had always considered the cleaning lady and a twenty-year-old brother he had barely known. The whole experience was overwhelming for him as a young boy. ‘Overnight, I lost the people I considered family and moved to a deprived neighbourhood. There was no running water in the house and just the idea of using the toilet was difficult. On top of that, I was living with strangers.’ The ‘cultural shock’ Lucho experienced upon moving within the city in which he had been born was not only related to moving families and houses. He did not get along well with his new classmates, who made fun of him for his refined manners. ‘It was too much for a child. I could not deal well with all those changes and just wanted to die. I was always trying to find ways to end my life. Fortunately, I met God and found in him a reason to live.’

Moving from a ‘Shanty Town’ to the ‘House of God’ Over time, Lucho got used to his new family and living conditions and started to build a positive relationship with his older brother. Lucho described him as a person with strong academic discipline and religious conviction. His brother wanted to become a pastor and was attending the Chinese Christian Church in Lima, which is part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. This is an international evangelical community of faith, which, following its founder, Canadian preacher Albert Benjamin Simpson, frames its core beliefs around the ‘Fourfold Gospel’: Christ is Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer and Soon Coming King.2 The church was attended by few Peruvians because the religious services were offered in Mandarin and only occasionally in Spanish. Lucho was one of those Peruvians who did attend. Through his engagement with the social activities organized by the Church, he started to learn about the Chinese people’s culture and their social and cultural values. But how did Lucho meet God? I joined my brother on a religious retreat organized by the Church. I remember the pastor was saying, ‘God loves everybody, no matter who you are. Nobody needs money, an academic title or a special talent to be loved by God.’ Those words changed my life. From then on, I wanted to be a pastor, like my brother. From then on, my suicidal thoughts started to vanish.

This moment changed Lucho’s life. He wanted to become a pastor like his brother but he was too young to join the seminary. The head of the Church advised him to finish school, attend university and take time to consider whether becoming a pastor was his real vocation.

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I was sure I wanted to be a pastor, but I finished school and university. I ended my studies with more conviction about my real passion. I wanted to become a missionary; a missionary to spread God’s teachings in countries and cultures in which people have never had the chance to read the Bible. I just started to dream about travelling to the Middle East and sharing our Christian values with Muslim communities.

This is how Lucho became interested in spreading Christian values in other cultures, especially in countries where the majority of people are Muslim. But his plan to move abroad was delayed for several years. He started to spread God’s message in the informal settlements of Lima first. My brother believes that you can only understand God’s suffering and spread his message when you experience suffering first-hand. We were already living in poor housing but my brother bought a plot in an informal settlement and we built an improvised shelter. When the rain came, we used plastic to cover the house. It was hard because we were sleeping on the floor and had no toilet. We opened holes in the floor and covered them with the lids of pots after using them. Such a way of living was largely a choice and this choice changed the ways I see life. It changed my heart. It helped me to empathize with people in need and reinforced my passion for the Church. Life in the settlement helped me to create a real connection with the people’s suffering, strengthened my faith and weakened my love of money.

While living in the community, Lucho supported children with their studies, approached NGOs to seek support to improve the housing conditions of the community and created Bible study groups. While doing his missionary work in the community, Lucho obtained bachelor’s degrees in systems and mechanical engineering and started to work for a multinational company. He enjoyed the job and was able to save money and make plans. ‘I even had the savings to dream about a master’s degree, which is still a privilege in countries like Peru, but I already knew I wanted to be a missionary.’ He added: I was in my early twenties. In Peru, people my age often think about getting married, having a family and buying a house. I had no interest in any of that. I wanted to study the Bible and understand God’s message and leave Peru. To travel to a foreign country and talk about my God with other cultures.

The idea of mixing himself with other cultures has fascinated Lucho since he joined the Chinese Church in Lima and learnt that the Church has branches in many places in the world. His journey abroad, however, was

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still only a plan. While doing his four years of theological studies, Lucho met Lilian, to whom he soon became engaged. ‘She was like me. Dreaming about becoming a missionary abroad. She was already investigating potential places to go abroad and we started to make plans together.’ Lucho and Lilian were part of the same denomination and decided to travel to either Jordan or Morocco. The Church provided support learning the language and helped with settlement. Their plans changed when they both remembered what a British missionary had said: ‘You do not need to go to the Middle East to do so. Go to the UK; you can meet many Muslims there.’ With the support of the British missionary, who arranged a short-term placement for Lucho in one of the branches of her Church in England, Lucho started to plan the move to England.

The First Encounter with Britain The third move was to England and, as Lucho said, new miracles were necessary to get the UK visa. Lucho recalled that he was unable to demonstrate to the British embassy in Peru that he had the financial resources to travel and stay in the United Kingdom without depending on social benefits. When his visa was rejected, he found himself shouting in the embassy: ‘I must go to England. God has asked me to serve him there.’ His conviction that God wanted him to spread his teachings in England seemed to be the only proof he had for his visa application. I was in shock. I had not considered that my visa application might be rejected and started shouting in the middle of the embassy, ‘I need to go to the UK. That is God’s will’, and suddenly a miracle happened. An immigrant officer told me, ‘Calm down, please’ – you know the British are always polite. Then, he just said, ‘If your God wants you to go to the UK, I cannot be an obstacle to his will. Show me again your papers.’

Lucho was granted a six-month student visa in 2003 and soon found himself in London, without his fiancée, enrolled in an English academy, living in student accommodation and ready to start his religious placement. The move did not meet his expectations. He was working around the clock as a cleaner with little time to learn English and few opportunities to share God’s words with Muslim communities, as planned. He said, ‘I was alone in the city just cleaning toilets and asking myself if London was really the place God wanted me to be.’ Things started to move in the right direction when members of the Latin Link, which is an international community of faith, organized for him to visit his religious community in three English cities: Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester. Manchester immediately

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piqued Lucho’s interest. He was astonished that such a small city could be composed of people of more than a hundred nationalities, speaking different languages, and started thinking of Manchester as a potential home. This is, in his words, ‘a place to live and spread our faith with Muslim communities’. He went back to London and, before his visa expired, travelled back to Peru. ‘I spent the whole of 2004 in Peru but, while there, I became aware that part of me had stayed in England. I was more convinced than ever that God wanted me to stay there.’ Lucho wanted to find his way back to England and got another short-term student visa for six months in 2005, after which he returned to Peru for a year and a half. During this time, Lucho married Lilian. The couple gave birth to a daughter and started to plan the next move, this time as a family. By that point, Lucho had already experienced navigating visa applications and, with the support of his Church, was granted permission to stay longer in the United Kingdom as a religious minister.

The Ongoing Move: Settling in England but … Experiencing Home on the Move The Peruvian couple and their three-month-old daughter started a new life in London in 2007. Lucho went back to work in the cleaning industry and soon started questioning himself about his reasons for moving back to England. Despite the many financial difficulties the family experienced as they settled in London, Lucho was committed to staying in the country. He said that London was overwhelmingly expensive for a low-income family and that they struggled to pay rent and feed themselves. He also mentioned that Lilian started to ‘feel so far away from home’. When I asked Lilian about how she remembers her time in London, she said: Um, that is hard to explain. Let me just give you an example. We saved every penny we could for days to phone my mother [she lives in Lima]. I just put all the coins in the telephone and said, ‘Hello Mom’. After several months, I just heard her voice saying hello. That was a deeply sad moment and I felt miles away from home.

Things started to move forward when Lucho contacted the members of his Church in England and he had the opportunity to make short visits with his family to the same three cities he had visited the first time he was living in London: Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester. The Churches in Birmingham and Bradford offered him housing and a pastoral position, which he had only dreamt about when planning his move to England in Lima. On the journey back to London, Lilian was so enthusiastic about a life in either Birmingham or Bradford.



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It was a very cold and rainy day in Manchester and Lilian did not like the city at all. She wanted to move to either Birmingham or Bradford, but I had the feeling that Manchester was the right place for us. Miraculously, we got an offer in Manchester and we moved here. We were just following God’s will. Now, this is our place; this is our home.

But how did Manchester become home? Lucho’s mobility is largely shaped by his religious convictions and what he calls ‘God’s signals’. ‘I came to England and settled in Manchester because God brought me here. I just patiently waited for his signals.’ Moved by the hand of God, Lucho has found a Church and a community that shares his faith. Lilian has worked in increasingly good positions in the National Health Service and given birth to a second child. After having started with a student visa, which he renewed a couple of times, the local ministers of the Church in Manchester supported Lucho’s application for a minister of religion visa. After four years, Lucho and his family were eligible to apply for unlimited leave to remain and, a year later, they were eligible to apply for citizenship. After their initial struggle to settle in England and after having spent more than £8,000 on visa applications, the whole family now holds British passports. As Lucho and Lilian emphasize, the religious community they belong to has played a significant role in the family’s settlement in Manchester. The Church has given the family a community of faith and support with their citizenship applications, as well as financial support to buy their house. We wanted to buy this house [the one the family currently lives in] and were struggling to gather all the money we needed. Our community generously collected money to support us. It was a new miracle in our life. God wanted this house to be our home in Manchester and here we are.

Lucho’s smooth settlement process in Manchester is by no means unique among those whose mobility is driven or facilitated by Churches and communities of faith. As Peggy Levitt (2003: 851) stresses, migrants often use religion to ‘create alternative allegiances and places of belonging’ and, more broadly, to access well-established networks in which religious practices are reproduced and migrants can gain support (see Levitt 2004 and Sheringham 2010). What is significant in Lucho’s experience is that the community itself, ‘moved by their faith’, gathered the financial resources to buy a house as part of the ‘welcome’ pack for the family. In the ways Lucho and Lilian recall the process of buying the house, I could imagine people from their Church donating even a single sterling pound to buy a house for their new pastor and his family. Lucho and his family’s ‘love for the poor’ (cf. Lancione 2014) and those ‘in need of God’ are compensated with

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something that many members of the Church do not have: a house. More broadly, as Leslie Fesenmyer (2018) suggests, pastorhood allows migrants to afford a social and cultural status that often facilitates their process of settlement in the new country. When reflecting on the ways in which the family has been welcomed in Manchester, Lucho said: Peru is our country, but the UK is our home. We are part of this community; our life is here. That does not mean that we want to live in Manchester forever. Jesus was a migrant himself, and we are following God’s signals, so we do not want to root our home anywhere. We want to serve him the best we can in the place he designates for us.

As the quote illustrates, ‘rooting’ home in a particular place is not an overarching aim for Lucho. For him, settlement does not necessarily mean the sense of being attached to a place (Ahmed et al. 2003). Largely inspired by what he describes as God’s experiences of migration and difficulties finding a home, home for Lucho is not a fixed physical space or geographical location. Instead, wherever he travels with God and his family, he experiences home on the move. Lucho’s narrative resonates with Salazar’s (2020: 46) reflections on the meaning of home for people on the move: ‘Many believe that people on the move have no home, but certainly that is not true. They do have a home, or multiple homes even. They can feel at home in different places because they take “stuff” and people with them so that they can (re)create a home wherever they go.’ At the same time, Lucho’s narrative goes beyond Salazar’s point. The reference to stuff, which must be intentional, implies material belongings. Lucho’s experience emphasizes the existential feeling of home in a faith community that transcends worldly goods. As Lucho says: ‘Home is a journey; home is a journey with God. If you travel with God and family, you do not need to be concerned about home.’ Lucho’s understanding of home as a ‘journey with God’ is also closely related to the ideas of home as a ‘religious space’ (Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2009) and a ‘spiritual space’ (Pérez Murcia 2019). Neither the house the family owns in Lima nor the one they own in Manchester constitute the main features of Lucho’s understanding of home. Home, for him, is a relationship with God and family. Manchester is home because, in Lucho’s understanding of the world, God chose that place for him: ‘This place [Manchester] is home. I do not mean the house; I mean our relationship as individuals and as a family with God. God wanted us to stay in Manchester as a family in this house and fill it with love, so this is home.’ When asked for how long Manchester would be home, Lucho said, ‘Only God knows. In my heart, I know that I no longer need to be concerned

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about home. As long as I stay with my family, home could be any person who is willing to listen to God’s voice.’ This is where Abraham, mentioned in the first sentence of the introduction to this chapter, and Lucho’s life stories meet. ‘Abraham began a journey, guided by his faith, that millions have followed’ (Levitt 2003: 870). Although Lucho is only one of those followers, his story powerfully illustrates how, in a world of movement, home transcends places and particularly the borders of nation states (Rapport and Dawson 1998).

Supporting Refugees in Finding a Home As discussed in the previous section, Lucho seems to no longer be searching for a place to call home. However, he emphasizes the role of his Church in supporting asylum seekers, refugees and the homeless to find a home. Refugees have lost everything. They do not have a home. So, as a family and as a community, we want to make our home their home. All of them are welcomed to our house. Our aim is to help them to find a home. By reading and studying the Bible together, we aspire to help them to feel at home.

The way Lucho speaks of a Church that embraces those who do not have a home recalls Cruz’s (2016) analysis of how the Christian mission and ministry, in the context of contemporary migration, are seeking to become a ‘home for all’ and Deanna Womack’s (2015) analysis of how Arabic churches have often become a cultural and ‘spiritual home’ for Arab Christian immigrants in New Jersey. I had the opportunity to visit Lucho’s church in Manchester and observe his work with those asylum seekers and refugees. The majority of them come from Middle Eastern countries. Many expressed that Lucho’s family has become their family and the church their ‘home’. The church has become a place for praying and reading the Bible and a place to share food and create bonds as a family and as a community. A Kurdish man, who had been cast out by his family in Iraq for expressing doubts about his faith and subsequently fled following persecution from what he described as a radical group, stressed that Lucho has become a father, the members of the Church brothers, and the church a home. When I met him for the first time in 2018, he described himself as a Muslim studying the Christian Bible. Lucho stressed that the Church welcomes people from different faiths and supports migrants and refugees’ exploration of the Christian faith without any commitment to conversion. Similar

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narratives can be found among Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan who engage with Churches that ‘approach transgression of the Muslim– Christian identity boundary with caution, often supporting Muslim exploration of Christian faith without formal conversion’ (Gutkowski and Larkin 2021: 1056). However, the second time I met the Kurdish man, in 2019, he mentioned that he had been baptized and had converted to Christianity. The narrative of this man is only an example of how Churches and places of worship in general – and, perhaps more importantly, the communities of faith around them – are creating spaces to support refugees’ search for a spiritual home. This narrative also opens the door to the contested ground of whether the conversion to a different religion is primarily driven by faith or the adverse circumstances migrants and refugees often encounter in their new places of settlement in which they seek to make a home. As Wilhelm Rees (2021: 42) points out, ‘free Church generous practice of baptism and the idea of affecting one’s own asylum procedure positively by receiving baptism made inquiries regarding ecclesiastical baptismal practice and lead to questions concerning sincerity of single person’s wish for baptism’ (see also Akcapar 2006; Rose and Given-Wilson 2018). More broadly, rather than limiting the space for the exclusive use of those from different ethnic and faith backgrounds, authorities and members of the communities of faith, including the authorities of places of worship, may develop strategies to control and ‘domesticate’ those who, for example, profess a different faith. As Hage (1996: 480) stresses, the process of building a nation ‘is nothing but the practice of domesticating otherness and positioning it within the national space’. It is worth nothing here that we are drawing a parallel between being domesticated by a nation and being domesticated by a religious denomination.3 The experience of the Kurdish man further illustrates the reasons Manchester has become a home for Lucho. By coordinating the biblical studies group in the church and celebrating baptisms, Lucho, as he describes it, is ‘supporting Muslims to embrace Christianity’. By helping those who are harmed for their faith and, more generally, those who fled persecution and find themselves navigating asylum procedures – for example, by providing language support or certifying that they are members of the Church – Lucho believes his community of faith is supporting refugees in making Manchester their home. ‘When those seeking asylum are granted the right to remain, they are entitled to apply for housing from the council and many get a house. But they also need a community and our Church offers exactly that: a community of faith and support.’ Lucho’s experiences of home in Manchester are far from unproblematic though. He lives in a neighbourhood that is largely inhabited by Muslims,

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many of whom have openly rejected his role in the community, especially his spreading of the Christian Bible amongst Muslims. ‘Generally speaking, I get along well with my neighbours and they respect the role I have in the community. There are some, however, who insult us and express racism against us for being Christians.’ Racism, he stressed, has also been experienced in the streets of Manchester, especially when trying to engage passers-by in conversations about Christianity. We spend time in the streets inviting people to visit our church and some react very badly and use offensive words against us. You know, you need to knock hundreds of doors before one is open to you … one of our students of the biblical seminars came to Manchester for a short placement and volunteered with our Church. Her role was inviting people to visit our church. On average, she needed to knock on 348 doors before a person accepted the invitation.

When asked about potential risks of what he calls ‘supporting Muslims to become Christians’, particularly through the ritual of baptism, Lucho mentioned a video in which a radical group calls for the murder of those who are celebrating baptisms. He stressed, however, that he feels safe because God protects him and his family and he is only serving God’s will. Lucho and his family’s future home cannot be anticipated. They were considering moving to the United States, a country of which Lucho’s

Figure 1.2. Biblical studies. Photo by Hannah Beatrice.

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mother and sibling have become citizens. He wished to pursue further studies, join a missionary agency and work as a lecturer and mentor for missionaries. However, he said that God gave him and his family a new mission in Manchester. He came to Manchester with the support of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Latin Link and Ebenezer Baptist Church, but then joined the Anglican Church in the United Kingdom. At that time, the Manchester Alliance Church had no specific biblical and social programmes that involved working with people from different cultures and faiths, which is why he moved to the Anglican Church. They offered him the opportunity to engage with people in need, regardless of their nationality, especially asylum seekers and refugees, a population Lucho and his family had already been working with for almost thirteen years. In late 2020, the Chinese Alliance Churches Union broadened the scope of its work, created a group called ‘Exploring Jesus’ and invited Lucho to become its Pastor in Mission. He welcomed the position as an opportunity for the Church to embrace people from multiple social, cultural, ethnic and faith backgrounds. He stressed that the position is also an opportunity to organize religious missions worldwide and create partnerships with other communities of faith to support people in need. When asked about the meaning of this new position in his life project, he replied: ‘The best things I have experienced in my relationship with God happened in the Chinese Alliance Church. So rejoining the Church was like going back to my roots. Like living again with your family and community. It was like going back home.’ Just to be sure, I asked whether he meant going back to Peru. He replied: Twenty years ago, I joined the mission in Lima and seventeen years ago Lilian and I were celebrating our wedding in the Church. By that time, the Church was so rigid and only open to people who shared its faith. Last October, for the first time, this Church opened its doors to those who profess a different faith. The church was full of asylum seekers and refugees. I have been waiting all these years to rejoin my former Church and see it full of people from different faiths and social and cultural backgrounds. So going back home means going back to my Church. My Church has learnt that the heart does not only speak one language but many languages. By rejoining my Church, I have just seen again the reasons why God wanted me to be in Manchester. In Peru, I was working with people who share our faith. In England, our aim is much more ambitious: to potentially share our faith with people from more than a hundred nationalities who live in this relatively small city.



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The idea that ‘going back home means going back to my Church’ in the previous quote does not mean going back to Peru. The Christian and Missionary Alliance is a global movement and, rather than talking about his country of origin, Lucho emphasized the opportunity to go back to his initial community of faith and the possibility of serving God anywhere. Despite the risk of annoying him with my next question, I asked whether he was planning to return to Peru at some point in the future. His quick answer was predictable: ‘Only God knows.’ What follows illustrates the tension between ‘being moved by the hand of God’ and Lucho’s apparent reluctance to go back to a place that he associates with his personal history and identity – a move he would perceive as a move backwards. I am like a fish. I was in Peru and felt like I was swimming in a pond only with people from my culture speaking my own language. Then, I saw a hole and experienced fear. However, I crossed it and started swimming in a river. Once in the river, I discovered new animals that I found more fascinating and then I arrived at the ocean. I feel like I am swimming in the ocean in Manchester because I see so many colours and so many animals that I did not know while swimming in the pond. In Manchester, I interact with people from different cultures, faiths, and communicate in different languages. Going back to Peru could be like moving from the ocean to the pond.

The reluctance to go back to Peru is not necessarily shared by the whole family. As both Lucho and Lilian acknowledged, Lilian misses her mother and Peru. Incidentally, the first time I met Lilian, she was wearing a t-shirt that read ‘I love Peru’, she cooked Peruvian food and she shared what she describes as beautiful memories of her mom and life in Peru. Like Lucho, however, Lilian is deeply committed to the Church and spends a significant part of her limited free time supporting Muslim women in their biblical studies and organizing other social activities. Her role in the Church is absolutely vital, as Lucho stresses, not only because being part of the Church is a family project, but also because, by working with women separately, the Christian Church can follow the Muslim convention of keeping men and women in different spaces.

Concluding Remarks: Has Home Already Been Achieved? This chapter has shown that faith-related mobility complicates meanings of home and attitudes towards return. To begin with, for those whose mobilities are shaped by personal religious convictions and ‘encouraged’ and supported by their communities of faith, the boundaries between

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forced and voluntary migration become even more blurred. There is perhaps little conceptual benefit in labelling as either forced or voluntary Lucho’s ‘decision’ to move to England, where he initially doubted having properly understood God’s signals. The same might be true of those asylum seekers who, after fleeing religious persecution, started to explore the Christian faith and converted to Christianity (see Rees 2021). Lucho’s life story and the narratives of those asylum seekers who attend his biblical studies group, however, illustrate both how choice and compulsion interact over time and space in all forms of migration and the significance of home in such interactions. Furthermore, Lucho’s life story challenges the assumption that attachment to a place called home is a ‘fundamental human need’ (Eyles 1989: 109) and a never-ending search (Taylor 2015). In fact, while ‘shifting roofs’, Lucho has not necessarily been searching for home. He already found home during his first encounter with God and, since then, has been experiencing home as a ‘journey with God’. Home, in this sense, transcends physical structures and the borders of nation states. Rather than a specific house or country, home for Lucho is primarily a spiritual space that he experiences on the move. More generally, home and faith travel together; they are largely mobile. They can be carried as part of the migrants’ ‘invisible’ baggage (Cruz 2014) and performed in the public and private realms, that is, in congregational spaces and in ‘the not so visible lives of immigrant families’ (Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2009: 257). This is not to say that faith and personal convictions are the only shaping influences on Lucho’s mobility and transnational experience of home. Lilian’s willingness to move and settle with him in England – at the cost of leaving her beloved mother and country behind – as well as the support of his community of faith in helping him overcome structural factors that constrain people’s mobility (i.e. visa regimes and the financial resources necessary to travel and settle), have also been central to his experience of home in both Peru and England. The same is true of those refugees whose asylum applications and initial settlement process were supported by Lucho’s Church and who have found in the community of faith a ‘spiritual home’ (see Womack 2015). Lastly, Lucho’s life story further complicates the question of return and shows that the idea of returning back ‘home’ (cf. the ‘myth of return’; Anwar 1979) is an ambivalent one, even for those who are moved by the ‘hand of God’ and openly express that ‘only God knows’ where home will be in the future. Lucho’s evocative statement that ‘going back to Peru could be like moving from the ocean to the pond’ powerfully highlights the difficulties of returning after living, raising a family and creating a community of faith elsewhere.



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Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, and has recently finished a three-year postdoc at the HOMInG Project, University of Trento. His research interests include home and homemaking, conflict-induced displacement, migration and mobilities, and ageing. Recent publications include ‘“Physically Sheltered but Existentially Homeless”’ (Migration Studies, 2021), ‘Remaking a Place Called Home Following Displacement’ (in The Routledge Handbook of Place, Routledge, 2020), Thinking Home on the Move (co-authored, Emerald Publishing, 2020), ‘Where the Heart Is and Where It Hurts’ (Refugee Survey Quarterly, 2019) and ‘“My Soul Stills Hurts”: Bringing Death and Funerals into the Ageing-Migration-Home Nexus’ (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2022).

Notes   1. Home Office (2021), T2 Minister of Religion caseworker guidance. https://assets. publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/1019637/T2_Minister_of_Religion.pdf. Retrieved on 28 January 2022.  2. See ‘What Is the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church?’ at https://www. gotquestions.org/Christian-and-Missionary-Alliance.html. Retrieved on 13 March 2021. For those interested in the Christian denominations, see Rhodes (2015).   3. The topic certainly deserves more scholarly attention but it is beyond the scope of this chapter.

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60    Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia Dubenská, Tereza, and Adéla Souralová. 2018. ‘Turning to or Away from Religion: The Role of Religion in the Lives of Romanian Migrants in the Czech Republic’, Journal of Religion in Europe 11(1): 73–98. Eade, John. 2012. ‘Religion, Home-Making and Migration across a Globalising City: Responding to Mobility in London’, Culture and Religion 13(4): 469–83. Ergin, Hakan, and Hans de Wit. 2019. ‘Religion, a Major Driver for Forced Internationalization’, International Higher Education 99: 9–10. Eyles, John. 1989. ‘The Geography of Everyday Life’, in D. Gregory and R. Walford (eds), Horizons in Human Geography. London: Palgrave, pp. 102–17. Fesenmyer, Leslie. 2018. ‘Pentecostal Pastorhood as Calling and Career: Migration, Religion, and Masculinity between Kenya and the United Kingdom’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24: 749–66. Fiałkowska, Kamila. 2020. ‘“By Education I’m Catholic”: The Gender, Religion and Nationality Nexus in the Migration Experience of Polish Men to the UK’, Central and Eastern European Migration Review 9(2): 89–107. Fortier, Anne-Marie. 2003. ‘Making Home: Queer Migrations and Motions of Attachment’, in S. Ahmed et al., Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg, pp. 115–37. Frederiks, Martha. 2016. ‘Religion, Migration, and Identity: A Conceptual and Theoretical Exploration’, in M. Frederiks and D. Nagy (eds), Religion, Migration and Identity: Methodological and Theological Explorations. Leiden: Brill, pp. 9–29. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gustafson, Per. 2001. ‘Roots and Routes: Exploring the Relationship between Place Attachment and Mobility’, Environment and Behavior 33(5): 667–86. Gutkowski, Stacey, and Craig Larkin. 2021. ‘Spiritual Ambiguity in Interfaith Humanitarianism: Local Faith Communities, Syrian Refugees, and Muslim– Christian Encounters in Lebanon and Jordan’, Migration Studies 9(3): 1054–74. Hage, Ghassan. 1996. ‘The Spatial Imaginary of National Practices: Dwelling– Domesticating/Being–Exterminating’, Environment and Planning D 14: 463–85.  . 2005. ‘A Not So Multi-Sited Ethnography of a Not So Imagined Community’, Anthropological Theory 5(4), 463–75.  . 2020. ‘Home as the Foremost Desire People Pursue in Daily Life?’, in P. Boccagni, L.E. Pérez Murcia and M. Belloni (eds), Thinking Home on the Move: A Conversation across Disciplines. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, pp. 27–31. Hillenbrand, Carolin. 2020. ‘Religion as a Driver or Brake for Threat Perceptions? An Empirical Analysis of the Relationships between Religion and Migration-Related Threat Perceptions in Germany’, Zeitschrift für Religion, Gesellschaft und Politik 4: 45–79. Kéri, Szabolcs, and Christina Sleiman. 2017. ‘Religious Conversion to Christianity in Muslim Refugees in Europe’, Archive for the Psychology of Religion 39(3), 283–94. Kwon, Ronald, and Kevin McCaffree. 2020. ‘Muslim Religious Accommodations in Western Europe: Do Multicultural Policies Impact Religiosity Levels among Muslims, Catholics and Protestants?’, International Migration 59(1): 215–40. Lancione, Michele. 2014. ‘Entanglements of Faith: Discourses, Practices of Care and Homeless People in an Italian City of Saints’, Urban Studies 51(14): 3062–78.



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Levitt, Peggy. 2003. ‘“You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant”: Religion and Transnational Migration’, International Migration Review 37(3): 847–73.  . 2004. ‘Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging: The Institutional Character of Transnational Religious Life’, Sociology of Religion 65(1): 1–18. Mazumdar, Shampa, and Sanjoy Mazumdar. 2009. ‘Religion, Immigration, and Home Making in Diaspora: Hindu Space in Southern California’, Journal of Environmental Psychology 29: 256–66. Pérez Murcia, Luis Eduardo. 2019. ‘Where the Heart Is and Where It Hurts: Conceptions of Home for People Fleeing Conflict’, Refugee Survey Quarterly 38(2): 139–58. Ponniah, James (ed.). 2020. Culture, Religion, and Home-Making in and beyond South Asia. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2020. Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson. 1998. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement. London: Routledge. Rees, Wilhelm. 2021. ‘Pastoral Care for Migrants. Canonical and Religious Related Legal Requirements on Asylum and on the Change of Religion’, Ecumeny and Law 9(2): 41–69. Rhodes, Ron. 2015. The Complete Guide to Christian Denominations: Understanding the History, Beliefs, and Differences. Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers. Rose, Lena., and Zoe Given-Wilson. 2021. ‘“What Is Truth?” Negotiating Christian Convert Asylum Seekers’ Credibility’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 697(1): 221–35. Salazar, Noel B. 2020. ‘Home as Relational Concept: Insights from Work among Nomads and Hypermobile People’, in P. Boccagni, L.E. Pérez Murcia and M. Belloni (eds), Thinking Home on the Move: A Conversation across Disciplines. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, pp. 46–50.  . 2021. ‘Existential Vs. Essential Mobilities: Insights from before, during and after a Crisis’, Mobilities, online first. Sheringham, Olivia. 2010. ‘Creating “Alternative Geographies”: Religion, Transnationalism and Everyday Life’, Geography Compass 4: 1678–94. Taylor, Steven. 2015. ‘“Home Is Never Fully Achieved … Even When We Are in It”: Migration, Belonging and Social Exclusion Within Punjabi Transnational Mobility’, Mobilities 10(2): 193–210. Van Tubergen, Frank, and Jórunn Sindradóttir. 2011. ‘The Religiosity of Immigrants in Europe: A Cross-National Study’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 50: 272–88. Vijailakshmi, Usha. 2020. ‘Old Identities in a New Space: The Role of Hindu Priests in Making Diasporic Communities Feel at Home in Mumbai’, in J. Ponniah (ed.), Culture Religion and Home-Making in and beyond South Asia. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2020, pp. 49–66. Womack, Deanna, F. 2015. ‘Transnational Christianity and Converging Identities’, Mission Studies 32: 250–70.

CHAPTER

2

One Essential Home (‘Ecuador’), Another Existential Home (‘with My Mother’), Many Houses In-Between The Story of Miriam Paolo Boccagni

Come in Paolo, take a seat! You won’t find much of Ecuador in this place – flags or anything … I don’t need that, as I carry it here, in my heart. —Miriam welcoming me to her place on the day of the interview

Miriam is an Italo-Ecuadorian woman in her mid-forties. She has been my most valuable interlocutor in fieldwork with transnational Ecuadorian migrants over the last fifteen years. I have spent time with her in most of the flats in which she has lived in Italy. I was also hosted in the house Miriam built in Ecuador, even before she visited it (Boccagni 2014). On either side of migration, I have been a witness to her changing housing, household and dwelling conditions. Interestingly, though, I had never had a fully fledged recorded interview with her before. None of the following topics were new in our conversations – we had often discussed them, especially



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in relation with my visit to her family in Southern Ecuador. Nonetheless, several new insights emerge from this particular interview, thanks to the more focused and reflexive attitude we cultivate. Miriam, by now a dual citizen, has been living in Italy for nineteen years. While she is used to speaking Italian in public, as she does in her jobs as a care worker, cleaner and cultural mediator, she has always spoken Spanish with me. This conversation about her life story will also be in her mother tongue.

Introduction ‘Most people’, Aviezer Tucker wrote some decades ago (1994: 84), ‘spend their lives in search of home, at the gap between the natural home and the par- Figure 2.1. Miriam. ticular ideal home where they would be Photo by Miriam. fully fulfilled’. This existential search, which conjugates depth and abstraction, could arguably provide a lens through which to view people’s life trajectories in general. Under circumstances of large-scale migration, however, the ‘search’ turns out to be more salient, complex and ridden with contradictions. In fact, a focus on the variable locations, meanings and emotions associated with home can illuminate anew migrants’ transnational careers (Martiniello and Rea 2014) and housing pathways (Clapham 2002), given the institutional, relational and personal resources available to them. Reading a person’s migration history against the background of the dwelling spaces in which it unfolded is a meaningful and delicate endeavour. It reveals a lot about how built environments and the underlying material cultures shape migrants’ life experiences, both in terms of constraints and affordances, with these life experiences also being shaped by their own agency. Dwelling articulates a fundamental human need, and better housing conditions – including house ownership – are likely a target for the hopes and investments of a number of people, including those ‘on the move’. Enriching migrants’ self-accounts with the emotional and moral metrics of home, then, introduces further complexities, but it also unveils

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the different spatial, relational and material foundations of the place(s) that matter most to them. What of those places is fixed or mobile, and what is transformed over time and after migration, can be investigated by matching migrant life stories with their housing pathways and their ways of displacing and re-emplacing home. What changes and what remains the same in migrants’ views of home and their underlying housing conditions over time? How do patterns of (im)mobility interact with patterns of social change? Do the former facilitate or constrain the latter? I approach these abstract questions from the bottom up, in light of the experiential concerns that emerge from one particular biography: that of Miriam, an Ecuadorian-Italian woman (as she would phrase it), in her forties, who has been living in Italy for about twenty years. Her case is not fundamentally different from the cases of many others and yet it is far more meaningful to me as a researcher. This is not only because it combines existential thickness with analytical purchase on the faceted and contradictory experience of home under changing migration, housing and household circumstances. It is also because I have a long-standing friendship with Miriam. While this account is based on a single in-depth interview, it draws on a fifteen-year relationship, including a number of visits to her dwelling places in Italy and Ecuador. As a result, the co-production of Miriam’s story is a deeply reflexive process. It is no coincidence that the verb ‘reflect’, used either literally or metaphorically, is omnipresent in Miriam’s self-account. On my side, converting her words into a formal life story, through active and selective mediation, is a belated acknowledgement of her discrete but constant presence in my work on migrant transnationalism. Stylistically, what follows mirrors Miriam’s linear way of recollecting her life experience as a migrant from the beginning of her migration journey to the here-and-now. It does, however, include some back-and-forth, whenever reflection on the meaning, location or circulation of home creeps in, and different segments of her narratives are revisited or anticipated accordingly. Along the way, while keeping Miriam’s voice in the foreground, I outline a meta-analysis of the questions of home and mobility that her experience illuminates and invites us to discuss further.

Telling Migration as a Story of Changing Homes, Houses and Households ‘On what should I focus?’ Miriam asks me as soon I have turned on the recorder. ‘On all that is house, or home?’ ‘On both, please!’ I immediately reply. ‘OK.’

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Narrating Houses and Homes through Migration As we soon find out, co-producing Miriam’s migration history along the lines of her housing pathway is at once an easy exercise and a difficult one. She has so much to say about certain events in her migration and family trajectory, those she now reconstructs as the ‘key’ events. Her narrative resonates with, and expands on, our respective memories of past meetings and chats. Interestingly, though, all that has to do with dwelling turns out to be both meaningful and sensitive, even slippery – especially as we shift from house to home or, although they do not overlap perfectly, from casa to hogar. There is much more than that, of course, in Miriam’s life history prior to leaving Ecuador. She often told me about her childhood with her mother in an outer, low-class neighbourhood of her city in the southern part of the Ecuadorian costa, as well as her time at university, her work as a teacher in a private secondary school and her marriage. All these things suggest an effort to transition from a lower- to a middle-class background, inasmuch as the chronic instability in Ecuador allows for such a transition (de la Torre and Striffler 2009). In fact, the collapse of the national economic and political institutions in the late 1990s led to an migration flow of unprecedented breadth and intensity, with Europe and the United States being the main destinations (Jokisch and Pribilsky 2002; Ramírez and Ramírez 2005). This impacted Miriam, who was an initially reluctant and ‘secondary’ migrant. My life is totally different from the lives of many others who arrived here. I came precisely in 2001. I came because I had to follow – as a wife – my husband [at that time] … as he was alone in [town name] and was renting a room. It was heavy for him to stay alone – he got me to travel and I came some months later. My life changed completely. I was not used to being jobless, maintained by someone else and having to live in the same room with people from different countries, in the beginning, with all of their problems relating to family, life, whatever. So, I began to work as a babysitter, and then live-in [as a care worker]. Although they paid me half as much as the others or even less, I kept on because I had to move forward economically, because one salary is not enough. I did not need to send [money] to Ecuador, but I did it responsibly anyway, every month. I was always supporting my mother; she’s the only person I have, I’m her only child. She’s never needed anything, ’cause she’s always been very active, but I knew there was always something missing, particularly in our house – so, I was always present. I mean, I felt like someone who had to keep up with her lifestyle, although it was totally different.

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There are frequent digressions in Miriam’s narrative. When looking back on her migration story, she seems particularly happy to linger on topics such as friends, politics, education, travelling or the association she has recently founded in Italy as ‘a bridge for educational support’, with immigrants’ children as the main target. All of these subjects may be comfortable to talk about, but none of them affect her memories and self-representation as deeply as questions of house and home. Whenever possible, Miriam underlines the distinction she perceives between her lifestyles, choices and tastes and those she attributes to her co-nationals abroad. She is ‘not like the others’, due, in her view, to her relatively good work position prior to migration Figure 2.2. Miriam. and her ‘sober’ lifestyle (relative to those who spend Photo by Miriam. more time and money on leisure and fun). Autonomy, modesty and parsimony are recurring themes she talks about herself. Her new house in Ecuador – what an academic (but certainly not Miriam) might call a ‘remittance house’ (Boccagni and Bivand 2021) – is a good embodiment of this distinction as she presents it. This is our method: if we can afford it, we carry on with it [building the new house], but I don’t want to go into debt, right? She [Miriam’s mother] did it, depending on how much I was sending, and I was always trying to save – no waste, cheap things only! In this way, we almost finished it in a couple of years, but at some point, we had to stop … I mean, I’ve no luxury there – it’s only a three-storey house with the strictly indispensable things, nothing elegant, but when I go there, I know I’ll find a place that is really my place – I’m not renting there. I can sleep there with no worries. I’ve no rent to pay at the end of every month, whereas here you’re thinking all the time: ‘It’s time to pay … how will we manage?’

Miriam associates a fundamental sense of ‘ontological security’ (Dupuis and Thorns 1998) with that house, and with Ecuador in general, more than she does with her dwellings and her migrant condition in Italy. In fact, her story has significant commonalities with the stories of co-nationals of hers that I have met over time. It is common to encounter, at the outset of the migration career of Ecuadorian women, a totalizing experience of live-in care work, including the quasi-kinship moral economy that underpins it (Baldassar et al. 2017). Equally pervasive is the expectation that migration will be a short-term experience (Cwerner 2001) of working



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abroad ‘for a while’ that will facilitate the construction of a new or better house back ‘home’. When I arrived, unfortunately, the first thing I did was to work, work, work – I had no chance to convert myself in a person like I was in Ecuador, so free … the first thing I did was to work live-in [estuve encerrada], so the first thing you want is to get something to survive … you’re so dedicated to work that you have no time to go out, share things, maybe meet friends. Or meet someone that opens up your mind and asks you what you’ve just asked me: ‘Look, why didn’t you do something else [with your money]?’ Well, in this case, the only thing I thought of was to enlarge my house, you know? I already had my house, which was my mother’s. I had a piece of land, with a small house, and … thanks to my own work, especially the two years I worked live-in with an old lady who was like my mother, because I saw myself in her – I mean, I could see my mother in her, so, with the money I didn’t spend … struggling a lot, I made a house that is not elegant, because I’m someone who doesn’t like elegance or appearance; it is what I have inside me that matters the most. And, you know, my house reflects our own interests. As I knew that my mother would be old someday, I built a little apartment downstairs, so if she’s alone, she doesn’t need to climb up the stairs … I mean, you should think of the future. For now, instead, I made an apartment for her. I copied it from Italy – you don’t need to have the kitchen downstairs and the bedrooms upstairs; no, each floor can be an apartment in itself. Now, there is my apartment, plus one in the middle, and two small ones that I could rent out someday to get something, although, you know, renting apartments is not … I saw it more like an opportunity to have someone else in, when my mother was there. And then, I mean, just in case, it’s €80 more anyway. But renting out is not like here, with tenants who care for it … so sometimes houses end up kind of abandoned. For example, my house is abandoned now … I have my uncle living in it, but I’m not sure that he takes care of it … well, at least I don’t need to worry about whom I’ve let in, you know?

What Is ‘Copied’ and What Circulates through Transnational Housing Out of the wealth of ideas and experiences that this excerpt encapsulates, ‘I copied it [the flat] from Italy’ seems like a secondary point for Miriam, but it is an intriguing one for me, even though she is simply referring to ‘copying’ the model of a condominium flat, as opposed to the detached houses that are common in the urban area she comes from. In a lower-class neighbourhood like that, such houses articulate the aspiration

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(and the emulation) of a wealthier lifestyle (Fletcher 1999; Klaufus 2012). ‘We’ Ecuadorians, Miriam explains, We’re fixated on this thing, that every bedroom should have its own bathroom … that’s because sometimes we see our ideal self in something that is kind of higher level, you know? And well, I had my own house … and people say, ‘When I’m rich, I’ll have such a big house, bedrooms upstairs, big kitchen downstairs, a big dancing hall’ … so, that’s the mentality of people … but I, when I was alone – you need to reflect and say, well, I’ve got this land, I’ll have a bigger house, I’ll improve it. … The main thing I copied from Europe is that you can do everything in one flat. It doesn’t matter if you have one bathroom for five people, or if you have the kitchen and sitting room together. What’s important, instead, is that I got out of my head the idea that you need a huge space, because people all think of a big, big hall … we have the American idea, we copy the American style … most people think of having a huge house with big stairs, like in the soap operas they download … no, I must be a simple person. I must be simple. I must cope and adapt to whatever I get.

As Miriam’s self-representation suggests, her encounter with the average standard of housing in Italy, and with immigrants’ typically over-crowded housing, may inform her more pragmatic view of what a good-enough house should be like. The fact remains that the influence of what she encountered abroad, and an attempt to circulate this transnationally, are clearly at work here, although within the limits of the resources available to her. ‘You would really like to copy a certain model of house’, repeats Miriam. In her case, interestingly, critical self-distantiation from the American big-house stereotype goes hand in hand with a fascination with what she sees anew in the Alps region, where she now lives. Again, this does not make for a simple or straightforward translocation into the coastal suburban environment of Ecuador. I didn’t travel much at that time, as I was working live-in, but I did watch TV. I could see different house models, and the countryside ones were beautiful; it’s houses that reflect who has money there. And I saw these pitched roofs, you know? Well, making them in Ecuador would be pointless … you need them here, when it snows; that makes sense. No point there though. So, I said, well, if I make it like that, I’m just going to attract thieves! So, for that reason, in my house I tried to do almost nothing on the outside – I mean, I see myself [my image, the way I like to be] more in the inside than the outside. That’s why my house keeps being what it is, from outside … because, if you’re a humble person, I guess you shouldn’t look at the external part but at the interior; that’s what really speaks about you, right? … It’s the



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interior that you should decorate according to your own personality … if I start to paint the outside, then I have to keep doing so all the time, and spend still more on painting, for the sake of aesthetics – and I don’t get along with aesthetics!

