Migration Narratives Research Articles

The Role of Mexican Immigrants in the United States on the Imagined and Invented Traditions in Mexico’s Regional Cities

Mexican immigrants who move to the United States exert great influence on the reproduction of tradition in regional Mexican cities. This study examined the “changes in vistas” that appear due to the frequent migration that connects global cities with sending societies. The emphasis here is on the realities in which residents upgrade their living spaces using traditionality with their own unique strategies (posttraditional vistas), despite social and financial restrictions. Employing ethnographic methods and measurement surveys of housing, this study focused on Jalostotitlán, Jalisco, Mexico. It was found that changes in the vista of Jalostotitlán have not resulted from the unidirectional impact of people, goods, and money flowing from global cities; rather, they have arisen from the bidirectional relationship between immigrants and their hometowns. This research helps to depict another factor for discussions of the global migration narrative by placing regional cities at the core.

Time mapping: charting transcultural and First Nations histories and geographies in doctoral education

ABSTRACT In this article, we introduce a time mapping methodology to chart the impact of transcultural and First Nations’ histories, geographies and cultural knowledges on doctoral education. Drawing upon a ‘Southern’, postcolonial-decolonial theoretical framing and extending textual life history methodologies, we argue that time mapping is a visual methodology that has the power to disrupt managerial, auditing discourses that have come to dominate present understandings of doctoral education. We present the time maps of migrant, international candidates and Australian First Nations candidates and supervisors, creating spaces for narratives of migration, war, discrimination, destruction, colonisation, change, survival, faith, energy, language and cultural revival, growth, inspiration and the power of Country. We seek to re-humanise discourses about doctoral education.

Not your sad, sad refugee: Ali Samadi Ahadi’s comedic rejection of the forced migrant’s identity crisis

ABSTRACTIt appears to have become customary amongst many centrist European and conservative American leaders in the new century to present Muslim refugees’ stories as tales of dangerous Others. These stories are alarmist, post-9/11 scare tactics, which an overwhelming number of statistics have debunked as factually untrue. Against this backdrop, a new wave of Muslim refugee artists has begun to reclaim agency over their narratives of forced migration and political asylum. This paper details how Ali Samadi Ahadi’s 2009 comedy film, Salami Aleikum, offers one of those counter-narratives. The film is a wry riff on the expectation that every Muslim refugee story contain a tragedy. It explores the personal journeys of its characters’ experiences of displacement and their life as cultural hybrids. I argue here that a crucial factor in the impact of such comedic narratives is their creative versatility. The director of Salami Aleikum, an unattended refugee minor from Iran himself, demonstrates it by mixing culture clash, Bollywood, and inter-ethnic wedding film comedy elements. With these elements, the film conveys a post-colonial critique of Western capitalism and its dogmatic prescription of identity. It is a strategic decision on part of Samadi Ahadi to deliver a warm-hearted riposte to token declarations of multicultural tolerance, which leave nonconforming communities behind.

What affects the mental health of people seeking asylum in the UK? A narrative analysis of migration stories

ABSTRACT This paper aims to understand how people seeking asylum make sense of their migration experience and the factors impacting the mental health of people seeking asylum in the UK how this influences mental health and well-being. We analyse three extended unstructured interviews with people who have sought asylum in the UK that were generated through interviews with a theatre company. This is augmented by two interviews with theatre company staff about the interview process. Transcripts are analysed using simultaneous thematic and narrative analysis. Seven themes are identified; the overarching theme is one of dehumanisation due to the asylum process and public discourse. Narrative analysis demonstrates how experiences of torture and lack of control in countries of origin continued in UK. Moreover, the asylum process inhibited people reconciling their pre-migration trauma and stopped interviewees planning for their future, leading to a loss of identity. Interviewers worked with interviewees to create a narrative to prompt the audience into action on migrants’ rights. Results suggest the importance of creating a secure, trusting space where people can purposively construct their narratives of migration to reframe traumatic experiences.

Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives

Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives

Irish Roots in Graciela Gabal's Story "Gualicho"

Graciela Cabal (1939-2004) was an Argentine children’s writer and an important and active figure in the consolidation of a youth literature in Argentina in the 1980s. She descended from two large Irish families who settled in Suipacha (Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina). Cabal lends her marvelous literary voice to those sheep raisers in the short story “Gualicho”, about a failed wedding and a bewitched groom in the Irish community around 1850, in which even Father Fahey is present to bless the ceremony. What at first sight appears as a beautiful children's story turns into a narrative of migration with intertexts from Jorge Luis Borges and from Argentina's national poem Martin Fierro. Cabal’s “Irishness” (also present in Secretos de Familia, her autobiographical novel) has never been studied and her texts are probably the only ones in Argentine children's fiction which make reference to the early Irish community

Shaping a digital memory platform on migration narratives: a public history project on Italian and Portuguese migration memories in Luxembourg - Luxembourg National Research Fund

Shaping a digital memory platform on migration narratives: a public history project on Italian and Portuguese migration memories in Luxembourg - Luxembourg National Research Fund

Questioning Representation: Testimonials, Witness Accounts and Literary Migrant Narratives

This article rethinks contemporary approaches to asylum by examining literary accounts of human displacement to problematise representations and authenticity. A believable testimonial of asylum seekers’ experience is key in the asylum application process and the pursuit of such truth by Europe’s border forces usually entails a celebration of authenticity. Yet, the emphasis on migrant testimonials as the definitive source in understanding the migration ‘crisis’ is deeply problematic. This essay argues that literary representations of displacement are equally valuable in helping us understand contemporary migration. This paper engages with the poetry of two exiled poets, Warsan Shire and Yousif Qasmiyeh, to illustrate the importance of literary accounts of migration, and to demonstrate that the intimate and traumatic stories of the borderline condition should be shared on migrants’ own terms, not by the demands of the European border forces. By drawing on John Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and its representation of the current approach to human displacement, this paper also explores the role of fiction to 'narrativize' the nuances of migratory experiences.

