Post/Colonial Reconfigurations. The Disregarded, Renewed Arrival of Spaniards in Rio De Janeiro

Tilmann Heil

doi:10.1080/15562948.2020.1754994

Abstract

Given the renewed arrival of Spanish migrants in Brazil since 2008, I analyze how post/colonial power relations are re/configured and contradictions produced when legal and economic precarity question status hierarchies based on origin, race, and class. Brazil currently hosts the largest number of illegalized Spaniards worldwide. Illegality and precarity contest the favorable effects of nearly unconditional whiteness in Brazil and globally racialized, colonial power hierarchies. Derived from 2.5 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro since 2014, my interlocutors’ trajectories show how they struggle with and embrace the urban fabric and its structural post/colonial configuration.

Highlights

Since the outset of the economic crisis in Europe in 2008, the new European emigrants who left the heavily affected southern European countries to go to Latin America have received some attention (e.g. Caro et al, 2018; Domınguez-Mujica et al, 2018; Valero-Matas et al, 2015)
This article investigates two arenas in which Europeanness is unsettled (Stoler, 2010) and which are interrelated in the case of Spanish newcomers in Brazil: firstly, precarity in international mobility and, secondly, whiteness in Brazil
It is relevant to ask how the power relations of coloniality are reconfiguring when young Spaniards emigrate in the context of the 2008 economic crisis to Brazil and how CONTACT Tilmann Heil tilmann.heil@kuleuven.be ß 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Summary

Introduction

Since the outset of the economic crisis in Europe in 2008, the new European emigrants who left the heavily affected southern European countries to go to Latin America have received some attention (e.g. Caro et al, 2018; Domınguez-Mujica et al, 2018; Valero-Matas et al, 2015). The reemerging presence of Portuguese and Spanish in former colonial territories lend themselves for such analyses (Matos, 2009; Miorelli & Manovil, 2018) To understand these highly divergent mobility trajectories, the legal frameworks that currently regulate the status of migrant newcomers have become a key variable as they intersect with the broader configurations of race, origin, and class (Meissner, 2018). I conclude that revealing the ambiguities and contradictions in the lives of young Spaniards in Rio de Janeiro regarding economic and legal precarity, typical of global migrations, as well as white privilege, characteristic of coloniality, provides a key to understanding the status trajectories and societal reconfigurations characteristic of the renewed Southern European outmigration of the past decade

Methodology

Findings

Conclusions