The emphasis on the outside–inside distinction is another recurring theme in Miriam’s narrative – one that conflates an aesthetic judgement with a moral one. The inner part of the house, what is kept to oneself (or selected guests), is viewed as more important than the outer appearance, which a number of migrants – she implicitly adds – tend to emphasize. This distinction in layout, style and tastes is interesting and contentious in itself in the context of the emerging literature on migrant houses (López 2015; Lozanovska 2019; Boccagni and Pérez Murcia 2021; Boccagni and Yapo, 2022). Likewise, the emphasis on the outside/inside divide could be seen as quintessential to the reproduction of the bourgeois ideology of home, which emphasizes both the private/public separation and the display of wealth through outer appearance (Chapman and Hockey 1999; Kaika 2004). It also testifies to the diffusion of that ideology among population strata, including most migrants, that may not have had much of a bourgeois background where they used to live, let alone where they live now. That said, there is another corollary of this outside–inside opposition that calls for elaboration: the way Miriam compares the house to a human body and the interior to a soul (Rigotti 1995). Similar metaphors have been extensively discussed in the anthropology of the house (Carsten and HughJones 1995) and in the psychology of home (Marcus 1995). Likewise, the comparison speaks to a range of critical and postmodern approaches to home studies (Ahmed et al. 2003). Interestingly, this multi-scalar metaphor also has a major emic and experiential resonance, at least in the self-narrative of a sensitive and reflexive interlocutor like Miriam. Care for oneself, decency, respectability, the primacy of the interior – what lies inside us spiritually – over external appearances: in all of these normative respects, Miriam’s tale of her Ecuadorian house is also a tale about herself and her own ideals. Talking about a house, especially one’s own house, can hardly be considered simply referring to a building. Doing so also articulates one’s moralities, tastes and, of course, life projects and concerns. ‘A house is the reflection of a person’, Miriam adds musingly. ‘The interior of a house, above all.’ So, how are lifestyles and self-representations embedded in a house, be it in the external appearance or the interior? And how is this process affected by migration? I ask Miriam if, over time, ‘there was anything more from Italy that travelled to Ecuador’ and reached her house – her own embodied experience of social remittances (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves

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2011). While my thoughts would have probably gone to questions of identity and material culture, her response unsettles my expectations once again. Rather than pointing to any particular object, Miriam shifts the focus to what she has learnt and how her mentality has changed accordingly. This, she says, informs a range of domestic practices, on a local and a transnational scale. I’d like to do [in the house in Ecuador] something IKEA style – I mean, no longer what is traditional, but rather what is useful … that would make a big difference. For instance, you know the hanging furniture in the kitchen? You shouldn’t have it in wood, in Ecuador, but in aluminium, otherwise there are these small insects that eat it up. … And even shelves, you’d better have glass ones … I mean, if I had my own house now, I’d make it like IKEA. It’s not because of beauty, but because of usefulness! That’s something I’ve learnt here – the importance of useful things, of recycling things …

A Migrant Career as a Housing Career: One Permanent Empty Place, Many Provisional Peopled Ones Overall, Miriam’s housing pathway has been both fragmented and sedentary. She has spent the majority of her twenty years abroad in the same city but in a dozen different apartments. The moves from one apartment to the next were related to a marital split-up and the formation of a new household, but also to her changing legal status and, more fundamentally, torent- and job-related constraints. Her housing constellation in Italy has been paralleled by the maintenance of one and the same house in Ecuador – Miriam’s house, as presented above. This has been a place for occasional visits and a silent but reassuring material background the rest of the time. ‘Nothing has changed’ in that house, Miriam says, but she immediately adds: ‘Well, I did pay to fix some little things from here, for instance, a canopy over the upper floor – that was out of necessity, as it would rain [and flood] otherwise. It was not to make it smart, you know what I mean?’ What has not changed, in other words, is her belief that one’s house should be simple and unnoticeable – the opposite of the stereotypical emigrant house (Boccagni and Pérez Murcia 2021). However, Miriam’s attitude and emotional attachment to that house have changed significantly, as a result of her life course and family circumstances. This is not uncommon in the lived experience of transnational housing when this is approached biographically (Pauli and Bedorf 2018; Boccagni and Bivand 2021).

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When I was first hosted at her house in Ecuador fifteen years ago, the conversion of the pre-existing single-storey house into a three storey-building had just been completed. Miriam’s mother, who still lived there, had proudly guided me through the entire house, up to the flat roof. Once on the roof, we had a stunning view of the entire neighbourhood. Many houses, reaching almost to the coast on the horizon, were apparently similar in every respect. At that point, I could hardly have overestimated the emotional, practical and even symbolic significance of the house. Despite being physically far away, and thanks only to her own hard work, Miriam had ‘made’ it. ‘Tell her we look forward to her return’, her mother said as I was about to return to Italy. Miriam herself, at that time, cultivated the same expectation as many immigrant newcomers – that she would be back ‘in a few years’ (which, ironically, is what her ex-husband ended up doing after their marriage finished). Fifteen years later, Miriam has become a dual citizen – ‘very well integrated in Italy’, she says. Much has changed in her family and work circumstances. Her house in Ecuador is still there, almost ready for use (from her point of view) or still half-finished (as an external observer might say). Yet, whenever we catch up, she is less inclined to tell me about it than she used to be – it is as if the house were a haunting presence from far away (Davidson 2009). ‘Now I want to sell it’, Miriam says abruptly at the end of the interview. Or rather, I soon realize, she would like to sell it if it were not for the possibility that her mother might decide to return to Ecuador. M: I’ve learnt from my life that nothing is eternal. Things change all the time. What matters is that my mother does well if she goes there [back to Ecuador]. If she tells me, ‘I don’t want it, let’s sell it!’, that’s also OK – it’s my house, for sure, but I’m not so attached to it, as if it were my skeleton. P: So, when you’re there, you can say, now, this is my house? M: Yes, there … P: And what about here? M: Here?! No way. You come back [to Italy] and have to start to work again. If you’re jobless, you need to know if you have enough savings [for rental], otherwise they’ll knock on your door and say: ‘Well – what about you?’, so … you always need to think if you have enough money at the end of the month, you know you have to pay.

Comparing Miriam’s dwelling arrangements in Ecuador and Italy is revealing in many ways. The most obvious difference is that between an empty, if somewhat permanent, place and a range of peopled, but

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provisional places. This distinction is also a matter of entitlement (to a place of ownership, in ‘one’s own’ country) vs dependency (on having enough money to pay the rent). As Miriam stresses this, and as we reconstruct her housing pathway in Italy, I realize that the abstract question I had articulated at the beginning – What makes a place feel like home for you? – is not the most relevant question for her. At the very least, it is not the question she would address first. As I look around the sitting room in which we are talking, I wonder aloud: from what can I infer that ‘this is Miriam’s place?’ ‘From the fact that it’s cheap!’ she replies, bursting into laughter. ‘It’s pretty small, as you can see.’ Although the condominium has a small courtyard ‘where my mother can hang out the laundry and stay breathing fresh air’, the flat itself has three bedrooms and, as of now, seven dwellers (including Miriam’s mother, her new husband’s three adolescent children, and a young asylum seeker they are hosting ‘for a while’). ‘You know, it was a disaster with the lockdown. It’s a nice house though, I like it, but I don’t see it as home for me.’ Likewise, Miriam gauges the pros and cons of her past dwellings essentially in terms of rental costs, rooms available, distance from her workplace. When I ask if any of her previous flats ever ‘felt like home’, she mentions one in particular, a flat she lived in some years ago. She underlines infrastructural qualities, like the presence of a balcony and the good exposure to light. It takes a few more seconds for her to mention the family-like relations she had with her neighbours: There was a man living alone – he liked talking about the moon and the stars and showing me all constellations – and another woman, she was so lovely – kind of a bizarre family, with dad and mum, you know? Whenever they were on the balcony, ‘Hi! How are you doing?’ It was so pleasant. We supported each other for anything. I’ve very good memories of this.

Only after some further description does she acknowledge that flat was different to all the others because it was there that she eventually split up with her previous husband and, some years later, was joined by the new one, who came from Ecuador with his children. This was the endpoint of a rather unusual reunification process, one in which Miriam displayed all her creative skills in navigating the rules (cf. Bonizzoni 2015). It was probably the new family experience in that flat, including her new identity as a stepmother, that made that place so special. Despite all the difficulties, Miriam recalls that ‘there was more of a union among us there – at the beginning of a new relationship’.

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Swinging between Experience and Ideal, or Moving from House towards Home The question remains, however, whether Miriam would ever see an apartment she was renting as a ‘real home’. As we scan through her housing pathway, her pragmatic attitude cannot conceal an intimate and resilient conviction that home ownership is the only ideal condition (Pérez Murcia and Boccagni 2022). ‘I’ve always wanted to have a house of my own’, Miriam says. Following up on this by asking what her ideal house would be like results in a creative and surreal exercise. It is clear, from Miriam and her husband’s precarious job arrangements, that a dream-house scenario is unlikely to come true for the time being. Yet, there is much to understand in her imaginary placement of the ideal house in the region in which she lives – rather than the one she comes from, although, interestingly, there some expected continuity between them. P: Talking about your ideal house, what would it be like? M: It would be … a bit out of town, with some open space, a detached house like the one I had in Ecuador. Because, I mean, if you always live in a condominium, you must just accept your neighbours. This is very good … you can rely on them for anything you need. However, as a Latin American [siendo latino americana], we need to have barbecues, maybe a birthday party with some music; sure, these are my roots – I’m not going to lose them! Although I’m not good at doing parties, I have my friends, including Italian friends – they would like to share that.

However, what if the conversation shifts from the ideal house to the ideal home? This brings to the foreground something more important than ownership, that is, people and kinship relations. From this perspective, the whole argument of the interview is reframed upside down. The ideal is here and now, although it relies on fragile material bases and is unlikely to turn into a permanent dwelling arrangement. M: My ideal home is the way we are right now, with mum [living with us]. If she moves away, it’s no more home. P: So, home is where – M: Where mum is … I mean, if mum is here with me now, I don’t care about the house there [in Ecuador]. Maybe my cousins and uncles end up getting it, but anyway – I don’t care. You know, money is not what makes me … I’d rather sell it and make it disappear. The point is that, although my mother is fine here, she’s so fond of that house, she’d like to go back, she can’t cope with the cold here, so one has

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to keep it. But if my mother is there, then the house is like a part of me, you see? It’s as if half of me is living there. … So, it all depends on what my mother says. I mean, if she says ‘Well, I’ll go back’, OK – we’ll go together and I’ll have to stay there one month and take care of the security thing. It’s so important that the house be secure for her … it’s not that it is unsafe now, but I mean, I must set a railing up on the balcony if she wants to stay there, and find some non-slip surface for the floor … I must think of domestic economy and security, and so much more … I’m worried for her personal life security. No idea how it will end up … I wouldn’t really like her to go. I’d like to sell that house and buy another one, somewhere else.

‘My place is home only if my mother is in it’, Miriam repeats. Otherwise, ‘it’s just a place for rent – you happen to be there and you’re paying for it. It’s something provisional: now I’m here, and tomorrow, who knows?’ There is a sense of permanency in Miriam’s understanding of her primary relationship with her mother, which sets it apart from any other tie she has built and negotiated over her life course. That such a tie is bound to be as impermanent as any other does not affect its moral construction as a different, almost sacred tie. However, what if some sense of permanency, maybe less intimate and meaningful but still resilient, is articulated on a macro scale of home, at a national level? Italy, Miriam says, ‘opened up its doors to me. It invited me to take a seat, like in a home – I mean, like in a house!’ We laugh together at her rectification, as we keep swinging between hogar and casa. As it turns out, whenever Miriam says ‘home’, she does so to try to capture something deeper and more essential than a house that provides shelter. Certainly, her relationship with both her mother and motherland falls within the scope of home, although in distinct ways and with different consequences. The ordinary experience of dwelling abroad as a migrant, however, has more to do with some sort of house. Opposite to the house’s clear and constraining materiality, the realm of home is blurred and ambiguous. At the end of interview, neither Miriam nor I are fully sure of what it means to her precisely. We are both sure, though, that it fundamentally matters to her in an emotional, moral and existential way, and that it demands a significant and protracted investment of emotional and care work, wherever it is located. M: I need to work so hard before calling it [Italy] home. I need to struggle a lot and find a way [to] be integrated with my mum, with my family! I mean, with mum, who is my family. So, if she’s here in this little house, I can call it ‘ho’, but not yet home [hogar], because it’s not mine … and my mother is not here for good.

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P: So, what is missing? M: My mum’s permanent presence – if she decides to stay. And a house of my own, because people do need their own house. A corner of it would be for my mum, a corner for the boys, when they’re back … that would make sense – buying my own place! [laughs]

There would be no need for paintings, posters or anything to symbolize Ecuador in that ideal place, Miriam repeats. Attachment to her country of origin is presented as a self-evident moral principle, one of those things that remains the same, retaining the same perceived salience over time, no matter what. M: I love my country, 100 per cent. It’s in my heart, I’m proud of my roots, but I don’t show it off in my place – I carry this patriotism here in my heart. If my country is sad, if it’s going through certain things, then I’m suffering too. The first thing we see when we wake up is news about Ecuador on YouTube … how many people are dying of Covid, what the situation is with all those nasty guys in politics … so, I see Italy as my second home, it will never be the first one … my Ecuador will always be my first home. P: So, what’s the difference between first and second home? M: The first one matters the most … because my roots are there. I was born there … I made my first steps and started to run there … I grew up there. I mean, for me to feel that a place here was home, a place of my own … it would take time. What is more, my mother is still tying me there [todavia me liga]. Although she’s staying here, I feel she’s staying there. She can’t stop thinking of her house there.

As Miriam poignantly adds, ‘as long as there is this house in-between, I feel that Italy is not my home’. This primarily has to do with her mother’s ambivalent feelings relative to that building and to her own migration. However, it seems that the mere existence of a remittance house, with its stubborn materiality – as a receptacle of so much investment, care and hope – is enough to prevent full acceptance of the country of settlement as home, even after having spent twenty years there (cf. Boccagni and Echeverria 2022). P: So, here and there, two houses – or two homes? Or what? M: Yeah, there are two houses [casas] – one in Ecuador, the other one in Italy. And home … now it’s here, because mum is staying here … it’s home because we’re complete [estamos completos], mum is here, so this would be my home, but not a physical one – it’s rather a spiritual one, you see?

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P: Yes … M: My first house is Ecuador and my second house is Italy. My first home is Ecuador, but I can’t really say that my second home is Italy. I can’t say home yet, because I don’t see it as mine. P: Is that because you’re not the owner of a house? M: No. In that case, I would only say that it’s my second house. The place where I’m staying is not the point. I call a place home when my mother is there. OK, it’s a bit complex, but that’s it, as long as mum is there, then it is my home. I couldn’t really explain it!

Conclusion: Retention and Circulation through the House and Beyond The primacy of one family tie and the essential(ized) view of Ecuador as the primordial home are not the only things that remain the same throughout our conversation and throughout Miriam’s life trajectory. There is another, less visible line of continuity that emerges only at the end of the interview. Unsurprisingly, it again has to do with values – in this case, values associated with politics. Just a few weeks after our interview, municipal elections will take place in the city where Miriam lives. After having made informal contact with different political groups, she decided to nominate herself for the city council for a right-wing party, much to the surprise of a number of her friends and social activists. ‘You know what the left did in my country and in Latin America?!’ she exclaims, as she shows me her political leaflets. ‘All of these people [in left-wing politics in Italy] are still endorsing them! So, how on earth could I nominate myself for them?’ ‘Paolo, it’s important to be self-consistent, isn’t it?’ her husband adds. He has been respectfully distant from us throughout the interview, doing a variety of chores in and out of the house, returning now with humita (a traditional South American dish) and a cup of ‘non-Italian’ coffee for me. ‘Of course’, I reply. I don’t grasp immediately, though, that their stance reveals something deeper than their political alignment. What matters, sociologically, here is rather the retention (by habit), but also the resilience (by active will), of past political values and ideas across the migration experience. It is as if values themselves undergo an effective and parallel circulation of their own, both in space (from country of origin to country of settlement) and in time (from Miriam’s early youth to her mid-adulthood). While I have focused on what circulates through the lens of the views and material cultures of a ‘migrant house’ (Lozanovska 2019),



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it is only ex post that I realize another social fact: many other forms of immaterial circulation take place through migration stories like Miriam’s, and deserve more attention in future research on the home–mobility nexus (Miranda-Nieto et al. 2020). Interestingly, though, values such as Miriam’s political values are both mobile, as they ‘follow’ her in space and time, and immobile, in that they tend to remain the same in her self-understanding, despite so many other things having changed. Geographical and housing mobility, here, goes hand in hand with emotional and ideational immobility – or, at least, with the claim for it. In other words, a sensitive and respectful understanding of migrant lives (and probably the lives of all human beings) demands that we question the view that mobility and immobility are mutual opposites. These are, rather, dynamics that simultaneously inform and shape, in different ways, the everyday lives of people on the move, as migration scholars tend to call them by way of simplification. Paolo Boccagni is Professor in Sociology (University of Trento) and Principal Investigator of ERC StG HOMInG. He has published in the sociology of migration, home, diversity and social welfare, mostly with a qualitative and ethnographic background. Over the last fifteen years, he has carried out multi-method research on the transnational family life of Ecuadorian migrants in Europe. He is currently conducting comparative fieldwork on the lived experience of home, with a particular focus on asylum seekers in reception facilities. Recent books include Migration and the Search for Home (Palgrave, 2017) and Thinking Home on the Move (co-authored; Emerald, 2020). His new edited book, The Edward Elgar Handbook on Home and Migration, is forthcoming in 2023.

References Ahmed, S., et al. (eds). 2003. Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. London: Berg. Baldassar, L., et al. 2017. ‘More Like a Daughter than an Employee’, Identities 24(5): 524–41. Boccagni, P., 2014. ‘What’s in a Migrant House?’, Housing, Theory and Society 31(3): 277–93. Boccagni, P., and M. Bivand. 2021. ‘On the Theoretical Potential of “Remittance Houses”’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47(5): 1066–83. Boccagni, P., and S. Yapo. 2022. ‘“You’re Always in Transit, but the House Stays”: Remitting, Restoring and Remaking Home in a Migrant Family House in Cuenca, Ecuador’, Housing, Theory and Society, online first.

78    Paolo Boccagni Boccagni, P., and G. Echeverria. Forthcoming. ‘Whose Homes?’, in P. Boccagni and S. Bonfanti (eds), Migration and the Domestic Space. London: Springer. Boccagni, P., and L.E. Pérez Murcia. 2021. ‘Fixed Places, Shifting Distances’, Migration Studies 9(1): 47–64. Bonizzoni, P. 2015. ‘Uneven Paths’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41(12): 2001– 20. Carsten, J., and S. Hugh-Jones (eds). 1995. About the House. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapman, T., and J. Hockey (eds). 1999. Ideal Homes? Social Change and the Experience of Home. London: Routledge. Clapham, D. 2002. ‘Housing Pathways’, Housing, Theory and Society 19(2): 57–68. Cwerner, S. 2001. ‘The Times of Migration’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27(1): 7–36. Davidson, T. 2009. ‘The Role of Domestic Architecture in the Structuring of Memory’, Space and Culture 12(3): 332–42. De la Torre, C., and S. Striffler (eds). 2009. The Ecuador Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dupuis A., and D. Thorns. 1998. ‘Home, Home Ownership and the Search for Ontological Security’, The Sociological Review 46(1): 24–47. Fletcher, P. 1999. La casa de mis suenos. New York: Routledge. Jokisch, B., and J. Pribilsky. 2002. ‘The Panic to Leave: Economic Crisis and the “New Emigration” from Ecuador’, International Migration 40(4): 75–101. Kaika, M. 2004. ‘Interrogating the Geographies of the Familiar’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28(2): 365–86. Klaufus, C. 2012. Urban Residence. Housing and Social Transformations in Globalizing Ecuador. Oxford: Berghahn. Levitt, P., and D. Lamba-Nieves. 2011. ‘Social Remittances Revisited’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37(1): 1–22. López, S.L. 2015. The Remittance Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lozanovska, M. 2019. Migrant Housing, Migration. London: Routledge. Marcus, C. 1995. House as a Mirror of Self. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press. Martiniello, M., and A. Rea. 2014. ‘The Concept of Migration Career’, Current Sociology 62(7): 1079–96. Miranda-Nieto, A., A. Massa and S. Bonfanti. 2020. Ethnographies of Home and Mobility. London: Routledge. Pauli, J., and F. Beford. 2018. ‘Retiring Home?’, Anthropology & Aging 39(1): 48–65. Pérez Murcia, L.E., and P. Boccagni. 2022. ‘Selling a House, Staging a Dream’, Migration and Development 11(3): 894–916. Ramírez, F., and J. Ramírez. 2005. La estampida migratoria ecuatoriana. Quito: Abya Yala. Rigotti, F. 1995. ‘The House as Metaphor’, in Z. Radnam (ed.), From a Metaphorical Point of View. Berlin: De Gruyter. Tucker, A. 1994. ‘In Search for Home’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 11(2): 181–87.

CHAPTER

3

Priya

Homing in the Global Job Market – the Life Story of an Indian Woman in the Netherlands Sara Bonfanti

In October 2009, a giant tent went up in the centre of Amstelveen for the town’s first Diwali festival. Inside, the group of organizers – a mix of council officials and Indian residents – turned to each other nervously. Would the 900person tent dwarf the small number of revellers expected? When 5,000 people showed up, it became clear that Indians were no longer an inconspicuous minority in the country – they were populous and they wanted to party. —D. Nicholls-Lee, ‘“Highly-Skilled, Happy and at Home”’

Such was the description in the local newspaper of the mundane event that set a benchmark in the annals of a borough where Indian food stalls were taking over Dutch herring booths. Priya is a young Indian woman who moved to the Netherlands when her co-national expat community was growing at an unprecedented rate. By 2018, when the two of us met to head down to the marquee in search of fun and a familiar atmosphere on the spookiest night of the year in Amsterdam, the crowd at the Diwali festival had doubled. Priya was born in Uttar Pradesh, the state of the Indian rose flower, and moved to the European capital of tulips nine years earlier. She was thirty-two when I first met and interviewed her. A Hindi speaker and Hindu by upbringing, she had lived in the Netherlands since 2009, having easily been able to renew her high-skilled working permit. Coming from a wealthy

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family in terms of class and caste status, she was hired in agribusiness multinationals after gaining her master’s degree in biodata statistics. A kennismigrant, as the Dutch call their foreign knowledge workers, and an ‘Indian expat(riate)’, as some Indians call themselves in order to separate themselves from low-skilled migrant labour co-nationals, Priya had been homing1 in the small but diverse European job market in this tax haven for corporations. Fluent in English and eager to keep herself socially active and entertained, she had responded to my advert on the webpage of BTG, the foundation run by our mutual friend Ritika (second generation), promising to bridge the gap between the Dutch and the Indian collectives resident in the country. Ethnically Indian but fully member of that imagined community of international expats (who interacted on a distinct digital platform), Priya was easy to communicate with and keen to relate her life story, however long that took. Since then, we have remained in touch via social media and she hosted me once at her place on the windy north coast. Time and again, we have argued about whether roots and routes are at odds with each other and who can afford to retain them both.

Introduction Since the advent of mobility studies, which increasingly noted and hailed global ‘flows’ of capital, people and objects, fine-grained ethnographies have revealed the hidden tension between mobility and immobility, localization and transnational connections, experiences and imaginaries of migration, belonging and cosmopolitan openness (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2016). Through the details of the life story of a young Indian expat in the Netherlands, the chapter explores the social disparities and national representations that facilitate and legitimate differential mobility from South Asia to Western Europe. An affluent individual from a part of the world that has progressively invested in migration as a way of moving upwards on the social ladder, Priya’s mobility can be described in terms of flexibility and personal choice. Yet, her life story and speculations after years spent abroad as a transnational professional did raise some doubts about her agency and the possibility of finding more than a transient sense of home (like many expat communities experienced as floating in the limbo of global capital beyond postcolonial continuities; see also Fechter and Walsh 2010). Amid an acute nostalgia for her homeland, a critical look at her new country culture and her many social networks, Priya reached out to me in search of someone with whom to chat and possibly establish a light-hearted friendship. Although not a solitary person, her interpersonal relations were somewhat



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limited in the peripheral town, Leeuwarden, to which she had relocated for her last job. While exhibiting a cultivated cosmopolitanism (as an idealized ethics of global manners; Appiah 2007), Priya’s set of mundane practices were also rooted in parochial Indian habits, in which she indulged, albeit in a critically self-aware manner. Priya’s life story is a clear example of elite mobility and yet a challenge to that very discourse (Korpela and Nagy 2013). As an Indian white-collar transnational professional (Kõu et al. 2015), Priya’s life story was compelling for three main reasons. First, her transnational transfer challenged the rift between labour migration and lifestyle mobility. While her drive to discover new cultures and places did resonate with the global tourism of Westerners, who often land in a blissful country in search of a better life at different ages (Benson and O’Reilly 2009), it was her privileged background and higher education, combined with similar economic aspirations, that led to her being recruited in possibly the most cosmopolitan and liberal state in the European Union. Furthermore, her legal status as a kennismigrant combined in an odd way with the Indian citizenship she could never imagine renouncing. In relation to her nationality and ethnicity, my informant found herself in a peculiar position in the Netherlands, arising from her many simultaneous affiliations. Besides being a transnational knowledge worker, like many international others (with whom she engaged at work), her Indianness also put her into contact with a peer community of national expats (who had recently moved to the country in pursuit of financial opportunities) and migrants who had been in the country for longer periods: mainly a 1.5-generation diaspora whose parents had moved to Europe in the 1980s as refugees and/ or a manual labour force (Oonk 2007). What kind of belonging could she claim, flanked by overlapping models of Asian mobility? Which cultural survival strategies did she develop to sustain herself in a transient Dutch home? Priya’s hesitant homing in the country in which she has ultimately chosen to relocate sheds light on the inconsistencies of immigrant integration policies and discourse. Fitting in the gears of global neoliberalism does not equate with flattening out cultural differences and forms of (self-) exclusion (Meissner and Heil 2020). Ultimately, Priya’s story did call into question the gender specificity of life narratives. While the term herstory, coined as a feminist revision of the male prerogative in historiography, has since been criticized for its infusion with ideology at the expense of free knowledge (Sommers 2005), I believe that the life accounts of this young mobile professional could not be understood without recognizing the difficulties that many Indian women encounter when designing their own mobilities, cutting across social categories, not least class-based categories. Shunning feminist claims, my

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interviewee chose instead to portray herself as the epitome of an Indian expat, allegedly gender neutral, in fact based on a male model in the global circuits of working capital (Roos 2013). Although relatively young, Priya’s home experiences did interrogate the sustainability of multiple models of mobility (namely labour vs professional migration, Iredale 2001; Nowicka 2007; and diaspora vs cosmopolitan, Agnew 2005; Vered and Gardiner 2017), with her subjectivity racing between ethnic social conundrums and global cultural ideologies.

Life-Story Analysis Perhaps due to her rigorous upbringing or her high self-esteem, Priya’s biographical narrative flew smoothly through her life course. She had rehearsed what she would say to me that day and came with a timeline that kept moving forward until it ran aground in present-day lowland sands. Three themes emerged from her chronicles: her education, grounded in a rhetoric of merit; her desire ‘to get a taste of the world’; and her reflections about other Indian communities in the Netherlands. Priya’s recollection of her life started with her strong attachment to Lucknow, the capital city of Uttar Pradesh, the north Indian state that neighbours Nepal and is renowned for its traditional chikan embroidery work. Wrapped up in a silk-and-woollen blanket that she had brought from her native city’s old town market, our entertaining conversation began with the memories of her childhood. As an NRI (lit. a non-resident Indian, i.e. an Indian citizen who had been living abroad for almost a decade), Priya’s sense of belonging reflected deeply South Asian experiences, although long-term residency in the Netherlands had shifted her attitudes towards imaginaries of East and West, in relation to what place and lifestyle she felt more comfortable with or ‘native to’.

The Home Culture of Excellence The second child of four siblings, with an elder brother and two younger sisters, Priya was born to Brahmin, well-educated parents. Raised to perform at their best in school, the elder siblings had to put up with remarkably strict daily discipline, caught between feelings of obligation and respect for their parental guidance. I mean I grew up in an environment which really backed me up. My father [an ayurvedic doctor] is also a trained yoga instructor … so he was doing yoga and so I had to do it every morning because when you wake up in the morning then you cannot sleep, you have to study



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hard. You know the competition is very high in India. They expect too much. So … When I was in my high school, … he used to wake me up, me and my brother, at 4–4:30 am in the morning and then by 7 o’clock we have studied for two hours, then my mom was like: ‘after you’re getting ready for school and by 8:30 you are leaving for your schools.’

This sounded overwhelming, to say the least: a model I could never achieve with my own children. She mentioned her mother’s emotional presence while we boiled some chai tea to help cope with such bittersweet memories 4 in the morning, and sometimes in the winter you’re sent out for a run because if you feel cold when you awake, you stay up. And my mother was making chai, you’ve been to India so I can say that, my mother was making us chai so that we cannot fall asleep with that caffeine intake. And then you’re studying, and then in between, from time to time, like half an hour, they were checking on us so we don’t fall asleep and get studying.

In those early days, ‘dear neighbours’ were present. Some are like a second family that provided food and care in the absence of Priya’s busy parents, others sound like caricatures from fiction who come to steal juicy fruits from the orchards. Nuances in Priya’s narrative reveal her longing for her lost neighbourhood in rural India in the 1980s: ‘a cooperative house society’ (where her family owned a manor house with paid helpers), which she favourably compared to a contemporary Western-like ‘flat system’ (where neighbours seem uninterested in, if not wary and hostile towards, each other). Memories of a childhood home appeared in many life interviews I conducted with different people and often had a strong influence on a person’s life course, their attachments and projections (Cieraad 2010). Competition is a refrain that consumes Priya’s life: firstly, competition with her elder brother, then competition with her peers in schools at different levels up to university and after. If there is one paradigm of mobility that sews together family and training, memories and projections, it is the ambivalence towards the need to stand out. Born and bred in a nation of over a billion people, where resources are obviously limited and an ‘enterprise culture’ has been promoted across social strata since the national turn towards neoliberalism (Gooptu 2013), this young woman concedes that it was hard work and determination that finally paid off in the form of her winning that first biodata analyst position in the Netherlands. Denouncing the enormous pressure put on her by her parents, and the societal ‘brainwashing’ in relation to high performance, she nonetheless recognizes that she was quite fortunate as her father subsidized her studies. Ending up in the Netherlands was not merely a reflection of merit and

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hard work but also the outcome of privilege (being fully sponsored by a wealthy family and not needing bursaries or a ‘quota’; these are allocations the Indian government reserves for needy students from ‘scheduled castes’ or ‘backward classes’; Subramanian 2019). Even so, this awareness of privilege did not disturb her placid contentment in relation to her status as a successful transnational professional. ‘One reaps what one sows’ was a saying that came spontaneously to her lips at every turn of the page in her young life. Priya’s competitiveness also played a role in shaping her gendered identity and her ideas of feminine and masculine performances, from her early youth. So, most of the time the guys also played a lot of cricket. We [the girls] have played more badminton and other Indian games basically … Well, I used to play cricket in my junior grades and I was much better at it than my brother: I still tease him on that! Then I think I left it pretty early, but the guys continued. And they still continue even in Europe sometimes when they can make a team. … I’ve always been a lover of cricket so I really watched all the games, I used to remember all their stats, but since I moved to Europe, slowly I lost some of, and of course, some of my favourite players also got retired, you know.

Cricket2 constituted a nice digression in my informant’s narrative, as she could follow along her biographical timeline the captains of the national Indian team and compare her efforts to succeed in life with those of her model Shikha Pandey – a young engineer who became the quick bowler in the Indian women’s cricket team while an air traffic controller for the Indian Air Force (see also Gupta 2013). Following in her family steps, by the time she was twenty-three, Priya had completed her university studies in India’s premier colleges, from Delhi JNU to an American-sponsored university in Noida. Having pleased her parents and graduated in biological sciences with honours, she had a hard time convincing them that she was not keen on a physician’s career, like that pursued by her father. She preferred to specialize in scientific data management, possibly doing technical work at a desk rather than ‘cutting open live people’, as she had always been horrified by the sight of blood. Sighing, Priya acknowledged: ‘See, most of the families back in India, basically the middle-class family, limit your career choices. You are a dreamer if you can’t qualify for becoming either a doctor or engineer, something like that.’ Reviewing her career choice, personal inclination merges with sound evaluation: ‘I always had an interest in life sciences, but with an inquisitive mind and a mania for numbers. When big data meets biology and experts infer insights from the data to solve a biological issue, it becomes bioinformatics.’ This emerging field, together with

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the drug-development race and the increasing focus on genomics, have resulted in a demand for computer scientists, in rapidly developing India as well as in the global top-tier market. When I provocatively questioned Priya about why she came to the Netherlands when she could have found an equivalent position in her home country, her response was quick and clear: In Holland, I ended up accidentally. I never had a plan for going abroad. I came accidentally. I just came for six months and then I stayed in this country approximately nine years now. Would you believe that? First, I left just for travelling, but then, in fact, a former teacher of mine suggested that I apply for an interview abroad, just to see what came through.

Globetrotting or Accidental Overstaying? With a little encouragement during our conversations, Priya revealed that there was a mix of happenstances and deep motivations behind her first move to the Netherlands. Rather than the shift being purely accidental, this young woman’s narrative about her move to Europe was inscribed in a twofold imaginary, practical and romantic at once. On the one hand, Priya was pursuing her ambition to find a well-paid job, given her high qualifications (or at least a better-paid job than what would be available to her in India). On the other hand, she wanted to travel the world and get to know places and people ‘other than home’. At 23, I moved to the Netherlands … Just after my master’s, I went doing a job interview in Holland, then I moved here. So basically, I had no brakes; that’s why Holland became my new destination and I started travelling. I travelled a lot after arriving in Europe. First, I came only for six months, and thought, ‘OK, after six months’ work, I take a two-months break to see Europe and then I go back.’ That was the plan. But I didn’t travel then because my contract was extended for three years, and then I got a permanent contract, so I just stayed here. And later on I changed my job.

Priya’s narrative attempts to present a clear trajectory and yet her behaviours are more ambiguous. If her argumentative coherence sounds at odds with her lived ‘incurable indecisiveness’, the way she puts organizes choices and happenstances into a plot is a reminder of the therapeutic effect of biographical interviews and life-story telling (Bertaux and Kohli 1984). As she recounted how she ultimately remained in the Netherlands, even changing to another permanent position, it seemed like she could

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not quite account for changing the initial plan she had. While the lure of a cosmopolitan experience remained (more as a condition for ‘leisure travel’ at will than a commitment to global openness; Roos 2017), the prospects of advancing her career in the country outbalanced the relative alienness she still felt living alongside the Dutch. Because for six years I was just thinking: OK, I’m going next year, this is my last year. I don’t know what happened, you know? This part has still not gone really, because I think there is still part of me that belongs to [my] home[land] so I’m not sure when I’ll feel like Holland is my home. Maybe I will never be able to feel like Holland is my home. When I talk about home, I always refer to India in some ways … But then I thought, well, I’m not going back to India [yet]. It’s better changing jobs then, advancing here, it’s better for my career.

Not only did she account for her split emotions in terms of belonging to a homeplace being intrinsic to her professional mobility (Ewing 2005). Looking back, my interviewee clarified that, as a young woman abroad for the first time, a childish excitement about seeing the world was rooted in her Indian imaginary of the modern developed West (as portrayed in the cinema industry; Kaur 2002) and in a conscious quest to cultivate herself. Actually, the first thing which I wanted to do is also to explore. I told you that I really wanted to travel and of course in the Bollywood movies I’ve seen a lot of places, and that’s what I wanted. And then I moved, I sort of started without living with my parents and that is the hardest part. And also is the part that lets me grow as a person, you know. That is deciding things, whatever you do, good things or bad things, this is all because of you … So you cry, you laugh, you become ashamed or proud of yourself at the same time.

Priya’s Bildungsroman3 started out with her fantasies about the transcultural repertoire in Bollywood movies and the naïve chats with her younger sister as she tried to envision her future beyond their parents’ grasp. Once my parents were really angry at me while I was doing my masters, and I told my little sister: ‘You’ll see, there will be one day that I leave, and I hope I get a job in a place where I can just meet my parents once a year!’ And then another time I told my same sister: if you were asked ‘what is your ideal place?’ And then I just imagined a place: all [the] world is there, people from all countries, a really cool and small place. I don’t know what time, in what mood, I said that but then it happened to be true, and I ended up in a city called Wageningen, and actually two hundred nationalities live there in that



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city and now I really go home only once a year, for a month in the summer [she giggles].

The willingness to migrate in search of employment does compel people to move, but, as a way of understanding underlying decisions and motivations, the picture it offers is overly simplistic. The dynamics of labour mobility are heavily influenced by the opportunities perceived and the imaginaries of both employers and regulating authorities (Sieger et al. 2020). In Priya’s case, the recruitment system of the transnational corporations she worked for operated on the same premises: kennismigranten are hired as skilled mobile professionals who enjoy competitiveness and learning on the job, make few demands as workers, other than high salaries (and adequate temporary lodgements), and are ready to leave (or be replaced) once their contracts are over. The disposable character of even the most qualified migrants in the heart of Europe gives Priya the chance to remain in the job in the long term (almost to dwell in it), while also preventing her from effectively blending in with the locals. As Anna Spiegel, Ursula Mense-Petermann and Bastian Bredenkötter (2017) contend, for mobile professionals the home becomes a critical place where belonging is constantly negotiated not only because of new multi-local spatialities, but also because of new transient temporalities. Due to the practice of extended work contracts, the everyday life of elite expats is characterized by a ‘permanent provisionality’, which disrupts the initially imagined time horizons of their mobility and permeates the material and social textures of expatriate homes. As it emerged in the course of the interview, during which some anguish arose in spite of the festivity associated with Diwali, Priya’s sense of occupying a ‘transient home’ oscillated between celebrating and avoiding cultural difference, between mobility and immobility. She constantly tried to navigate between a homeland kept alive in her heart and in her cupboard, and a country of residence that she praised as ‘neatly organized at all times’ but that she felt lacked spontaneous joie de vivre. This tension is the idiosyncratic rhythm of an Indian expat woman’s dwelling in the Netherlands. I could see first-hand that this [the Netherlands] is a super-organized country, and coming from the mess of India, what a difference! But, in interpersonal relations … Well, with Dutch friends, when I call ’em, I always have to think: ‘Can I call him or her? Is this the right time?’ I have fifty questions in my mind that deter me before I make that call … F**k this appointment system in personal life … I don’t want an appointment system! I don’t want friends checking their agenda to tell me ‘we can see each other in five weeks from now’! What friend would say that?

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Indian Mobilities and Dutch Domestication Mapping Priya’s subjectivity means taking into account the cultural poetics of mobility and identity that a certain elite segment of the Indian diaspora has forged. Priya assesses her sense of self vis-à-vis the local Dutch culture, which she both appreciates and criticizes, but she also frames this sense of self in a co-ethnic social field (those with whom she shares cultural references, habits, language and nationality), neither of which easily fits into her grand scheme of being an Indian expat kennismigrant. As Fran Meissner and Tilmann Heil (2020) recently explained, ‘de-romanticising’ the notion of integration, the experience of super-diverse conviviality does not need to level out forms of cultural dis-integration, as long as relational uncertainties and power asymmetries persist under new reconfigurations. Overall, Priya’s ephemeral sense of (being at) home in the Netherlands, in spite of the years she has spent there, seems to challenge the rift between high- and low-skilled migrants, beyond material conditions and resource opportunities. ICT (Information and Communication Technology) professional migrants may be relatively privileged in terms of education and employment, but they still encounter specific emotional, social and career challenges (Povrzanovic´ Frykman and Öhlander 2018). Research on expats can expose the limits of conventional ideas about ‘failed integration’, which focus on employment and relate to origin and (ethnic) culture rather than class and race (Schinkel 2018). Priya’s existential indecisiveness was exposed in her everyday grind, as if her life story had entered a suspended mode, revealing an experience that trialled policy definitions of inclusion and wellbeing for people who feel mobile and yet are (long-term) residents. As with all other Indian migrants, regardless of background and trajectories, the dilemma of nationality and OCI (lit. Overseas Citizen of India) status can reveal migrants’ attachment to the homeland or their openness to firmly establishing themselves abroad by acquiring a new citizenship (Verma 2013). Since India does not allow double nationality, Priya is torn between resigning her Indian citizenship to apply for Dutch citizenship (to which she would be entitled by now, due to her long-term residency and her work contract), and just continuing to renew her residence permit. Once more, her hesitancy swings like a pendulum, which she likes dwelling on. When I enquire about whether her family connections influence her uncertain views about home (and her potential nationality rite of passage), Priya maintains that she is fully autonomous in her life choices. Even so, she regularly speaks with her family and concedes that their place of residence still feels like her emotional home back home. She acknowledges that it is quite common for Indian expats to live abroad ad libitum without



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much concern for tomorrow. Her brother is a case in point: an expat young man who has moved to Germany and reunited with his Indian bride, with whom he has bought a nice, terraced house with an iconic German jagged roof; the house is filled with spices and jewellery that are regularly replenished from India. In addition to her weekly online communication with her transnational kin, I ask Priya about her personal understanding of home and her future aspirations about mobility and mooring. Her response reveals a wealth of emotions, images and speculations. Home? Oh God! Home is about the people, never about the city. You know, this is my place. I like it. I love it! It makes me creative, so I’m happy about the place I am now, it’s not that I’m unhappy … But home is where I see that people are chatting and talking, you know … and somebody is screaming at you but also is showering love to you. That is what I call home. It’s never about the building; it’s about the people. So, I think home is more about the people and the family and the bonds you share.

Priya indulges in visualizing her future, as she would like it to happen. I broke up with my long-time fiancé from India because we did not see much of each other, but I think I will get married to an Indian man in the end. And I would like to raise my kids some time in India at first. I want them to get that Indian thought process, about people. Otherwise you get too individualistic; they can acquire this mindset as they grow up, if we return to a place like this [the Netherlands].

