Abstract
For more than 10 years living as a Mexican migrant, between two countries (Mexico and Australia), two cities (Mexico City and Sydney), and two social worlds (Mexican and multicultural Australian ‘families-friends’), I have been immersed in a systematic process of self observation and self reflection on my life in my country of destination. During this time I have explored my memories of place and their relationship with my emotional experiences, looking for strategies to continue to be connected with my country of origin and my people. In this process I discovered films were especially significant in sustaining me emotionally. I benefited from the memory associations triggered by representations of Mexico in films produced by Mexicans or by filmmakers from other nationalities. By reflecting on my responses to those films, in this paper I explore how representations of their country of origin can impact on migrants’ emotional life. Using autoethnography, examining my own subjectivity as a way to arrive at a deeper grasp of these processes, I analyse the roles played by different senses in the process of recollection and in the emotional effects produced, which come to embody the experience. My particular focus in this article is the sense of smell triggered by complex interactions within the sensorium while watching films, producing associations and feelings through which I re-live my memories and maintain my emotional sustainability.
Highlights
I am sitting in the darkness, surrounded by Australians waiting for the film to begin
When conversations trigger memories and associations with my city I often feel that common urban referents would have allowed me to establish connections and meanings, and enabled me to relate better with my interlocutors in social and emotional ways. In those cases I have usually chosen selected memories to communicate who I am, in the hope that my audience would be able to find in my represented identity who I am as a migrant, a Mexican, but who I am as myself
In search of emotional sustainability: A Mexican migrant goes to the movies In some way the process of writing, trying to describe my reactions in front of the screen and watching the films again and again to corroborate my recollections, reinforced my emotional sustainability
Summary
I am sitting in the darkness, surrounded by Australians waiting for the film to begin. When people migrate to a culturally different country the act of remembering acquires a vital and distinctive meaning. In many cases I find it impossible to communicate my memories to people I interact with in the new environment who do not share my cultural referents. It is not so simple for migrants to recount our memories. Telling our stories of past experiences in another cultural context involves refractions that give stories new meanings. In this dialogue the act of narration transforms what we remember and how it can be interpreted in the different cultural context. ISSN: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal PORTAL is published under the auspices of UTSePress, Sydney, Australia
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