Recalling the bidonvilles of Paris: Historicity and Authority Among Transnational Migrants in Later Life

Abstract

In this article, I aim to shed light on the linguistic and discursive practices entailed in historical meaning‐making—that is, the various ways in which social groups perceive the past and how those perceptions inflect the interactional present. Specifically, I present ethnographic data collected at a day center for Spanish seniors outside of Paris, focusing on interactions among a group of the center's members upon their visit to a museum exhibition documenting the Parisian bidonvilles [shantytowns] in which many of them lived after they migrated from Spain in the 1960s, over 40 years earlier. As they engage with one another and their guide, participants display and enact different modes of knowing the historical content of the exhibition. Drawing on Bakhtin's (1981) concept of the chronotope, I show how these modes of knowing the past may be recruited in ideological processes of affiliation and distinction. For the transnational migrants in later life who populate this article, such chronotopic calibration is a vital means of making sense of the past and establishing forms of belonging in the present.*