I try to argue that second-generation Indians in Europe, and the ‘Dutchies’, as she jokingly calls them, often remain family-oriented, in my ethnographic experience at least, but she shakes her head, unconvinced. When we happen to mention Ritika, our mutual friend who is the Dutch-born daughter of a Gujarati couple that moved to the Dutch capital city in the 1980s, Priya advances some critical reflections on the status of the Indian diaspora versus the Indian (and international) expat community in the country. The first would be ‘like the ants making their nests in the ground’, the second like ‘the bees sucking nectar from flowers’ and returning to their hives to make honey. Through this poetic natural metaphor, Priya evokes the disparate life investments that different types of mobility induce, despite being rooted in the same homeland, Bharat (India).4 Adding to this cleavage, she mentions yet another group of Dutch Indians, who outnumber all other groups: the Hindustani people with their peculiar postcolonial history as exiles of a former Dutch colony. They are the descendants of Indian bond labourers who were slavetraded by the English in Suriname, which was then conquered by the

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Dutch in the nineteenth century. They were granted the right to resettle in the Netherlands when Suriname became independent in 1965 (Sinha and Kerkhoff 2003). As if summing up, she outlines a catalogue of all the people with an Indian background in the Netherlands that she has come across in her life on the move: the first, the Indian diaspora, often seems ‘lost between two cultures’; the second, the Indian expats, are trying to ‘get the best of both worlds’; while the third, the Hindustanis, are a racially-mixed ‘leap in the past’. While I could understand her arguments, it was clear to me that Priya was barely aware of the standpoint from which she spoke, in terms of gender and age (as a single woman without care commitments) and class and migration status (as a global ICT expert from a wealthy class-cumcaste background). Or perhaps she did not wish to claim any privileged identification, thereby evading further awkward questions that would scramble the neat timeline she had drawn ‘for my convenience’, which was in contrast to the complex simultaneity of her transnational experience (Erdal 2020). When a talkative informant becomes tongue-tied, the ethnographer intuits the need to divert his or her attention elsewhere (at least for the time being). Secrecy and silence in the research process can be just as telling as the most eloquent of dialogues, if the anthropologist acknowledges the boundaries that his or her informant does not wish to cross (Ryan-Flood and Gill 2013). Upon hearing about my interest in the religious activities associated with different Indian beliefs in one of the most fervently Protestant countries of Europe, my interlocutor admits that, despite a set of cultural commonalities, there is a substantial class division between all those groups, which is evident in their separate attendance at dedicated mandir (Hindu temples). You really have this class with division actually, I mean it shouldn’t be like that, but yes, doing puja (prayer service) is where the diaspora and the expats can come together, sometimes … but there is a fence between the Suriname community and the Indian community, and I don’t go much to the temple, but I know they would lecture separately for us folks …

By this point, we have amply exceeded the agreed timespan of the interview and there is no need to enquire which ‘folks’ or group she subscribes to. As a provisional way of negotiating differences, ‘convivial dis-integration’ has already been set in motion (Meissner and Heil 2020). In the face of ‘Dutch boring food’, Priya suggests we go down to the mall and buy some snacks to nibble on as we wait for the night festival’s grand opening. The way she tosses Gouda cheese slices and Bombay mix in the trolley without blinking an eye makes me smile. I bite my tongue



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Figure 3.1. Celebrating Diwali in Amstelveen. Photo by Sara Bonfanti (2019).

and follow her to the open-air square, where her everyday cosmopolitan English chatter code-mixes with her embedded Hindi. Anthropological musing is munched away in the explosion of fireworks that light up Diwali in Amstelveen: an Indian tehsil (urban quarter) in the rainy heart of the Netherlands.

Conclusion Priya’s life story struck a chord with me as it depicts an Indian culture of excellence that fosters international mobility in order to reaffirm social privileges (Subramanian 2019). As Wendy Bottero (2019) poignantly argued, paying attention to affective experiences of stratification demonstrates how complex the moral economies of inequality are, as they are being reproduced (and transformed) across scales, from local to global postcolonial capitalism. When one puts this young kennismigrant’s story in perspective, there is a dark side to Priya’s successful experience that my informant barely mentioned during our interview, but disclosed more clearly in subsequent interpersonal conversations. The capital that kept my informant in the Netherlands as an expat was a reminder of the class separation between herself and other mobile co-nationals who had moved with fewer resources (Bilecen and Van Mol 2017), as well as of the racial separation from her Dutch colleagues who complained behind her back that international professionals were paid a higher income than locals who did the same work.

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When I visited Priya a few months later, she was about to move out and find a more welcoming place to rent. Although she had a golden plaque inscribed with her name on her bedroom door, she had never felt ‘beloved’ (as the meaning of her name promised) in that houis (exceptionally, she used the Dutch word for dwelling). For a transnational professional for whom feeling at home was only partially achievable in the anonymity of the office, the lack of friends or close relations in her home was difficult to bear. Between the photo collage of her family and the world map on which she pinned all her travel destinations, there was a void: managing the space between aspiration and the practice of ‘moving happily ever after’, as she wittily put it, this independent Indian expat woman was still searching for home. In the face of international mobility put on hold, Priya’s residential mobility questions the notion of home: to have a room to oneself is not enough when the rest of the city does not beat at your tempo (Buckle 2017). To conclude, I also acknowledge that Priya’s herstory (an account of the self as a positioned gendered subject; Kolodny 1996) makes a case for articulating the distinction between oral history and ethnographic life narratives. On the one hand, our fruitful research encounter allowed for the dialogic authorship of her narrative and the resulting text here: if we had not clicked so well in terms of mutual empathy as different and yet analogue subjects (fairly young women and globalist knowledge professionals), I cannot imagine that she would have revealed so much of her life or let me crash on her couch. On the other hand, my modest questioning throughout and her final remarks on a possible taxonomy of Indian mobilities in the heart of Europe created room for a proper reflection on the past histories of peoples and cultures that was personally situated and yet critical enough to challenge facts and fictions. It is in the fracture between these two modalities of telling personal stories and social history that anthropological interpretations bloom, questioning the efficacy of ethnographic encounters (Di Leonardo 1987) and the promise of ‘blurring genres’ in representing oneself and others (Clifford 1983). Sara Bonfanti is a migration scholar who is an expert on South Asian diasporas. With a background in Cultural Studies, she gained a PhD in Social Anthropology in 2015, conducting multi-site ethnography in Italy and India to analyse generational change among Punjabi transnational families. Keen on participatory approaches, her interests include kinship, ethical pluralism and media cultures, seen through intersectionality and visual methods. A visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, she has collaborated on the comparative



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ERC-HOMInG project based at Trento University since 2017. She has published widely in Italian and English, also co-authoring Ethnographies of Home and Mobility (Routledge, 2020).

Notes   1. I have some reservations about describing my Indian informant’s relocation in the Netherlands as homing: on the one hand, this process is quite ambivalent in itself (Boccagni 2017; Miranda-Nieto et al. 2020), on the other, Priya’s experience of homemaking in specific conditions of mobility is at most a form of homing ‘yet to come’. As discussed in the Introduction to the book, homing need not be accomplished; it can also be a rather vague longing, in the face of the struggle to ‘feel at home’ or be at ease in the place one inhabits.   2. Cricket in India intersects gender inequality and nationalism, because it is strongly associated with feelings of patriotism and yet women are underrepresented (Gupta 2013).   3. In literary studies, a Bildungsroman is a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character, as he/she overcomes the conflicts between individual desires and societal demands (Bertaux and Kohli 1984). Priya’s life recollection, in which she made sense of her coming of age as an Indian expat woman, was reminiscent of this way of constructing a biographical narrative (see also Stanley 1995).   4. Bharat is the original Sanskrit name for India (the land where the Indian Union of States sits today). Occasional slips of the tongue on Priya’s part reminded us both of her Hindu (and Brahmin) background.

References Agnew, Vijay (ed.). 2005. Diaspora, Memory and Identity: A Search for Home. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2007. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton and Company. Benson, Michela, and Karen O’Reilly. 2009. Lifestyle Migration: Expectations, Aspirations and Experiences. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Bertaux, Daniel, and Martin Kohli. 1984. ‘The Life Story Approach: A Continental View’, Annual Review of Sociology 10(1): 215–37. Bilecen, Bas¸ak, and Christof Van Mol. 2017. ‘Introduction: International Academic Mobility and Inequalities’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43(8): 1241–55. Bottero, Wendy. 2019. A Sense of Inequality. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield International.

94    Sara Bonfanti Buckle, Caitlin. 2017. ‘Residential Mobility and Moving Home’, Geography Compass 11(5): e12314. Cieraad, Irene. 2010. ‘Homes from Home: Memories and Projections’, Home Cultures 7(1): 85–102. Clifford, James. 1983. ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, Representations 2: 118–46. Di Leonardo, Micaela. 1987. ‘Oral History as Ethnographic Encounter’, Oral History Review 15(1): 1–20. Erdal, Marta Bivand. 2020. ‘Theorizing Interactions of Migrant Transnationalism and Integration through a Multiscalar Approach’, Comparative Migration Studies 8: 31. DOI: 10.1186/s40878-020-00188-z. Ewing, Katherine Pratt. 2005. ‘Immigrant Identities and Emotion’, A Companion to Psychological Anthropology: Modernity and Psycho-cultural Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 225–40. Fechter, Anne-Meike, and Katie Walsh. 2010. ‘Examining “Expatriate” Continuities: Postcolonial Approaches to Mobile Professionals’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36(8): 1197–210. Glick Schiller, Nina, and Noel B. Salazar. 2016. ‘Introduction: Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe’, in Regimes of Mobility. London: Routledge, pp. 11–28. Gooptu, Nandini (ed.). 2013. Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India: Studies in Youth, Class, Work and Media. London: Routledge. Gupta, Raadhika. 2013. ‘Bowled out of the Game: Nationalism and Gender Equality in Indian Cricket’, Berkeley Journal of Entertainment and Sports Law 2: 89–120. Iredale, Robyn. 2001. ‘The Migration of Professionals: Theories and Typologies’, International Migration 39: 7–26. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2435.00169. Kaur, Ravinder 2002. ‘Viewing the West through Bollywood: A Celluloid Occident in the Making’, Contemporary South Asia 11(2): 199–209. Kolodny, Annette. 1996. ‘Unherating Herstory: An Introduction’, in C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (eds), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 171–81. Kõu, Anu, et al. 2015. ‘A Life Course Approach to High-Skilled Migration: Lived Experiences of Indians in the Netherlands’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41(10): 1644–63. Korpela, Mari, and Raluca Nagy. 2013. ‘Introduction: Limitations to Temporary Mobility’, International Review of Social Research 3(1): 1–6. Marcus, Laura. 1994. Auto/Biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Meissner, Fran, and Tilmann Heil. 2020. ‘De-Romanticising Integration: On the Importance of Convivial Disintegration’, Migration Studies 56: 1–19. Miranda-Nieto, Alejandro, Aurora Massa and Sara Bonfanti. 2020. Ethnographies of Home and Mobility: Shifting Roofs. London: Routledge. Nicholls-Lee, D. 2019. ‘Highly-Skilled, Happy and at Home – Indian Expats Share Their Experiences’. https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2019/09/highly-skilled-happyand-at-home-indian-expats-share-their-experiences/, last accessed 3 September 2022.



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Nowicka, Magdalena. 2007. ‘Mobile Locations: Construction of Home in a Group of Mobile Transnational Professionals’, Global Networks 7(1): 69–86. Oonk, Gijsbert. 2007. Global Indian Diasporas: Exploring Trajectories of Migration and Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Povrzanovic´ Frykman, Maja, and Magnus Öhlander (eds). 2018. Högutbildade migranter i Sverige. Lund: Arkiv förlag. Roos, Hannelore. 2013. ‘In the Rhythm of the Global Market: Female Expatriates and Mobile Careers: A Case Study of Indian ICT Professionals on the Move’, Gender, Work and Organization 20(2): 147–57.  . 2017. ‘The New Economy as a Gateway to Leisure Travelling: Experiences of Highly Skilled Indian Professionals in Europe’, Leisure Studies 36(2): 192–202. Ryan-Flood, Róisín, and Rosalind Gill (eds). 2013. Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections. London: Routledge. Schinkel, Willem. 2018. ‘Against “Immigrant Integration”: For an End to Neo-colonial Knowledge Production’, Comparative Migration Studies 6(31): 1–17. Sieger, Fiona K., et al. (eds). 2020. Migration at Work: Aspirations, Imaginaries and Structures of Mobility. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Sinha, Kathinka, and Ellen Bal Kerkhoff. 2003. ‘“Eternal Call of the Ganga”: Reconnecting with People of Indian Origin in Suriname’, Economic and Political Weekly 38(38): 4008–21. Sommers, Christina H. 1995. Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women. London: Simon and Schuster. Spiegel, Anna, Ursula Mense-Petermann and Bastian Bredenkötter. 2017. Expatriate Managers: The Paradoxes of Living and Working Abroad. London: Routledge. Stanley, Liz. 1995. The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/ Biography. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Subramanian, Ajantha. 2019. The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vered, Amit, and Pauline Gardiner Barber. 2017. Mobility and Cosmopolitanism: Complicating the Interaction between Aspiration and Practice. London: Routledge. Verma, Sohali. 2013. Instruments of Engagement: Assessing India’s PIO and OCI Schemes, Migration Policy Centre, CARIM-India Research Report, 2013/21, http://hdl. handle.net/1814/29483.

PART II

Struggles at Home Sara Bonfanti

In his manifesto for biographical research, Ken Plummer (2001) advocates for the moral and political significance of life stories. Listeners and readers are invited to expand their ethical horizons and democratic imagination. If all biographies are located in flows of time, stories likewise take on a flow of change once they are told. At a time when home has become a place of shelter or quarantine for millions, this part acknowledges that the recurrent problem of regulating movement, demarcating thresholds and legitimizing people’s right to reside sits at the core of migrant oral histories of public relevance. While home is often reduced to a dwelling place that provides a safe base for the intrinsic frailty of being human, the lived experience of home reveals the continuous interplay of risk and reward, in material, symbolic and relational terms. Home might be sought, found and lost during one’s life course, especially in a time of personal or historical crisis (Hinkson 2017). As a space of ‘safety, comfort and familiarity’ (Botticello 2007), and a place where one can be at ease with oneself and significant others which may not be there yet (as illustrated in Part I), making a home on the move brings inequalities into sharp relief. As Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving (2009: 3) point out, the possibility of attaching or detaching home to or from particular places is informed by relations of power and, conversely, social inequalities are crucial in shaping how people are afforded the ‘transformative power’ to emplace. While migrants may have fewer resources and make tenuous claims for home (or reach a ‘sanctuary’ after violent displacement; Long, Lynellyn and Oxfeld 2004), in the three life stories that follow, our interlocutors focus on their suffering and strains to account for their hopes of settling despite taxing environments (Appadurai 2013).

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This part emphasizes the exceptional attention to research ethics required by ethnographic work on migrant narratives focused on ‘struggles at home’. Interviewing different groups involves different challenges and opportunities. As it was made clear in the Introduction to the book (and in each chapter), people represented as migrants, who are often marginalized in public discourse (if not silenced politically; see Walters 2004), are among those who warrant special methodological and ethical considerations. Building on biographical interviews, the life stories collected here highlight some key practical and emotional issues that impact the oral process as much as the textual product of telling lives. All of these biographies contain traces of suffering in their narrative presentation, which unveil mundane hardships and extraordinary dramas, as experienced and expressed by the subjects themselves. The collection and editing of these biographical interviews required attentive listening and nuanced writing skills to maintain the authenticity of people’s narratives but also pay respect to their different degrees of engagement and perceived vulnerability. The three chapters adopt mixed approaches, from disclosing the open activism of some committed interlocutors, to sharing the compelling life stories of others but preserving their anonymity as much as possible. This part encourages an appreciation of how accountability matters for all involved in telling lives, starting from the participants and the communities to which they report back. ‘Stories help fashion political identities, … imagined communities, discourses of the “others”, and the literature of human rights. We ask, then, how our moral and political lives are fuelled by [life] stories’ (Plummer 2001: 10). While the authors avoid considering their informants’ narratives as paradigmatic of their respective social groups (though they recognize that some interlocutors claimed to speak on behalf of their identity collective), the three life stories presented here challenge each other at multiple levels. Chapters 4 and 5 revisit the journeys of two male Eritrean refugees who fled their homeland and crossed borders in search of asylum in Europe. Landing in two countries with distinctive immigration politics and reception policies, their unique life stories shed light on the entanglement of one’s own biographical resources and the variation in regimes of (im) mobility across different welfare states in Europe (specifically Holland and Italy). Their repeated moves, or frequent evictions from temporary accommodations, present the painful underlying reality in which the two men’s ‘struggles at home’ can be understood. This constant displacement interrupts their present attempts at homemaking but also precludes opportunities to address the past trauma experienced in their homeland or during their forcible transits. Personal and collective at once, traumatic experiences are inscribed in peoples’ histories, but they may also appear, abrupt



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and virulent, in times of global acceleration (Eriksen 2020). Chapter 6 addresses the present day by delivering a crucial account of how an external stressor of great magnitude, like the Covid-19 pandemic, does (and did) profoundly impact people’s homes. This life story exposes the frailty of a female Peruvian care worker who has lived in Spain for twenty years and successfully reunited most of her family. Apparently well settled, and specialized in nursing care for the most vulnerable (elders and neonates), the woman reveals her personal distress and that of her family in dealing with the pandemic. This home vulnerability affected her job responsibilities and also disrupted her private routines, demanding extra physical distance and sanitizing procedures that unsettled the sense of intimacy and sanctuary normally associated with being at home. Each of these life stories points to different existential and structural vulnerabilities that are involved in the struggle to make (and maintain) a home under trying conditions of mobility (cf. Bonfanti, Chen and Massa 2022). Nevertheless, all the authors demonstrate that the interlacement of home and vulnerability can be fully grasped only if we pay attention to individual lives and their own storytelling. These authors insist that we listen to how such struggles are recounted by those who experienced them and consider how people’s subjectivity interacts with representations of disruptive moments in precarious contexts. In the opening chapter of this part, Milena Belloni follows the biographical narrative of an Eritrean refugee who has lived in the Netherlands for about five years. The man’s recent past has been characterized by restless shifting from one reception camp for asylum seekers to the next. While this housing policy provides shelter for people who are otherwise displaced and stranded, it fails to create a sense of welcome and orientation towards the future for the camps’ troubled guests. Analysing her interlocutor’s account, Belloni reflects on the notion of cultural ‘trauma’, at once subjective and collective (Alexander 2004), as it is interpreted by Aaron himself. Feeling estranged and compelled to flee from his war-torn homeland, Aaron depicts his own experiences as paradigmatic of a whole generation, which is seeking to make a home in Europe, despite structural obstacles and diasporic emotional injuries. On top of farraginous procedures to secure their right to stay, many refugees’ aspirations are affected by painful memories. Their search for a safe base is undermined by the violence they experienced and the wounds that have not yet healed. In the face of the interplay of homemaking and home-unmaking practices that stories of forced mobilities expose (Brun and Fábos 2015), Aaron tells of his attempts to reconcile himself and his people to their unique history of struggles. Highly educated, Belloni’s interviewee has already begun to explore the therapeutic power of auto/biographical writing. Furthermore,

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the man presents himself as an activist committed to the wellbeing of his community. Hudmona, ‘our home’ in Tigrinya, is an association he has set up in the Dutch town in which he lives to allow Eritrean refugees to gather and share personal stories, overcoming past struggles and moving on. Milena Belloni and Aurora Massa join forces in chapter 5, which relates the life story of Mateos, a middle-aged man from Eritrea who has been in Italy for fifteen years and still lacks a secure place to stay, other than provisional, shanty-like settlements. The authors met their interlocutor independently at different times and can thus rely on longitudinal ethnographic data. Despite his still poor mastery of Italian language, the man proactively engaged in relating his biography and accounting for the systematic precariousness of Eritreans seeking asylum in Italy. The ethnographers develop their argument around the alluring notion of ‘accumulated homelessness’, which sounds paradoxical, insisting on Mateos’s repeated experiences of losing home and lacking shelter, first in Eritrea, then several times in Italy. While the notion of resilience has been overused in recent times, this man’s story of recurrent displacements proves that struggling for home under adverse conditions is part and parcel of his coming of age as an adult man, of his ‘active waiting’ to make better prospects a reality (Hage 2009). Mateos’s account of fleeing his homeland and failing to find a home for himself and the family he left behind partially resonates with Aaron’s life, as narrated in Chapter 4. Yet, besides biographical specificities, the tentative re-emplacement of these two Eritrean men seeking asylum in Europe diverges also on the ground of their destination countries, Italy and the Netherlands respectively. Like thousands of other refugees from the Horn of Africa, who find postcolonial connections in Italy, Mateos settles in Rome, which is beset by the high influx of newcomers, the congestion of the local labour market, the corrupted mismanagement of asylum reception and the lack of adequate facilities. And yet, the long tradition of civil society movements that struggle for housing rights in the capital has given Mateo the chance to partake in forms of mutuality that exceed ethnic cleavages and provide an alternative to the criticalities of his life ‘stuck in transit’ (Fontanari 2019). In chapter 6, Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia defies the assumption that people’s homes, once seemingly achieved, are resistant (or can easily respond) to further challenges and risks of unmaking. Yolanda is a late-middle aged woman who moved from Peru to Spain over twenty years ago. Combined with fragments of interviews with other family members, Yolanda’s narrative questions the role of care in the making of a home in the transnational space. Her autobiographical account powerfully reconstructs the difficulties of finding a place for herself in Spain. This process is burdened not only in terms of financial strain and emotional distress about having left



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her dear ones behind (which also badly affected her relationship with her daughter, despite their later reunification), but also with regard to her own self-esteem as a valued citizen of the nation that welcomed her. Investing in her job and being appreciated by those in her social circles in the everyday seems as important to her as having raised a family across continents. The woman’s storytelling interrogates the variability of home on different scales: from one’s family haven to one’s workplace or community space. It also reveals the double belonging and difficult work–life balance for a migrant working mother who served on the Spanish ‘frontline’ of health care when Covid-19 broke out. ‘How can you leave the boat when the crew need you most?’ Yolanda wondered aloud as her interviewer listened attentively to her account of the frantic commotion of her nursing work over the last year. There is no more appropriate metaphor for a life story of home and mobility in the face of the current global storm than that of a potential shipwreck (Adey et al. 2021). This chapter recalls the life stories of other Latin American migrants included in the book (with similarities and differences beyond the commonality of cultural background). It also displays the potential for people’s identification at large, whether they are on the move or not, in recognizing that home can only exist as an ongoing tension or a moving target that is as much sought after as elusive to relish (Frost and Selwyn 2018). Lastly, the ethnographer’s long-term collaboration with his interlocutor reveals the implications of engaging in fieldwork with participants who can remain friends even after the formal research period has elapsed. As Plummer (2001) asserted, ‘the call of life stories’ also resides in the higher level of intimacy that this method entails, with various promises and pitfalls, as all of the chapters in the book demonstrate. Following Matei Candea and Frederick Lemonde (2016), if we operate ‘lateral comparisons’ rather than frontal ones in ethnographic case studies, thus putting the three chapters included in this part side by side, we can achieve greater comprehension of their singularity but also their shared intelligibility. In the face of various conditions of precariousness, this selection of life stories provided by people on the move who struggled for home and wanted their experience to be recorded speaks to what Karen Fog Olwig (1998) defined as ‘contested homes’. Migrants’ lived accounts of homemaking not only denaturalize a common-sense understanding of home (sedentarist and ethnocentrically biased); they also contribute to rethinking the prospects and limits of humanistic anthropology (Rapport and Williksen 2020). Besides, although every life story is obviously gendered (Summerfield 2004), the social embodiment of a putative masculine or feminine form of mobility appears ever more relevant in this part, in which the struggles for home are faced within specific migratory patterns, which are themselves

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typified by gender. On the one hand, Aaron’s and Mateos’s lived accounts of displacement and asylum-seeking are embedded in the long-standing established trajectories of lone young male refugees from the Horn of Africa to Europe (Hammond 2004). On the other hand, Yolanda’s lived experience is representative of the lives of millions of transnational mothers and female care workers who make of ‘care’ their (re)productive labour across continents (Lutz 2018). Nonetheless, the subjectivity of each migrant experience is patent in their narration; thus, gender and its many intersections with age, race, class and so forth are brought into sharp relief by all the life stories presented here. As a final consideration, readers might have noted that one of the reference groups within the volume, the South Asian diaspora, is not present in Part II. This apparent gap does not mean that South Asians do not experience ‘struggles at home’ in their efforts to relocate across Europe. Today, among millions of asylum seekers, economic migrants, family reunifications, the life stories of first or second-generation Indians and Pakistanis in Europe (with their highly diverse mobilities and contested attempts at homemaking) are numerous and well documented (Brah 1996; Ghosh 2014). However, the ethnographer’s struggle to convince (some of) her informants to make their sensitive life stories available to the public illuminates how vulnerable those narrators may feel and the limits of confidentiality in the biographical interview (cf. Ryan-Flood and Gill 2009). May this remark assist the readers to navigate the book, and especially approach this part, with the same care and respect with which the authors treated all their research participants. Sara Bonfanti is a migration scholar who is an expert on South Asian diasporas. With a background in Cultural Studies, she gained a PhD in Social Anthropology in 2015, conducting multi-site ethnography in Italy and India to analyse generational change among Punjabi transnational families. Keen on participatory approaches, her interests include kinship, ethical pluralism and media cultures, seen through intersectionality and visual methods. A visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, she has collaborated on the comparative ERC-HOMInG project based at Trento University since 2017. She has published widely in Italian and English, also co-authoring Ethnographies of Home and Mobility (Routledge, 2020).



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References Adey, Peter, et al. 2021. ‘Pandemic (Im)mobilities’, Mobilities, online first. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (eds), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 620–39. Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. ‘Housing and Hope’, in The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso, pp. 115–30. Bonfanti, Sara, Shuhua Chen and Aurora Massa. 2022. ‘Vulnerable Homes on the Move’, Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 92: 1–14. Botticello, Julie. 2007. ‘Lagos in London: Finding the Space of Home’, Home Cultures 4(1): 7–23. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. Abingdon: Psychology Press. Brun, Cathrine, and Anita Fábos. 2015. ‘Making Homes in Limbo? A Conceptual Framework’, Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees 31(1): 5–17. Candea, Matei, and Frederick Lemonde. 2016. ‘De deux modalités de comparaison en anthropologie sociale’, L’Homme 218(2): 183–218. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2020. ‘The Enforced Cooling Down of an Overheated World’, Social Anthropology 28: 285–86. Fontanari, Elena. 2019. Lives in Transit: An Ethnographic Study of Refugees’ Subjectivity across European Borders. London: Routledge. Frost, Nicola, and Tom Selwyn (eds). 2018. Travelling towards Home: Mobilities and Homemaking. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Ghosh, Papiya. 2014. Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent. London: Routledge. Hage, Ghassan (ed.). 2009. Waiting. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press. Hammond, L. 2004. This Place Will Become Home: Refugee Repatriation to Ethiopia. New York: Cornell University Press. Hinkson, Melinda. 2017. ‘Precarious Placemaking’, Annual Review of Anthropology 46(1): 49–64. Jansen, Stef, and Staffan Löfving (eds). 2009. Struggles for Home. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Long, D., Lynellyn, and Ellen Oxfeld (eds). 2004. Coming Home? Refugees, Migrants, and Those Who Stayed Behind. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lutz, Helga. 2018. ‘Care Migration: The Connectivity between Care Chains, Care Circulation and Transnational Social Inequality’, Current Sociology 66(4): 577–89. Olwig, Karen Fog. 1998. ‘Contesting Homes: Home-Making and the Making of Anthropology’, in Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson (eds), Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World in Movement. Oxford: Berg, pp. 225–36. Plummer, Ken 2001. ‘The Call of Life Stories in Ethnographic Research’, in Paul Atkinson et al. (eds), Handbook of Ethnography. London: SAGE Publications, pp. 395–406. Rapport, Nigel, and Solrun Williksen (eds). 2020. Reveries of Home: Nostalgia, Authenticity and the Performance of Place. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

104    Part II Ryan-Flood, Róisín, and Rosalind Gill (eds). 2013. Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections. London: Routledge. Summerfield, P. 2004. ‘Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews’, Cultural and Social History 1(1): 65–93. Walters, William. 2004. ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics’, Citizenship Studies 8(3): 237–60.

CHAPTER

4

Once We Relax, the Door of Trauma Is Open Aaron’s Life Story Milena Belloni

I thought my life would have been stable here, but instead … I have changed three camps and three houses … for a couple of months I had no house at all … yeah, it was a trauma for me. I often tell myself, ‘Oh my God, what is next for me?’ —Aaron

Aaron is an Eritrean man in his forties. Entrepreneurial and with a high level of education, he has been living in a small city in the Netherlands for the last five years. He arrived there as a refugee and became busy trying to organize and assist the local Eritrean community. The interview (conducted in English) took place in a café by the river, one of Aaron’s favourite places in town.

Introduction How many times and in how many ways can someone lose home? And when does the feeling of loss end? How can migrants recreate a sense of home? As is the case for many refugees today, Aaron’s life story is a

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continuous accumulation of events that progressively estranged him from his home country and influenced his experience in exile and in his new residence in the Netherlands. Personal events, however, often acquire a collective meaning, not only because they are shared by many, but also because they represent milestones of a people’s identity. Aaron’s narrative thus is both an individual/personal and a collective story of Eritrean people’s long pathway in search of a ‘stable’ and ‘safe’ haven. Aaron’s story intersects with key events of Eritrean history over the last forty years: the independence struggle, the border conflict, the progressive militarization of society, the experience of displacement in unstable countries and the pros and cons of living as ‘racialized others’ in Europe. His story shows the consequences of these macro events on the possibility of recreating home in its many dimensions. Specifically, Aaron’s narrative highlights: the importance of considering home as a space of future possibility in which subjects feel in control of their lives (Boccagni 2016); and the idea of home as a feeling of belonging to a group of people linked by common history (Malkki 1995) – and common traumas (Alexander 2004). Trauma, an important ingredient in Aaron’s story, is here analysed not so much as a psychological condition, but rather as a narrative device (Alexander 2004) that allows Aaron to make sense of his feelings and to re-establish a bond between him and his community. It is common to encounter among exiles shared narrations of critical collective events that mark the history of their people and their identity. Let us consider, for instance, the experience of the Shoah for the Jews, the Nakba for Palestinians or the genocide in Burundi for the Hutu refugees investigated by Liisa Malkki (1995) in Purity and Exile.1 Shared representations of historical traumatic events that become markers of group identity are called ‘chosen traumas’ by Vamik D. Volkan (2001). Trauma, in this chapter, is not so much an event as a ‘master narrative’, as Jeffrey C. Alexander (2004) puts it, that implies claims of belonging, responsibility and collective aspirations. The above considerations can be applied to Aaron’s narrative. His life story is marked by key events that are recognized as foundational in Eritrean history and the re-elaboration of the most recent experience of displacement and exile. The idea of ‘trauma’ allows Aaron to provide a powerful interpretation of his own life story in light of a common history. It gives him the opportunity to re-establish the markers of his community in a symbolic and practical way (through the establishment of a cultural association, as it will be illustrated later in the chapter). Unlike individualistic psychological and analytical approaches to health and trauma, Aaron points to the role of the group in healing. The idea of trauma, here, is useful in producing shared meaning for personal events, and in reconstructing a

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community among people whose trust and solidarity have been disrupted by different forms of violence (Bezabeh 2017). In Aaron’s story, trauma is not an individual experience, but a collective one. As Gilad Hirschberger (2018: 1441) wrote: The term collective trauma refers to the psychological reactions to a traumatic event that affect an entire society; it does not merely reflect a historical fact, … it suggests that the tragedy is represented in the collective memory of the group, and like all forms of memory it comprises not only a reproduction of the events, but also an ongoing reconstruction of the trauma in an attempt to make sense of it.

The notion of collective trauma is useful to illustrate the shared experience of violence and the crucial role of the group in making sense of such violence. As several authors have highlighted (Robben and Suárez-Orozco 2000; Somasundaam 2014), strong bonds protect communities from the long-lasting effects of collective violence. Community coping strategies play an important role in overcoming traumas and in allowing the emergence of a new sense of home.

The Child of Patriots Aaron was the last of nine children for his mother. He was born in Asmara. His father was a businessman who spoke fluent Italian and good English. He grew up in a low-income neighbourhood, but his family was relatively resourceful: ‘We always had food on the table … they took me to the cinema sometimes … we were OK compared to the rest.’ Part of the family income came from remittances: ‘When I was born, two of my sisters were already in Kuwait, so they sent clothes to the family with a big jerrican. In the neighbourhood nobody had a television, but we had it already in 1982.’ The neighbourhood where he grew up remains a special place in Aaron’s story. It represents a warm and safe place, the setting for his games and the most important site of reciprocal support among families, no matter their origin. When I was a child, we were playing outside all the time. I was known in the neighbourhood for my acrobatic jumps and braveness. I could jump from a roof of 2–3 meters! And I had a dog. I enjoyed the company of my dog … I went to so many places with him. His name was Chakur.

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It was a nice neighbourhood. All the people were friendly, I could eat lunch in my neighbour’s house … it was like a big family. You know, some of my neighbours were Ethiopians, but I knew that only later. When Eritrea got its independence from Ethiopia, people started making distinctions based on nationality. Otherwise, we never talked about these things before.

Although Aaron remembers his childhood as a serene period, the shadow of the Eritrean–Ethiopian war eventually appears in his story, even when my questions were not directly addressing it. In the above extract, he mentions the shift in the social relationships in his neighbourhood as a result of the new significance that people started to attribute to nationality. The war then appears in his narrative again, as illustrated in the next extract. It is important to consider the historical context here. From 1961 to 1991, guerrilla movements were active across the country, fighting for Eritrean independence from Ethiopia (Iyob 1997). While the war was mainly fought in rural areas in the first stages, in the 1980s the struggle spread to the main urban centres. Ethiopian soldiers were deployed all across the country, even in Asmara, and the contact with the local population was often hostile. M: Can you recollect what sort of occasion you celebrated in your family during your childhood? A: Many occasions! I remember Easter when I was about nine years old. We went to the church and my dog was shot dead. It was a drunk Ethiopian soldier … my dog was running in front of him and he just shot at him. I cried for three days.

Aaron’s faithful pet was not the only victim of the conflict for the family. Two of Aaron’s brothers participated in the freedom fight and one of them died as a martyr. ‘Martyr’ is the word commonly used in Eritrean public discourse to refer to those who died fighting for the liberation of the country. Martyrdom is a foundational element of the patriotic narrative of the country and a key ingredient in the way citizenship is experienced in the country (Bernal 2004). You know in ’78, I was only two years old, and the fighters were near Asmara. I know that at the time my mother went to search for my brother among them, but he unfortunately was not there. She couldn’t find him. I remembered that later my parents always talked about tegadelti [‘fighters’ in Tigrinya] in the house and listened to the radio of the fighters. My brother died in 1981 during the shadshay wirar, the sixth round. It was a tough time for the EPLF.2 He was buried in the Sahel region of Eritrea.

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M: Couldn’t they bring the body back home? A: No, they just sent us the martyrdom certificate … He is buried in a forgotten place … that was painful for my mother. No mother would like to know that her own son or daughter is buried in an unknown place. It is painful but we had no choice.

This marked the life of the whole family, as well as affecting their loyalty towards the government that emerged from the guerrilla warfare. Aaron grew up as a patriot, feeling proud of his country and aware of the sacrifices that the population and his family had to make to achieve independence. As a young man, he welcomed the duty to follow in the footsteps of his brothers and learn the necessary skills to defend his country when needed. Unlike young generations of Eritreans today (Treiber 2018), Aaron was enthusiastic about going to Sawa when he turned seventeen (1994). Sawa is the military training centre where young Eritreans receive basic military training and are taught the values of national unity and the history of the independence struggle (Bereketeab 2002). Many young people were excited to go to Sawa. I was seventeen … It was harder then than it is now. You know, now students can shower, they have food and a decent house. They have a bed. Instead, we slept on the ground. We had to build our own huts, and for that, we had to carry a lot of logs. It was heavy, but I enjoyed it. All the people around me were from Asmara and surroundings. I was the youngest among them, because I was only seventeen, while some of them were thirty-five … so they took care of me. For me, Sawa was a nice experience. I have good memories about it …

After Sawa, Aaron went to university. He was a bright student of economics at the University of Asmara for three years before the border conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia broke out (Abbink 2003). In 1998, he was deployed in the military for four months. He had a desk job at the front but was exposed to violence and death. He was responsible for the registry of the soldiers. His duty was taking notes on the wounded and the dead. I was in Assab, Bure Ghenbar. At the front. The war was horrible, but it was even harder when I went back home and met the families of the people who died in Asmara … It was so painful, because I knew the secret … the way they died … where they were hurt and how it all ended.

After a break of a few months – before the last Ethiopian offence strike – he was called again to patrol a clinic for the wounded not far from Keren. In between one military post and the other, Aaron managed to finish his

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university studies. When he obtained his degree, the government decided to employ him in the administration of a ministry in Asmara.

Growing Estranged from What Is Familiar: First Experiences of Migration and the Gradual Loss of Home The war formally ended in 2000, but the country remained suspended in a ‘no peace, no war’ situation. Aaron worked in the ministry for a few years and then went abroad to study biology. He was twenty-four at the time. After this international experience, Aaron went back to Eritrea to work for another ministry. He had a good position and was frequently travelling to Asia, other African countries and Europe. Although he had many opportunities to leave Eritrea, Aaron was a ‘patriot’ and nothing could shake his loyalty to the government. In the meanwhile, his family was putting pressure on him to settle down and start a family of his own. In 2009, Aaron decided to get married to a young woman who was an acquaintance of the family. Soon after, they had a baby girl. Although he had relatively stable employment and was close to his family, Eritrea became too suffocating for him. The progressive deterioration of structural circumstances not only disrupts livelihoods but also turns the familiar reality of home into an uncomfortable, unsafe, unrecognizable environment. As pointed out by several authors (Belloni 2018; Khosravi 2010), refugees’ loss of home often involves a gradual process of estrangement that takes place before displacement. ‘My spirit had flown away from Eritrea, well before I physically left the country’, Aaron reflected. Aaron started to lose his feeling of being at home a long time before he decided to leave. I left in May and then in June everyone should carry a gun. Everyone should wake up at 5 in the morning to do military training, so you are no longer a civilian. The government wants to show you that everyone is its hand. That was the situation: everyone was fed up. Frankly speaking, I have never wanted to leave Eritrea, but I saw no future for myself anymore …

Aaron felt increasingly incapable of doing his job due to political pressures and decided to escape to South Sudan, a newly independent country (2011).3 His flight occurred at the end of a long process of home-unmaking (Baxter and Brickell 2014), whereby Eritrea, once the homeland he and his family had fought for, became a persecutor and no future was possible in the country.

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Turbulent Trajectories: On Repeated Attempts to Make Home From the time Aaron left Eritrea, his pathway has been shaped by mobility regimes that systematically restrict the possibility of moving for some subjects (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). His turbulent trajectory is one example of the many complex trajectories of Sub-Saharan Africans making their way to Europe (Schapendonk 2012). It shows not only the immobilizing effect of border regimes, but also how these mobility regimes continue to permeate the everyday life of refugees when they arrive at their destination (Lafazani 2021). Aaron’s life story points to the invisible yet omnipresent exclusionary mechanisms that continuously portrayed him as ‘other’ and ‘outsider’ in Europe, in contrast to his experience – materially challenging, but less psychologically strenuous – in Uganda and South Sudan. Aaron knew many people in Juba (South Sudan) and started managing a four-star hotel owned by some rich Eritreans. He liked the job and the company of his colleagues, but the weather was challenging and malaria endemic. The safety conditions were also far from ideal. Eritreans were considered relatively wealthy in that context and had thus become systematic targets in gun robberies. Moreover, the country was on the brink of a new escalation of violence, which started in 2013 (International Crisis Group 2016). Again, displaced by violence and war, he reached Kampala, the capital of Uganda, where his family joined him. His experience of Kampala was a pleasant one. A: In Kampala, I felt like home, the people were friendly, very nice … they don’t make you feel like an outsider. I really enjoyed Kampala. I would even go back and live there. It is a nice place, everything is cheap, the weather is nice, and it is green. M: Did you regret coming to Europe? A: Yes, I really regret it, but now as soon as I get my nationality I will go back to Africa. That was the worst decision I’ve ever made … I was under pressure, because of my family. I wanted to get us all together to Europe for them to be safe. If I were alone, I would have gone to other places, such as America, Canada, Australia, because you know … I studied in English since grade three. Now I speak a bit of Dutch but not fluently. I cannot compete here even with my qualification. I had to start from scratch.

It is evident that Aaron perceives his journey to Europe as a socially declining trajectory. Once respected and with a recognized social status in Eritrea, he had progressively fallen into the diminishing category of ‘refugee’, unable

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to use his education and cultural resources to make a living. Life in the Netherlands, the country he managed to reach after Uganda, has been characterized by his effort to overcome the gap between how he perceives himself and the lower social status that is attributed to refugees in Europe. Although the Netherlands gave him legal protection and the opportunity to reunite with his family, his account of his experience since his arrival is marked by feelings of having wasted time and of existential instability. M: How many houses did you change since you arrived in the Netherlands? A: At first, I was in a place called Ter Apel. It is a place where you get the first interview, then to the camp where … the first was a preliminary interview so is simple questions then we waited in … for two months in another temporary location. A lot of people were coming through the Mediterranean Sea: Syrians, Afghans, Eritreans. It was April 2014. So, we waited there for a couple of months and then they got us in Ter Apel again. We got interviewed a couple of times for three days then we went to a stable camp where we waited for the house offer for about four months. I stayed almost eight months, but there were people in camp who had stayed there for years. Some of them had been there for ten years. They don’t have status and one of them set himself on fire. Some people are frustrated. The Dutch migration system is not always smooth, while for us it was fortunately smooth, for me, for the rest of Eritreans, but if you do not submit the right papers, then you get rejected and there is no way back … I know Eritreans for whom the procedure went wrong, and they are just languishing in camps or even in the streets …

Aaron felt that the asylum reception centre was a waste of time for him. He started learning Dutch and collaborated with the organization managing the camp by providing some Tigrinya–English translation, but most of the time he felt useless. This confirms the results of several studies about the long-term effect of permanence in asylum centres for refugees’ sense of agency and integration (Korac 2009; Hainmueller, Hangartner and Lawrence 2016). Aaron remarked: ‘If you lose one or two years without doing nothing, it is a long time. I wasted one year. I was writing, because writing is my hobby here. You know, but some people were doing nothing.’ Writing became his medicine, as he explained. Writing has always been Aaron’s passion and writing his own life story became an objective for Aaron while he was stuck in the reception camp. His life intersects with some key events of Eritrean history, as Aaron maintains: Recently I had a plan to finish the book of my life in Tigrigna. I can translate into Dutch and English with the help of some people. I have



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been to different historical places. I have written it. The story carries with it a lot of important moments for Eritreans: in Sawa, in Kampala, in South Sudan, in the camp, in the prison.

