Abstract
ABSTRACT Migration infrastructures have usually been identified with stable socio-material arrangements controlling migration (e.g. airports and detention camps), stressing highly stratified power geometries and hierarchies. Recent debates about arrival infrastructures, however, have highlighted the informal, ephemeral and improvisational character of ‘bottom-up’ infrastructures. Departing from a widened understanding of infrastructure, this paper looks at migrants’ businesses as urban infrastructures assembling various kinds of mobilities. In particular, we address small businesses established by Senegalese migrants in Brazil, and Brazilian-owned cafés in Portugal. We approach these businesses as urban infrastructures where different forms of mobilities overlap and interact, exposing various trajectories and scales of circulation. While the businesses in Brazil cater mainly for Senegalese and other migrants’ needs (money transfer, ICTs, and job offers), the Brazilian-owned coffee shops in Portugal function as sites of co-working and sociality of tourists, digital nomads, and other urban creatives. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of São Paulo and Caxias do Sul (Brazil) and in Lisbon (Portugal), this paper makes innovative connections between migration research, mobility studies and urban theory. We discuss the infrastructural production of transnational and local mobilities and how these businesses both result from and facilitate the existence of mobile lifestyles.
Highlights
We argue that despite their small number, looking at these busi nesses enhances our understanding of Senegalese movements within Brazil and allows us to capture the mobile lifestyles of many Senegalese migrants in the country
The mobile lifestyles we discussed here are diverse: they entail mobile forms of labour such as street vending, and encompass remote work, such as the work of artists, translators and other digital nomads. They are not limited to work-related aspects of life, and include mobility linked to leisure and consumption as we have shown in the cases of Benjamin and Valsa, or as strategies to deal with bureaucratic procedures or to sustain communal practices, as we have seen in the case of Senegalese businesses in Brazil
Mobile trajectories are entangled with urban infrastructures that facilitate – or even enable – the maintenance of mobile lifestyles
Summary
In Brazil, we analyse small businesses owned by Senegalese migrants in the cities of Caxias do Sul and São Paulo. Using different ethnographic methods in the form of recorded interviews and informal conversations with owners and customers as well as (participant) observa tions, seven businesses owned by Senegalese migrants were studied in two very different urban contexts: the big metropolis of São Paulo, and the two medium sized cities Caxias do Sul and Passo Fundo.
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