Then, after being recognized as a beneficiary of international protection, he was given a house in a multi-ethnic area of the city. As Aaron described it, the house was pretty, big and had good facilities, but he never felt at home there. As much as he found safety and security in the Netherlands, he could never retrieve a sense of control over his life (Boccagni 2016). As he told me several times, ‘working in a restaurant or at the chain of a factory are not jobs for me’. Coming from a socially privileged position in Eritrea, Aaron was having a hard time adapting to his new status of ‘refugee’, employed in the lower strata of the job market (cf. Bonjour and Duyvendak 2018). In the meanwhile, he was also losing his role as a breadwinner for his family. He felt unable to recreate a space for himself in Dutch society and became progressively alienated from his own family, which finally led to a divorce. This resulted in deep existential and material instability. I thought my life would be stable in Europe. But look at what I have been through. I have never been stable for the last five years … I have changed three camps and I have changed three houses, for a couple of months I had no house, I was living with some friends of mine, so yeah it was a trauma for me, it was like, ‘Oh my God, what I am going through?’ It was a really difficult time.

This ongoing feeling of precariousness begs the question: when does displacement end? Aaron’s words point to the significance of looking beyond material and legal parameters to understand the ongoing feeling of protracted displacement in refugees’ lives. While research on protracted displacement has generally focused on low- and middle-income countries, Aurora Massa and I (2022) have recently pointed to the ongoing experience of displacement that follows refugees in Europe. As they argue, the vocabulary of home is more suited than the policy-oriented categories of protracted displacement to account for refugees’ subjective understanding of their own experience as they struggle to turn a dwelling into a secure, familiar and controllable space (Boccagni 2016). Aaron highlights the impossibility of regaining control over one’s own life, the inability ‘to restart the boat’, as Aaron explains in the section below in answering my question, ‘Do you feel at home here?’ A: Home is where your heart is, my heart has never been in the Netherlands … it has never been here.

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M: Do you think it depends on the people? Because before you mentioned that in Kampala you felt at home … A: I don’t know, maybe there you don’t notice that you are a refugee … until they tell you that you are one. I didn’t consider myself as an immigrant when I was in Kampala, but when I came here, all of a sudden I felt a refugee for the first time. I was forced to study the language, I had people telling me what I had to do, but I had no duties in Kampala. I spoke English and people there spoke English too. But there is more to it. Many people are traumatized here, not only in the Netherlands, but also in Belgium, Sweden, all the European countries. Do you know why? Because trauma works like football: when you play football and you exercise a lot, you don’t feel the pain immediately. When you sit and rest, then comes the pain. Until we are busy moving, we don’t feel the pain. Once we relax, the door of trauma is open. It is still like a big ship, you have been loaded and you have been moving and then at a certain point there is your port, you sit down and when you want to start again you cannot anymore. The engine doesn’t start anymore, or it doesn’t start as easily as you would like it. So that’s the trauma. So yes, I am in Europe, but I don’t feel good. I have food on my table, a roof over my head, but I am not comfortable … and I feel a part of me is dead … That’s how trauma works.

Psychological literature on trauma is vast and ranges from the causes to the consequences of post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as the criteria for identifying it (Breslau 2004). Trauma has been a key element in defining refugees and their experience in exile, to the extent that refugees have become the quintessential manifestation of vulnerability (Malkki 1993; Marlowe 2010). Some of the aspects that Aaron highlights in his story can easily be associated with long-term symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (Breslau 2004). However, Aaron’s frequent use of the word ‘trauma’ in his story is rather a way of connecting his individual experience with a recent collective history of displacement that he shares with other Eritrean exiles. After his divorce, Aaron moved house several times. When I interviewed him, he was staying in a shared house in a deprived neighbourhood in the city and was trying to rent a student shared house. He was trying to restart his education in the Netherlands in the hope of regaining a position and a job he could feel proud of. In his free time, he would often go to see friends and relatives that lived in nearby areas to watch TV and discuss politics and the future of Eritrea. Although drinking traditional coffee with friends and calling his family back home were some of the ways in which Aaron tried

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to reconnect with home, something was inevitably lost. His words usefully point to the limits of the ‘portability of home’ (Boccagni 2017). I miss everything from back home. Asmara is my home. Not the house where I lived with my family, but the city. I miss some corners of Asmara, like I would miss a person … For example, the stairs of ascala hankasat, the stairs close to city park … and Imperial Hotel, Hamasien Hotel, some bars where I used to go to … I remember the way we used to behave when we were drunk, the way waitresses would joke with us … these things, small, small things. I cannot explain it. And then there is the smell. The smell of wet soil … after it rains. Sometimes I smell it here and that smell takes me back home. And the smell of coffee … roasted coffee and the smell of some foods, in particular, shiro.4

However, Aaron felt that he had an important role to play for his community in the Netherlands. He often noticed how young people were lost away from their families. He decided to help them to organize a football team. He mediated with the local city council so that the team could acquire some equipment for playing and get involved in other local youth projects. But Aaron still felt that Eritreans had no place for themselves in the city. That is why, together with a group of friends, he decided to open a community centre. A: Recently, my friends and I established a foundation; our plan is to open a space where Eritreans can meet with each other, discuss, chat, share their problems, laugh together and somehow recreate the feeling of home. In that place we are going to recreate an atmosphere which takes us back to Eritrea. We will put pictures and traditional painting and we can listen to Tigrinya music and write in our language. M: What’s the name of this organization? A: Hudmona … it means our home in Tigrinya. We are trying to recreate our home here, or to reconnect to it. But it is also about supporting each other in this new place where we live now. Hudmona should be a kind of bridge between the past and the present, the Eritreans and the Dutch. It could also work as an information centre for those who have just arrived here and need to orient themselves in the new city, make a bus card, understand how offices work here. All refugees have a trauma. We all miss our family, we experienced a horrible journey and the solitude of living abroad. We need to meet among each other to reconstruct a feeling of solidarity and belonging.

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Hudmo is a specific kind of house, typical of the highlands of Eritrea. Geza is the general word for house, used as a prefix of a personal male name (eg. geza Haile) it can describe that person’s domestic group or, as part of the expression gezauti (lit. group of houses), can indicate agnatic lineages (cf. Tronvoll 1998). This interlacement of place and family ties is a key ingredient in the Eritrean understanding of home. The idea of home locates each person in a wider family, communal and spatial unit and works as a powerful source of identity and belonging. This illuminates the reasons why Aaron’s attempt to ‘recreate home away from home’ is intrinsically intertwined with the communal struggle to reconstruct a space for the Eritrean diasporic community. While coping with communal suffering, Hudmona would work as a site at which to perform home and belonging to the homeland. Aaron’s narrative points to the importance of communal strategies for overcoming displacement, defined as a subjective experience of disempowerment, which can only end when refugees recreate a sense of home. The search for home is not an individual struggle, but rather a communal enterprise to overcome trauma while building a new base for reciprocal support and a familiar space in an environment perceived as foreign and uncontrollable. This highlights the potential role of ethnic networks and associations in facilitating integration. Often seen as spaces of self-segregation by authorities, these organizations have rather represented, on many occasions, opportunities to promote a sense of security and served as mediating actors with local society (Strömblad and Bengtsson 2009). As several authors maintain, preservation is not antithetic to integration (Babis 2016). While promoting continuity with the original homeland, culture and practices, these ethnic associations can enable migrants’ adaptation to the new country by mediating between newcomers and local authorities, facilitating political integration.

Conclusion Aaron’s narrative reflects the difficulties of recreating home after having arrived at a chosen destination, since the accumulated stress seems to catch up with refugees wherever they go. The disrupting effect of trauma on the lives of refugees, even after they reach a safe destination, is the main ingredient of Aaron’s story. The pain that footballers feel only after resting and the struggle to reinitiate the engine of a big ship are the metaphors that Aaron uses to capture the suffering that catches up with migrants at the end of their journeys. Aaron’s focus on trauma can be interpreted as an attempt to reconstruct a recent Eritrean history around key events that



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mark the identity of the group. The category of trauma provides a master narrative (Alexander 2004) for re-elaborating individual events and suffering in the light of a larger collective history. The shared narrative serves not only to reinforce trust and solidarity mechanisms within the community, but also to claim space in the new country of arrival. The collective re-elaboration of trauma is associated with the need for a familiar and safe physical place – Hudmona – where refugees can gather, listen to music and talk about their past and present problems in the Netherlands. The stress on trauma somehow legitimizes this claim for space, which is often viewed with a distrusting eye by local authorities. Despite the focus on trauma and traumatic events, Aaron’s story demonstrates that pathologizing representations of refugees as traumatized helpless subjects are rarely suitable (Marlowe 2004). As much as Aaron’s search for home is marked by challenging experiences connected to war, militarization and exile, his life is continuously punctuated by attempts to cope with those in creative ways. His story points to the co-existence of homemaking and home-unmaking attempts in refugees’ journeys (Brun and Fábos 2015). Writing down his own life story is one of the ways in which Aaron has planned to make sense of his life and give sense to the experience of a whole generation of Eritreans who have suffered with him. Aaron’s desire to reconstruct a home for himself and his family expanded to the aspiration to create a space where his community could feel at home again. His attempt to establish an Eritrean association in his new home town in the Netherlands is also a way of turning the trauma into a meaningful experience of shared solidarity and a way of building the foundation for a new life for himself and his community (Alexander 2004). Milena Belloni is an ethnographer who specializes in migration and refugee studies. She is currently an FWO Postdoc Fellow at the Department of Sociology of Antwerp University and the Human Rights Centre in Gent. Her research mainly concerns refugees’ migration dynamics and integration pathways, transnational refugee families, migrant smuggling and ethnographic methods. She has published in international peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Refugee Studies, the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Her monographic study on the migration of Eritreans to Europe, The Big Gamble, is published by the University of California Press (2019).

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Notes   1. Liisa Malkki (1995) shows how the memory of the past is kept alive by a continuous re-narration of its events among refugees in camps. She explains how this narration produces a strong in-group identity and allows a group of people who have lived away from their homeland for decades to retain a sense of belonging and an aspiration to return to the homeland, while marking their differences in relation to outsiders.   2. The Eritrean People Liberation Front (EPLF) was one of the two main groups of combatants active during the independence struggle. The EPLF was the winning front at the end of the war and many of the fighters became involved in ruling the country post-independence. The People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), the party that has ruled the country since 1991, is mostly composed of ex-fighters, including the president, Isaias Afwerqi, previously the military chief of the liberation front.   3. The circumstances of his flight from Eritrea and the following journey will not be addressed here to protect the confidentiality and the privacy of the protagonist.   4. Traditional food in both Eritrean and Ethiopian cuisine.

References Abbink, Jon. 2003. ‘Ethiopia–Eritrea: Proxy Wars and Prospects of Peace in the Horn of Africa’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 21(3): 407–26. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (eds), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 620–39. Babis, Deby. 2016. ‘The Paradox of Integration and Isolation within Immigrant Organisations: The Case of a Latin American Association in Israel’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42(13): 2226–43. Baxter, Richard, and Katherine Brickell. 2014. ‘For Home UnMaking’, Home Cultures 11(2): 133–43. Belloni, Milena. 2018. ‘Becoming Unaccustomed to Home: Young Eritreans’ Narratives about Estrangement, Belonging, and the Desire to Leave Home’, in Kathy Davis, Halleh Ghorashi and Peer Smets (eds), Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies. Bingley: Emerald, pp. 161–81. Belloni, Milena and Aurora Massa. 2022. ‘Accumulated Homelessness: Analysing Protracted Displacement along Eritreans’ Life Histories’. Journal of Refugee Studies 35(2): 929–47. Bereketeab, Redie. 2002. ‘Supra-Ethnic Nationalism: The Case of Eritrea’, African Sociological Review/Revue Africaine de Sociologie 6(2): 137–52. Bernal, Victoria. 2021. Nation as Network. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



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Bezabeh, Samson A. 2017. ‘Africa’s Unholy Migrants: Mobility and Migrant Morality in the Age of Borders’, African Affairs 116(462): 1–17. Boccagni, Paolo. 2016. Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives. New York: Springer. Bonjour, Saskia, and Jan Willem Duyvendak. 2018. ‘The “Migrant with Poor Prospects”: Racialized Intersections of Class and Culture in Dutch Civic Integration Debates’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 41(5): 882–900. Breslau, Joshua. 2004. ‘Cultures of Trauma: Anthropological Views of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in International Health’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28(2): 113. Brun, Cathrine, and Anita Fábos. 2015. ‘Making Homes in Limbo? A Conceptual Framework’, Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees 31(1): 5–17. Glick Schiller, Nina, and Noel B. Salazar. 2013. ‘Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39(2): 183–200. Hainmueller, Jens, Dominik Hangartner and Duncan Lawrence. 2016. ‘When Lives Are Put on Hold: Lengthy Asylum Processes Decrease Employment among Refugees’, Science Advances 2(8): e1600432. Hirschberger, Gilad. 2018. ‘Collective Trauma and the Social Construction of Meaning’, Frontiers in Psychology 9: 1441. International Crisis Group. 2014. ‘South Sudan: A Civil War by Any Other Name Africa’ Report N°217. Retrieved 5 May 2021 from https://d2071andvip0wj.cloudfront. net/south-sudan-a-civil-war-by-any-other-name.pdf. Iyob, Ruth. 1997. The Eritrean Struggle for Independence: Domination, Resistance, Nationalism, 1941–1993. African Studies Series (Vol. 82). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Khosravi, Sharam. 2010. ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-ethnography of Borders. New York: Springer. Korac, Maja. 2009. Remaking Home: Reconstructing Life, Place and Identity in Rome and Amsterdam. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Lafazani, Olga. 2021. ‘The Significance of the Insignificant: Borders, Urban Space, Everyday Life’, Antipode 53(4): 1143–60. Malkki, Liisa. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, And National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marlowe, Jay M. 2010. ‘Beyond the Discourse of Trauma: Shifting the Focus on Sudanese Refugees’, Journal of Refugee Studies 23(2): 183–98. Robben, Antonius, and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco. 2000. Cultures under Siege. Collective Violence and Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schapendonk, Joris. 2012. ‘Turbulent Trajectories: African Migrants on Their Way to the European Union’, Societies 2(2): 27–41. Somasundaram, Daya. 2014. ‘Addressing Collective Trauma: Conceptualisations and Interventions’, Intervention 12(1): 43–60. Strömblad, Per, and Bo Bengtsson. 2009. ‘Empowering Members of Ethnic Organisations: Tracing the Political Integration Potential of Immigrant Associations in Stockholm’, Scandinavian Political Studies 32(3): 296–314.

120    Milena Belloni Treiber, Magnus. 2018. ‘From Revolutionary Education to Futures Elsewhere: Children and Young Refugees Fleeing from Eritrea’, in Jacqueline Bhabha, Jyothi Kanics and Daniel Senovilla Hernández, Research Handbook on Child Migration. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 49–65. Tronvoll, Kjetil. 1998. Mai Weini, a Highland Village in Eritrea: A Study of the People, Their Livelihood, and Land Tenure during Times of Turbulence. Asmara: The Red Sea Press. Volkan, Vamik D. 2001. ‘Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas: An Aspect of Large-Group Identity’, Group Analysis 34(1), 79–97.

CHAPTER

5

A Story of Accumulated Homelessness

Mateos, an Eritrean Refugee in Rome Aurora Massa and Milena Belloni

Living alone makes me feel very good. Sharing your dwelling with other people is not real life; you don’t have time to look a little further into your life. Now that I have my own apartment, I feel relaxed, and I have time to think about myself and my future. —Mateos

Mateos is a man in his forties who has lived in Italy since 2005. He grew up in a village of transhumant farmers on the fringe of the Southern Eritrean highlands and left his home country after being recruited into the compulsory and endless national service. Recognized as a refugee, he settled in Rome, where, due to the lack of housing programmes for refugees and job instability, he has had to move from dwelling to dwelling, most of which have been informal shelters. Although he developed a feeling of being at home in certain context in Rome, his sense of home has been repeatedly disrupted by evictions. He sometimes considers moving to Addis Ababa, where his wife and their two children live. Aurora Massa (A.M.) formally recorded his life story on 16 July 2018 in a shopping centre on the outskirts of Rome. However, this chapter is also based on several informal

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conversations that she and Milena Belloni (M.B.) have had separately and together with him in Rome and in Addis Ababa since 2013.

Introduction Instability and insecurity are features of refugees’ lives well after they have reached their country of arrival. The conventional image of the migrant who flees his/her home and lands in a safe refuge in a liberal democracy is far from the reality today. As an increasing number of studies illustrate, recognized refugees in Europe – and elsewhere –commonly experience troubled housing pathways (Netto 2011; Rokem and Vaughan 2019; Belloni, Fravega and Giudici 2020). Limited socio-economic stability, precarious legal status and discrimination dynamics affecting foreigners are some of the main challenges facing refugees in accessing local rental markets. Within a generalized policy gap characterizing the transition from asylum reception to independent housing, each country and locality has its own difficulties connected with specific structures of the housing market, labour market characteristics and the socio-cultural and political context of reception. Given their family-based and residual welfare contexts, Southern European countries are a particularly challenging environment for refugees seeking to achieve socio-economic and housing stability (Arbaci 2008; Korac 2009). In the last twenty years, Italy, in particular, has demonstrated structural deficiencies in the asylum reception system and, more importantly, in providing support for refugees’ inclusion. Although it is hard to generalize, given the different regional and institutional contexts, Italian asylum reception and its integration measures are characterized by an ‘emergency approach’, which results in the fragmentation of practices and the continuous implementation of ad hoc solutions (Campomori and Feraco 2018; Scotto 2018).1 This has resulted in the substantial abandonment of refugees after they acquire legal protection, and in the burgeoning of informal settlements, ranging from occupied houses to small shanty towns with highly varied living conditions across Italy (Busetta et al. 2021). In this national landscape, Rome is a specific but crucial case given the high influx of newcomers, the congestion of the local labour market, the recent history of corruption connected with asylum reception management (Martone 2017), the long tradition of civil society activities with foreign populations, and the lively social and political movements struggling for housing rights (Vereni 2015). Mateos’s story of repeated displacements emerges at the crossroads of this complex social and political context, and exemplifies the interplay



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between the extreme material precariousness of refugees’ pathways in Italy and their ongoing attempts to make a home even in the most challenging environments. Since arriving in Italy, Mateos has lost his accommodation four times. As we argued elsewhere (Belloni and Massa 2021), this loss of shelter is accompanied by the loss of a sense of familiarity and control, which haunts refugees from before their departure from their countries of origin. Mateos’s story highlights a phenomenon that we have defined as ‘accumulated homelessness’, in reference to the continuous sense of the material and emotional lack of security, familiarity and control associated with a place that can be called ‘home’ (Boccagni 2017). As we pointed out, this accumulated homelessness is produced by three levels of home-unmaking factors: the macro (institutional and structural), meso (social networks) and micro (subjective). At a structural level, Mateos’s story illustrates the displacement caused by a wider context of political oppression in Eritrea, as well as the institutional neglect characterizing Italian refugee policies. At a social level, his story is marked by the perceived discrimination characterizing his relationships with the local population, and the feeling of distance from significant others. At a subjective level, he perceives a gap between personal and family expectations and the impossibility of meeting them. These multiple dislocations across several shelters contribute to the feeling of being stuck that many migrants (regardless of their legal status) experience in Europe/Italy today and that prolongs the condition of ‘protracted displacement’ – the perpetuated lack of long-term prospects – which characterizes the lives of millions of refugees in developing countries. Moving from one dwelling to another within the same city, repeatedly looking for a place where their basic needs can be met, they are unable to progress spatially (to reach what they consider better destinations) and socially (to improve their life conditions and their social status), that is, to move along their previously imagined life trajectories. This fragmented mobility also influences migrants’ perception of time (Fontanari 2018), provoking a temporal disruption and suspension that often last for years. Being mobile is here a sign of a condition of precarity and exclusion, where the lack of shelter and the lack of home influence one another. Nonetheless, this does not necessarily mean resignation or despair. In Mateos’s narrative, each eviction corresponds to a new attempt to struggle for a better shelter and to turn this into a hub where he could not only feel at home, but also plan for the future, as the quotation at the beginning of this chapter highlights. The word ‘struggle’ here accurately describes not only his personal efforts but also the social battles in which Mateos participated in order to claim his right to housing. These expulsions have progressively worsened Mateos’s already vulnerable health

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condition and, at the same time, led him to feel solidarity with his co-nationals and solidarity with local civic organizations and political grassroots movements producing, even in the most deprived settings, a sort of social inclusion from below. By focusing on an exemplary story of ‘accumulated homelessness’ from a biographical perspective, this chapter explores, on the one hand, the multiple political, social, material and personal factors that can be obstacles to refugees’ housing pathways even years after their arrival in a country, as well as the consequences these have on the possibility of the refugees feeling at home. On the other hand, it sheds light on the continuous struggle to create a sense of home, which includes creative practices, imagination and the development of new social solidarities. The biographical and longitudinal approach we have adopted in this chapter allows us to investigate the cumulative aspect of these experiences of home-unmaking, which can start many years and thousands of miles away, as illustrated in the next section. Unlike other life stories we collected, Mateos’s narration has required from the authors a higher level of translating skills. After twelve years in the country, Mateos’s linguistic abilities in Italian can only convey some of the richness of his experience, and the authors’ mastery of Tigrinya – Mateos’s mother tongue – is limited too. Therefore, we decided to make moderate use of direct quotations since we realize that, transcribed on a paper and divorced from face-to-face interaction, his words are not so telling. Rather than rewriting his sentences to make them readable, we prefer to use indirect description and to build on our long-term ethnographic engagement with Mateos’s life to reconstruct the main steps of his housing and migration trajectory.

Moving but Feeling at Home: Mateos’s Life in Eritrea Housing mobility has always been a part of Mateos’s life and, in some senses, it precedes his birth. Mateos was born in a transhumant community in the Southern Eritrean highlands. In this area, families normally move in the season of the small rains to allow the animals to graze in greener pastures located in the lowlands. A culture of mobility is part of the everyday life and livelihood of these communities (Hahn and Klute 2007). Home in these cultural contexts does not overlap with house (Hammond 2004) but rather refers to a family group and a community to which Mateos felt deeply emotionally connected even after many years of exile. Indeed, he has built most of his intimate social relationships in Rome among refugees from the same area. Moreover, each time he spoke about his family and his



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village, Mateos expressed a deep nostalgia, but also the bitter awareness that he could not go back there. In addition to the transhumant mobility experience of his original family life, Mateos moved to the city to access education. He attended the last five years of school in Asmara, in a Catholic mission, because there was no high school in his area. Unlike later mobility in his life, he perceived this movement as an adventure and an enriching experience that opened his eyes to the world. He commented: It was an important experience: people with different backgrounds living together, I know other cultures. … Going to Asmara was incredible: from a village to the capital city! On the day I arrived there was an international sporting event, and Asmara was full of parties and people. It was an unforgettable joy.

This intense housing mobility did not coincide with a feeling of homelessness, because each shift was socially, familiarly and personally meaningful. Indeed, being homeless encompasses material, social and emotional aspects and cannot be reduced to a condition of shelterlessness. Just like home, the concept of homelessness is multi-scalar and multidimensional and is locally and socially defined (Kellet and Moore 2003). Things changed dramatically when he was recruited to the Eritrean national service. Since achieving its independence in 1993, Eritrea has established a system by which all citizens above eighteen years of age must serve the country for eighteen months. This ‘national service’, however, has been extended since the 2000s and young men and women serve as teachers, medical staff, public officers and soldiers for an unlimited number of years. During this period, they are assigned to jobs and locations they cannot choose, on a very limited salary. The displacement, as well as the structural transformation that the national service and the repressive drift have engendered in Eritrean society and livelihoods (Hirt and Mohammad 2013), has turned the country into an open-air prison in the eyes of many young Eritreans. What was once home has now become an unfamiliar, insecure and dangerous place (Belloni 2018) where young Eritreans have lost any possibility of controlling their own lives. This process of home-unmaking also applies to the story of Mateos, who suddenly discovered that home was not safe for him any longer. In the experience of Mateos, the discovery of this brutal face of his home country was abrupt: after suffering military training, Mateos decided to abscond. It was then, well before leaving Eritrea, that Mateos lost home for the first time. This meant, for him, the impossibility of being with his family – as he was hiding to avoid unannounced searches by soldiers in his parents’ house – or contributing to the livelihood of his community. Within a few months, the dissolution

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of his sense of home in Eritrea led Mateos to cross the Eritrean border and to start his journey towards Europe.

A Difficult Beginning: The Arrival in Italy Mateos arrived on the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2005, after a dangerous year-long journey during which he travelled through the Sahara Desert, spent time in Libyan prisons and crossed the Mediterranean. Like many other refugees who arrived in Italy in the early 2000s, he was dismissed by the reception centre in Rome where he had been hosted soon after receiving his legal protection. Then, he had no choice but to rely on the informal solidarity networks offered by the other Eritrean migrants in Rome. While asylum seekers are normally granted shelter and basic assistance elsewhere, it has often been highlighted how the Italian reception system provides little assistance to recognized refugees (and similar protection status holders) in their integration pathways. In the city of Rome, squatting has offered a solution to housing problems since the beginning of the century. Due to the lack of housing programmes for refugees, the emergency approach characterizing migration and asylum policies, and migrants’ marginality in the labour market, international migrants and refugees have been particularly exposed to housing precariousness (Vereni 2015). Mateos was among those who felt abandoned by the Italian reception system. This feeling of abandonment was amplified by the awareness that elsewhere in Europe, his co-nationals who gained protection received housing, a small economic support and assistance in learning the language (Belloni 2016). The idea of a possible better future elsewhere was omnipresent in Mateos’s narrative. Like many Eritreans, Mateos was constantly immersed in a transnational flow of emotions, information and images that increased the sense of relative deprivation he experienced in Italy in comparison with the conditions experienced by refugees in other countries. Unable to rent an apartment, Mateos ended up sleeping for some months in an empty building where, he said, five hundred other migrants from the Horn of Africa lived. ‘Imagine! We slept on the floor!’ he stated to highlight the lack of comfort he had experienced. In his case, the lack of comfort was a significant factor in the worsening of his already vulnerable health condition (cf. Mendola and Busetta 2018). The difficult life conditions he experienced in Libya, where he was detained for several months, resulted in an infection that compromised the functioning of one of his kidneys. Although he seemed to have recovered from this health issue while he was hosted in the asylum centre, it got worse when he was exposed to poor nutrition, cold and humidity in the building in which he was squatting.



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However, his vulnerability allowed him to gain access to the reception system again. In the current moral landscape of ‘humanitarianism’ (Fassin 2007), where ‘evidence from the body’ is the basis upon which help and support are granted by states, international agencies and NGOs, his injured kidney allowed Mateos to obtain a dedicated form of protection. For several months, he was hospitalized and, isolated from his Eritrean friends, he had the chance to learn some Italian. Once discharged, he was admitted by a reception centre run by Caritas as extranumerale, that is to say someone who is hosted in the centre over the usual number of assisted asylum seekers and refugees for reasons of his/her extreme vulnerability. In other words, this admission was not a right he had as a refugee, but rather a form of exceptional support that was given to him due to the multiple fragilities he embodied. Despite what he defined as ‘a difficult beginning’, Mateos started to participate in different social integration projects organized by civil society organizations in Rome. Between 2006 and 2007, he was involved in a course to prepare tourist operators and other workers in the hospitality sector. There he improved his skills in cooking, a passion he had developed when he was in Eritrea, and started to bake bread, an activity usually reserved for women. Although these opportunities were easily accessible to him thanks to the assistance he received in the Caritas centre, living in such a place implies several limitations (van der Horst 2004). Rules and regulations – such as sharing rooms with others, having a curfew, the lack of personal space and the impossibility of cooking – often provoke a process of infantilization for people in these centres. This condition also hampers the possibility of beneficiaries developing a sense of home, with deep consequences for their wellbeing. In the case of Mateos, his problems with the reception centre started when he decided to take part in some protests organized with other refugees to demand their housing and working rights. We did many demonstrations and slept in front of the UNHCR in Rome for a month. … Suddenly the manager of the reception centre kicked me out of his centre. He said I did not respect the rules of the centre because I slept outside too many nights. This was true, but I also knew that he did not approve of our protests and he thought I incited other refugees to participate.

This points to a crucial distinction between the idea of a lack of shelter and homelessness: sleeping under a roof is not enough to feel at home, while material precariousness does not necessarily exclude a feeling of home. Research on people dwelling in precarious conditions on the street, in the underground and in squats shows the importance of recognizing the value

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of alternative ways of life and the relationships that are created between places and communities, in order to assist these groups without negating their homemaking efforts and producing further vulnerability (Lancione 2020). The next section of Mateos’s story further illustrates the importance of this distinction.

Finding Home in Displacement In 2007, two years after his arrival in Italy, Mateos found himself homeless for the second time and, once again, he relied on the Eritrean informal networks of solidarity to solve his housing problem. He moved to Ponte Mammolo, an informal settlement, named after the nearby metro station. The settlement was established in 2001 by a group of Eritrean refugees who had previously been sleeping under the porch of an important museum in the city centre and were pushed out to an empty area on the outskirts of Rome where they could build their shelters. Over time, the informal settlement grew with the arrival of more refugees and migrants from other parts of the world, becoming a small shanty town. When M.B. visited the settlement in 2011, it had been renamed ‘Comunità La Pace’. It consisted of a quite extended ensemble of makeshift huts with tin roofs and wooden walls (figure 5.1). It was inhabited by migrants from Eastern Europe and several Eritreans. The latter were not only men retained in Italy by the Dublin Regulation,2 but also women and children in transit to other European countries. People in the settlement were in touch with local Catholic organizations that provided assistance. Many of them worked as seasonal agricultural labourers or in the logistics sector. Mateos lived in Ponte Mammolo for six years, during which he was part of a cohesive community, based on solidarity and mutualism, which allowed him to develop a sense of attachment and a feeling of being at home in that insecure and precarious space. These informal settlements are not only a temporary solution to the basic need for shelter but can also be interpreted as creative instances of re-establishing familiarity, control, security and, hence, a home in a difficult social and political space (Belloni, Fravega and Giudici 2020; Massa 2020b). This sense of home was triggered by the kind of sociality connecting the inhabitants of Ponte Mammolo, at least as Mateos remembered it. He recalled: There was a great peace in Ponte Mammolo. In so many years, there was never a conflict, never a quarrel. We helped each other, even to eat, even to cook. It was really a community of peace. This is why at the gate there was a placard: ‘Community of peace’.



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Although in his account the ‘peaceful’ atmosphere referred mainly to the Eritrean community, he also mentioned the good relationships he and his co-nationals had with migrants from other backgrounds. Thus, Ponte Mammolo can be considered a ‘borderland’, namely an area that is produced by the current regime of mobility and by the indifference and the lack of hospital- Figure 5.1. ‘Comunità La ity of the host society, but where new forms Pace’ in Ponte Mammolo, Rome. Photo by Milena of social configurations and banal cosmoBelloni. politanism may emerge (Agier 2016). Moreover, Mateos’s sense of home was increased by his own and his friends’ efforts to change and domesticate that place – that is, to exert some control over it – by engaging with its materiality and turning it into a home-like setting. Indeed, by working together, they turned the shanties made of makeshift materials into masonry huts equipped with kitchens and gas cylinders for cooking, with electricity generators for recharging mobiles and watching TV, and furniture such as wardrobes, chairs and tables. Bricks, zinc covers and concrete offered protection from cold and rain, and allowed them to keep the domestic space as clean as they could. Water came from a nearby public fountain. Thanks to the improvement of his health condition and to the sense of security and protection that Ponte Mammolo gave him, Mateos could start to actively look for a job. However, the job market turned out to be difficult to navigate. In this span of time, he changed jobs several times, often taking irregular and underpaid work: for some years, he worked in the logistics sector in Rome; in 2008, he was employed as a metalworker in Modena; and in 2011 and 2012, he was a seasonal agricultural worker in Northern Italy. Thus, even in this period of stable precarity in Ponte Mammolo, his housing trajectory was hyper-mobile: he changed cities and regions, looking for jobs and ways to earn money and help his family back in Eritrea. As several studies have illustrated (Lindley 2010; Belloni 2018; Massa 2020a), refugees, no less than labour migrants, often leave their country with the moral obligation to relieve their family members from material precariousness and to help some of them to migrate. Interestingly, each time he lost his job, he went back to Rome. The capital represented for him a place to which he could retreat in times of need: ‘My home has always been in Rome’, he surprisingly said to A.M. after having narrated all his misadventures in Italy. Home here is perceived not as an enclosed material and geographic space within which the individual can be free, but rather as a platform from which freedom can be exercised (in this case his freedom to move and look for a job).

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Homeless Again and Again Ponte Mammolo was cleared in 2013. This came as a shock for Mateos: suddenly, he lost the results of his efforts to improve the shelters, his belongings and the peaceful sociality he loved. In a nutshell, he lost the place he had considered his home for six years, the only home he had had in Rome. In addition to that, he was shocked by the form of the eviction and the reasons behind it: ‘It was an empty space; it was not someone else’s home. It wasn’t like a squat, we didn’t take anything from anyone there, we built everything by ourselves. We lived in great peace, but the mayor decided to evict us.’ Together with the other Eritrean refugee dwellers, he engaged in a strong protest against the eviction. With the support of human rights, refugee rights and housing rights associations, they occupied the area that hosted the shanty town, sleeping outdoors for three months. In parallel to this mobilization, negotiations took place with officials from both the municipal and the local governments. Despite their initial determination, they were able to obtain just a buono casa (rent voucher), which granted them a monthly payment for four years. However, the buono casa was not a structural solution to the housing problem. Rather, it was an ad hoc response adopted by the municipality to resolve a contingent problem, namely taking some dozens of refugees off the streets and quelling a public protest. Here again, we can see the ‘emergency approach’ that characterizes the Italian refugee management response. The category of emergency has been used by policymakers and mass media to design most of the new developments in international migration to Italy over the last three decades. However, the category of emergency describes less the patterns of immigration to Italy, and more certain structural features of the receiving context, that is to say, the relatively low awareness of Italy’s own recent immigration history (in parallel to the lack of acknowledgement of the country’s colonial heritage); the lack of preparedness; and the instrumental use of emergency jargon to address emerging social problems in the absence of more comprehensive integration strategies. For Mateos and his friends, the buono casa was also difficult to use. He explained: ‘I had no job, so it was impossible for me to find a landlord who was willing to rent his apartment to me. They don’t trust the municipality to give them the money on time, and they don’t trust me, an unemployed Black guy.’ Moreover, the amount of money (€600) was barely enough to cover the cost of an apartment in Rome, where many landlords prefer to rent without a regular contract. For this reason, many of the people who had lived in Ponte Mammolo decided to try and seek asylum



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elsewhere in Europe, in spite of the high probability that they would be returned to Italy. Mateos pondered whether or not to leave, but decided to stay because his kidney had started to cause him discomfort again. When he found himself homeless for the third time, he ended up in a squatted building, referred to by the Eritrean community as Piazza Indipendenza or addish geza, literally ‘new house’ in Tigrinya, because it had been established after other buildings occupied by squatters and mainly inhabited by people from Eritrea. Piazza Indipendenza is an eight-storey squatted building located near the main railway station, where eight hundred people from the Horn of Africa lived from 2013 to 2017. The building was the headquarters of a state-run agency (Federconsorzi); following corruption scandals, it passed through the hands of real-estate speculators, which resulted in it being left empty until it was occupied. After it was squatted, the inhabitants turned it into a dwelling-like space, creating small apartments, building toilets, shaping spaces for common activities and so on. Mateos lived in Piazza Indipendenza for three years, hosted by a friend in his apartment. ‘Life was not bad’, he recalled. ‘There was a good atmosphere, everything was clear, there were guardians and cleaning services.’ The conditions in Piazza Indipendenza, indeed, were better than those at other squats in Rome (and definitely better than those at Ponte Mammolo). Nonetheless, the departure of many of his friends, the presence of Eritrean government loyalists in the building, his precarious health condition and the lack of a private space made Piazza Indipendenza a less homely place for Mateos. In addition, the time he spent in Piazza Indipendenza was relatively short. In August 2017, Piazza Indipendenza was cleared by the police (Hung 2019; Massa 2022) and Mateos found himself homeless again (figure 5.2). However, this time anger, shock and despair were replaced by a feeling of resignation: his repeated experiences of losing home and being homeless had accumulated in him, making it an almost ordinary event in his life.

Looking Ahead: Where Is the Future? After the eviction, Mateos stayed for a few months at a friend’s flat until, thanks to a real estate agency that supports refugees and migrants and fights implicit forms of racism, he found a small apartment for rent that would finally allow him to take advantage of the buono casa. Working in an Eritrean restaurant only occasionally, life was not easy for him: the 600 euro granted by the voucher was not enough to pay the rent and he needed money for bills, food and so on. Mateos, however, was deeply

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happy to have his own place, because, in his words, ‘home is the first step to having a normal life’ and it is the place where ‘I can finally breathe my air’. Moreover, although the buono casa was not sufficient to cover his basic expenses and lasted only a few years, it gave Mateos some stability. He said: ‘In Ponte Mammolo and in Piazza Indipendenza I had nothing guaranteed, there was always the risk of eviction. You must always rely on your luck. Instead, now for four years I know I will be fine. In these four years, I can look for a better job and I can make plans for the future.’ In addition to changing his daily life in the present, living in a rented apartment allowed Mateos to establish a new relationship with the future, here understood as a horizon of meaning and a set of aspirations that shape the present time (Appadurai 2013). As Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving write, the sense of possibility plays a crucial role in the ways home is continuously recreated by people, connecting it with ‘the opportunities for change, improvement and the unexpected – that is room for dreaming and imagining’ (2009: 13). This new feeling of optimism and confidence about the future was also fuelled by his health status. After a serious deterioration in the condition of his kidney in 2015, the problem was definitively solved by the removal of the injured organ: ‘My mind has been busy thinking about my health for years. Now I can think about my future. I know what I can do and what I cannot do; I know my strengths and my weaknesses.’

Figure 5.2. The eviction of Piazza Indipendenza, Rome, 2017. Photo by Aurora Mass.



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However, his pathway to feel at home in Rome still appears long and rough. In 2013, Mateos married an Eritrean woman living in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital city where a large community of Eritrean refugees live. Although he had the right to apply for the family reunification process as a refugee, his application encountered several complications and was then rejected. This rejection was followed by a divorce. In 2018, when Mateos and his new partner, who also lived in Ethiopia, had two children, the results of his new family reunification application were still due. Each time Mateos talked about his family, his happiness and optimism disappeared and a veil of despair fell over his face. ‘I don’t care about this house if the law doesn’t help me to live my life with my family as a refugee, I don’t care’, he commented. The impossibility of cohabitating with his partner fuelled Mateos’s sense of frustration. Indeed, in the Eritrean transnational social sphere, having a home and becoming the head of the household are important steps in fulfilling the role of an adult man. As has been noticed in other contexts (Kleist 2010; Massa 2020a), the impossibility of filling the role of breadwinner challenged Mateos’s conventional perception of masculinity. As scholars of home have often highlighted (cf. Boccagni 2017), the possibility of a place that creates the conditions to fulfil one’s own aspirations is a key ingredient for the emergence of a sense of home. In Mateos’s case, his desire to become a family man was continuously frustrated and this affected his feeling of being at home in Rome and in his new apartment. Gender indeed has an important role in shaping the meanings of home (Gorman-Murray 2012). Thus, despite the improvement of his living conditions in Italy, he sometimes considers the idea of moving to Addis Ababa to join his family. However, due to the lack of opportunities on the Ethiopian job market, legal provisions for refugees and political and historical features, he doubts that his living conditions would improve. The last time we spoke to him on the phone in February 2021, he was still waiting for the results of his appeal regarding his wife’s visa and, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, his socio-economic situation had deteriorated. Recurring lockdowns led to him losing his job in the Eritrean restaurant and, because of his irregular contract, he was not eligible for any unemployment benefit. In addition, the four years of support of the buono casa were about to expire. After sixteen years in the country and having reached the formal timeframe for a citizenship application, Mateos did not feel he belonged there. ‘I don’t care about citizenship because I have not experienced true integration. Having Italian citizenship in this situation would be meaningless for me.’ Although, arguably, Mateos’s housing and socio-economic instability over the last decade would prevent him from gaining Italian nationality even if he wanted it, his words highlight

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his limited attachment to the country and his lack of hope regarding his future prospects there.

Conclusion Mateos’s migration and housing pathway are paradigmatic of the extreme precariousness that afflicts refugees in Southern Europe and in Italy in particular. Residual welfare provisions, a difficult labour market and limited access to social housing have led many refugees to experience further displacement, rather than a safe haven. While this condition of displacement results in extremely mobile housing trajectories, it also leads to a feeling of social and personal immobility, which parallels the experience of many migrants and refugees trapped in limbo-like situations (Brun and Fábos 2015). Despite their efforts to find jobs and stable accommodation, many refugees from Eritrea still feel far from settled, even after many years. While their mobility sometimes appears meaningless, as in the case of Mateos, these difficulties also fuel the migrants’ desire for further mobility towards Northern European countries (which are not accessible due to the Dublin Regulation, but where reception systems and living conditions are expected to be better). This desire for mobility can also be focused on other destinations, such as Ethiopia, where, however, the chances of an improvement are low. Mateos’s story not only speaks of long-term displacement and material precariousness. It also illuminates different facets of what it means to be homeless. While Mateos is actively looking for stable and decent accommodation, his experience in different informal settlements shows the importance of community bonds, the feeling of control and the expression of some agency in the perception of being at home. Among the five places of accommodation that Mateos experienced in Rome, ‘Comunità La Pace’ stands out as a real hub where Mateos – in spite of the deprived setting and discomfort – found that sense of belonging that he had once experienced in his village in Eritrea. Reception centres, however, are, in his narration, alienating places where he felt unable to control the space or use it as a foundation on which to build his future. These reflections enable us to appreciate the multifaceted feeling of being at home and the importance of taking into consideration the intertwining of the material, social and personal aspects of building a home. Mateos’s attempts to make a home are hampered not only by his material precariousness and by structural factors, but also by more intimate factors, such as his vulnerable health condition and the distance from his family



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members. His accumulated homelessness is a result of all these intervening home-unmaking factors (Belloni and Massa 2021). Aurora Massa is a research fellow and lecturer at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’. She is a social anthropologist with expertise in migration studies and mobility within and from the Horn of Africa. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Trento under the ERC-HOMInG research project and at CRN-IRPPS. Her main fields of inquiry include travelling experiences, conditions of im/mobility, nationalism, the homemaking process and research methodology. She has conducted ethnographic research in Ethiopia, Italy, the United Kingdom and Sweden. Her works are published in English and Italian. She co-authored the book Ethnographies of Home and Mobility. Shifting Roofs (Routledge, 2020). Milena Belloni is an ethnographer who specializes in migration and refugee studies. She is currently an FWO Postdoc Fellow at the Department of Sociology of Antwerp University and the Human Rights Centre in Gent. Her research mainly concerns refugees’ migration dynamics and integration pathways, transnational refugee families, migrant smuggling and ethnographic methods. She has published in international peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Refugee Studies, the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Her monographic study on the migration of Eritreans to Europe, The Big Gamble, is published by the University of California Press (2019).

Notes   1. Although SPRAR, the Italian centralized system for asylum seekers and refugee reception, has existed since the 2000s to accompany newcomers towards social and economic inclusion, the discursive, organizational and political category of ‘emergency’ has led to the development of parallel systems of reception. Since 2008, the establishment of ‘temporary centres’ for asylum seekers has paralleled the standard reception system. In 2011, private businesses – such as hotel managers, along with traditional humanitarian agencies – were involved in the so-called ‘North Africa Emergency’. A further national enlargement of the reception system occurred in 2015 with the establishment of ‘extraordinary centres’ (CAS), which accommodate most asylum seekers. SPRAR has now been replaced by the SIPROMI system, which offers assistance only to those migrants who have already been granted legal protection.

136    Aurora Massa and Milena Belloni   2. The Dublin Regulation is one of the main provisions of the European asylum system. It ensures that the first country of arrival in Europe will take charge of the asylum applications of new arrivals. It also regulates the secondary movements of asylum seekers and refugees in Europe. The Dublin Regulation has been amended several times since its introduction in 1997. More on the current ‘Dublin Regulation III’ can be found at https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/migration-and-asylum/common-european-asylum-system/country-responsible-asylum-application-dublin-regulation_en.

References Agier, Michel. 2016. Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as a Cultural Fact. Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso. Arbaci, Sonia. 2008. ‘(Re)Viewing Ethnic Residential Segregation in Southern European Cities: Housing and Urban Regimes as Mechanisms of Marginalisation’, Housing Studies 23(4): 589–613. Belloni, Milena. 2016. ‘Learning How to Squat: Cooperation and Conflict between Refugees and Natives in Rome’, Journal of Refugee Studies 29(4): 506–27.  . 2018. ‘Becoming Unaccustomed to Home: Young Eritreans’ Narratives about Estrangement, Belonging and the Desire to Leave Home’, in K. Davis, H. Ghorashi and P. Smets (eds), Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, pp. 161–81. Belloni, Milena, Enrico Fravega and Daniela Giudici. 2020. ‘Fuori dall’accoglienza: insediamenti informali di rifugiati tra marginalità e autonomia’, Social Policies 7(2): 225–44. Belloni, Milena, and Aurora Massa. 2021. ‘Accumulated Homelessness: Analysing Protracted Displacement along Eritreans’ Life Histories’, Journal of Refugee Studies 35(2): 929–47. Boccagni, Paolo. 2017. Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives. New York: Springer. Brun, Cathrine, and Anita Fábos. 2015. ‘Making Homes in Limbo?’, Refuge 31(1): 5–17. Busetta, Annalisa, et al. 2021. ‘Measuring Vulnerability of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Italy’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47(3): 596–615. Campomori, Francesca, and Marcello Feraco. 2018. ‘Integrare i rifugiati dopo i percorsi di accoglienza: tra le lacune della politica e l’emergere di (fragili) pratiche socialmente innovative’, Rivista italiana di politiche pubbliche 13(1): 127–57. Fassin, Didier. 2007. ‘Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life’, Public Culture 19(3): 499– 520. Fontanari, Elena. 2018. Lives in Transit. London: Routledge. Gorman-Murray, A. 2012. ‘Meanings of Home: Gender Dimensions’, International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 251–56.



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Hahn, Hans Peter, and George Klute (eds). 2007. Cultures of Migration: African Perspectives. Münster: LIT Verlag. Hammond, Laura. 2004. ‘The Tigrayan Returnees’ Notions of Home: Five Variations on a Theme’, in Fran Markowitz and Anders H. Stefansson (eds), Homecomings. Unsettling Paths of Return. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 36–53. Hirt, Nicole, and Abdulkader Saleh Mohammad. 2013. ‘“Dreams Don’t Come True in Eritrea”: Anomie and Family Disintegration Due to the Structural Militarisation of Society’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 15(1): 139–68. Hung, Carla. 2019. ‘Sanctuary Squats: The Political Contestations of Piazza Indipendenza Refugee Occupiers’, Radical History Review 135: 119–37. Jansen, Stef, and Staffan Löfving (eds). 2009. Struggles for Home. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kellett, Peter, and Jeanne Moore. 2003. ‘Routes to Home: Homelessness and HomeMaking in Contrasting Societies’, Habitat International 27(1): 123–41. Kleist, Najua. 2010. ‘Negotiating Respectable Masculinity: Gender and Recognition in the Somali Diaspora’, African Diaspora 3: 185–206. Korac, Maja. 2009. Remaking Home: Reconstructing Life, Place and Identity in Rome and Amsterdam. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Lancione, Michele. 2020. ‘Radical Housing: On the Politics of Dwelling as Difference’, International Journal of Housing Policy 20(2): 273–89. Lindley, Anna. 2010. The Early Morning Phonecall: Somali Refugees’ Remittances. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Martone, Vittorio. 2017. ‘Marketisation of Social Services and Mafia Infiltration: The Case of Migrant Reception Centres in Rome’, European Review of Organised Crime 1: 1–20. Massa, Aurora. 2020a. ‘Families at a Distance, Distances within Families: Borders and Emotional Bonds among Migrants from Eritrea’, Anuac 9(1): 135–57.  . 2020b. ‘Inequalities’, in A. Miranda Nieto, A. Massa and S. Bonfanti, Ethnographies of Home and Mobility. Shifting Roofs. London: Routledge, pp. 141–65.  . 2022. ‘“All We Need Is a Home”. Eviction, Vulnerability, and the Struggle for a Home by Migrants from the Horn of Africa in Rome’, Focaal 92: 31–47. Mendola, Dario, and Annalisa Busetta. 2018. ‘Health and Living Conditions of Refugees and Asylum-Seekers: A Survey of Informal Settlements in Italy’, Refugee Survey Quarterly 37(4): 477–505. Netto, G. 2011. ‘Strangers in the City: Addressing Challenges to the Protection, Housing and Settlement of Refugees’, International Journal of Housing Policy 11(3): 285–303. Rokem, Jonathan, and Laura Vaughan. 2019. ‘Geographies of Ethnic Segregation in Stockholm: The Role of Mobility and Co-Presence in Shaping the “Diverse” City’, Urban Studies 56(12): 2426–46. Scotto, Angelo. 2018. Emergenza Permanente: L’Italia e le politiche sull’immigrazione. Novi Ligure: Edizioni Epoké. van der Horst, Hilje. 2004. ‘Living in a Reception Centre: The Search for Home in an Institutional Setting’, Housing, Theory and Society 21(1): 36–46. Vereni, Piero. 2015. ‘Addomesticare il welfare dal basso’, Meridiana 83: 147–69.

CHAPTER

6

Yolanda

A Peruvian Care Worker on the Spanish Frontline Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

More and more of our patients were dying and I was afraid of catching the virus and bringing it home. Quitting my job, however, was not an option. How can you leave the boat when the crew needs you the most? —Yolanda

Yolanda, aged fifty-eight, is one of those female care workers that the Covid-19 pandemic has put on the frontline. After leaving her partner and children behind, she arrived in Madrid in 2000 and has, since then, been looking after elderly people and neonates. As Yolanda’s life story suggests, care work has given her the possibility of reuniting family, buying a property and making Spain home. For over two years, however, coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has disrupted Yolanda’s experience of home. Her narrative reminds us that the provision of care for those who are at more risk of dying because of the virus not only makes work physically exhausting and emotionally devastating; it also makes domestic life extremely complicated. Aiming to protect her family from the virus, Yolanda has adopted ‘compulsive’ cleaning practices and strict social distancing measures that have created distance between family members living together and made the home unhomely. The collection of the empirical material for Yolanda’s life story started in early 2018, when I interviewed her son Roger in Manchester and he mentioned his mother as a potential research participant. Between the summer of the same year and early 2019, I interviewed Yolanda in her house three



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Figure 6.1. Yolanda at work. Photo by Maria del Pilar Bohada Rodriguez.

times and walked with her and her family through their neighbourhood and other areas of Madrid. Those go-alongs were significant as they allowed me to interact with her neighbourhoods and observe the dense social network she has built in Madrid during all these years. A face-to-face follow-up interview was conducted in 2019 when Yolanda was visiting her son in Manchester, and since March 2020 we have had regular video calls to follow her experiences during the pandemic. Her partner, sister, cousin and several of her care worker colleagues in Madrid and her sister in Pisco, Peru, were also interviewed for this research. All the material was gathered in Spanish and only selected quotes have been translated into English.

Introduction Care work, especially in countries of the so-called ‘Global North’, is increasingly being carried out by migrant workers (Huang, Yeoh and Toyota 2012; Baldassar, Ferrero and Portis 2017). As many researchers have noted, the circulation of care between countries repeatedly entails the experience of leaving family members behind and the renegotiation of care practices across migration corridors (Parreñas 2012; Raghuram 2012). While at one end of a corridor such a renegotiation may mean that caregivers replace

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family members in the provision of care, at the other end, it may signify that one’s relatives experience the sense of being ‘like stones left in the middle of the road’ (Vullnetari and King 2008: 154). Yolanda is one of those thousands of female care workers moving from the ‘Global South’ to the ‘Global North’ (Olakivi and Niska 2016); in her case, from Peru to Spain. Like many female care workers moving north from Latin America, Yolanda left children, a partner and parents behind (Bastia 2015; Horn 2019), which had a profound effect on her family relationships back in Peru and her daily experiences of home in Spain. Several case studies have explored those dynamics and highlighted the significance of different forms of social injustice such as labour exploitation, racism and marginalization in the experiences of transnational care workers (cf. England and Dyck 2012; Stevens, Hussein and Manthorpe 2012). More recently, scholars have also started to look at how caregivers negotiate home in the domestic space of the elderly people they look after (England and Dyck 2016; Boccagni 2017a). Yolanda’s narrative contributes to further illustrating those debates. However, and considering that this issue has received less scholarly attention, I draw on her life story to primarily discuss the potential of care work in facilitating migrants’ transnational homemaking. Furthermore, and given the fact that coronavirus has put care workers like Yolanda on the frontline, I explore whether and how coronavirus has affected her experiences of home within and beyond the domestic space. Acknowledging that the making of a home is by no means a straightforward process or something that, once achieved by individuals, is unproblematically experienced for the rest of their lives, I argue that care work can potentially be understood as a practice deployed by caregivers to make a home in the transnational space. By bathing, feeding and changing the nappies of children and elderly people in Spain, Yolanda has been able to make a living, reunite her family and buy a house. She has also been able to develop a sense of community, belonging and ultimately home. Home and care, in this regard, intersect in the very fact that they both entail material, symbolic and spiritual dimensions (Escrivá 2016). As Yolanda’s narrative illustrates, the provision of care frequently involves emotional commitment. Rather than a straightforward profit maximization rationale between ‘care recipients’ and ‘caregivers’, care work can be better framed in what Lena Näre (2011) denotes a ‘moral economy’ and Tanja Bastia (2015) an ‘ethic of care and responsibility’. For the sake of simplicity, the term ‘home’ in this chapter denotes a set of relationships that people establish with other people and places. Home, therefore, is not only the place where individuals dwell but also the set of emotions they attach to particular people and places. In the context of



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care, the people that become part of a home may also include care receivers and caregivers. This is often the case when they see each other as part of the family and, as was beautifully illustrated by one of Loretta Baldassar, Laura Ferrero and Lucia Portis’s (2017: 524) research participants, sit ‘at the table with a spoon each, eating from the same big ice-cream bucket’. In terms of places, home is not limited to the care workers’ domestic space; it is potentially any environment in which care is provided. It includes institutional arrangements, such as residential service centres and care homes, and so-called ‘home-care’. The latter largely refers to the domestic space of care receivers (see Howe, Jones and Tilse 2013). The term ‘homemaking’ denotes a set of practices deployed by individuals to transform their houses and, more broadly, places of settlement into meaningful homes (Blunt and Dowling 2006). Following this introduction, the chapter briefly describes Yolanda’s experience of migration and settlement and discusses how she did eventually resort to care work to make Spain home. The analysis then moves on to examine how the ongoing pandemic has affected Yolanda’s care work, everyday domestic practices and subsequently experiences of home. The chapter ends by discussing the critical implications of this analysis for conceptualizing the links between care and home in the context of mobility/ immobility.

Life in Peru and Arrival in Spain: Struggles for Home on Both Sides Yolanda left Peru in early 2000 in search of better economic prospects. Rather than an individual decision, Yolanda’s move to Spain was a family project. Indeed, migration has been part of Yolanda’s family history. Both of her parents migrated at an early age from the Andes region of Peru and settled in Lima. After Yolanda’s mother died in the 1990s, all her five adult children started to migrate abroad, including in places such as Australia and Spain. Yolanda followed in the footsteps of her cousin and two of her siblings and moved to Spain. In contrast to them, but similar to many other migrants, migration for Yolanda meant leaving her partner and two children behind. In the middle of the country’s financial crisis, Yolanda was struggling to make ends meet back in Lima and her relatives in Madrid encouraged her to migrate. Moving abroad was certainly her plan but it was kept on hold because she married at an early age and gave birth to Roger. She mentioned that the birth of her son meant the postponement of her plan for several years because she ‘has not the guts to leave her baby boy behind’. Yolanda’s

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plan to move abroad became even more distant when she gave birth to Keila and decided to stay put in Lima until her children were able to understand her decision to move, leaving them behind. Yolanda and her partner bought a house with a mortgage in a low-income neighbourhood in Lima but never had the chance to inhabit it. She commented that the family was full of plans, seeing the construction of the house on weekends, but in the end they could not afford the mortgage and the bank took the house. ‘The savings of more than five years of work simply disappeared.’ Following the frustration of losing the family investment and experiences of domestic violence, Yolanda left her partner. ‘He was an abusive man and I did not want to live with him anymore.’ Despite the struggle to pay rent and feed her children on her own, she started to save small amounts to move abroad. ‘Migration started to become my choice.’ However, she stayed put in Lima for longer. She met Limber, who has been her partner for nearly thirty years. Yolanda, Roger, Keila, Limber and his son from a previous marriage created a new family. The plan to migrate started to become more than a plan and Yolanda and Limber agreed that moving to Spain was part of the solution to their financial needs. They both agreed that Yolanda would migrate first because she already had technical training as a nurse and they knew that women had more of a chance of finding a job in Spain and supporting family reunification later. By that time, Yolanda’s sister and cousin were already working as caregivers in Madrid. My sister got a job contract for me and we decided to take the risk. Limber has been always a hard-working and supportive man and thus I left my children with him. My son, who was already a teenager, understood my decision. My daughter, who was only a child, could not understand it. She felt abandoned and it has irreversibly affected our relationship.

Yolanda arrived in Madrid with a temporary job contract and work visa.1 She arrived at her sister’s rented house and found herself away from home. This was not only because she had left her family behind but also because the relationship with her sister was not as it had been back in Peru. ‘My sister was so distant; she was always busy with work and spending her free time only with her boyfriend. This was understandable but hard anyway. I was in a new country, my first time abroad, and they went out and when not working, I was alone in the flat.’ Although Yolanda phoned her family back in Peru on a nearly daily basis, the experience of seeing how a close relationship with her sister had turned into a distant one increased her concerns about the lack of physical contact with her children and partner and the potential impact of that on her relationship with her family. Despite the geographical



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distance between Peru and Spain, technology helped Yolanda to maintain the emotional connection with her partner and son (cf. Baldassar 2007). However, as the last part of the previous quote suggests, such communication did not work for her daughter. Partly because of her young age, the lack of physical connection created emotional distance between mother and daughter. For many years, my daughter told me that I abandoned her. I have explained to her hundreds of times that I did not leave her abandoned; I migrated for the benefit of our family. I even have explained to her that thanks to our decision to move, she now holds a bachelor’s degree and a professional job. In Peru, she would be married by this time only looking after children, with no career. Since she understood my reasons we have a much closer relationship.

Yolanda’s emphasis on moving for the benefit of the family and her daughter’s ‘initial’ unwillingness to understand her reasons illustrate further the tensions that transnational families often experience when deciding between providing care to their families in person and sending remittances back ‘home’ (Boccagni and Baldassar 2015). Indeed, during the initial months in Madrid, Yolanda was overly concerned about her sense of her family being affected by her practices of ‘distant care’. In this context, this means the practice of sending love to her family only through phone calls and money to pay rent, food and school fees. To make things more complicated, Yolanda’s temporary contract expired and she found it difficult to find a new job in Madrid. Unemployed in Madrid, Yolanda started to struggle even more to feel at home in her sister’s house and started to spend more time outdoors. I started to make friends from Latin America in the streets and they helped me to find occasional jobs mainly as a cleaner or substituting caregivers on leave. When I had no jobs, I also opted to stay outdoors. I was rambling across the city and in train stations. My sister welcomed me to her place but it was not my home. It was her home. I felt lonely and desperate about my children. I just started to think about going back to Peru.

Going back was not a real option because Yolanda had already spent the savings of years of work by her and her partner in Peru on the move to Spain and thus did not want to go back empty-handed. While performing occasional jobs, Yolanda enrolled in technical training and acquired further qualifications. She specialized in caring after two specific groups of the population: neonates and elderly people. ‘While studying, I started practising with elderly people. I signed a contract with a company and the

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company sent me to look after elderly people in their houses. They liked my job and I got a long-term contract.’ Relying on her salary as caregiver, Yolanda gained independence from her family in Spain and found a place for herself. ‘I wanted to have my own space. It was the first step I needed to take before planning to bring my family to Spain.’ After a couple of years in the country, Yolanda did apply for a residency card and, after renewing her permit a couple of times, she applied for residency and became a Spanish citizen. With the right to stay and work in Spain, Yolanda started the reunification of her family. Her partner and daughter arrived first. A couple of years later, when more resources were available, Yolanda and Limber brought their sons, and then, in a final stage, Yolanda brought her father and nephew. Within six years, the whole family was settled in Spain and even in the position to support the migration of Yolanda’s youngest sister and her partner. They spent a couple of years in Spain, but then, because a family emergency, returned to Pisco without having achieved the right to apply for residency. ‘With the exception of my sister and her family, the whole family was together again and thus we started to think about moving to a bigger house.’

Making Madrid and Spain Home Given the loss of her house in Lima, Yolanda was initially reluctant to apply for a mortgage in Spain. Her ambition was to save the money and buy a free-mortgage house. I was paying rent and my sister used to tell me, stop paying rent. With that money you can pay the mortgage instead. My neighbours also encouraged me to buy a flat. A flat in the same building was on sale and the people in the building used to tell me Yolanda should buy this flat. It is big enough for you and your family.

After years paying rent, Yolanda was granted a mortgage. The process of buying the house illustrates further how migration became a family project. Yolanda’s, Limber’s and Roger’s incomes and payslips were put together to satisfy the minimum income required for the mortgage. Roger, who, as mentioned earlier, was the first person of the entire family to be interviewed for this research, mentioned that he left Peru because his mother wanted to reunify the family and also because she was concerned her son would become a parent while still a teenager, ‘just like her’. He said: My mother carefully planned the movement of the whole family. She always plans everything in advance. A day after my arrival at Madrid,



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I was submitting my documents for residency. It was a prerequisite to get access to the health system and apply for jobs. After a few months after my arrival, I found myself contributing to buy a house for our family in Spain. I was very young and did not care much about buying a house but my mother did; so I was happy to support my family.

With the family reunited and a flat, Yolanda started to feel at home in Madrid. She said, ‘After working around the clock for years, our effort paid off. We started to live again under the same roof. It was a nice feeling to be all together again in our own house.’ Not by chance, the property was in the very same building in which her sister owns a flat. It is located in a working-class district in South Madrid, popular amongst Spanish families and migrant communities. When interviewed for the first time in 2018, Yolanda said, I have been living in this neighbourhood since I arrived in Madrid and in the same house since we bought it. I feel comfortable in the space and with the residents of the building. Most of them are elderly people. I have good relationships with all of them and my sister lives next door. … If you walk around the streets, you can see Spaniards and people from Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and many more places.

Yolanda and Limber have been working double shifts in Spain to be able to pay for the house and higher education for their children. Certainly, when Yolanda talks about working around the clock, she means it. For many years, she has devoted her morning shifts to look after elderly people in residential centres, care homes and, less commonly, in their own houses. At night, she has been providing care to neonates in a hospital. Residential centres are like schools for elderly people. We pick them up in their houses early in the morning in a van and then we spend the day with them in the residential centre. Our aim is that they feel alive and have fun. They dance, sing and share food. Then, we leave them back in their houses. Work in the care home is rather different. Many of those who live there receive palliative care and thus we often need to bath them, feed them and change their nappies. It is not rare that you see patients one day and the next day they have gone [died]. In the hospital, things are similar to the care home but with neonates. Most of those who are in a special unit for neonates are in very fragile health condition and thus some of them also die.

Yolanda’s description of a regular working day is fascinating. She daily works with both those who have just been born and the very oldest people in society. The narrative changed from fascinating to poignant when she went into detail about the two jobs. She has been working with those who

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are striving to live. Some of the elderly people she cares for are in very poor health and often find themselves battling for their lives. The premature babies are also frequently in a delicate health condition and battling for their lives. The very elderly and the newly born meet Yolanda every day. Yolanda feels that by looking after those with difficult health conditions she is contributing to Spanish society and she appreciates it when the families of the people she looks after show appreciation for her work. However, she also highlights the emotional burden of her daily routine. The connection you create with families because you are caring for their babies and grandparents is so special. Most Spaniards are kind with caregivers and show respect and appreciation for our work. The problem is that you see people dying very often. At the beginning, I could not just forget the faces of those who died because you know you create a connection with patients. I was really suffering and finding it difficult to cope. The psychologist asked me to create distance between me and patients. I do not see that it is possible to work as a caregiver without this emotional connection with patients but the experience has helped me to deal with the sadness.

By caring for the youngest and the oldest in the population, Yolanda has not only gained a space in the Spanish care sector but also in Spanish society. Both aspects have been central in making Madrid and Spain home. When I walk around the streets of my neighbourhood, people know who I am and what I do for a living. Many look after me with consideration and respect because they know I am a caregiver. Their gratitude is important to me because I feel well integrated into the Spanish society. I am part of this city; I am part of this country. I cannot tolerate when people say bad things about Spain, even my own father.

Walking tours with Yolanda in her neighbourhood and different areas of Madrid were an opportunity to observe how she connects with people. It was not unusual for neighbours to call Yolanda by her name and ask about her family. Friendship was significant amongst neighbours and served as an opportunity to observe the role of care work in Yolanda’s process of making Madrid and Spain home. Her monthly payment has been central to reuniting and educating her family, buying a property and paying bills, all aspects that are significant to how Yolanda experiences home. However, the more symbolic aspects of care work, such as creating strong ties with the people she looks after, their relatives and, in general, the people who show appreciation for her work, have given Yolanda a sense of community, belonging and ultimately a sense of home in Spanish society. More generally, Yolanda’s narrative powerfully illustrates the significance



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of considering the confluence of the material and the symbolic when conceptualizing the intricate relationship between home and care (cf. Escrivá 2016). But what does this life story tell us about the interplay between home and mobility/immobility? Yolanda’s narrative illustrates further the need to look at this nexus taking both the individual and the family levels into consideration. As discussed, Yolanda moved from south to north in search of economic betterment and, rather than spending money travelling back and forth to visit family and for holidays, she invested her savings in bringing her partner and their children to Spain. By ‘grounding’ herself in Spain, a country she has only ‘left’ for a week in over twenty years (when visiting her son Roger in England), she created opportunities for her family’s mobility. This is notably the case for Roger, who, after joining his mother in Spain and acquiring qualifications and citizenship, has embraced the opportunities for mobility that his Spanish passport has given him. While Yolanda’s migration largely entailed the intention to settle in Spain and make it home, her son has been negotiating home on the move: Peru, Spain, England and now Portugal. To paraphrase Noel B. Salazar’s (2014) words, Yolanda moved ‘until paradise found her’. Being grounded in Spain does not mean, however, that she no longer wants to move (cf. Ahmed et al. 2003). Once her youngest son finishes higher education, she expects to travel to the many places she has been putting on a wish list for twenty years, during which time her financial resources have been destined for other priorities, including the reunification of the family, education and the purchase of two properties.

Experiences of Home during the Pandemic Yolanda’s daily experiences of home have been significantly affected by coronavirus. As is likely the case for most people working on the frontline, the pandemic has affected the ways she experiences home within and beyond the domestic space.

Not So Much Social Distancing Outdoors When the first wave of the pandemic started in Spain in early 2020, Yolanda was working in the care home and the special unit for neonates, as described above. At the beginning, when it was not clear how the virus was spreading, Yolanda was just taking extra precautions at work and at home. She was washing her hands more often than usual and for longer, using more handwash and disinfectant. Caution quickly became a state

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of emergency when many of Yolanda’s patients in the care home died and some of her work colleagues caught the virus. Yolanda, like most of her colleagues, started to work more and more hours until the point of exhaustion and with insufficient protective equipment. ‘We have enough protective equipment for ordinary emergencies but not for a pandemic. What to do? We continued with our work the best we could: bathing, feeding and changing the nappies of our patients.’ Yolanda’s account reminds us that social distancing rules can rarely be adhered to by care workers. All the activities she performs at work entail human contact. With all the precautions, Yolanda continued giving medication to patients, measuring their temperature, cleaning their teeth, brushing their hair, holding their hands and, in general, looking after their health and their physical appearance. While looking after patients ‘with love, as if they were family’ (cf. Baldassar, Ferrero and Portis 2017), Yolanda started to become afraid of bringing coronavirus home. Understandably, her family shared the same fear. Yolanda recalled that her youngest said to her, ‘Mum, quit your job, it is too risky.’ More and more of our patients were dying and I was afraid of catching the virus and bringing it home. Quitting my job, however, was not an option. How can you leave the boat when the crew needs you the most? It was heart-breaking to see my son asking me to quit my job but it is morally wrong. I am taking extra precautions at work and additional cleaning measures at home. Figure 6.2. Feeding a patient. Photo by Yolanda.

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What were those measures? Yolanda mentioned that she became a ‘compulsive cleaner’ and thus her entire domestic routine changed. Upon arriving home after work, she immediately took her clothes off and washed them with disinfectant before taking a shower; only then would she give a kiss and a hug to her family. Yolanda’s description of those practices makes it clear that the shower no longer represents a means of relaxing after a busy day at work but has become a way of killing any potential virus. Limber, her partner, who works in a supermarket, has become even more ‘compulsive’; he started to wear face masks and observe social distancing within the domestic space. Yolanda’s and Limber’s hygiene practices resonate with the widely advertised use of bleach to tackle the virus and, more broadly, with ongoing research on the impact of the pandemic on human–microbial relations in the home and beyond (McLeod, Hadley and Nerlich 2020). Those measures became even stricter when Yolanda caught the virus, presumably at work. When reflecting on how she likely caught the virus, she said: I was feeding one of my very old patients and suddenly he took my hand. He did not want me to continue feeding him. It was a sign for me to stop. He touched my hand and I just realized he was dying. That is an utterly sad moment. I touched his hand back and it was the last goodbye. Not a single member of his family could see him or attend his funeral. I was the last person he had contact with. He died because of the virus and it was likely the moment I caught it. I do not know why but I have this feeling.

Social Distancing at ‘Home’ Once Yolanda’s positive test was confirmed, she was ordered to self-isolate in her house. The fear of catching the virus and bringing it home had become a reality and thus she adopted a strict social distancing policy indoors. Yolanda self-isolated in her room for over three weeks. She recalled that before catching the virus her family had already been reluctant to touch her and ordinary human acts, such as ‘hi mum followed by a hug and kiss’ when she arrived home, stopped being daily practices for several months. My family treated me as a stinky person. Nobody wanted to have contact with me. Imagine then the situation once I was infected with the virus. I was all the time in my room receiving food in separate crockery and cutlery and my partner disinfected it every time I used it. I had no contact with my partner and son for over three weeks. We did not share a single space of the house. Luckily, we had already moved to the new flat and the room is en-suite.

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Yolanda has ‘stayed indoors’ when possible but has struggled to feel at home most of the time since the start of the pandemic and especially after catching the virus. The feeling of being treated as a ‘stinky person’ by her own family means that Yolanda experienced not only physical but above all affective distance. What she was really missing during the critical waves of the pandemic was something that we can no longer take for granted: a hug from her kin upon arriving home. Yolanda was not the only person in her family whose experiences of home were affected by the pandemic. When she was infected with the virus, Limber told his company and started to follow self-isolation rules. He said, ‘I started to look after Yolanda and my son. I cooked the best I could and they both disliked what I cooked. It was awful and I was full of anger.’ The couple’s son’s mental health also seemed to be affected. Yolanda mentioned that her teenage son was struggling to cope with social distancing rules. My son was all the time in his room living like a prisoner, with no chance of going out, and it was so sad for me. Most of the year he has been alone in the house and when we arrive, he goes to his room to reduce the risk of contagion. When I caught the virus, we did not even have a face-to-face conversation.

Experiences of home in the domestic space became more complicated when Yolanda’s father, aged eighty-eight, who had been caught on holidays in Peru when the pandemic started, was able to return to Spain but arrived in poor health. Yolanda mentioned that her father had struggled with lockdown policies back in Peru and had suffered a stroke. As a result, he had lost some of his physical and mental functioning. With her father back in Madrid, and the observation of social distancing rules in the house, Yolanda’s son was asked to temporarily move in with Keila, his sister. Keila lives with her partner in a flat in the same building as Yolanda’s new apartment and this facilitated the move. However, the move did give rise to tensions within the family. ‘My son needs care and this is his house but my father needs care as well and I want to care for him in this difficult moment. It was difficult for my son to understand my point and he reluctantly moved to my daughter’s flat.’ As the last part of the quote suggests, Yolanda’s narrative is an invitation to look at mobilities beyond the national and transnational spaces and to give consideration to the ‘micro’ scales on which individuals negotiate home. The fact that her son moved temporarily to a different flat located in the same building does not mean that Yolanda and her son did not find that their experiences of home were affected. Especially in the context of the pandemic, those apparently ‘insignificant’ movements may



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create significant distance between family members and potentially hurt their home feelings. While Yolanda’s son is currently staying with his sister and her father’s health is quickly deteriorating – she says ‘he is dying and has probably not much time left’ – Yolanda is back to work. Besides the risk of catching the virus again and infecting her father, Yolanda is concerned about not being able to look after her son and her father. Now they are living in the same flat or very close but Yolanda cannot provide the care she would like to provide because she is busy looking after the elderly and neonates of Spanish families. She does not raise this apparent contradiction but it is easily perceived when her family talks about her job. Besides, Yolanda is now considering putting her father in a care home, something that, as she stresses, is not a common practice in Peru, where family is expected to look after parents and grandparents (cf. Escrivá 2016). I misjudged Spanish families for many years because rather than looking after their parents and grandparents by themselves they put them in care homes. I was always thinking that they lacked commitment to their own families. I only understand their reasons now. If I look after my father by myself, I will have to quit my job. Not to mention the emotional impact of looking after your own family. My father will feel embarrassed if I need to change his nappies.

Although she has her concerns about not being able to look after her father and son, Yolanda continues performing her work. She stresses that she was afraid of going back to work after being infected with the virus because she did not want to be infected again and put her ill father and family at risk. Despite the ongoing third wave of the pandemic, this time with a strain of coronavirus described by scientists as more infectious and deadlier, Yolanda emphasizes that hospitals are now better equipped to care for patients and protect members of the staff. She also mentioned that, through the current roll-out of the vaccine, she and her father have already received the two doses of the jab and the family feel safer at work and have started to ease social distancing measures at home. In a recent follow-up call, she was not alone in her room but on a sofa in the living room with her partner. For the very first time in about a year, they were sharing the same room and having a real sense of human contact. The video call captured an intimate moment in the couple’s life. After sharing lunch, they were hanging out at the end of a busy week at work. Their narratives reveal how a hug and a kiss between partners, even in the domestic space, can no longer be taken for granted. The pandemic has disrupted those everyday expressions of affection that help them to feel at home.

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Besides disrupting the practices and intimate expressions of affect that help Yolanda and her family to feel at home, coronavirus and the subsequent lockdown policies have disrupted their mobility. Yolanda was planning to pick up her father in Lima and have a holiday in the city, which she has not visited since she moved to Madrid, but could not. Instead, she spent her savings on the repatriation of her ill father, as discussed earlier, and thus her ‘immobility’ once more facilitated the mobility of a family member. Roger was also affected by the pandemic-related immobilities (Adey 2021; Cresswell 2021). In his case, however, the outcome has been more positive. Before the first lockdown in England, in early March 2020, he travelled to Portugal to meet his partner’s family. After six months actively waiting to go back to England, the couple decided to settle in Portugal. The settlement is not only related to Roger’s willingness to embrace new cultures; it is also fundamentally related to the arrival of the couple’s first baby. The couple has bought a house and is now arranging the shipment of the material belongings they left behind in Manchester. While Yolanda is reluctantly accepting that her son is not coming back to Spain as she expected, Roger continues to take advantage of his Spanish passport. He has settled in a place he and his family, including the dog, soon expect to call home.

Conclusion: Already Home … but Feeling Away from Home This chapter has explored the role of care work in caregivers’ homemaking practices in the context of mobility/immobility and the role of the ongoing pandemic in their daily experiences of home. Drawing on Yolanda’s life story and the narratives of several members of her family, the chapter has shown that care work provides migrants with the financial resources to make a living, acquire citizenship and reunify a family. By looking after elderly people and neonates for over twenty years, Yolanda has also been able to negotiate a space for her and her family in Spanish society. By caring ‘with love and dedication’, which is how Yolanda describes her work, she has gained the respect, admiration and appreciation of many of her patients, their families and members of the community. Such expressions of affection have been instrumental in her attempts to make Madrid and Spain home. Yolanda’s narrative, however, does not idealize the role of care in the making of a home in the transnational space. Her account directs our attention to the many struggles and complexities migrants experience when attempting to transform a place into a home. While some of these are shared by people living within transnational families, such as leaving family



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members behind (Vullnetari and King 2008; Horn 2019) and the struggle to emotionally reconnect with kin after spending years apart (Hunter 2016), others are specific to care work. Having little time to care for oneself and one’s family, notably amongst those working double shifts (Bastia 2015), and the emotional impact of doing a job where patients are dying on a regular basis, are only two notable examples. As expected, many of the struggles to feel at home when performing care work have become much more overwhelming as coronavirus has put care workers on the frontline. Yolanda is only one example of how the ongoing pandemic can potentially shape experiences of home and homemaking practices amongst care workers. After working around the clock, Yolanda goes back to her place but struggles to feel at home in it. This is because the virus threatens not only the sense of security and comfort she used to attach to the domestic space before the pandemic, but also her sense of family. For many months, her arrival in the domestic space has been perceived with anxiety and fear. Affective practices such as kissing and hugging family members and sharing dinner were replaced by practices of compulsive cleaning to kill any potential virus and social distancing within the domestic space to avoid spreading the virus at home. Remarkably, during the peak of the pandemic and after catching the virus, Yolanda found herself living in isolation in her room. Initially, it was only a practice she adopted to minimize the risk of spreading the virus. Then, everyone in the house became concerned about Yolanda bringing the virus home. The fact that she spends more of her time with those patients at greater risk of being infected by coronavirus and that many of her patients have died because of the virus increased the level of fear amongst family members. At some point, when she felt treated like a ‘stinky’ person, Yolanda struggled to see whether the social distancing at home was her choice. All those practices overwhelmed her everyday experiences of home and created distance between family members. More generally, Yolanda’s experience powerfully reveals that the sense of security and familiarity (Hage 1997) and the sense of control (Boccagni 2017b) often attached to the home cannot be taken for granted, and especially not in the context of extraordinary events such as the ongoing health pandemic. For many months, Yolanda and her family have been feeling neither safe nor in a familiar space in their apartment. The risk of being infected with the virus and all the new domestic practices adopted during the pandemic have made the rooms less homely and have even sometimes made it unhomely. Besides, some members of the family no longer have control over the family space; this is notably the case with Yolanda’s youngest, who was asked to vacate his room and give it to his ill grandfather.

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All in all, the whole house/home environment was rearranged and re-negotiated amongst family members. Beyond the domestic space, the feeling of being at home was also disrupted. At the beginning of the pandemic and especially during the first and second waves, when hospitals and care workers were overwhelmed with the number of patients and deaths, Yolanda did not have time to engage with neighbourhoods and the city as she used to and it disrupted her sense of attachment to people and places across Madrid. Although the struggle for home was already a feature of Yolanda’s life in both Peru and Spain, the pandemic has made those struggles more significant. For over a year, the house, the neighbourhood and the city have suddenly lost the home feeling she regularly attaches to those places and their inhabitants. Finally, it is worth highlighting that Yolanda’s life story is an invitation to look at the mobilities/immobilities–home nexus beyond individualistic approaches. As discussed throughout the chapter, the family dynamics and negotiations are vital for better understanding how the mobility of some members either open up or deter other members’ opportunities to move. Yolanda and her family’s struggles for home during the pandemic also encourage us to look at the mobilities/immobilities–home nexus beyond the national and transnational space. We must put more emphasis on those perhaps easily perceived as ‘insignificant’ movements, for example, moving within one’s house or building, as they can potentially affect our home feelings. Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, and has recently finished a three-year postdoc at the HOMInG Project, University of Trento. His research interests include home and homemaking, conflict-induced displacement, migration and mobilities, and ageing. Recent publications include ‘“Physically Sheltered but Existentially Homeless”’ (Migration Studies, 2021), ‘Remaking a Place Called Home Following Displacement’ (in The Routledge Handbook of Place, Routledge, 2020), Thinking Home on the Move (co-authored, Emerald Publishing, 2020), ‘Where the Heart Is and Where It Hurts’ (Refugee Survey Quarterly, 2019) and ‘“My Soul Stills Hurts”: Bringing Death and Funerals into the Ageing-Migration-Home Nexus’ (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2022).



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Note   1. Under this visa scheme, the employer sponsors the visa applicant. For the first two years, the renewal of the visa is subject to either the extension of the work contract or the provision of a new one.

References Adey, Peter, et al. 2021. ‘Pandemic (Im)mobilities’, Mobilities, online first. Ahmed, Sara, et al. 2003. ‘Introduction. Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration’, in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg. Baldassar, Loretta. 2007. ‘Transnational Families and the Provision of Moral and Emotional Support: The Relationship between Truth and Distance’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 14: 385–409. Baldassar, Loretta, Laura Ferrero and Lucia Portis. 2017. ‘“More like a Daughter Than an Employee”: The Kinning Process between Migrant Care Workers, Elderly Care Receivers and Their Extended Families’, Identities 24(5): 524–41. Bastia, Tanja. 2015. ‘“Looking after Granny”: A Transnational Ethic of Care and Responsibility’, Geoforum 64: 121–29. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. 2006. Home. London: Routledge. Boccagni, Paolo. 2017a. ‘At Home in Home Care? Contents and Boundaries of the “Domestic” among Immigrant Live-in Workers in Italy’, Housing Studies 33(5): 813–31.  . 2017b. ‘Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives’, in Mobility & Politics. Palgrave Macmillan US. Boccagni, Paolo, and Loretta Baldassar. 2015. ‘Emotions on the Move: Mapping the Emergent Field of Emotion and Migration’, Emotion, Space and Society 16: 73–80. Cresswell, Tim. 2021. ‘Valuing Mobility in a Post COVID-19 World’, Mobilities 16(1): 51–65. England, Kim, and Isabel Dyck. 2012. ‘Migrant Workers in Home Care: Routes, Responsibilities, and Respect’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102(5): 1076–83.  . 2016. ‘Global Care at Home: Transnational Care Workers Caring for Older People in Toronto’, in Katie Walsh and Lena Näre (eds), Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age. London: Routledge, pp. 227–38. Escrivá, Angeles. 2016. ‘Transforming Conceptions of Care at Home: Ageing Moroccan and Peruvian Migrants in Spain’, in Katie Walsh and Lena Näre (eds), Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age. London: Routledge, pp. 201–13. Hage, Ghassan. 1997. ‘At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-Building’, in H. Grace et al. (eds), Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West. Marrickville: Pluto Press, pp. 99–153.

156    Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia Horn, Vincent. 2019. Aging Within Transnational Families: The Case of Older Peruvians. London: Anthem Press. Howe, Anna, Andrew Jones and Cheryl Tilse. 2013. ‘What’s in a Name? Similarities and Differences in International Terms and Meanings for Older Peoples’ Housing with Services’, Ageing & Society 33(4): 547–78. Huang, Shirlena, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Mika Toyota. 2012. ‘Caring for the Elderly: The Embodied Labour of Migrant Care Workers in Singapore’, Global Networks 12: 195–215. Hunter, Alistair. 2016. ‘Emotional or Instrumental? Narratives of home Among North and West African Seniors in France’, in Katie Walsh and Lena Näre (eds), Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age. London: Routledge, pp. 75–86. McLeod, Carmen, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw and Brigitte Nerlich. 2020. ‘Fearful Intimacies’, Anthropology in Action 27(2): 33–39. Näre, Lena. 2011. ‘The Moral Economy of Domestic and Care Labour: Migrant Workers in Naples, Italy’, Sociology 45(3): 396–412. Olakivi, Antero, and Miira Niska. 2016. ‘Constructing Homelikeness: Migrant Caregivers and the Politics of “Activation” in Public Care Provision in Finland’, in Katie Walsh and Lena Näre (eds), Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age. London: Routledge, pp. 214–26. Parreñas, S. Rhacel. 2012. ‘The Reproductive Labour of Migrant Workers’, Global Networks 12: 269–75. Raghuram, Parvati. 2012. ‘Global Care, Local Configurations – Challenges to Conceptualizations of Care’, Global Networks 12: 155–74. Salazar, Noel B. 2014. ‘Migrating Imaginaries of a Better Life … until Paradise Finds You’, in M. Benson and N. Osbaldiston (eds), Understanding Lifestyle Migration: Theoretical Approaches to Migration and the Quest for a Better Way of Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 119–38. Stevens, Martin, Shereen Hussein and Jill Manthorpe. 2012. ‘Experiences of Racism and Discrimination among Migrant Care Workers in England: Findings from a Mixed-Methods Research Project’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 35(2): 259–80. Vullnetari, Julie, and Russell King. 2008. ‘“Does Your Granny Eat Grass?” On Mass Migration, Care Drain and the Fate of Older People in Rural Albania’, Global Networks 8(2): 139–71.

PART III

Tastes of Home Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

Food recipes and, more generally, food practices, including ways of cooking, serving and sharing, can travel in people’s memories and be activated at any time through the senses. They are simply part of the cultural baggage that moves with people (Cruz 2014) and as such they make us rethink borders and boundaries as spaces of intermingling and creativity even as they transcend political or territorial borders. Food practices can potentially be recreated in any place to which migrants may attach ideas of home, that is, the domestic surrroundings, the neighbourhood, the city and beyond. Besides travelling in one’s memories and practices, actual food can travel across borders through mechanisms such as ethnic markets (Manekar 2005; Renne 2007) and food remittances (Crush and Caesar 2017). Those mechanisms can be instrumental to migrants’ desire to recreate their food practices on the move; in recreating such practices, they create and sustain transnational connections (Beagan and Chapman 2011). The possibility of reproducing one’s food practices in the transnational space, however, should not be romanticized. In a single city, migrants’ food practices can be both celebrated and rejected. They may be welcomed in the so-called ‘ethnic’ restaurants and ‘ethnic’ markets as they expand the range of food available in a society and create business opportunities. They can be also unwelcomed in the very building or community in which migrants dwell. The smell of one’s ‘home-made’ food or even simply the way it is consumed in a public space – for example, with one’s hands rather than with cutlery – can lead to conflicts between neighbours and perhaps multiple forms of exclusion and segregation (cf. Bonfanti et al. 2020). Whatever the case, food is one of the salient themes that the more than two hundred migrants and refugees we have been working with over the last four years have consistently reported when thinking about home and

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sharing their experiences of mobility. While commonly evoking memories of homelands and affects, their narratives demonstrate the significance of food for both feeding one’s body and feeding one’s soul. The three life stories published in this part showcase how, by cooking, eating and sharing food, those on the move may experience the sense of being either at home or away from home. A piece of bread may have the power to bring us back home, which may have different meanings for those who are ‘grounded’ and those who are on the move. As Amra Sabic-El-Rayess and Laura Sullivan (2020: 34) beautifully put it, ‘bread is the smell of home – of everyone’s home … bread is comfort. It is stability. It is unity … [the brioches baked by her mother] smell like sweet, yeasty heaven.’ All those practices are likely to be observed in both migrant and non-migrant communities and perhaps more generally amongst those who are living in their communities of origin and those who are on the move. By putting the emphasis on the home–food–mobility nexus, however, the contributors to this part are making the case that food practices are significant in everyone’s experience of home but acquire particular resonance for those who are on the move. The three contributions powerfully show that food practices matter for both those who move to flee war and those who move in the search of personal or professional development. Based on the life story of Makda, an Eritrean who left Asmara in 1989, two years before the end of the war for independence that Eritrea fought against Ethiopia, Aurora Massa explores the role of ‘Lemlem Kitchen’ in re-writing the history of Eritrean food in London. Makda’s life story stresses the influence of the different places to which she attaches feelings of home on how she sees herself as an individual in the world and as a Black woman who is part of the Eritrean diaspora in the United Kingdom. Having lived more than two-thirds of her life abroad, Makda’s culinary practices and engagement with food are not only informed by her childhood memories in Asmara, where her mother used to enrich her recipes with the flavours of her journeys to countries such as Sudan, Lebanon and Egypt. Her food practices are also shaped by her journeys and experiences in two of the world’s most multi-ethnic food markets: New York and London. Rather than emphasizing the authenticity of the so-called ‘ethnic’ Eritrean food, Makda embraces diverse culinary practices that make her food ‘local’ in London. As her narrative stresses, ‘Lemlem Kitchen’ is not only about selling food. It is essentially an opportunity for Londoners and customers from every corner of the world to learn about the history of Eritrean food and better understand the meaning, smells, tastes and flavours of ‘Black food’. Based on the life story of Sumant, a Sikh man from a land-dispossessed Kashmir family working as a chef in a prestigious Indian restaurant in London, Sara Bonfanti shows how internal and international mobility



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interact in the making of a home. By cooking to feed inquisitive middle-class foodies in cosmopolitan London, Sumant positions his food, his culture and himself in a social and cultural space in which he wishes to belong. His culinary practices, and more generally his life story, reveal the entanglement of colonial history, family relationships and the gendered distribution of power amongst his family members. Sumant is proud of being a chef and welcomes the opportunity to showcase his culinary skills in the restaurant, where his cooking skills can be appreciated by employers and international customers. With notable exceptions, such as when cooking Kashmiri ‘Mutton Pulao’ and ‘saffron poached pears’ in his flat in London to be sent to his twin brother in Kuala Lumpur, Sumant is not so much inclined to cook at ‘home’. Cooking is very much a responsibility of his busy wife, who, after spending the day working at Heathrow, doubles her shift at ‘home’ preparing a meal for her beloved chef husband and children. Needless to say, for Sumant cooking at ‘home’ is not like cooking for customers. Food, in this case, seems to be mainly for biological sustenance and reinforcing traditional gender roles. Overall, Bonfanti’s chapter shows us how Sumant’s long-developed cooking skills have not just placed him and his family in London. By cooking and actively being part of the British Indian diaspora, this family has been able to overcome racial and class inequalities inherent in the colonial legacy of Indian cuisine. The life story of Paola, an Ecuadorian woman with a Spanish passport who has been living in Manchester since 2015, closes the book. Her narrative reveals how, by cooking, serving, eating, sharing and selling food, migrants are not only evoking memories of previous homes, but also actively transforming their current places of settlement into homes. The chapter shows how food plays a primary role in Paola’s homemaking practices within and beyond the domestic space. By cooking her grandmother’s recipes at home and selling and serving the food in public venues, Paola has been able to ameliorate feelings of loneliness and depression and become part of a community. Her food has also served to make members of the Ecuadorian community feel at home and has led to international customers embracing a new gastronomic culture. The chapter shows how food practices reproduced in the transnational space are often replete with patriotic symbolism. An everyday recipe shared with family in the domestic space of one’s homeland to ‘simply’ nourish the body may be loaded with allegory, and even become an expression of national identity, when cooked and shared among the same people in the public space of one’s host-land. In this sense, the analysis of food practices displayed by migrants allow us to better understand the diverse ways in which culture and national identity interact. They disclose migrants’ everyday representation of their culture and can also awaken sentiments of nostalgia and patriotism. Overall,

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Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia’s discussion illustrates further how the taste and smell of food have the power to connect memories and practices of home across multiple places and create the opportunity for migrants to simultaneously experience home as both grounded and mobile (Ahmed et al. 2003). Makda, Sumant and Paola’s life stories are only three examples of the ways in which people on the move engage with food and the role of food in the making of a home. These stories, however, powerfully illustrate that food is not only a way of making a living in the transnational space, but fundamentally an attempt to display one’s culture, become part of a community and feel at home. By following Makda, Sumant and Paola’s mobile lives and food practices, this part pushes the boundaries within which the food–home–mobility nexus has been conceptualized (Abbots 2016; Ratnam 2018). First, they show how ‘ethnic’ food can play a significant role in the everyday lives of those on the move. Whether migrants cook to feed their families, for their own business or to satisfy the appetites of an international clientele, the very process of recreating a recipe from back home conjures up memories of home. Those memories, however, cannot be romanticized. Food also has bitter flavours and evokes struggles for home. As Paola’s narrative illustrates, a simple smell can remind us that the very person who inspired our cooking is dead and that we could not attend his or her funeral (cf. Perez Murcia 2022). The struggle to find the right ingredients in contexts in which ethnic commodity food chains are not well-developed for minority migrant communities also reminds migrants of the significant distance between their current settlements and their homelands. Furthermore, the life stories illustrate further the complicated relationship between food and nostalgia. As powerfully illustrated in the narrative of Sumant, food gives rise to nostalgia for one’s culture, tradition and landscape, but this cannot be interpreted as the desire to go back (cf. Hage 1997). None of the migrants reveal through their narratives a desire to return home to settle. A detailed analysis of their narratives also shows that the presentation of the food matters for understanding the home– food–mobility nexus. Back in Eritrea, India and Ecuador, those recipes may be perceived as ‘ordinary’ practices of cooking and serving. In England, by contrast, these practices are replete with meaning basically because they occur in a different place, a place where they are perceived as distinctive, and this distinctiveness can be the key to either success or rejection. In other words, what is perceived as ‘exotic’ in London and Manchester may be perceived as plain or ‘everyday’ food back in Asmara, Kashmir and Esmeraldas.



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These three chapters also contribute to highlighting the significance of food in homemaking for both women and men across generations. Sumant reproduces recipes and techniques from home, no less than Makda and Paola. Although narratives of female migrants dominate the literature on food and homemaking in the context of mobility, the experience of Sumant shows how those practices are also significant for men. This is not to deny the gender disparities in the distribution of gender roles and power in the domestic space emphasized decades ago by feminist scholars (cf. Ahmed et al. 2003), which are reproduced in Sumant’s domestic space, but only to challenge unfruitful gender divisions in relation to the role of food in homemaking in the transnational space. Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, and has recently finished a three-year postdoc at the HOMInG Project, University of Trento. His research interests include home and homemaking, conflict-induced displacement, migration and mobilities, and ageing. Recent publications include ‘“Physically Sheltered but Existentially Homeless”’ (Migration Studies, 2021), ‘Remaking a Place Called Home Following Displacement’ (in The Routledge Handbook of Place, Routledge, 2020), Thinking Home on the Move (co-authored, Emerald Publishing, 2020), ‘Where the Heart Is and Where It Hurts’ (Refugee Survey Quarterly, 2019) and ‘“My Soul Stills Hurts”: Bringing Death and Funerals into the Ageing-Migration-Home Nexus’ (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2022).

References Abbots, Emma-Jayne. 2016. ‘Approaches to Food and Migration: Rootedness, Being and Belonging’, in J. Klein and J. Watson, The Handbook of Food and Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 115–32. Ahmed, Sara, et al. 2003. ‘Introduction. Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration’, in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg. Beagan, Brenda, and Gwen Chapman. 2011. ‘Food Practices and Transnational Identities: Case Studies of Two Punjabi-Canadian Families’, Food, Culture and Society 16(3): 367–86. Bonfanti, Sara, Aurora Massa and Alejandro Miranda-Nieto. 2019. ‘Whiffs of Home. Ethnographic Comparison in a Collaborative Research Study across European Cities’, Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 2: 153–74.

162    Part III Crush, Jonathan, and Mary Caesar. 2017. ‘Food Remittances: Rural-Urban Linkages and Food Security in Africa’. Working paper. London: IIED. https://pubs.iied. org/sites/default/files/pdfs/migrate/10793IIED.pdf (last accessed 8 September 2022). Cruz, Gemma T. 2014. ‘Journeying (Together) in Faith: Migration, Religion, and Mission’, in Toward a Theology of Migration. Content and Context in Theological Ethics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hage, Ghassan. 1997. ‘At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-Building’, in H. Grace et al. (eds), Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West. Marrickville: Pluto Press, pp. 99–153. Manekar, Purnima. 2005. ‘“Indian Shopping”: India Grocery Stores and Transnational Configurations of Belonging’, in James L. Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell (eds), The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 197– 214. Pérez Murcia, Luis Eduardo. 2022. ‘”My Soul Stills Hurts”: Bringing Death and Funerals into the Ageing-Migration-Home Nexus’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Online first. 1–17. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2022.2115626. Ratnam, Charishma. 2018. ‘Creating Home: Intersections of Memory and Identity’. Geography Compass, 12(4). Renne, Elisha P. 2007. ‘Mass Producing Food Traditions for West Africans Abroad’, American Anthropologist 109(4): 616–25. Sabic-El-Rayess, Amra, and Laura Sullivan. 2020. The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival. New York: Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER

7

Cooking Multiple Homes by Revisiting Eritrean Food in London The Story of Makda Aurora Massa

You know, Lemlem Kitchen is not just about food, it is also about changing our history, the history of our food, and making it accessible to people that didn’t know about Afrofood before. —Makda

Makda is an active and talkative woman who was born in 1973 in Asmara, Eritrea. Following in the footsteps of hundreds of thousands of other Eritreans, in 1989, at the age of sixteen, she left her well-off family and her hometown to flee the war for independence that Eritrea fought against Ethiopia for nearly thirty years (1961–91). She reached the United States with a student permit and was hosted by some relatives in Massachusetts and California until 1993, when she found a job as a fashion designer in New York City. Eleven years later, she moved to London to follow the British man who would become her husband and the father of her two daughters. I collected her life story on 26 November 2017 and 19 February 2018 in her house in the elegant suburb of Muswell Hill.1

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Introduction I met Makda on an autumnal Saturday afternoon in Lemlem Kitchen, her stall located in a street food market in North London. We had spoken on the phone a few days before and she had enthusiastically accepted my invitation to take part in my collection of migrants’ life stories. ‘However,’ she warned, ‘you must try my food first.’ When I reached her stall, she welcomed me with an asa fish iyu injera taco – a taco made with teff2 and garnished with battered cod, awaze (a hot mix of spices from the Eritrean and Ethiopian highlands), yogurt and pickles (figure 7.1). In the following hours, new and old clients popped in for a drink or a snack, often stopping by to hang out with Makda and her husband, despite the gloomy weather. By retracing the life story of Makda, this chapter aims, on the one hand, to shed light on the processual entanglement of food, a sense of home and subjectivity that occurs in biographical trajectories marked by multiple relocations in different countries. On the other hand, it shows how foodways and their routes can be the way through which the politics of identities and history are handled from below in an attempt to challenge postcolonial power relationships among groups in multicultural settings. In recent years, the literature on food and migration has explored the multiple ways in which migrant-run grocery stores, food trucks and restaurants can enable owners, workers and customers to make themselves at home in their countries of settlement (see, among others, Hage 1997; Manekar 2005; Saber and Posner 2013; Miranda-Nieto and Boccagni 2020). As nodes in the circulation, preparation and consumption of food from back home and as assemblages of material culture, tastes and smells (Abbot 2016), these settings can emotionally and symbolically evoke memories that connect to one’s country of origin (Sutton 2001). As social spaces where certain forms of sociality can be enacted, they can elicit feelings of domesticity and familiarity in the present and can represent a homely form of intimacy that serves as a base for confronting everyday life. In this chapter, food, its presentation and the material arrangement of the stall do not constitute the continuity and reproduction of Makda’s past life, but are, rather, indicative of change, creativity and hybridization (Renne 2007; Frost 2008), which arises from her long migratory trajectory of reflecting on and making her ideas of home and herself. Food is indeed closely intertwined with collective and individual processes of identification, feelings of belonging and forms of recognition. However, the tangle of food, belonging and subjectivity should not be defined in a static way, since individuals have discontinuous and sometimes conflicting identities, which reflect the intersection of their gender, class, age and multiple transnational attachments (Beagan and Chapman 2013). The creativity that



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Makda infused into Lemlem Kitchen’s cuisine was closely related to her intersecting positionalities and multiple senses of belonging and allowed her to give continuity to the numerous shifts that she experienced during her mobile life course. Food was thus a fil rouge that connected her ‘here and now’ with her previous home experiences. Following in the wake of numerous other authors (see, among others, Al-Ali and Koser 2002; Ahmed et al. 2003; Boccagni 2017), I understand home not as a static experience and a fixed space, but as a set of transportable and changing ideas and values, and feelings of familiarity, belonging and intimate connectedness to a certain place. In this chapter, I am interested in analysing mobile people’s sense of home in relation to their self-representation processes, feelings of belonging and movements across spaces (Ralph and Staeheli 2011; Erdal 2014), acknowledging that home is crucial for their senses of self and wellbeing (Rapport and Dawson 1998). Indeed, Makda emphasized the influences that the different places where she felt at home have had on her life story and her way of thinking about herself and her place in the world. Lemlem Kitchen’s street food was not just a legacy of her childhood and adolescence in Eritrea, but a patchwork of all the home experiences she had had in the different places where she lived. Condensed in food, all these experiences were used by Makda not only to feel at home in London but also to leave her mark in one of the global capitals of the multi-ethnic food market and its super-diverse social environment (Vertovec 2009), in which people of different ethnic and migratory backgrounds, classes, genders, ages, educations and so on cohabit. Indeed, while offering new recipes to London’s ‘cosmopolitan foodies’ (Johnston and Baumann 2015), she also aimed to challenge the widespread representations of migrants, Black minorities and their food. As the quote that opens this chapter clarifies, Lemlem Kitchen was ‘not just about food’; it was also ‘about changing the history of our food’, with ‘our’ referring both to people with an Eritrean background and to wider Black minorities in London.

‘This Is London Food’ In Tigrinya, which is Makda’s mother tongue, lemlem is a wish, a personal name and a term that means ‘green’ and ‘fertile’. Makda chose to call her stall restaurant ‘Lemlem’ because of what that word evoked for her: the pistachio-coloured buildings in the centre of Asmara, the luxuriant English countryside and an aunt named Lemlem who ran a food truck in Asmara when Makda was a child. Just as Auntie Lemlem worked hard to take care of her kids by selling sandwiches and tea in the city centre, so did Makda,

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who, in 2015, left her well-paid job in the luxury fashion industry to open her street food stall in order to be able to spend more time with her young daughters. As she proudly said, ‘I’ve been able to balance my business and my family life; in London, that’s very rare, very rare.’ Indeed, the activity only kept her busy on weekends. On the other days, while preparing her street food in her huge kitchen at home, she could take her daughters to school, make them lunch and help them with their homework. The dimension and the shape of the kitchen, as well as the quality of the nearby schools, were some of the reasons that led her and her husband to move into that particular house a few years earlier. ‘Having this space is very important, because we use it for everything, working, family, kids’, she commented. As the focal area of Makda’s dwelling, the kitchen allowed her to mediate between her gendered domestic life and her entrepreneurial aspirations. As a threshold between the private and public spheres, it played an important role in strengthening Makda’s feeling of home both in her house and in London. Cuisine is part of the history of the women in her family, not only through her aunt, but also through her mother, who is a passionate cook and traveller and expanded Makda’s ‘planet of food’ from when she was a child. ‘The food I ate in my home when I was growing up is not the food that people eat in every Eritrean household’, she explained, adding that at home her mother reproduced recipes she had collected in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon or Egypt while visiting relatives. The same openness and creativity about food characterized Lemlem Kitchen, where Makda did not serve the usual Eritrean food, but supplemented its flavours ‘with a modern twist’, to use her words: the size, the appearance of the food, the ways of serving it, as well as the names of the dishes and the recipes, were creatively reshaped to adapt to the burgeoning London street food market panorama. This is well represented by the idea of the ‘injera taco’ or ‘afrotaco’, for which the large, sour, fermented flatbread that is a fundamental part of the cuisine of the Eritrean and Ethiopian highlands is miniaturized into a taco-like shape, as well as of the ‘shiro fries’ – chips topped with a spicy chickpea stew – and the ‘awaze wings’ – hot chicken wings. However, what may seem to be a mere marketing strategy was in fact the manifestation of a more complex issue, which, for Makda, was both intimate and political: ‘doing justice’ to Eritrean and African food so that people could ‘start seeing it through a different eye’. Food and cooking traditions can be divisive in the context of migration (Wise 2010; Rhys-Taylor 2013; Bonfanti, Massa and Miranda-Nieto 2019). Contact with new and unknown food, with its smell and taste, can be problematic both for those who move somewhere and those who experience the arrival of foreign populations, eliciting culinary disgust that

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may in turn express and reinforce the social boundaries marking the difference between the Self and the Other, leading to forms of marginalization, discrimination and xenophobia. As empirical investigations have demonstrated, migrants can hide or neglect their cuisine to conceal their origin (as in the case of migrants from Iran; see Harbottle 1997), or because they consider their gastronomy to be unrefined (as in the case of migrants from Ghana; see Tuomainen 2009). Although ‘ethnic food’ has prestige nowadays and there are plenty of Eritrean restaurants in London, many of which already attract ‘cosmopolitan eaters’ (Hage 1997), Makda referred to the fact that these restaurants are usually cheap and seek to reproduce a ‘traditional’ experience of Eritrean tastes. Through Lemlem Kitchen, she sought to innovate Eritrean gastronomy by bringing the influences of the London foodscape to the surface in her products. She stated: It’s not just saying ‘this is Eritrean food’, you are not going to find tacos … if you go to Eritrea, but it’s an introduction to what Eritrean food tastes like. This is London food: if I didn’t live here, I wouldn’t do this. … And also, we want people to believe that it’s OK to change. Don’t be scared of change. The main thing is not to lose the essence of what you are. Things change all the time.

Figure 7.1. An injera taco, London, 2017. Photo by Aurora Massa.

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This excerpt from Makda’s narrative sheds light on how the invention, preparation and serving of injera tacos should be understood as a result of how she had practically negotiated her sense of home and her sense of self in London up to that point. Although the city hosts a huge number of people from Eritrea – highly differentiated in terms of year of arrival, political orientation, religion and so on – Makda was not particularly interested in getting in contact with these diasporic groups. After all, in comparison to the majority of people with an Eritrean background in the United Kingdom in the 2000s, her mobility trajectory was rather unusual, as she had moved from a life that she loved in New York to join her future ‘White British’ husband and have new experiences in another country. In her narratives, the years she spent in London were characterized by the leisure she could enjoy with her husband when they were ‘DINKY’ (double income no kids yet), by her work environment and by her close relationships with the ‘amazing mums’ of her daughters’ schoolmates. In other words, in contrast to the mainstream representations of migrants as people with low incomes who live in poor conditions, associations that are conveyed by the homogenizing and general label of ‘migrant’, she portrayed herself as a wealthy person from Eritrea with high social and cultural capital. Thus, the changes she made to her food were closely related to the changes she experienced in London and, following her life story back, those she experienced in the United States, as the next section shows.

Food as a Game Changer Makda had moved to the United States at the age of sixteen and, after finishing the last two years of high school, went to university. Similar to what she said about her life in London, she told me that in the United States she was ‘never worried about losing her identity’ and did not try to ‘be always around my people’. Curious and open since childhood, she preferred ‘to interact with people from other parts of the world’, to discover their food and their music. Recalling the eleven years she spent in New York from 1993 to 2004, she told me about her friends from France and Puerto Rico, her love of Mexican food and her passion for Spanish Harlem and Black American jazz clubs. In this regard, Makda emerged as a cosmopolitan subject, not only based on her mobile life trajectory (from Eritrea to the United States to England), but also based on ‘micro-cosmopolitanisms at the urban scale’ (Radice 2015), which she experienced in London, New York and also, as we will see shortly, Asmara. Her cosmopolitan attitude was also evident when I asked her how she built her sense of home in these different places:



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I am still building it, I think. I think the sense of a home comes from the state of mind and stability. … You can’t help but have a sense of home wherever you are, because you are building your life. But I have always seen my world as my home, rather than the specific place, but I think how I find it mainly is integrating with other cultures, with the people that are there, not by separating myself, saying this is me, and this is what home feels like, or this is my idea of home.

Thus, Lemlem Kitchen was an expression of her ongoing search for a home, as ‘home’ is never a stable achievement, but is always in the process of becoming. As shown above, her economic enterprise allowed her to mediate between her role as a mother and woman and her career, but it was also an attempt to act in and contribute to the public sphere of the town in which she lived. Here I am not referring to the efforts to domesticate and appropriate public space that often characterize ‘ethnic’ restaurants or food trucks (Kaller et al. 2016), but rather to Makda’s desire to change the image of Black minorities in London. Makda’s aspiration was for Lemlem Kitchen to be something new that could open up ‘not only the mentality of Eritrean people, but also of African people in general’, change their attitude towards food and innovation, and inspire other African cooks to follow in her footsteps. Following Arjun Appadurai (2013), we should point out that the capacity to aspire is not equally distributed but connotes the more affluent sector of society. Drawing on her multiple forms of high capital (economic, social, cultural and cosmopolitan), Makda, through Lemlem Kitchen, expressed her aspiration to become a producer of sophisticated and upscale food, demonstrating that other African chefs could do the same. If we acknowledge the intimate relationship between cuisine and group identities, Makda’s re-elaboration of popular Eritrean recipes and her attention to food plating techniques could be understood as efforts to positively influence the widespread derogatory images of Eritrea, Africa and Black people, through her search for representations that reshape these stereotypes. By showing the potential for Black people in London to be innovative and to become protagonists of the high-level contemporary culinary culture, she was, at the same time, acting in the social environment of her new home. While attempting to negotiate a sense of home, Makda was also creating a social space in which she could recognize herself and be recognized not just as an Eritrean, or as a denigrated or victimized migrant. In the British context, characterized by multicultural politics, Makda aimed to express her peculiar diversity, defining herself using a multiscale self-identification as ‘an Eritrean, an Eritrean person living in London, a Londoner’, who has a shifting yet fully embedded sense of home.

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Lemlem Kitchen was also an attempt to give herself and other Eritreans a reason to be proud: I get a lot of emails and feedback from younger [Eritrean] people, like always so proud. … Right now, when you hear about Eritrea, Lampedusa or refugees, listen, listen, and there is nothing to be excited about. You know, except sorrow and politics, there is nothing else. So, when their friends tell them: ‘Do you know what I saw? Eritrean food on Time Out! [a popular guide covering events, entertainment and culture in cities across the world]’ …, it is the same thing as when somebody wins cycling. For me, it is to be able to provide them with something to be proud of, it is a game changer.

Although on other occasions she spoke about her participation in the tragedy of Eritrean migrants coping with brutal border regimes, in this excerpt she expressed the importance she attached to the possibility of talking about Eritreans in the diaspora in other terms. It is in this respect that she created a link between her street food and cycling, the most popular and internationally successful Eritrean sport.

Heritages and Authenticities Although she had gone back to visit Asmara only four times in twenty-eight years and had few close relatives still living there, Makda continued to call Eritrea her homeland and had deep feelings of belonging to it. When she said that she wanted ‘to take African food to another level’, this ‘other level’ concerned not only her ‘here’ and ‘now’, but also her ‘there’ and ‘then’. The war that would later force her to leave her country against her will was sometimes missing from her childhood memories, and Asmara appeared in such memories as a modern and cosmopolitan town. She told me that she grew up going to the cinema, watching international movies and football championships, and listening to pop music, and that her home was always full of ‘things, stories or whatever’ that her parents had brought from their travels abroad, including one of the first non-professional video cameras. ‘When I was in Eritrea, I was already kind of, well, I was aware of the world … so I was not so much … “this is Africa and this is Europe”, … I’ve always felt like I belong to this world, I don’t belong to Eritrea’, she commented. At the same time, living in a war-torn country meant that she had never had the option of imagining a future for herself in Eritrea: ‘I didn’t grow up in Eritrea feeling like, “Oh, yes and after I finish high school I will go to university, I wanna be this, I wanna stay in my country”; we didn’t have that choice, we didn’t have that option.’ Thus, as



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a result of her parents’ discourses and the migration of other family members, she said that the idea that ‘one day I’m going to leave’ was always at the back of her mind. This sense of modernity and connectivity with the (so-called Western) world that characterized the years she spent in Asmara was also fuelled by the traces of the sixty-year-long Italian domination over various aspects of urban daily life. ‘I grew up in Eritrea, but at the same time, I grew up in a little postcolonial Italy’, she explained. ‘I was like going for a cappuccino, and eating the best mortadella sandwich, ricotta … When I was growing up, it’s a time period where all the people that grew up in Asmara, they are called Asmarino, … you go on the streets of Asmara and everybody is “Ciao, allora?”, drinking their espresso.’ In the words of Makda, as in those of other people I met who grew up in urban Eritrea, the legacy of Italian colonialism was an everyday experience, which emerged in the urban structures of Asmara (declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017 for its modernist architecture), in the language and in the consumption of certain foods. Like elsewhere in Africa (see, for example, Tuomainen 2009), the prolonged contact with a different cuisine during colonialism changed eating habits, introducing new herbs (such as rosemary), habits (like drinking macchiato or espresso) and foods, both in the daily diet (such as pasta or spaghetti) and on special occasions (such as pizza or lasagne). These elements make up a background that is neither inert nor routinized. It can rather be described as a set of practices and discourses that people mobilize to define themselves, build symbolic boundaries between themselves and their others, and orient their migration strategies, for example, by shaping semi-public spaces such as restaurants (Massa 2018). Evoking a colonial past and her modern and globally connected life in Eritrea allowed Makda to retrospectively reconstruct certain aspects of the sense of home she experienced in her childhood, as well as allowing her to enrich how she represented herself both at that time and today. In this respect, it is significant that she opposed her urban (and, I would add, middle-class) background to the Eritrean countryside and its typical food. She stated that she was not interested in cooking ‘old traditional village food’, because she aimed to recount the ‘other histories’ in Eritrea. From her perspective, these histories were part of her personal life story, a story that differed from that of her grandparents or great-grandparents. If for them colonialism was marked by suffering and oppression, her postcolonial experience told a different story, showing how the ‘bad colonial past’ could be creatively and positively resignified: Do I feel bad about it [colonialism]? No, because that’s part of my history, that’s what I am, … of course it is a bad thing, [but] at the

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same time it is our history. Let’s embrace it. A lot of other good things came out from it as well. So even Eritrea and Asmara and the food culture I grew up with, my mentality, my ideas, which have shaped me, everything comes with the colony, it’s my life, that’s why I am.

This attitude towards the past was concretely expressed by the shape of her stall, which reproduced the Agip Service Station in Godaif, Asmara, designed by an Italian architect in the 1930s (figure 7.2). As a small version of the Agip Service Station, the stall was covered with pastel-coloured stucco and had an oval shape and two levels of round windows. A counter and six high stools ran around its external curved wall, on which slates bearing the menu were hung; inside, there were food and drinks, as well as some ‘typical’ Eritrean dishware. Asmara’s architecture is another of Makda’s great passions. It was only once she reached the United States that she became aware that she came from one of the ‘most beautiful, stunning cities in the world’, to use her words. Indeed, when she was a child, she thought that all Africa looked like Asmara because nobody had ever mentioned the peculiarities of those buildings to her. For Makda, designing her stall as a homage to the Agip Service Station was a way of combining food history with architectural history, as well as a means of challenging ‘clichéd notions of African architecture’. This reflected her approach to food and her ideas about ‘tradition’ and ‘change’, ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’. ‘What does it mean to be authentic?’ she asked. ‘What’s modern today is gonna be tradition tomorrow. Take for example the areki.’ She explained to me that she offered all clients a shot of areki, an anise-flavoured alcoholic drink that is very popular in Eritrea. While areki is locally considered to be a typical Eritrean beverage, she argued that, from a historical point of view, it was not invented by the Eritrean people but arrived in the country with the Turks, during the time of the Ottoman Empire. ‘[I]f you are looking through food anthropology, actually none of the things that we have in Eritrea come from Eritrea; [they] come from Egypt, come from Italy, India’, she pointed out. At a time when food preparation and consumption are often considered (and frequently institutionally designed) as ‘cultural heritage’ – namely as a discrete set of goods or practices that can be claimed or possessed by governments, preservationists and communities at local, regional or national levels (Brulotte and Di Giovine 2016) – Makda depicted foodways as marked by hybridizations, changes and movements. By adopting this processual approach to cooking habits, and by highlighting the relevance of food and peoples’ mobilities across the globe, Makda aimed to include her restaurant in a wider and longer history of food fusion, which resonates with her personal story.



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Figure 7.2. Lemlem Kitchen’s stall, London, 2017. Photo by Aurora Massa.

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Moreover, this attempt was oriented not only towards herself and the past, but also towards the collective present and future. For example, in speaking about her customers, Makda accorded special importance to the young people born in London to foreign parents or grandparents, in particular from India and Turkey. In her view, her food could allow them to explore similarities between Indian curries and berbere (a mix of spices from the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands) and between the Turkish alcoholic drink raki and the Eritrean areki; they could thereby detect familiar tastes in allegedly exotic food, discover past mobilities and contacts, and thus become more aware of their personal and collective histories. Even more significantly, she sought to reach the children or grandchildren of Eritrean migrants with her food: They think Eritrean food is something that the mum makes at home for older people, and they don’t engage with it very much, but when I use the same spices that they eat at home, and I’m putting it with fries they used to eat when they go to McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken … They feel connected with it because I’m speaking their language.

To put it simply, she expected her food to serve as a bridge between their home in London and their ‘back home’; between their everyday food and the flavours of their parents’ homes. As such, Lemlem Kitchen offered resources to help them in the search for what we could call ‘the taste of their homes’, a search that Makda started in the United States when she always carried a small bottle of hot Tabasco sauce in her handbag to make the tasteless and new American food tastier and more familiar.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried to capture the continuous shifts between the personal and the political, the intimate and the public, the past and the present, that characterized the way in which Makda wove together the story of her life during our dialogues. In these contextual and situated narratives, food acted as a material symbol through which she built her own ‘biographical illusion’ (Bourdieu 1986), giving coherence to the different spaces that she had passed through and the experiences she had lived. By overcoming the migrant/non-migrant binary, her case shows how food not only informs and allows people to negotiate the meaning of their lives, their homes and their sense of self, but also transforms them and invests them with new connotations. Through her creative culinary practices, Makda connected the different stages of her mobility and biographical



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trajectory with the multiple positionalities of her present subjectivity (in terms of gender, class, race and nationality). By relating her ‘being on the move’ to the spatial movements connotating the history of food, her narrative gave nuance to and overcame some consolidated dichotomies, such as authenticity/inauthenticity and tradition/modernity, by bringing to the fore discontinuities and hybridizations. In this way, the injera taco emerged as an implicit vehicle for indicating her changing and dynamic sense of home, and for re-examining the social boundaries between groups and their public representations. In an influential article about multiculturalism, food and migrant home-building in Sidney, Ghassan Hage (1997) demonstrates how the Australian media’s celebration of migrants’ food as a positive example of multiculturalism is often a form of classy ‘gastro-tourism’ or ‘cosmo-multiculturalism’ that entails little engagement between hosts and migrants. This lack of engagement relegates migrant voices to the passive role of providers of the kinds of food that please the Orientalist tastes of White consumers. It leads to a ‘multiculturalism without migrants’, which means that migrants are not active subjects, and so the hegemonic AngloAustralian identity is not modified. With its search for high standards and its emphasis on creativity, Lemlem kitchen is, to some extent, an expression of this cosmo-multiculturalism. However, Makda’s active reinvention of food cannot be easily included in Hage’s critique. Indeed, while we should acknowledge that ‘multiculturalism’ is mainly a model suited to accommodating ‘cultural diversity’ rather than social inequalities, we should also recognize that the socio-economic positions of those who come from former colonial countries are extensively stratified. Thanks to her social, cultural and economic capital, Makda was able to actively participate in the London gastroscape, contributing something new to it. Firstly, Makda targeted the super-diverse London population, well beyond its White middle-class consumers, as she intended to create a dialogue with migrants’ children and grandchildren and to challenge reified widespread representations of migrants and Black people. Makda is well aware of how ‘ethnic food’ is usually represented as traditional and unalterable, in contrast to which Western cuisine is considered to be more open to change and innovation. Thus, her idea of modern and cosmopolitan Eritrean food is an attempt to break a ‘grammar of civilization’ that implicitly survives in cosmopolitan liberal London and differentiates between the ‘modern Western us’ and the ‘traditional others’. To put it differently, Makda has transformed ‘gastro-tourism’ into an implicit political critique of a top-down view of multiculturalism, and into a sort of ‘gastro-solidarity’ that seeks to make transversal connections and fight anti-migrant racisms.

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Secondly, by reinventing Eritrean food, she sought to bring her ‘Eritrean’ home closer to herself and thus to the person she became in the course of her biographical trajectory. By connecting places, times and experiences that might at first appear to be distinct, the injera tacos emerged as something more than an adaptation to London tastes. They were a means by which she negotiated her sense of self, but without claiming an ideal authenticity. Makda rejects predefined labels such as that of ‘migrant’ or ‘Eritrean’, as well as rigid versions of the past, instead trying to enhance other stories and other representations. And it is ultimately through these stories and these representations that Makda cooks her taste of home. Aurora Massa is a research fellow and lecturer at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’. She is a social anthropologist with expertise in migration studies and mobility within and from the Horn of Africa. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Trento under the ERC-HOMInG research project and at CRN-IRPPS. Her main fields of inquiry include travelling experiences, conditions of im/mobility, nationalism, the homemaking process and research methodology. She has conducted ethnographic research in Ethiopia, Italy, the United Kingdom and Sweden. Her works are published in English and Italian. She co-authored the book Ethnographies of Home and Mobility. Shifting Roofs (Routledge, 2020).

Notes   1. This chapter is based on data collected as part of the ERC project HOMInG (grant no. 678456). It also draws on the long-term multi-sited ethnography that I conducted at different stages of the migration route from Eritrea.   2. A cereal cultivated in the Eritrean-Ethiopian highlands.

References Abbot, Emma. 2016. ‘Approaches to Food and Migration: Rootedness, Being and Belonging’, in James Klein and Jacob Watson (eds), The Handbook of Food and Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 115–32. Ahmed, Sara, et al. 2003. ‘Introduction’, in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–19. Al-Ali, Nadje, and Khalid Koser. 2002. ‘Transnationalism, International Migration and Home’, in Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Khoser (eds), New Approaches to Migration?



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Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home. London: Routledge, pp. 1–14. Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. New York: Verso Books. Beagan, Brenda L., and Gwen E. Chapman. 2011. ‘Food Practices and Transnational Identities: Case Studies of Two Punjabi-Canadian Families’, Food, Culture and Society 16(3): 367–86. Boccagni, Paolo. 2017. Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives. New York: Palgrave. Bonfanti, Sara, Aurora Massa and Alejandro Miranda-Nieto. 2019. ‘Whiffs of Home: Ethnographic Comparison in a Collaborative Research Study across European Cities’, Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 2: 152–74. Brulotte, Ronda L., and Michaela A. Di Giovine (eds). 2016. Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage. London: Routledge. Erdal, Marta Bivand. 2014. ‘“This Is My Home”: Pakistani and Polish Migrants’ Return Considerations as Articulations about “Home”’, Comparative Migration Studies 2(3): 361–84. Frost, Nicola. 2008. ‘“Strange People but They Sure Can Cook!” An Indonesian Women’s Group in Sydney’, Food, Culture & Society 11(2): 173–89. Hage, Ghassan. 1997. ‘At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-Building’, in Helen Grace et al. (eds), Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West. Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press, pp. 99–153. Harbottle, Lynn. 1997. ‘Fast Food/Spoiled Identity: Iranian Migrants in the British Catering Trade’, in Pat Caplan (ed.), Food, Health and Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 87–110. Kaller, Martina, Marcus Mayer and John Kear. 2016. Delicious Migration. Street Food in a Globalized Word. Rockville: Global South Press. Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann. 2015. Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape. New York: Routledge. Mankekar, Purnima 2005. ‘“Indian Shopping”: India Grocery Stores and Transnational Configurations of Belonging’, in James L. Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell (eds), The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 197– 214. Massa, Aurora. 2018. ‘Back in (Whose?) Time. Traces of Italian Colonialism in Eritrean and Somali Restaurants and Cafés in Northern London’, Homing: The Home–Migration Nexus, 8 January. https://homing.soc.unitn.it/2018/01/08/ aurora-massa-back-in-whose-time-traces-of-italian-colonialism-in-eritrean-andsomali-restaurants-and-cafes-in-northern-london/. Miranda-Nieto, Alejandro, and Paolo Boccagni. 2019. ‘At Home in the Restaurant: Familiarity, Belonging and Material Culture in Ecuadorian Restaurants in Madrid’, Sociology 54(5): 1022–40. Radice, Martha. 2015. ‘Micro-Cosmopolitanisms at the Urban Scale’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 22(5): 588–602.

178    Aurora Massa Ralph, David, and Lynn A. Staeheli. 2011. ‘Home and Migration: Mobilities, Belongings and Identities’, Geography Compass 5(7): 517–30. Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson (eds). 1998. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg. Renne, Elisha P. 2007. ‘Mass Producing Food Traditions for West Africans Abroad’, American Anthropologist 109(4): 616–25. Rhys-Taylor, Alex. 2013. ‘The Essences of Multi-Culture: A Sensory Exploration of an Inner-City Street Market’, Identities 20(4): 393–406. Saber, Galia, and Rachel Posner. 2013. ‘Remembering the Past and Constructing the Future over a Communal Plate’, Food, Culture and Society 16(2): 197–222 Sutton, David. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford: Berg. Tuomainen, Helena M. 2011. ‘Ethnic Identity, (Post) Colonialism and Foodways: Ghanaians in London’, Food, Culture and Society 12(4): 525–54. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. ‘Super-Diversity and Its Implications’, Journal Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(6): 1024–54. Wise, Amanda. 2010. ‘Sensuous Multiculturalism: Emotional Landscapes of InterEthnic Living in Australian Suburbia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36(6): 917–37.

CHAPTER

8

Sumant

The Home Recipe to Make a Move – the Life Story of a Sikh Man in Britain Sara Bonfanti

I gulp as my host takes the leftover roti, inhales its buttery smell and groans something I cannot understand … He opens the window abruptly and tosses a bit of the roti to his daughters’ rabbits, which come running across the balcony. Sumant’s inspection of the doggy bag that I took from the restaurant the night before is over. As he had warned me in advance, ‘there is no such premise that can claim being a fine diner in Southall … only pretending dhabas1 here’, and as a stellar Indian chef, I ought to trust him. He might have moved to Southall to accommodate his family in London’s Little Punjab, but the bustle of the City ignited his aspirations. Next time, I am invited to the premier club where he works in Westminster, currying flavours to another level. Born in Kashmir, the northernmost region of the Indian subcontinent, in the territories currently administered by India (the rest being split between Pakistan and China), Sumant has lived in England for the past twelve years. A crimson dastar (turban) on his head reveals his affiliation with Sikhism. He sports the dastar more easily now that he lives among the diaspora in Britain than he ever could in his home village, where Sikhs represent a tiny minority caught up in the conflicts between the Muslim majority and the Hindu rulers. Having moved to London after responding to a job advert seeking an experienced Indian chef (he had by then travelled across India to train in food catering), he managed to reunite with his wife and small

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daughter in Surrey. They later moved to Wembley and finally bought a new flat in Southall when the family welcomed a second baby. As I developed a friendship with his wife, and the couple repeatedly hosted me during my research time in the borough, they provided me with wonderful food and tales. Sumant’s life history was delectable indeed: his journeys were based on a food capital that hinged on the aftermath of the British Empire and its postcolonial tastes.

Introduction In relation to certain standard tropes in transnational migration studies, Ben Rogaly (2020: 43) argues that ‘biographical narratives contain a built-in historical perspective that, by situating an individual’s cross-border moves across an individual’s whole life, has its own disruptive power’. Sumant’s life story illuminates the meaningfulness of movement on multiple levels. Spatially: within India, from India to Britain, and across the greater London region. Socially: from a landowning family of origin in decline and a frantic search for advancement in the hospitality sector, to the attainment of better work opportunities and housing conditions for himself and his young family. Sumant’s oral history of upward mobility detailed journeys and stopovers, class and racial inequalities. His constant references to foodstuffs and foodways were not just a recollection of flavours, but an effective account of his day-to-day investment in preparing a tasty life for himself and his dear ones. Although I met my informant through networks of Sikh acquaintances in Southall (when I responded to a notice for a room to rent posted by his wife), the journeys and homemaking of this Indian man in West London made for a sui generis experience of British Asianness (Werbner 2004). Being a first-time migrant who reunited with his Indian wife and created a nest for his budding family in Southall did not mean that he wanted to ‘drown in the Sikh diaspora saga’ of the borough, a BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic) district where Punjabi was the most common spoken language (Baumann 1996; Bonfanti 2019). While the couple did speak Punjabi at home, they enjoyed interacting in English and strived to remain distinct from their co-ethnic local residents because they felt that the community might limit their aspirations. In fact, the apartment they had just moved into (the lounge floor was still uncoated and covered up with a Kashmiri knitted carpet) clearly conveyed their class ambitions: a three-bedroom flat, with ‘all mod cons with en-suite master bedroom’, words Manjit repeated like a mantra, in a residential block off the Grand Union Canal. Although the district has been populated by Indian



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migrants since the 1950s, with a strong Sikh prevalence (Singh and Tatla 2006), and the large Havelock Gurdwara is situated one mile down the road, the condo that led Sumant to apply for a mortgage was an unconventional development in that kaleidoscopic area (Nasser 2004). Beyond neglected Victorian houses, the young couple had bought their family property on the fourth floor of a six-floor tower that was akin to a gated community: there were no names on the doorbell panel, just a padlock with digits, and there was a soundless lift that took one up home, ‘safe and far from it all’. It was there, benefitting from their hospitality, that I learnt how much the hospitality industry, namely food catering, could become a meaningful path in life and an effective strategy for a person to move. What follows is a reconstruction of Sumant’s biography. I will first discuss his coming of age in Kashmir under trying conditions and then his internal mobility within India in order to qualify as a skilled chef. The next stage in the life begins with my interviewee’s love marriage with Manjit. He proudly recounts the cooking trial he passed in Mumbai that allowed him to move to London and work as a hotel kitchen manager. The theme of ‘trialling’ recurs in the tales my host recounted: transiting from lower to higher job positions as a chef, through which he has reunited his family in the United Kingdom and partaken in the making of the new Indian culinary scene in contemporary Britain. ‘To fairly tell’ (Benei 2010), my informant’s words placed food at the crossroad of mobility and identity, but also at the intersection of work and love (McDowell 2008). His life story disrupts conventional migration models and confirms how a ‘mobility approach’(Rogaly 2015) is a tool that researchers can actually borrow from participants themselves, as we learn how they navigate and make sense of their lives across times and spaces. Sumant’s life tale was particularly challenging as it was recounted in a mixed modality: partly in a conjugal interview I conducted with him and his wife at home (Hertz 1995) and partly after his day shift at the restaurant where he worked. On the one hand, the settings of our exchanges (Jackson and Russell 2010) represented the private and public sides of his homing experience in Britain. On the other hand, his cooking practices and the tastes of the food he prepared (and shared) revealed how crucial gastronomy was to his sense of wholeness and mastering of the place. While culinary practices may recreate an identity in the diaspora (Parveen 2016), the locations where Sumant cooks reveal the entanglement of colonial and family relations and their affects and power distribution. If the kitchen is often the heart of people’s homes, British Indian kitchens are the engines of an entire culture of mobility, with its roots in imperial times and its routes in postcolonial movements (Fielding 2014; Palat 2015). The alchemy that takes place in Desi2 kitchens relates to nations

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and economies, politics and history, and of course human relationships. Sumant’s life story serves as proof of his multiple ‘geographies of movement’ (Lawson 2000), mixing stories with recipes for delicacies that fuse memories, desires, people and places.

Life-Story Analysis I followed up with Sumant’s family for about three years, recording his life story through recurrent conversations at his home and in the borough. Yet, within the scope of this chapter, I will focus on the biographical narratives that he delivered on two specific occasions. The first conversation occurred while having dinner together in the family’s lounge as his spouse cooked according to his instructions: she juggled skillets on the fire, while he was stretched out on the sofa with a glass of whiskey (evidence of his hypermasculinity, which Manjit had warned me about in advance with a playful smile). The second conversation occurred as we returned home after his day shift at the restaurant, where I had enjoyed a superb meal, which proved how premium Indian cuisine could appeal to any palate (even that of a Mediterranean vegan foodie like myself). My gastronomic critique was scrutinized by the commis chef himself and his boss, who wondered whether I might review his ritzy restaurant. In these settings, not only were specific Indian foods being prepared and consumed (for and by different hosts/guests); his London kitchens at home and in the workplace were also the everyday backdrop of this ambitious chef’s recollections and tales.

Bittersweet Memories As a guest in their house who paid a small amount of rent for my room and kept the kids entertained, one quiet night my host consented to reply to my research queries just to please his wife. Weary at first, he stretched out his legs and became loquacious as the biographical interview proceeded. Had it not been for the lamb stew that took Manjit hours to prepare and that Sumant eagerly awaited, I doubt that his recollections would have been so expansive. Sumant was born in Baramulla, an Indian town in Kashmir close to the border with Pakistan, where the Muslims make up the majority, the Hindus are a sizeable minority and the Sikhs resist as a micro-minority despite decades of alienation in the country. While the area used to be a separate kingdom (ruled by Sikh maharajas for centuries), the Partition of India left an inerasable mark on inter-group relations, determining



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who had to leave, who was in charge and thrived, and who could stay but with limited freedom. For more than sixty years, internally displaced people have roamed this buffer zone between two superpowers, where bloodshed has been recurrent in spite of curfews and military patrols (Malhotra 2007). According to the latest census data, Sikhs account only for 1 per cent of the local population: rather than religious persecution, it is economic hardship that threatens their permanence in the Kashmir valley after generations of relative social harmony. In Kashmir, Sikhs are just … we are basically nowhere on the map. We are just staying there because we got our lands there ages ago. My grandparents used to have rights and authority, because they owned land. But now, we have gone to a small stretch. … We couldn’t keep those lands. Because these people [Indian authorities] want control over the land. So, they will come and tell you: ‘We need this land. We give you this money.’ You cannot oppose.

Sumant’s parents still live in a lodge in the countryside. There are apple trees growing on the hills and saffron crops that are tended by local women farmers on the plateau. When he showed me pictures on his smartphone, I could understand why he wanted to go there for their honeymoon. While his bride would have preferred a warmer destination, she gave in to her groom and they enjoyed a luxury package holiday, including a ‘romantic stay in a boathouse on Dal Lake’ (her words) and ‘the finest restaurants in Srinigar’ (his words), the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir. On that occasion, Sumant had professional pictures taken of his parents’ house, which helped him unearth details from memory. Look, how do you call these? Plant pots, they’re flowerpots! Over three hundred, my mother has them planted and bloomed every year since I can remember. See: we’ve got tulip, marigold, rose, hollyhock … and all names I forgot. We also have a kitchen garden, vegetables grow eight months a year: capsicum, cucumber, shaan, okra … Gar firdaus bar-rue zamin ast, hamin asto, hamin asto, haminast! It is indeed true, if there is a heaven on earth then it is here, here and only here … If only not for the people who live there …

When he spoke of his homeland, Sumant shifted from love for his family and the landscape, which he expressed in his mother tongue,3 to anxiety about constant extortion by the authorities and the family’s inability to shield its estate properties. There was no single foe in his recollection, but he recalled the painful lifelong anticipation that it would be better to leave home sooner or later.

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The Muslims never told us to go away. But then, if you’re staying in a small place, you need a border for yourself, I think. When they start throwing stones over the fence and you go out and say you want peace … they say they want peace too, but they will tell you with a gun. Retaliation is the law of rule in Kashmir. … It’s violence every day, not just at the border. It’s all over Kashmir. It’s a big, big headache for the Indian government. Heartbreaking for us.

Trying to soothe her husband, Manjt hands each of us a cup of Noon Chai, a pink tea that is traditional in Kashmir. Boiling gunpowder green tea with milk, cardamom and a pinch of baking soda turns it rose-coloured and savoury. Sumant pushes the copperware tray away and sticks to his whiskey. I take a sip of the tea. He is quick to comment: ‘That is what Kashmir tastes in my mouth: sweet like strawberries, briny like salt on wounds.’ With no other way of providing for themselves, Sumant and his twin brother were sent to study hotel management in Bangalore, where they stayed with their father’s brother-in-law. When I enquired whether he had moved elsewhere in India because of the constant low-level violence at home, Sumant replied: Not really, I moved because the hotel industry was not there. I mean, I did my hotel management course and then after that, I couldn’t do anything. You can’t do anything in Kashmir because the tourism industry is gone. And for myself I needed to work. … My elder sister was very smart, and my father paid much to have her study at dentistry school. My brother and I were rascals: we were caught breaching the curfew a few times and hardly escaped jail. We weren’t troublemakers, just didn’t have the lakhs to stay out of trouble. … We knew we could not count on our land. It’s small and acres are going bit by bit. We had to find another occupation for ourselves.

Training in Hospitality The twin brothers travelled from India’s far north to the far south in order to study; apparently, they did so for a mix of personal and professional reasons. While his brother Pardeep was always in the mood to party, Sumant got a sense early on of the career possibilities that ‘hotel management and catering’ could offer. Bangalore sounded like a reasonable choice: it is known as India’s Silicon Valley but also the pub capital of the country. People in Bengaluru have always liked to have a good time. They used to go out on weekdays and drink regularly which was very unusual in other cities. Bengaluru has not been a high cultural city … So, bars and



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pubs were always a place for people to come together, network and enjoy. … Similarly, if you get a bar or restaurant on top of a commercial property, it adds the commercial value of that company: this is how our uncle made a bang!

Sumant spent four years at college in Bangalore, learning principles of hospitality that he then he applied when he was training at his uncle’s restaurant. Pardeep went into the accommodation sector (nowadays he is a hotel manager), while Sumant preferred to stay in the food sector. Not only did he enjoy cooking as a creative activity, but he also believed that cooking skills would give rise to endless job prospects. And that proved to be the case. In an effort to move closer to home, the twins travelled to Delhi, with qualifications in their hands and great expectations. For the next ten years, Sumant practised as a skilled chef in the city, progressing from shabby to better-quality restaurants, with the advantage of being culturally attuned to the local Punjabi-speaking Sikhs. That cultural attunement made it easier to find work and to mingle, including with the woman he would go on to propose to. Delhi was a big change, we [his brother, a cousin and him] took to rent shared rooms, nothing fancy but furnished. We worked shifts and never slept. The pay was miserable, first job I made 3,000 rupees a month, 30 pounds. Then it jacked up, but nothing to compare with England: first year here, I earned 3,000 pounds a month … When not on the job, we went out and met people, just to enjoy and network. … Manjit, I saw her first in the shop, they sold chef wear there … clothing, aprons and uniforms. I went in everyday for a week before asking her out! … Then I almost went off drinking. I still drink, but not as much as I used. She made me a very respectable man.

Four years younger than Sumant, Manjit was a young Sikh woman, born in Pakistan and raised in Punjab by liberal parents, who challenged her when she reached the age of twenty-one: either she would consent to an arranged marriage and run their family grocery store, or she would move out and find a way to provide for herself. Manjit chose to move out. Manjit and Sumant are part of that Indian generation that grew up in the 1990s, when the country’s economy opened up to liberalization and self-initiative was crucial for reaping the opportunities that the global market and the rising new middle class offered (Fernandes 2000). The couple dated each other for two years. Both of them wished for a transnational move to the West some day. Many of their Punjabi peers shared the same mobility drive: seizing the chance ‘to go out’, dreaming of the United States, settling for the United Kingdom if the opportunity arose (Blunt 2007; Cross 2014). Manjit had to fight her father’s resistance in order to marry Sumant. In her father’s eyes, a

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Kashmiri Sikh who had almost lost his landowner status was not an appealing candidate for marriage. Nevertheless, the wedding was celebrated in Amritsar, with blessings from both sides of the family. The newly-weds went to stay in Kashmir temporarily, in accordance with patrilocal habits. When Manjit got pregnant with her first baby, their yearning to move became ‘like pining for the moon’. Both spouses recount how they spent hours surfing the web, searching for job adverts that would allow them to fulfil their desire to leave and make a new start abroad. They still debate who it was that found that glossy advert in a newspaper seeking a skilled Indian chef for a job in London. Manjit leaves the pot on the hob and draws closer to confirm how things happened. Sumant proudly recounts how he went to Mumbai for a cooking trial and got the post straight away. One day I was on the computer looking into things like jobs in the UK. I looked up the job that said ‘Chefs required for UK’. I sent an enquiry. They gave us numbers to talk in Mumbai … So, I sent in my resume and two, three days after, the person there, she called me up. She asked where I was based, qualifications … all those things. They needed a kitchen manager in London for a four-star hotel; she was looking for a guy with ten years’ experience. The designation fitted me, but I had to prove it. So, she told me: ‘Why don’t you come give me a trial? On Friday in Mumbai. I’ll give you all you need: tickets, board, lodging, set of cooking here in Mumbai.’ I said, ‘Fine. I will come.’ And I went there. She gave me seven to eight dishes to cook at her home. And I cooked: a full-course Indian menu; cocktails also. She tasted everything, she tested twice chutneys and korma. And then she told me: ‘OK. You are qualified and we are ready to hire you. So, what are you going to do? What do you think?’ ‘I’ll tell my wife!’

Sumant’s internal mobility within India served as a rehearsal for his later transnational migration to the United Kingdom, in a capability-aspiration framework, as Hain de Haas (2021: 27) recently postulated: ‘Embracing a more “modern” lifestyle only prompts aspirations to migrate if people believe that their life goals cannot be fulfilled locally within the foreseeable future and if they believe that better opportunities exist elsewhere.’ Manjit had relatives who had been settled in Birmingham since the time of the Partition and Sumant had friends from his school days who had successfully relocated in London. ‘An apple doesn’t fall far from tree’, he used to say, accounting for Indians’ widespread expectations of moving to Britain. If their ‘dream zone’ (Cross 2014) in which to live and work was not on the map of India, they could expand the map. Postcolonial migrations might have decreased in the twenty-first century, but Sumant’s hard

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work had paid off, as he had hoped it would. With that working permit, he moved to London within a fortnight.

A Career as an Indian Chef in London Observing the working lives of young Indian men employed in the hospitality sector in London, Adina Batnitzky, Linda Mcdowell and Sarah Dyer (2008) investigated a particular form of global mobility that differs from the unskilled versus high-skilled migrant model. Similarly, Sumant’s first experience of work in Hounslow questions middle-class Indian notions of masculinity, as well as the hotel staff recruitment process, which is often gendered, racialized and economically selective. Unlike the single males considered in the article though, my interlocutor was already a husband and a father whose masculinity depended not so much on the job itself as it did on the job serving as an effective platform for family reunification. By the time that his hotel kitchen manager contract finished, Sumant had undergone another selection procedure in North London, where a fulltime chef was required to work in a tandoori4 restaurant. After six months’ probation, he was offered an indefinite work contract, which resulted in him getting a visa that allowed him to reunite with his wife and daughter. Sumant moved from Hounslow to Wembley, where he rented a room in a shared house for his family of three. Despite the seemingly happy ending, he felt that his cooking talent was being wasted and that their accommodation in the city was inadequate. ‘Navigating the city’ necessitated negotiating boundaries across and within gender, race and class (Herbert 2008), beyond what the ambitious couple could predict. Wembley, we stayed two, three years. Salary was OK, but the room way too small for our needs. … Wife had found a job in Ealing and it was time for Naila [their daughter] to start playschool. If I stayed on the job, we would never move out of the swamp.

Circumstances changed when Sumant went ‘for another trial’, on the recommendation of his old teacher from Baramulla, who had also moved to London ten years earlier. While his first and second workplaces had been run by South Asians, catering for a middle-income clientele, Sumant had not yet given up on his aspiration to get an even better job. In a late-night conversation with Manjit, I learnt that their ambitions included higher pay and thus the possibility of getting a loan and buying a house of their own. Our late dinner was over and I could barely keep my eyes open when Sumant summed up his gastronomic philosophy:

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People just eat because they’re hungry. They like coming home and having food with family or eating out with friends. They don’t know the difference. When I say I’m a chef, they think I am a cook. It’s not just cooking. Anyone can do it, if they set to. … It’s about cookery. A chef applies the right techniques in the process of cooking and transforms foodstuff into a dish. … And if you are a fine eater, you taste that dish and find the cuisine in it, the region, heritage. See, tandoori is one thing, if the order is for wazwan5 is another … Come to my restaurant next Tuesday and I’ll prove what I mean.

‘Pairing carefully sourced Indian spices and regional flavours with seasonal ingredients from across the British Isles.’ So reads the welcome banner of the gourmet Indian restaurant where Sumant has worked as a commis chef. He started working there in 2016, seven years after relocating to London. Situated in a historically listed building, my waiter informs me that The Cinnamon Club has been an institution for creative Indian cuisine in London for twenty years. I used to eat out in Birmingham and enjoy balti6 bowls in simple family diners; by comparison, Sumant’s workplace looks majestic both inside and outside. He has reserved a table for me. There is linen napery on the sandalwood tables and portraits of colonial India on a sapphire-coloured wall. I skim the menu, hoping I can afford the feast. From appetizers to dessert, the tasting menu consists of seven courses, with a rest course midway. Three hours and two glasses of wine later (the sommelier recommended Italian Amarone to accompany my selection), I wrote a field note about my lunch: tandoori king prawns with pumpkin chutney and masala peanuts; chargrilled halibut fillet, Mangalore-style curry sauce; mango and mint salad with roasted cumin granita. No need to fret about the bill as the commis chef ensured that the meal was on the house. That day, I did not run into the CEO of the restaurant (the first of a luxury chain), who had become a food celebrity on British television. But I spotted his executive chef nodding towards me, after Sumant had explained that my visit was for ‘research purposes’. The two Bengali owners had built a glitzy enterprise that brought together tradition and modernity, the exotic and the local, the pleasure of Indian food (one single tag for all flavours from the subcontinent) for a cosmopolitan clientele, wealthy and sophisticated, whether Asian, British or foreign. If ‘going for an Indian’ sounds like an everyday suggestion for dining out in Britain (takeaway or delivery), the divide between natives and migrants has largely been filled, insofar as the local customers are British Asians or white Britons who consider Indian food their own national cuisine. While this domestication of ethnic food has taken place over two centuries (Buettner 2008), its most recent development can be summarized by the parodic article ‘The Taj Mahal in the High Street’, according to which

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Indian restaurants are the tastiest example of diasporic popular culture (Highmore 2009). I argue that the top Indian restaurant where Sumant works reveals his intention to take advantage of this food culture scene and reclaim the capital that he himself embodies: an Indian chef who is a rising star on the way to overcoming class and racial inequality (McDowell 2008; Rogaly 2020). To date, commis chef at The Cinnamon Club is the best position my informant has been able get. I went for a long walk and waited for him after his day shift ended. As we drove home from Central to West London, I dared to ask what his salary was. Salary is competitive? Acha [Yes …] More than ever, I enjoy my work. It is a challenge every day, with private parties, the banquets we held, the customers we serve. Delegates from Westminster drop in, [they] also invite foreign leaders. … We have to maintain high food quality standard and reputation. People consider commis chef a junior position. It is not. Commis chefs assist different station chefs in the kitchen and supervise all work is done right. Ingredients, procedures and timing: I have such responsibilities!

Home Cooking for Whom? Anthropologist Jack Goody (1998) has pointed to the fact that, in addition to ingredients and recipes, the prerequisite for the development of a significant cuisine is a large amount of ‘adventurous eaters’: travellers who enjoy life abroad but also like to reproduce (and modify q.b., meaning ‘just enough’) their eating habits in new settings. The case of South Asians is emblematic. On the one hand, Sumant does cater to adventurous eaters (be they co-ethnics or not), performing a professional role that makes him the breadwinner of the family. On the other hand, his personal relationship with Indian food and his use of his cooking skills in the private space seem controversial. Not only does he shy away from any restaurant that fails to conform to his ideal quality standard; he has also grown reluctant to attend the Gurdwara and enjoy its langar, the free meal that is served to anyone in the Sikh temple as a sign of equality. Food plays a significant role in the social lives of diasporas: It can create a sense of continued belonging and reiterate affiliations to ‘home’. … Food preferences have been demonstrated to facilitate the construction of discrete migrant subjectivities and group identities by both inclusion – in that they reaffirm relations between migrants – and exclusion – in that others in the host region do not share migrant tastes. (Abbots 2015: 215)

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While Manjit observed more than once that her husband had become a picky eater in public, she knew that food played a huge part in their memories as migrants: Honey, you act such a teaser if we go out for eating. At friends’ or never mention another bar. Thanks God you are not holding that against to me! … Your mother never had this hassle with your father: you had servants once, and a kitchen maid, to please your bellies! … Before they grabbed your lands, I mean, and the rest tumbled down…

Manjit and I spent more time together, enjoying women’s chai chats when she was off duty. There were controversial topics that she tactfully avoided in front of her husband, including conversations about food that could upset him, since he felt the art of cooking could change one’s fate. When all of us were at home, I sometimes felt like an awkward third wheel in a domestic row. Their haggling about gender roles was a constant, amplified by homeland memories and kinship networks that challenged or reinforced those roles. Photographs of Sumant’s parents were scattered all over the house, with framed pictures of the Kashmiri Valley instead of the guru portraits so common in Sikh homes. Within the modern Western layout of the flat, certain pieces of furniture revealed something about its occupants: an Indian-style bedroom with bed linen and cashmere curtains that Manjit’s mother-in-law had brought as a gift when she had last come to visit. ‘The one who’s perfect and ever right’, Manjit once exclaimed to her husband, who criticized her way of draping towels on the chairs to prevent them from being soiled, comparing her unfavourably to his dear mother, educated in colonial India, at a time when stains of food or drinks were fatal on the upholstery. ‘What is food without love?’ Punita Chowbey (2017) wondered, considering the micro-politics of food practices in the South Asian diaspora. The women in her study sometimes struggled to subvert gender oppression and negotiate more powerful positions within the household through food management. While, among British Asians, the home kitchen was more commonly occupied by women, who often reproduced their mothers’ recipes to please their husbands, children and other family members (Parvathi 2011), Sumant and Manjit’s marital relationship was also performed through a separation of food deeds. Since she worked at a Terminal superstore at Heathrow airport, she would do all the shopping for their home, including the food shopping. Sumant would compile a list of ingredients he might need if he wished to cook ‘a treat for their friends’; otherwise, she had free rein. For food lovers like them, they were sad to admit that they did not have much time to enjoy proper meals together. ‘I do shifts and grab sandwiches on the go. Our girls eat at the school’s canteen,’ Manjit



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Figure 8.1. The ancestors’ cupboard in Southall. Photo by Sara Bonfanti (2018).

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explained. ‘Sumant sweats at the restaurant six days a week. … When he gets home, he enters the kitchen only to be served.’ ‘Whatever is there, I’ll have it. It’s not that I don’t care,’ he retorted, ‘just I can’t complain.’ It was easy to understand how the daily grind of modern life had impacted their family eating habits and why they were resorting to packaged foods to get by. It surprised me that, on exceptional occasions, homemade food in the diaspora could still be made and shared as a transnational connector across large distances. About a year after my first stay, I visited the couple in Southall again. The girls were growing up quickly, the rabbits had gone and one night I was surprised to find Sumant cooking in his home kitchen. He looked tired but attentive. Manjit took me aside and whispered not to disturb him. His beloved twin brother had just signed a ‘dream work’ contract in Malaysia and his sister-in-law had organized a surprise party for her husband to celebrate his success. In the name of brotherhood and Sikh diligence, the chef was preparing Kashmiri ‘Mutton Pulao’ and ‘saffron poached pears’. The food would be frozen and sent from London to Kuala Lampur, which would take two days. Manjit had arranged for the transfer of the food at below-zero temperatures with colleagues at Heathrow. Sumant had procured the best organic ingredients from his classy restaurant to reproduce a sense of home. The next morning at breakfast, for the first time, the couple disclosed their long-term prospects. Sumant envisioned returning to India twenty years from now, once he had earned and paid enough taxes for a British pension. So far, he has only resolved to apply for British nationality. ‘For the girls’ sake, you know. They are from London … after all.’

Conclusion Sumant’s biography is a ‘moving story’ (Thomson 1999) insofar as an oral history of migration turns into a deep reflection on oneself in the world: one’s senses and affects, life course and environs. In addition, emphasizing his past internal mobilities in the homeland, and further life adjustments in the host-land (in terms of shifts across London to better houses and career advancement to superior restaurants), Sumant reframed his transnational migration from India to the United Kingdom as a step further in his lived translocal geographies (Brickell and Datta 2011). The idea of ‘mobility’ which my interviewee argues about refers not only to the sites that this Sikh Kashmiri man in London has crossed and inhabited, but also to the social mobility in relation to class and race that he has experienced. In particular, Sumant’s professional mobility illuminates the public discourses surrounding British Asian cuisine (from the trade-offs of spices and



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recipes to the rise of a creole curry culture), in a blend of colonial histories and postcolonial relations (Fielding 2014). Besides, Sumant’s personal biography merges the multiple meanings that Desi food entails for a diaspora family, from the taste of nostalgia to the transnational circulation of foodstuffs and the everyday reproduction of foodways (Parveen 2016). For an Indian chef in London, culinary practices simmer on the rift between cooking for customers and eating with dear ones, belonging to a racial minority and yet projecting oneself as an elite member of the diaspora. To conclude, Sumant’s his-story cannot be severed from his wife’s biography (Bennett and McAvity 1985). Not only has the couple overcome long spells of separateness across internal and international distances, but they have also arranged their mobile lives together, upholding common objectives and personal boundaries, despite intrusion from their extended kin, backbiting acquaintances and financial downturns. In response to my cheeky question, ‘What is the best recipe to make a move then?’, Sumant grins, looks at his wife naughtily and answers, ‘Lotus stem honey crush.’ The treat that he prepares every year on Manjit’s birthday is a honed version of what he used to enjoy at school. It was the recipe that helped him win her over. It has been a declaration of love that binds together times and places, that makes a marriage on the move taste like home. Sara Bonfanti is a migration scholar who is an expert on South Asian diasporas. With a background in Cultural Studies, she gained a PhD in Social Anthropology in 2015, conducting multi-site ethnography in Italy and India to analyse generational change among Punjabi transnational families. Keen on participatory approaches, her interests include kinship, ethical pluralism and media cultures, seen through intersectionality and visual methods. A visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, she has collaborated on the comparative ERC-HOMInG project based at Trento University since 2017. She has published widely in Italian and English, also co-authoring Ethnographies of Home and Mobility (Routledge, 2020).

Notes  1. A dhaba is a cheap, roadside restaurant, quite popular in Punjab. The expression that my informant let slip sounded to my ears like an ironic comment on the humbleness of Indian restaurants in Southall, despite whatever pretence of refinement the owners might engage in.

194    Sara Bonfanti  2. ‘Desi’ is used to describe the cultures and products of South Asia and their diaspora. It is derived from the ancient Sanskrit word for ‘homeland’. The term has been popularized by British Asians since the 1970s.   3. The Sikhs in Kashmir speak Punjabi, though Kashmiri is the official language, and Urdu is common in everyday communication.  4. A tandoor is a clay oven in which breads are baked (roti or naan) and spicy marinated meats are roasted (mostly Halal chicken or lamb). It is cylindrical in shape and fired to a high heat by wood or charcoal. Such ovens have been widely used across South Asia for centuries. Tandoori restaurants in the United Kingdom are predominantly run by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (Buettner 2008).  5. Wazwan is a rich, multi-course dish in Kashmiri cuisine, the ultimate formal banquet: once served at royal ceremonies, today it is presented to would-be in-laws on one’s wedding day. On another occasion, Manjit commented that wazwan was offered at her wedding, as if sumptuous food could compensate for financial distress.   6. A balti is a type of goat meat curry served in a thin, pressed-steel wok. Balti curries are cooked using vegetable oil rather than ghee, over a high heat in the manner of a stir-fry. They are said to have originated in Baltistan (north Pakistan) and have been established in the Midlands since the early 1970s (Palat 2015).

References Abbots, Emma-Jayne. 2016. ‘Approaches to Food and Migration: Rootedness, Being and Belonging’, in J. Klein and J. Watson (eds), The Handbook of Food and Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 115–32. Bonfanti, Sara. 2019. ‘Walking along in Southall: Changing Frames of a Fabled Ghetto in Greater London’, Lo Squaderno 53: 11–15. Trento: Professional Dreamers. Batnitzky, Adina, Linda Mcdowell and Sarah Dyer. 2008. ‘A Middle-Class Global Mobility? The Working Lives of Indian Men in a West London Hotel’, Global Networks 8: 51–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2008.00185.x. Baumann, Gerd. 1996. Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benei, Véronique. 2010. ‘To Fairly Tell: Social Mobility, Life Histories, and the Anthropologist’, Compare 40(2): 199–212. Bennett, Linda A., and Katharine McAvity. 1985. ‘Family Research: A Case for Interviewing Couples’, in G. Hayden and G. Whitchurch (eds), The Psychosocial Interior of the Family. New York: De Gruyter, pp. 75–94. Blunt, Alison. 2007. ‘Cultural Geographies of Migration: Mobility, Transnationality and Diaspora’, Progress in Human Geography 31: 684–94. Buettner, Elizabeth. 2008. ‘“Going for an Indian”: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain’, The Journal of Modern History 80(4): 865–901. Brickell, Kathrine, and Ayona Datta (eds). 2011. Translocal Geographies. London: Ashgate.



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Chowbey, Punita. 2017. ‘What Is Food Without Love? The Micro-politics of Food Practices Among South Asians in Britain, India, and Pakistan’, Sociological Research Online 22(3): 165–85. DOI: 10.1177/1360780417726958. Cross, Jamie. 2014. Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India. London: Pluto Press. de Haas, Hain. 2021. ‘A Theory of Migration: The Aspirations-Capabilities Framework’, CMS 9(8) (online first). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-020-00210-4. Fernandes, Leela. 2000. ‘Restructuring the New Middle Class in Liberalizing India’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 20(1): 88–104. Fielding, Stephen A. 2014. ‘Currying Flavor: Authenticity, Cultural Capital, and the Rise of Indian Food in the United Kingdom’, in R. Cobb (eds), The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1057/9781137353832_4. Goody, Jack, and John Rankine Goody. 1998. Food and Love: A Cultural History of East and West. London: Verso. Herbert, Joanna. 2008. Negotiating Boundaries in the City: Migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hertz, Rosanna. 1995. ‘Separate but Simultaneous Interviewing of Husbands and Wives: Making Sense of Their Stories’, Qualitative Inquiry 1(4): 429–51. DOI: 10.1177/107780049500100404. Highmore, Ben. 2009. ‘The Taj Mahal in the High Street’, Food, Culture and Society 12(2): 173–90. DOI: 10.2752/175174409X400729. Jackson, Peter, and Polly Russell. 2010. ‘Life History Interviewing’, in D. De Leyser et al. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Geography. London: Sage, pp. 172–92. Lawson, Victoria A. 2000. ‘Arguments with the Geography of Movement: The Theoretical Potential of Migrants’ Stories’, Progress in Human Geography 24: 173–89. Malhotra, Charu. 2007. ‘Internally Displaced People from Kashmir: Some Observations’, Indian Anthropologist 37(2): 71–80. McDowell, Linda. 2008. ‘Thinking through Work: Complex Inequalities, Constructions of Difference and Trans-National Migrants’, Progress in Human Geography 32: 491– 507. Nasser, Noha 2004. ‘Southall’s Kaleido-scape: A Study in the Changing Morphology of a West London Suburb’, Built Environment 30(1): 76–103. Palat, Ravi Arvind. 2015 ‘Empire, Food and the Diaspora: Indian Restaurants in Britain’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38(2): 171–86. Parvathi, Raman. 2011. ‘Me in Place, and the Place in Me’, Food, Culture and Society 14(2): 165–80. DOI: 10.2752/175174411X12893984828674. Parveen, Razia. 2016. ‘Food to Remember: Culinary Practice and Diasporic Identity’, Oral History 44(1): 47–56. Rogaly, Ben. 2015. ‘Disrupting Migration Stories: Reading Life Histories through the Lens of Mobility and Fixity’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(3): 528–44. DOI: 10.1068/d13171p.  . 2020. Stories from a Migrant City: Living and Working Together in the Shadow of Brexit. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

196    Sara Bonfanti Singh, Gurharpal, and Darshan Singh Tatla. 2006. Sikhs in Britain: The Making of a Community. London: Zed. Thomson, Alistair. 1999. ‘Moving Stories: Oral History and Migration Studies’, Oral History 27: 24–37. Werbner, Pnina. 2004. ‘Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30(5): 895–911.

CHAPTER

9

Paola

Performing Memory and Reproducing Food Cultures Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia

I do not see myself as a patriotic person. However, I realized that since I started to cook and sell Ecuadorian food abroad, I have been instinctively displaying the dishes next to the Ecuadorian flag. I see my food and the colours of the Ecuadorian flag go well together. —Paola

Paola was born in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, in 1980. She left Ecuador in 2000 at the age of nineteen and lived in the Catalonia region of Spain for eleven years. Following the financial crisis in Spain, Paola and her family sold their house and closed down a family-run restaurant where they used to serve Ecuadorian food. Paola went back to her hometown in 2011 and lived there for three and a half years. After facing family and financial problems, and difficulties adapting to her ‘own’ culture and feeling ‘at home’, Paola went back to Europe. Travelling with a Spanish passport this time, she and her family moved to Manchester in the United Kingdom, where they have been living since November 2015 and have recently been granted settled status. The collection of Paola’s life story started in May 2018 in Salford, Manchester, and included interviews with her partner in Manchester and family members back in Ecuador, conducted in 2019. Follow-up interviews have been conducted at least twice a year. All the material has been gathered in Spanish and only quotes have been translated into English.

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Introduction Food, mobility and home are intimately connected. Food recipes from one’s country of origin can travel across places and be reproduced by people on the move. As Mimi Sheller and John Urry (2006: 207) point out, ‘all the world seems to be on the move’ – and this does not only apply to people. Social and cultural practices, including food cultures, can be also mobilized and reproduced by migrants ‘as a way of building memory and maintaining identities with the home’ (Ratnam 2018: 7). The taste and smell of food can evoke migrants’ memories of very disparate but arguably significant places they have lived in. A single mouthful can stimulate the senses, conjure up vivid memories of home and bring those memories and sensations to their current places of settlement. In this regard, as Paola’s life story illustrates, cooking food from one’s country of origin in a transnational setting is not only an everyday domestic practice for feeding our bodies. It is also a social and cultural practice that connects migrants to the places that embody their connections to culture, identity, belonging and, ultimately, home. This chapter explores the extent to which and how food cultures shape experiences of home for people on the move. Although scholars have long debated the relationship between food, mobility and home (Hage 1997 and 2010; Obeid 2013), less emphasis has been placed on how migrants mobilize food practices from their countries of origin as an attempt to make themselves at home in the diverse places they inhabit while on the move. Based on Paola’s life story, the chapter argues that through the very acts of cooking, serving, eating, sharing and selling food inspired by recipes from their countries of origin in a transnational space, migrants do more than simply bring memories of home into the present. These shared actions and performances with food also display culture and identity, and fundamentally attempt to transform migrants’ places of settlement into homes. The reproduction of such everyday social and cultural food practices in the transnational space certainly gives rise to nostalgia for the people and places left behind, but such practices also constitute homemaking practices deployed by migrants in order to feel at home in the places they inhabit in the present and with the people in those places. Although conceptual debates regarding the terms ‘culture’, ‘nostalgia’ and ‘food cultures’ are beyond the scope of this chapter, it is useful to provide the reader with explicit definitions of their meanings in this chapˇapo Zmegacˇ (2011: 7), ‘culture’ denotes ‘an open ter. Drawing on Jasna C system of meanings that people constantly reinterpret, utilizing its resources for defining their own position in society’. This notion contests the use of culture as a homogeneous and fixed system of social codes and patterns



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of behaviour that can characterize individuals and communities from a specific country or ethnic group. More generally, as Clifford Geertz (1973: 14) stresses, ‘culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviours, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly – that is, thickly – described’. The term ‘nostalgia’ denotes a transitional phenomenon that ‘in its most straightforward sense as homesickness and longing for times past melds time with space’ (Radstone 2010: 188). As discussed below, a migrant’s longing for a place of origin does not imply a willingness to return to that place. Such a longing may help a migrant to create a home in the present and potential homes for the future (Hage 1997; Obeid 2013; Pérez Murcia 2020). Finally, and for the sake of simplicity, the term ‘food cultures’ denotes here the interconnected practices of cooking, serving, eating and sharing food inspired by recipes from one’s country of origin in a transnational setting. The corollary of this is that food cultures are reproduced and negotiated by migrants over time and space. Ultimately, food connects and blends cultures and in doing so transcends space and time (see Abbots 2016; Zara et al. 2020). After a brief description of Paola’s life back in Ecuador and her motivations for moving, the following sections of this chapter illustrate the multiple roles that Ecuadorian food cultures have played in Paola’s attempts to transform both the private and public spaces she has inhabited into homes during her transnational life. The chapter ends by discussing the broader implications of Paola’s life story for further conceptualizations of the relationship between food, mobility and home. It is suggested that through the mobilization of food cultures across a variety of scales, including the domestic and the public realms, as well as one’s country of origin and the transnational space, migrants bring memories and practices of home from their homelands to their host-lands.

Background: Moving from Coast to Coast Paola was nineteen years old in 2000 when she left Esmeraldas, Ecuador. Although she is only one of thousands of Ecuadorians who left the country following its economic crisis in the late 1990s, she proudly introduces herself as the first member of her close family to move abroad. But how did Paola manage to migrate to Spain? To understand this, it is necessary to go back in time in Paola’s life story. Paola was born into a family of four, comprised of her father, her mother, her sister and herself. Before her second birthday, her parents divorced. Paola’s mother took care of the children and they all lived together until

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her mother found another partner and the children were sent to live with their grandmother. It was difficult to understand my mother’s decision. I felt abandoned and [it] took me years to understand her. Today, there is no resentment in my heart. Life with my grandmother was lovely. She was a loving person and I only have good memories of my life with her.

Gratitude for her grandmother’s care and devotion, and the desire to support her, were central to Paola’s decision to move abroad. She recalled that she was working and starting university, but her family was struggling to make ends meet. ‘We had no money even for a single bus ticket.’ Prospects for her future were uncertain and she started to see migration as an option. By chance, as Paola recalled it, she accompanied her grandmother to visit her sister who was on holiday in Ecuador after having lived in Spain for twenty years. My grandmother’s sister was talking about life in Spain. She said that her daughter, who was about my age, was studying, working and living independently in a rented flat in Spain. In Ecuador, it is difficult to become independent at such an age. It is rather common that children live with parents and even after marriage continue living with them. That is why you see three generations living together in a single house in Ecuador. I wanted something different and then put Spain in my mind.

Without enough money for a bus ticket, paying for an international flight fare seemed like a distant goal. Luckily, as she said, family supported her. Her uncle used his savings to pay for the ticket and got a loan for a travel grant. At that point, the Spanish migratory authorities asked tourists from Ecuador to demonstrate financial resources upon their arrival. Tourists were also asked to provide proof of accommodation. This was not a problem for Paola, who was travelling with her grandmother’s relative, who was a Spanish citizen and would be hosting her. Within a week, Paola was moving from Esmeraldas, a coastal city in north-western Ecuador, to Santander, a coastal city in northern Spain.

Life on the Move: ‘With a Room, a Boyfriend and a TV, All Started to Look Like Home’ Paola had not thought about the implications of leaving her family and house when moving to Spain and soon began to experience homesickness. ‘After a week, I started to ask myself what I am doing here. I soon realized that I was not ready for living abroad, away from my family. I was thinking about going back all the time.’ Besides missing her family, Paola’s



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homesickness was related to the fact that she was living with strangers in an unfamiliar place. I landed in Spain on 11 January 2000, right in the middle of the winter, and I found myself living with strangers. They were my grandmother’s relatives, but we were strangers to each other. I was a child when they left Ecuador and I could not recognize them. I was sleeping in the family living room and was astounded by the fact that they behaved so distantly with me and with each other. I wanted to go back to Ecuador.

Paola’s source of support was back in Ecuador. She had endless phone calls with her boyfriend and told him about her plan to return. She recalled that he said: ‘Stay there, it is your chance to support your grandmother. You started this journey for her, so do not come back. I will be there with you soon.’ Before leaving Ecuador, Paola and her boyfriend had made a plan to live together in Spain. ‘It was my first goal, to bring Douglas to Spain. It was hard because there were no jobs for me in Santander and we needed a lot of money for the flight ticket and travel grant. So I moved to Barcelona.’ Once in Barcelona, Paola started sharing a room with a cousin and found a job washing the dishes in a café. With her savings, she was able to bring Douglas to Spain but could not afford a room just for themselves. They shared a room with a Peruvian migrant Douglas met at work. After a few months, the couple did manage to save enough money to afford a room to themselves. ‘Everything was going according to plan. We were together in Spain with a room for the two of us. Then, I bought a TV. It was the first thing I bought for myself in Spain and I felt good. With a room, a boyfriend and a TV, all started to look like home.’ Paola continued working in cafés and restaurants while Douglas worked in construction. They were, however, working as undocumented migrants.1 ‘We were doing fine but always concerned about deportation. When you do not have documents, you are always afraid of being deported.’ As Paola describes it, they were incredibly lucky as the Spanish government launched a regularization plan for Ecuadorians. Families were asked to go back to Ecuador to collect the necessary documents and apply for Spanish residency. Paola and Douglas accepted the plan and were granted nationality within a few years. With documents, their prospects for the future and experiences of home in Spain dramatically changed. The couple did not go back to Spain as migrants, but as Spanish passport holders and the return was experienced as a sort of homecoming. ‘We came back to Spain full of joy. With documents, it was easier to find jobs, accommodation, to decorate the house in the way we wanted, and above all, we felt that we could not be thrown out. We were home.’2

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Life went on and Paola set a new goal: to bring her mother and siblings to Spain. Within four years, all of them, including the uncle who paid for her flight, had joined Paola and Douglas in Spain. Bringing her partner and family to Spain seemed to be an effective homemaking practice. At times, Paola experienced homesickness and wanted to go back to Ecuador. By encouraging and supporting the migration of her family, she not only helped them to achieve the dream of living and working in Spain, but also helped herself. She was regaining a sense of family and doing her part in transforming a low-income Spanish neighbourhood into an Ecuadorian community. ‘At the beginning, there were few Ecuadorians in our neighbourhood but soon we started to see more and more. Many migrants brought their families, and it was like a little Ecuador. My mother, my uncle and even people that Douglas grew up with, were living next door.’ During all these years abroad, something was present in Paola’s everyday life that is central to our analysis, although we have not mentioned yet: Ecuadorian food. Cooking, serving, eating, sharing and selling Ecuadorian food in daily life and on special occasions, whether when sharing a room with family or strangers, or in her own house, have been central to how Paola experienced home and reproduced her national identity and culture in the transnational space. As Tim Edensor (2002: 17) contends, ‘national identity is grounded in the everyday, in the mundane details of social interaction, habits, routines and practical knowledge’.

Food Culture and Food Practices The first time I met Paola, our conversation was enlivened by everyday Ecuadorian food cooked by her partner. I had not expected to share lunch with the family during my first visit to their domestic space. However, the experience created the perfect environment for engaging in conversations about Ecuadorian food and its role in the family’s transnational practices. The couple was keen to share details about several Ecuadorian recipes, the difficulties finding the right ingredients to cook them abroad, and the meanings associated with cooking and eating Ecuadorian food during their more than twenty years in Europe. They also shared details about the types of occasions on which they would cook and share the different dishes when living back in Esmeraldas and how Ecuadorian food connects their homeland with their host-lands. The smell and taste of the food started to evoke Paola’s memories of Ecuador and, at the same time, brought Paola’s grandmother to Manchester. While Paola was eating and sharing the recipe of the day, which was a mix of plantain, home-made cheese, roasted peanuts and



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spices, and talking about how her grandmother used to cook and serve it, Paola’s grandmother became ‘present’ in a place she had never visited. ‘My grandmother was everything to me. She is the main reason I came to Europe. She was working hard to raise us, and I wanted to support her.’ Upon witnessing Paola’s emotional reactions in talking about the dish, it became clear to me that we were not only eating a traditional Ecuadorian recipe. We were fundamentally paying tribute to a woman whose food used to make Paola feel at home in Ecuador and whose recipes have inspired her homemaking practices in Spain and the United Kingdom.

Reproducing Food Cultures in the Domestic Space: ‘Food Is Our Way of Keeping Ecuador Present in Our Lives’ The smell and flavours of Ecuadorian food are embedded in Paola’s memories of home and connect her with her country, its culture and its traditions. As Emma-Jayne Abbots (2016) suggests, the smell and taste of food facilitate imaginings of place and can effectively transport migrants back home. In fact, even the mere presence of food in migrants’ dwellings can elicit their home memories and evoke a sense of home (Bonfanti, Massa and MirandaNieto 2019). By cooking, eating and sharing Ecuadorian food with family and friends in the domestic space, Paola is not only making herself at home; she is also reproducing social and cultural Ecuadorian traditions in the transnational space. After more than twenty years abroad, the routine acts of cooking, eating and sharing Ecuadorian food brings Paola’s memories of her daily life in Ecuador into her daily life in Manchester. ‘Ecuadorian food is cooked and served in our house, every day, at any time. Food connects me with my grandmother, and all my family back in Ecuador. Food is our way of keeping Ecuador present in our lives.’ Paola’s reproduction of Ecuadorian food cultures in the transnational space also serves the purpose of keeping Ecuador present in the hearts and minds – and stomachs – of her Spanish-Ecuadorian children. I want my children to learn about my culture and food certainly says a lot about one’s culture. They were born in Spain and are keen to [eat] Spanish tapas and omelettes, but they have been raised with Ecuadorian food and love it. Food helps me to pass Ecuadorian culture on to my children.

Other than in everyday life, Ecuadorian food culture is displayed by the family on special occasions and ceremonies. Birthdays, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and religious festivities are almost always enlivened with Ecuadorian food. During the Holy Week, for example, Catholics in Ecuador congregate with family and friends in their houses and share

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traditional dishes. Paola has maintained this tradition in Spain and the United Kingdom for over two decades. One of my favourite grandmother’s recipes is called fanesca. The dish has a very symbolic meaning, and it is only cooked to celebrate the Holy Week. The dish, which is actually a soup made with fish, butternut squash, cheese, spices and twelve different grains, including peas, corn and fava beans, is the Ecuadorian representation of the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. Each grain represents an apostle. This is an important tradition for Ecuadorians and I want to pass this tradition on to my family. As usual, this year [2020], I cooked the dish to celebrate the Holy Week as we celebrate it back in Ecuador.

Every time I talk to Paola about food, I am struck by her passion for her culture and her nostalgia for her country. She said, ‘food makes me feel nostalgic. The smell and flavours of the food make me feel as if I were there, in Ecuador.’ This illustrates the connections between food, culture and nostalgia. Paola experiences nostalgia for her country but this does not mean that she wants to go back and live there. As Ghassan Hage (1997) and Michelle Obeid (2013) have already shown in their studies of the experiences of Lebanese and Palestinian migrants in Sydney and London respectively, nostalgia for the place left behind does not imply a desire to return. Paola has been reproducing Ecuadorian food practices in Barcelona and Manchester to make herself at home in both places. In fact, it seems that Paola no longer sees Ecuador as home. After eleven years in Spain, she went back to Ecuador for over three years and experienced the sense that she was a stranger in her own country. It was tough to find a job and thus difficult to provide my children with the standard of living they were accustomed to in Spain. I could not apply for a loan because I had no financial history in the country. I felt like a stranger in my own country and desperately wanted to go back to Spain. I could not go back to Barcelona as planned and came to Manchester. The crisis was not over in Spain and it was difficult to find a job there.

When asked where home is, Paola went on to say: Ecuador is and will always be my country. Manchester is the place I live and share with my family. I have a house in Ecuador and no house in Barcelona, but my home is there. Home is where my soul is. I cannot accurately describe my feelings towards Vilafranca del Penedès. Trivial things such as sitting outside my mother’s house and saying hello to neighbours make me feel happy. I have the feeling that I was just reborn there.



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Paola and her children could not go back to Barcelona as desired and went to Manchester instead. As discussed below, Manchester entered Paola’s life by chance. A friend she had made in Spain was living in the city and encouraged her to try her luck in the United Kingdom. Paola and her children have found some comfort in the idea that ‘Spain is around the corner’ and have enjoyed school holidays in Barcelona. They all miss life in Spain but have started to see Manchester as a potential home. Intriguingly, the consumption of Ecuadorian food in their everyday life in Manchester has helped them to maintain memories of home in Spain. Ecuadorian food has helped them to navigate the distance between the two places. Overall, the experiences of Paola and her family teach us that the mobilization of food cultures across countries and cultures is not only a way of remembering one’s country of origin. It is also a purposeful homemaking practice deployed by migrants to make themselves at home in the transnational space. As Edensor (2002: 63) suggests, in a mobile context ‘home may become less rooted in a single place and be constituted by the connections between places, as memories … are serially recreated’.

Reproducing Food Cultures in the Public Space: ‘Food Helped Me to Find My Way in the City’ Paola arrived in Manchester in November 2015 and since then she has been struggling to find her way in the city. This is not only because her original plan had been to go back to Barcelona, a place she describes as home, but also because in Manchester, after twenty-three years of marriage, Paola divorced her partner. The divorce, along with the lack of family and social connections in the city and the language barrier, has given rise to feelings of what Paola describes as loneliness and depression that have made it difficult for her to experience Manchester as home. The focus here is how the reproduction of Ecuadorian food cultures in public places in Manchester has helped Paola to start finding her way in the city. After landing in Manchester, Paola and her family spent a month in the living room of her only friend in the city. Although Paola felt welcomed in her friend’s house, she stressed the difficulties of doing ordinary things such as cooking or using the toilet. She wanted to spend time outdoors to allow her friend to enjoy the privacy of her own domestic space but she could not speak the language, had no place to go and knew no one. All these factors, as the following quote suggests, shaped her first encounter with the city and her opportunities for socialization. My first year in Manchester was difficult. I did not know a single street and had nearly no interaction with other people. I rarely used my

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voice. Isolation and depression became permanent companions. I did not want to go out because I have nobody to talk with and because of the language. I did know only a couple of English words. ‘Hello’ and ‘thanks’.

Ecuadorian food helped Paola to find her way in the city. By cooking and selling Ecuadorian food in public places, she started to become familiar with the city and gain a sense of community. This process began when Paola advertised her food on social media. She went out and met people in Piccadilly Gardens and Whitworth Park, in Central and South Manchester, respectively. As most of her customers are either Ecuadorians or from other parts of Latin America, selling food became an opportunity to meet people and share, in her mother tongue, her experiences of the city. ‘Some people only wanted to buy food and leave. Others, especially regular customers, were often willing to engage in a short but often meaningful conversation. I think my food helped me to find my way in the city. The joy of cooking and sharing became a remedy for isolation.’ The reproduction of Ecuadorian food culture in Manchester became a homemaking practice for Paola and other Ecuadorians in the city – notably international students. By organizing picnics with these students, Paola started to bring a ‘taste’ of Ecuador to public places and, in doing so, began to nurture her fellow Ecuadorians’ experiences of home in Manchester.

Figure 9.1. Picnic at Whitworth Park. Photo by Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia.



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Picnics at Whitworth Park became an opportunity to share with the city what Ecuadorian food and culture are about. Ecuadorian students were fed by an Ecuadorian woman and they started to share their food practices and thus their culture and identity with their fellow international students. At the beginning, only a few students joined the picnics. Then, some of them started to spread the word, saying, ‘We can find authentic Ecuadorian food in Manchester’, and all the food was sold out. Students arrived with other students, from Ecuador and other countries. Our picnics became like little food festivals. Some students even said, ‘Umm, this tastes like my mother’s food.’ I was so pleased with those comments.

The experience of cooking and sharing food with Ecuadorian students and their international friends at picnics in public places in Manchester has not been of much help improving Paola’s language skills, as she would like. This is not only because most of those who enjoy Paola’s food come from Latin America and communicate in Spanish, but also because her fellow Ecuadorians are always willing to ‘support’ her with translation when needed. Those practices, however, have helped Paola to socialize and alleviate feelings of loneliness. Furthermore, those practices have become central in Paola’s and some of her fellow Ecuadorians’ attempts to make themselves at home in public places of Manchester. Through these practices, they are expressing their national identity and their love, or perhaps it would be better to say their ‘patriotism’, for their country. I do not see myself as a patriotic person. However, I realized that since I started to cook and sell Ecuadorian food abroad, I have been instinctively displaying the dishes next to the Ecuadorian flag. I see my food and the colours of the Ecuadorian flag go well together. The fact that I have been doing this for years makes me think that I am probably more patriotic than I initially thought. When cooking, I often remember a popular Ecuadorian song called ‘To My Beautiful Ecuador’ (A mi lindo Ecuador). The lyrics say, ‘Wherever I am, I am Ecuadorian.’ If I think about myself, the lyrics should say, ‘Wherever I am, I cook Ecuadorian food.’ That is my way to say I am Ecuadorian. Yes, by cooking and selling our traditional recipes abroad I express love for my country and how proud I am to be Ecuadorian. Food is like a patriotic symbol and I see my food as an expression of patriotism.

Ecuadorian Food Cultures: Connecting the Domestic and the Public Space By cooking food in the domestic space and then selling it in the public space, Paola is not only making a living but also attempting to transform

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different scales of the transnational space into home. The focus of the analysis here is how the reproduction of Ecuadorian food cultures connects experiences of home within and beyond the domestic space. To discuss this, we need to go back to Paola’s life in Spain. In about 2004, with the savings from more than three years of work in Spain, Paola and her partner paid the first instalment on a house in Barcelona and were granted a mortgage. During the economic crisis of 2009, they sold the house to minimize the financial loss. With the remaining money, they bought a house in Ecuador, which helped support their families, and they opened an Ecuadorian restaurant in Barcelona. Ecuadorian food was cooked and served all day at the restaurant, which quickly became a hotspot for Ecuadorians and other Latinos in Barcelona. The place was completely booked for special occasions, such as Ecuador’s national day or when the national football team played. Handcrafts and pictures of different parts of the country were a central part of the decoration and helped to recreate an Ecuadorian corner in Barcelona. The restaurant became not only a business for the family, but also a place for displaying Ecuadorian culture and identity in Spain and, ultimately, for remembering and recreating home. I think many Ecuadorians abroad yearn for our food. They experience sorrow and nostalgia for what they have left in our country and the restaurant quickly became a home for many of us. I think the decor and the activities we organized helped our customers to connect with their roots and I still remember the joy in their faces after tasting our food.

Figure 9.2. Displaying patriotism. Photo by Paola.



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Cooking Ecuadorian food for Latin American customers proved to be an effective family business, especially before the economic crisis, but it did not help the family to meet and intermingle with Spaniards. Paola recalled that her interaction with Spaniards was limited and nearly non-existent in the restaurant. ‘The Spaniards are very proud of their own food and often very picky about trying other culinary traditions. I think some of them did not like the appearance or the smell of our food. I do not remember a single Spanish customer in the restaurant. They only visited our place to buy cigarettes from the dispenser.’ Although Paola’s narrative did not emphasize experiences of discrimination, her account indicates how the reproduction of food practices from one’s country of origin in the transnational space may involve a risk of self-ethnicization and food-related forms of discrimination. Paola’s reference to Spaniards being ‘picky’ about trying other culinary traditions, as well as the fact that they only visited the place to buy cigarettes from a machine, suggests that the family’s food practices were neither openly rejected nor welcomed by ‘locals’. As argued throughout the chapter, food practices have the power to bring migrants back ‘home’, but we cannot forget that such practices may simultaneously limit migrants’ opportunities to make a home in the transnational space. As Sara Bonfanti, Aurora Massa and Alejandro Miranda-Nieto’s (2019: 154) ethnographic account suggests, ‘culinary scents are potent elicitors of home memories, providing emigrants with a tangible sensory reproduction of one’s social belonging. Likewise, food whiffs can erect boundaries of segregation and even provoke bodily aversion against “fouling others”, tainting immigrants as targets of discrimination and racism.’ In Paola’s case, she did not report that her food practices were unwelcome in Manchester. Rather, she emphasized the enthusiasm of her customers, including those few British people she encountered who were curious about Ecuadorian gastronomy. Although Paola has gained a loyal clientele in Manchester, she has not yet considered opening an Ecuadorian restaurant. As discussed above, however, she has been reproducing her grandmother’s recipes in the city and finding ways of informally selling her food in public places or simply delivering it to people’s ‘homes’. My grandmother used to cook tamale [a dish of seasoned pork, chicken and maize flour steamed in plantain leaves] and ceviche. I inherited the recipes from her and every time I cook them, I think about her. I cook these recipes for my family and to sell. You cannot imagine the incredibly positive reactions of those Ecuadorians who buy my food. I cook, serve and box the food to be delivered by myself. Before leaving my house, I take pictures of the food and send them to my customers.

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I like to think about their excitement for our food all the way to their homes. Then, when I see their faces, I see that all my effort has paid off. The profits are low, but I found the whole process incredibly rewarding. The other day a customer told me, ‘Your ceviche is the best ceviche in the world.’ That is what all of this is about.

The restaurant in Barcelona and public areas of Manchester have become places where Paola and her family, and likely some of her customers, experience home away from both their homeland and the domestic spaces in which they have settled. By mobilizing Ecuadorian food cultures across different countries and cultures and beyond the confines of domestic spaces, Paola and some of her fellow Ecuadorians are ‘making taste public’ (Jackson et al. 2020) and forging a sense of community, identity and home in public space. In this sense, food cultures constitute an instance of what Alejandro Miranda-Nieto and Paolo Boccagni (2020) conceptualize as the ‘domestication of space’.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the relationship between food, mobility and home. Based on the life story of Paola, which connects the experiences of a large number of people in Ecuador, Spain and the United Kingdom, the chapter has shown how food cultures can be mobilized and reproduced by migrants across multiple places. By cooking, serving, eating, sharing and selling food, migrants not only evoke memories of previous homes (Longhurst, Johnston and Ho 2009; Ratnam 2018), but also actively transform their current places of settlement into homes. Indeed, the analysis revealed that food cultures can connect multiple scales of home. Through practices such as organizing picnics and selling and consuming food from one’s country of origin in public places, migrants are both displaying their culture and identity on the move and also seeking to experience home beyond the confines of the domestic space. However, the recreation of migrants’ food practices in the transnational space does pose the risk of self-ethnicization. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that food practices reproduced in the transnational space are often replete with patriotic symbolism. An everyday recipe shared with family in the domestic space of one’s homeland to ‘simply’ nourish the body may be loaded with allegory and even become an expression of national identity when cooked and shared in the public space of one’s host-land. In fact, food practices displayed by migrants allow us to better understand the diverse ways in which culture and national identity



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interact. They disclose migrants’ everyday representation of their culture and can also awaken sentiments of nostalgia and patriotism. Overall, the analysis of how the reproduction of food cultures in both everyday life and on special occasions helps people to transform their physical houses and communities into homes has further conceptual implications for theorizing the interplay between food, home and mobility. The fact that the taste and smell of food have the power to connect memories and practices of home across places, and the fact that people like Paola can consider multiple places home over time, provide further evidence to suggest that, for some, home can be simultaneously grounded and mobile (Ahmed et al. 2003). Yet the critical challenge is to develop analytical frameworks that illuminate the interaction between food and home while acknowledging both ‘fluidities’ and ‘fixities’ (Bissell 2020). Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, and has recently finished a three-year postdoc at the HOMInG Project, University of Trento. His research interests include home and homemaking, conflict-induced displacement, migration and mobilities, and ageing. Recent publications include ‘“Physically Sheltered but Existentially Homeless”’ (Migration Studies, 2021), ‘Remaking a Place Called Home Following Displacement’ (in The Routledge Handbook of Place, Routledge, 2020), Thinking Home on the Move (co-authored, Emerald Publishing, 2020), ‘Where the Heart Is and Where It Hurts’ (Refugee Survey Quarterly, 2019) and ‘“My Soul Stills Hurts”: Bringing Death and Funerals into the Ageing-Migration-Home Nexus’ (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2022).

Notes   1. By 2000, about 78 per cent of Ecuadorians in Spain were undocumented migrants. See Iglesias et al. (2015).   2. Similar narratives of not being concerned about being thrown out were found among British returnees (see Walsh 2018).

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References Abbots, Emma-Jayne. 2016. ‘Approaches to Food and Migration: Rootedness, Being and Belonging’, in J. Klein and J. Watson (eds), The Handbook of Food and Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 115–32. Ahmed, Sara, et al. 2003. ‘Introduction. Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration’, in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg. Bissell, David. 2020. ‘Mobilities and Place’, in T. Edensor, A. Kalandides and U. Kothari (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Place. London: Routledge, pp. 99–108. Bonfanti, Sara, Aurora Massa and Alejandro Miranda-Nieto. 2019. ‘Whiffs of Home. Ethnographic Comparison in a Collaborative Research Study across European Cities’, Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 2: 153–74. ˇapo Zmegacˇ, Jasna. 2011. Strangers Either Way: The Lives of Croatian Refugees in their New C Home. European Anthropology in Translation. Vol. 2. New York: Berghahn Books. Edensor, Tim. 2002. National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books. Hage, Ghassan. 1997. ‘At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-Building’, in H. Grace et al. (eds), Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West. Marrickville: Pluto Press, pp. 99–153.  . 2010. ‘Migration, Food, Memory and Home-Building’, in S. Radstone and B. Schwarz (eds), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 416–27. Iglesias, Juan, et al. 2015. ‘La población de origen ecuatoriano en España [‘Ecuadorians in Spain’]’. Report, Embassy of Ecuador, Comillas, Ikuspegi. Jackson, Peter, et al. 2020. ‘Tasting as a Social Practice: A Methodological Experiment in Making Taste Public’, Social & Cultural Geography 23(5): 1–18. Longhurst, Robyn, Lynda Johnston and Elsie Ho. 2009. ‘A Visceral Approach: Cooking “at Home” with Migrant Women in Hamilton, New Zealand’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34(3): 333–45. Miranda-Nieto, Alejandro, and Paolo Boccagni. 2020. ‘At Home in the Restaurant: Familiarity, Belonging and Material Culture in Ecuadorian Restaurants in Madrid’, Sociology 54(5): 1022–40. Obeid, Michelle. 2013. ‘Home-Making in the Diaspora Bringing Palestine to London’, in A. Quayson and G. Daswani (eds), A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism. Maldon, MA: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 366–80. Pérez Murcia, Luis Eduardo. 2020. ‘Remaking a Place Called Home Following Displacement’, in Tim Edensor, Ares Kalandides and Uma Kothari (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Place. London: Routledge, pp. 468–76. Radstone, Susannah. 2010. ‘Nostalgia: Home-Comings and Departures’, Memory Studies 3(3): 187–91.



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Ratnam, Charishma. 2018. ‘Creating Home: Intersections of Memory and Identity’, Geography Compass 12(4): 1–11. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38(2): 207–26. Walsh, Katie. 2018. ‘Materialities and Imaginaries of Home: Geographies of British Returnees in Later Life’, Area 50(4): 476–82. Zara, Cristiana, et al. 2020. ‘Geographies of Food beyond Food: Transfiguring NexusThinking through Encounters with Young People in Brazil’, Social & Cultural Geography 23(5): 1–24.

AFTERWORD

Home as a Trope of Inequality Russell King

As I write the opening lines of this brief Afterword in early April 2022, it is hard to progress academic writing, especially on migration and home, without being emotionally consumed by the tragic events unfolding in Ukraine since 24 February 2022. Finding Home in Europe is the title of this book, with its rich and beautifully storied accounts of how nine migrants and refugees from Latin America, Africa and Asia found a sanctuary of sorts in Europe. Now, ‘finding a home’ has become a challenge for millions of people from one of Europe’s own largest countries, due to the naked belligerence of a near-neighbour. As we witness daily on our screens and in our newspapers the desecration wreaked by Russia’s military, we cannot help but think of the hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed, the tens of thousands of lives lost and the millions of Ukrainians displaced from their homes, which have either been erased or are under attack. This morning’s Guardian (my newspaper of choice), like many other newspapers today (4 April 2022), bears the headline ‘Horror in Bucha’ as it has been revealed that the Russian onslaught has virtually wiped from the earth an entire town, including the homes of most of its population. Bucha, Mariupol, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and, from earlier destructive wars, Grozny and Aleppo … All draw from the Russian playbook of scorchedearth warfare driven by one man’s ego and the hubris of a lost empire. What we are witnessing in Ukraine is the mass degradation of home and normal home life: a cynical process of ‘un-homing’ or ‘de-homing’ on a huge scale. First comes a communications blackout and the cutting-off of water, gas and electricity, followed by the blanket bombing and shelling of civilian targets – not only countless homes but also hospitals, schools and theatres. The population is being displaced, locally to underground



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car parks and basements or out onto adjacent streets, and further afield to safer parts of Ukraine or to seek temporary homes in neighbouring countries to the west or south. At the time of writing, more than four million Ukrainians have sought sanctuary in Poland (more than two million), Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, or have joined relatives in the wider Ukrainian diaspora in other European countries. The ramifications of the war in Ukraine have also revealed to the public gaze another very different vision of what ‘home’ can signify – the multi-million-dollar properties of Russian oligarchs (in some cases kleptocrats), which are candidates for confiscation. Hidden in plain sight in the most expensive and fashionable areas of London, or in the form of villas, chateaux and castles in Spain, France and Italy, these properties are often empty most of the time, because their owners possess many such properties. So can they be regarded as ‘homes’? Rather, they are the emblems of incredible wealth. And then there are the mega yachts, floating palaces, ostentatiously luxurious beyond belief – symbols of a kind of gross competition to determine who has the largest and the most expensive boat. These behemoth vessels are also, in a sense, ‘homes’, enabling their owners to be on the move, typically in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean (even if many seem to be constantly docked up for ‘refitting’), thereby allowing their owners to avoid borders, national territories, tax duties and any sense of formal responsibility or social connection to their fellow human beings. Thus, ‘home’ becomes a trope for the obscene inequality that divides the world we dwell in, made worse by war, obviously, but nevertheless always present as a permanent structural feature of the global economy and ecumene. All this may seem far removed from the core contents of this book: nine case histories exploring the notion of home as the existential container space for human life, especially in situations of migrancy and refuge. But connections there are. Had this book been researched and written a couple of years later, one could easily envisage a tenth chapter based on the life story of a Ukrainian person or family, thrust out of their home in Mariupol and searching for a new home somewhere else. Any hope of return to the status quo ante would have been lost as a result of a combination of the wholesale destruction of where they used to live and the place’s likely subjugation by Russia. The closest parallels lie in the stories of Aaron (chapter 4) and Mateos (chapter 5), the two Eritrean refugees who wind up in the Netherlands and Rome respectively and struggle to establish what for them would constitute a real home in a not-very-receptive host society. The authors presenting the stories of Aaron and Mateos – Milena Belloni and Aurora

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Massa – cite Richard Baxter and Katherine Brickell’s (2014) notion of ‘home unmaking’ or ‘accumulated homelessness’ (Boccagni 2017) as both Aaron and Mateos lose their homes and accommodations multiple times. Indeed, Belloni opens her chapter on Aaron with the question: ‘How many times and in how many ways can someone lose home?’ The Eritrean case has some geopolitical similarity to Ukraine as well, in that Eritrean refugees are the product of a long-running independence wrangle with a larger neighbour (Ethiopia). If home is a refuge or a ‘space of future possibility’ (quoting Belloni again) in the face of ‘collective trauma’ (cf. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), this is compounded by stories of individual trauma. Aaron’s dog, his treasured childhood companion, was shot dead ‘by a drunk Ethiopian soldier’; then one of his brothers, labelled a ‘martyr’, died in the war with Ethiopia. Daily news stories from Ukraine reveal a similar multi-scale unfolding trauma: the Russian invasion and wholesale destruction of towns, infrastructure and countless lives (including those of Russian soldiers), the wider global geopolitical inability to stop the carnage, and the micro-traumas of individual deaths, injuries and personal tragedies. In her introduction to Part II of the book on ‘Struggles at Home’, Sara Bonfanti notes that ‘making a home on the move brings inequalities into sharp relief’. This is the theme of this Afterword. Quoting Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving (2009: 3), Bonfanti goes on to stress that the possibility of losing or creating a home in particular places is structured by relations of power. Likewise, and from a different angle, social inequalities are crucial in shaping how people can exercise choice and agency to emplace themselves in new locations. Staying with the three Eritrean life stories, recall from chapter 7 how Makda, from a well-off Asmara family, was able to leave her hometown at the age of sixteen, escaping the War of Independence and leading a comfortable life with relatives in the United States. Moving on a student visa, living in California and New York, and enjoying a career as a fashion designer, her journey to the Western El Dorado was as different as can be imagined from the life-threatening itineraries of other Eritreans, who endured hazardous journeys across the Sahara to Libya and then travelled in flimsy dinghies to Lampedusa, Europe’s southern island outpost. After eleven years in New York, Makda relocated with her British husband to the ‘elegant suburb’ of Muswell Hill in North London, where, in order to have more time to bring up the couple’s two daughters, she established the ‘Lemlem Kitchen’ street-food enterprise, offering exciting new recipes to London’s ‘cosmopolitan foodies’ (cf. Johnston and Baumann 2015). Again, how different has her life been to those of her two compatriots in the book, for whom a comfortable home and a stable family life in a posh part of London must seem like a dream. For Aaron and Mateos, the struggle for home has seen them in camps, homeless, squatting in empty



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buildings and living in shanty towns. Temporary periods of feeling at least somewhat at home – for Aaron in the Ugandan capital Kampala, for Mateos in the ‘community of peace’, an informal village of shacks on the outskirts of Rome – have been brought to an end by subsequent events. Makda’s story opens up a debate on what Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia calls the ‘home–food–migration nexus’, the subject of Part III of the book, on ‘Tastes of Home’. This is an under-explored aspect of migration studies, yet, as Pérez Murcia points out, food is part of the cultural baggage of people on the move and, moreover, can travel across borders more easily than people. The trade in ‘ethnic food’ runs in parallel to migration streams but also spreads beyond these streams. Food practices – ingredients, recipes, tastes, means of preparation, presentation and consumption – are part of migrants’ ‘noshtalgia’ for home (excuse the pun), but can also be marketed more widely. Ethnic food shops, markets and restaurants are an obvious example; less obvious are the ‘food remittances’ that connect migrants to their homelands in two-way exchanges (Crush and Caesar 2018). The three food-related life stories presented in Part III are sufficiently different to open up a wide-ranging debate on the food–home–migration nexus. Makda’s story has already been commented on above. Sumant’s (chapter 8) and Paola’s (chapter 3) stories present contrasting experiences – Sumant is a Sikh man working in a gourmet Indian restaurant in Central London, while Paola serves Ecuadorian snacks in the open air to Latin American migrants and students in Manchester. Thinking beyond these three case studies to a broader global ‘foodscape’ of migrant-origin cuisines makes us realize that some national/ ethnic foods are more marketable (and perhaps palatable) than others. The relationship between the ‘cultural capital’ of food and its ‘financial capital’ through business appeal to the market is highly variable. Here, there are two markets: the ‘ethnic’ market of co-ethnic consumers, and the ‘crossover’ or ‘mainstream’ market, which ranges from budget-conscious students to cash-rich ‘cosmopolitan foodies’. Hence, some foods are highly diasporic (obvious examples include Italian food, Indian food, Lebanese food, etc.), while others (Ukrainian food?) have not yet made any mark on the global foodscape, and perhaps never will. In his pioneering essay on ‘The Roving Palate’, the population geographer Wilbur Zelinsky (1985) describes the ability of some migrant groups to develop their food practices entrepreneurially in the context of North America’s ethnic restaurant scene, including ‘going mainstream’ to appeal to clientele beyond the ethnic niche. Italian food has arguably become the most widespread ethnic cuisine, from high-end restaurants to the humble pizzeria. Ian Cook (2003) deploys a postcolonial lens to explore the ability of different ethnic

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cuisines to ‘cross over’, whereby ‘going for an Indian’ at the ‘Taj Mahal in the High Street’ has an obvious resonance (Highmore 2009). In comparing the case histories, I was struck by the extent to which some of the protagonists were motivated to help other members in their exiled communities and other people regarded as needy. It seems that those who have endured the toughest journeys from the most marginal backgrounds are the most willing to help others. The most obvious exponent of this philosophy is Lucho (chapter 1), whose entire adult life, including his migratory trajectory to Manchester, has been guided by his faith and his mission to help refugees and the homeless to find both a spiritual and a physical home in the city. For Lucho, ‘home and faith travel together; they are largely mobile’ (quoting Pérez Murcia’s interpretation of Lucho’s life). Likewise, despite her own challenging journey from Ecuador to Italy, Miriam (chapter 2) spends part of her time and energy helping others, through the founding of an association to support immigrant children and hosting a young asylum seeker in her already-crowded flat. Aaron organized a football team and a community centre for young Eritreans who were ‘lost’ in his town of residence in the Netherlands. And Yolanda (chapter 6) endures immense emotional labour and personal risk in her professional life caring for the elderly, the sick and the dying in Covid-afflicted care homes in Madrid. By contrast, the three most middle-class subjects in the book – the highly educated Indian singleton and ‘transnational knowledge worker’ Priya (chapter 3), the ex-fashion designer and now food entrepreneur Makda and top chef Sumant – are more focused on their careers and, in the latter two cases, their families. I close with a brief reflection on the methodology and structure of the book. The lengthy introduction by the editors provides a comprehensive and nuanced discussion of oral history, life stories and the narrative approach, specifically as they concern migrants and refugees – in Alistair Thomson’s memorable phrase, these are ‘moving stories’. Bonfanti and Pérez Murcia’s discussion is copiously referenced and well embedded in the relevant methodological literature and its theoretical connections. I am fully on board with all that is written in this Introduction and it would be presumptuous of me to try to add anything. What interests me is the relationship between the nine cases selected and the much larger corpus of material collected by a team-based, multi-sited, transnational research programme, involving more than two hundred in-depth interviews with migrant and refugee participants. Of course, I realize that this book is not the only published outcome of the HOMInG project; far from it, the research team working with and alongside Paolo Boccagni has been extremely prolific. But how to select nine from two hundred without completely ignoring the insights and experiences of the 191 other participants?



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This is a question that I have grappled with myself, most notably in my research with Anastasia Christou on second-generation Greek Americans and Greek Germans who have ‘returned’ to their parental homeland, Greece (Christou and King 2014). Having conducted in-depth interviews with over a hundred participants, we chose six life stories (we called them portrayals) to focus on, three from each group, and built the book around these narratives. But rather than devoting a chapter to each life story, as Finding Home in Europe does, we adopted a thematic approach based on stages in the relocation process. Our chapters were on growing up in diaspora and experiencing transnational childhoods; the decision to ‘return’ to the ancestral homeland; experiences of life, work and career in Greece; issues of gender and family relations; and questions of identity and belonging. Threaded through each thematic chapter were insights and experiences from the narrative scripts of the six interviewees, along with selected voices of other interviewees. Naturally, the question ‘Where is home?’ loomed large in the book. Pérez Murcia and Bonfanti present a much more oral history-focused biographical account; each chapter is dedicated to a single life story, there is little cross-referencing between them and all other participants’ voices are absent. This has both benefits and shortcomings. The shortcomings have already been hinted at – the lack of obvious connection to the broader research corpus and doubts regarding the ‘representativity’ of the nine chosen stories. In relation to the latter point, representativity is not the issue at stake: the stories have their own research integrity and give rise to insights as stand-alone accounts. For me, the chief benefit of the approach adopted is the sheer impact of the stories and the particular events encased within the stories. Moreover, the structuring of the case studies around the three themes of searching for home, struggling for home, and tastes of home, with three ‘moving’ biographies in each part, works well since the accounts can be more easily categorized and retained in the reader’s memory. Indeed, I venture to say that, having read them all closely, the nine life stories in this book will remain with me for a long time. Lucho, Miriam, Priya, Aaron, Mateos, Yolanda, Makda, Sumant and Paola, will I ever forget your stories? And can we ever forget the mass destruction of people’s homes now going on in Ukraine? Russell King is Professor of Geography at the University of Sussex and Visiting Professor in Migration Studies at Malmö University. His long-standing research interests include many forms of migration, on which he has published extensively. Amongst his recent books are Counter-Diaspora: The Greek Second Generation Returns ‘Home’ (Harvard University Press, 2014,

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co-authored with Anastasia Christou), Ageing, Gender and Labour Migration (Palgrave, 2016, with Aija Lulle), Return Migration and Psychosocial Wellbeing (Routledge, 2017, co-edited with Zana Vathi) and Handbook of Return Migration (Edward Elgar, 2022, co-edited with Katie Kuschminder).

References Baxter, Richard, and Katherine Brickell. 2014. ‘For Home Unmaking’, Home Cultures 11(2): 133–43. Boccagni, Paolo, 2017. Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives. New York: Springer. Christou, Anastasia, and Russell King. 2014. Counter-Diaspora: The Greek Second Generation Returns ‘Home’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cook, Ian. 2003. ‘Cross over Food: Re-Materializing Postcolonial Geographies’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28(3): 296–317. Crush, Jonathan S., and Mary S. Caesar. 2018. ‘Food Remittances and Food Security: A Review’, Migration and Development 7(2): 180–200. Highmore, Ben. 2009. ‘The Taj Mahal in the High Street: The Indian Restaurant as Diasporic Popular Culture in Britain’, Food, Culture and Society 12(2): 173–90. Jansen, Stef, and Staffan Lofving (eds). 2009. Struggles for Home. Oxford: Berghahn. Thomson, Alistair. 2011. ‘Moving Stories: Oral History and Migration Studies’, Oral History 27(1): 24–37. Zelinsky, Wilbur. 1985. ‘The Roving Palate: North America’s Ethnic Restaurant Cuisines’, Geoforum 16(1): 51–72.

Index

Abbots, Emma-Jayne, 160, 161, 189, 194, 199, 203, 212 ageing, 138, 150, 155 agency, 17, 63, 80, 112, 134, 216 Ahmed, Sara, 2, 16, 20, 30, 52, 69, 147, 160, 165, 211 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 99, 103, 106, 117 asylum, 45, 53, 54, 58, 72, 98–100, 102, 112, 122, 126, 135, 218 (sense of) belonging, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23, 25, 51, 80, 86–87, 106, 115, 134, 140, 146, 164–65, 189, 198, 209, 219 biographical interviews, 12, 14, 102, 182 Black minorities/Black people, 9, 20–21, 130, 158, 165, 168–69, 175, 180 body, 29, 69, 109, 127, 159–59, 210 British Asians, 188–90, 194 capability-aspiration framework, 1, 186 caring practices, 28, 32, 143, 146, 152, 218 caregiver(s), 28, 139–46, 152 Christianity, 46, 54–55, 58 circulation (of home practices), 64, 76–77, 139, 164, 193 collective history, 5, 106, 114, 117 collective trauma, 107, 119, 216 colonial history, 159 Colonialism/(post)colonial times, 8, 17, 24, 28, 80, 89–91, 100, 164, 171, 181, 186, 193, 217 communities of faith, 44–46, 51–57

community coping strategies, 107 compulsive cleaning, 28, 138, 149 Coronavirus, 138, 140, 147–53 cosmopolitanism(s), 80, 129, 168 Crapanzano, Vincent, 9, 12, 17, 32 Cresswell, Tim, 1–2, 15–16, 20, 32, 152, 155 Cruz, Gemma, 45, 58–59, 157, 162 creativity/creative practices, 72–73, 89, 117, 124, 128, 157, 164, 166, 174–75, 185, 188 cultural baggage, 157, 217 cultural ideologies, 82 death(s), 25, 28, 109, 154, 216 Desi food, 193–94 differential mobility, 80 distance(s) 2, 28, 41, 72, 99, 123, 134, 138, 143, 146, 150–53, 160, 192, 193 (social) distinction, 66, 69, 72, 128 domestication, 88, 188, 210 domestic space(s), 3, 21, 23, 28–29, 129, 140–41, 147–55, 159, 161, 202–10 Ecuadorian food, 197, 199, 202–10 Emotions, 2, 15, 63, 86, 89, 126, 140 England, 43, 46, 50–51, 56, 58, 147, 152, 160, 168, 179, 185 Eritrean(s), 100, 109–15, 125–28, 163, 170, 216–18 Esmeraldas, 160, 167, 199–202 ethnic association(s), 27, 118 ethnicity, 16, 81

222    Index evictions, 27, 98, 121 expat(s), 80–81, 87–90 faith-related mobility, 57 family reunification, 20, 133, 142, 187 feminism/feminist movement(s), 7–9, 17, 81, 161 Fontanari, Elena, 100, 103, 123, 136 food(s), 115, 171, 189, 192, 217 foodscape, 167, 217 foodways, 28, 164, 172, 180, 193 food-mobility nexus, 158, 160 food practices, 23, 28, 29, 157–60, 190, 198, 202–10, 217 Fortier, Anne-Marie, 45, 60 future, 17–18, 37–38, 40–41, 55–58, 67, 86, 89, 99, 110, 114, 121, 123, 126, 131–36, 168, 170, 174, 186, 199–201, 216 God, 21, 26, 39–52, 55–58 gender, 8–9, 15, 23, 30, 81, 90, 93, 102, 133, 159, 161, 164, 175, 187, 190, 219 Ghassan, Hage, 2, 21, 33, 46, 54, 100, 153, 160, 164, 167, 175, 198–99, 204 Hindustani(s), 89, 90 history-ies, 92, 97–98, 171, 174, 193, 215, 218 home-land, 15, 19, 27, 29, 80, 87–89, 98–100, 116, 118, 159, 170, 183, 190–94, 202, 210, 219 homeless(ness), 100, 121, 123–27, 216 home-making, 10, 14, 17, 21, 28, 30, 36, 39, 40–45, 93, 98–103, 117, 128, 140141, 152–54, 159–61, 180, 198, 202–6 housing career, 70 conditions, 38, 48, 63–64, 180 policies, 28, 99 precariousness, 126

(war for) independence, 21, 27, 106, 108–9, 118, 125, 144, 158, 163, 216 Indian(s), 79–80, 89, 102, 186 informal settlement(s), 21, 27, 48, 122, 128, 134 internal and international mobility, 158, 193 internal mobilities, 181, 186, 192 journeys, 1, 4, 18, 21, 46, 98, 116–17, 158, 180 kinship, 66, 73, 190 life course, 4–5, 9, 14, 16, 37, 39, 70, 74, 82–83, 97, 165 life storying/telling, 3, 12, 18 limbo, 80, 134 Lima, 43–52, 141–44, 152 Londoner(s), 158, 165, 169, 179, 216 loneliness, 159, 205, 207 Lozanovska, Mirjana, 69, 76 Madrid, 28, 138–39, 141–46, 150–54, 218 Manchester, 138–39, 152, 159–60, 197, 202–10, 217–18 material culture(s), 21, 23, 70, 76, 164 migrations, 9, 186 mobilities/immobilities, 1, 2, 10, 15–16, 19, 32–36, 41, 46, 57, 81, 88, 92, 99, 101–3, 150–55, 172, 174, 192 mother(s), 102, 190 Muslim communities, 26, 44, 46–50, 53–54, 57, 179, 182–84 narratives, 3, 6–10, 13, 15–22, 38–40, 54, 58, 64, 81, 92, 98, 152, 158–61, 168, 174, 180–82, 211 nationality, 16, 19, 56, 81, 88, 108, 111, 133, 175, 192, 201

Index    223



neighbourhood(s), 15, 40, 43, 46–47, 54, 64, 67, 71, 83, 107–8, 114, 139, 142, 145, 154, 157, 202 Netherlands, 21–22, 24, 41, 79–91, 99–100, 105–6, 218–20 Oonk, Gijsbert, 81, 95 oral history, 4–18, 25–26, 43, 92, 180, 192, 196, 218–20 outer appearance, 69 Palat, Ravi, 181, 194–95 past, 4–6, 12, 18, 38, 65,72, 76, 90, 92, 98–100, 115–18, 124, 164, 171–76 patriotism, 29, 75, 93, 159, 207, 211 Peruvian(s), 26, 28, 39, 43–44, 47, 50, 57, 99, 138, 201 Portelli, Alessandro, 5, 10, 14, 35 public and private homes, 4, 58 reception center/asylum center, 112, 16–127 refugee(s), 15, 21, 38, 99, 105, 111–14, 121–23, 127, 130, 133, 218 remittance house(s), 66, 75 Robben, Antonio y Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, 107, 119 Rogaly, Ben, 9, 15, 35, 180–81, 189, 195 Rome, 27, 100, 12–134, 215–17

Salazar, Noel Bernard, 1, 46, 80, 111 Sheller, Mimi, 1, 16, 36, 198, 213 shelter (lack of), 48, 74, 77, 99–100, 123, 126–28 Shopes, Linda, 5, 7, 17, 36 social distancing, 28, 138, 147–53 Southall, 179–80, 191–94 Spain, 28, 99–100, 138, 140–54, 197–205, 2018–12, 215 ‘spiritual home’, 53–54, 58 squat, 127, 130–31 (legal) status, 70, 81, 88, 90, 113, 122–23, 126, 197 (social) status, 52, 79, 84, 89, 111–12 street food, 23, 28, 164–66, 170, 216 subjectivity /sense of self, 4–5, 10, 17, 28, 82, 88, 99, 102, 164, 168, 174–76 transnational families, 20, 143, 152, 180, 186, 192 Tucker, Aviezer, 63, 78 Urry, John, 1–2, 16, 36, 198, 213 Vered, Amit, 82, 95 Walking along, 146, 194