Narratives of integration: Liminality in migrant acculturation through social media

Migrant integration is a long drawn out process requiring synergies with various dimensions of life, rhyming with those of the host country. In this paper, we attempt to deconstruct the digital narratives of migrants to explore how they may lead to a meaningful assessment of their acculturation and consequent integration in their host societies'. Drawing on acculturation theory as a lens, we argue that migrants' use of social media creates a liminality that is synonymous to ambiguity and disorientation that may diminish through a composite adaptation of acculturation and ethnic identity. Our data evidence on social media use among migrants domiciled in major cities in Sweden suggest that social media-based interaction of migrants is not encouraging integration, while their digital proclivities tend to define their narratives of online ethnicity and their physical realities. Implications for migrant integration are presented.

“God is in control”: middle-class Pentecostalism and international student migration

ABSTRACTIn this article I explore the role of Pentecostalism in the lives of middle-class Brazilian students-turned-migrants in Australia. Brazilian students lead precarious lives in Australia. They are transitioning into adulthood, living away from the homeland and without their families for the first time and they experience downward mobility. In addition, they are at the mercy of constant changes in Australian migration policy. Drawing on three years of multi-sited fieldwork in Australia and Brazil in three Pentecostal churches (the Australian megachurches Hillsong and C3 and a Brazilian church), I argue that Pentecostalism supports these students in their migration pathway. This is particularly the case because these are Seeker churches. By focusing on youth culture, entertainment, and informality and by addressing real-life situations, these churches cater to middle-class sensibilities. I also contend that their religious beliefs and practices are interwoven with the students’ narratives of migration to Australia. Thus the students pray for visas, jobs, and sponsorships for permanent residency and they see every obstacle and achievement as God’s work in their lives. For them, God determines whether they can stay or must return home. Importantly, citizenship in God’s kingdom gives them a more significant sense of belonging than that of the Australian state.

Travelling toponymy: The contribution of place names to the textual representation of place and memory in Abdellah Taïa’s Une mélancolie Arabe

Abstract Narratives of exile and migration pose important questions related to the role of language in the representation of space, both that of home and away as well as sites of transit. This article argues that the textualisation of space is a central strategy for representing these spaces as place, i.e. as the site and product of lived experience, and that toponyms, place names are an important linguistic tool in this respect. The article draws on critical place name studies in order to examine the political and emotional aspects of place names in narratives of exile and migration. To do so, it examines the role of place names in Abdellah Taïa’s novel Une mélancolie Arabe, a text where place names play an important role, as the protagonist navigates between his native Morocco, his adopted city Paris, and Cairo, capital of the Arab world; and where the names of the cities come to function as symbolic representations of home and freedom. The use of place names thus becomes a means of recreating places that may be geographically distant, but emotionally close. Moreover, the close relations the text establishes between place names on the one hand, and emotions and affect on the other, give reason to reconsider the textual and mnemonic functions of place names.

The Welsh and the medieval world by Patricia Skinner (review)

106 North American journal of Celtic Studies ation. One aspect of this concerns kingship; in Chapter Four, Adomnán is shown to have presented Columba as a new Samuel to try to shape the concept of kingship among the Picts in the late seventh and early eighth centuries (169–173). By the time of Uunust son of Uurgust, king of the Picts and probable commissioner of the St. Andrews sarcophagus (d. 761), Márkus suggests that the Pictish kings had adopted this Christian model to the extent that he wonders ‘if Psalm 44 had become a kind of royal anthem in Pictland’ (251). The process continued through the ninth century, with the adoption of the name Constantine by the kings of the Picts/Alba being presented as a sign that they had adopted the first Christian Roman emperor ‘as a paradigm for the proper behavior of a ruler in church affairs’ (275). Having dismissed the idea that Scotland was born out of ethnic conflict , Márkus seems, thus, to suggest that Christianity and the institutional Church offer an alternative framework within which to understand the conception of the kingdom. Whether this argument will win favor is yet to be seen. What is clear currently is that Márkus has written a book that is both accessible and thought-provoking. With this addition to two other recent works on early Scotland—James Fraser’s From Caledonia to Pictland. Scotland to 795 and Alex Woolf’s From Pictland to Alba. 789–1070—students of the early medieval history of northern Britain are exceptionally well provisioned to take on the unique problems of the discipline. The Welsh and the medieval world, ed. Patricia Skinner. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018. ISBN 978–1–78683–189–7. xiii + 336 pages. ₤29.99 (paperback). Joshua Byron Smith University of Arkansas The Welsh and the medieval world explores ‘how the Welsh interacted with and made their mark on the medieval world through their expertise, creativity, and enterprise’ (1). This clear, yet broad, theme lends these chapters a coherence too often not found in edited collections. Patricia Skinner deserves commendation for drawing on experts in literature , history, and archeology to compile a volume that surely will offer something new to any reader, regardless of discipline. Moreover, The Welsh and the medieval world shows that Wales has much to contribute to recent scholarly conversations about the global and transnational Middle Ages. Part I concerns the Welsh and their immediate neighbors, the English. Janet Kay’s opening chapter, ‘Moving from Wales and the west in the fifth century. Isotope evidence for eastward migration in Britain’, unsettles some old paradigms about British migration in the long fifth century. Using the analysis of stable isotopes found in skeletal remains, she shows that the unidirectional narrative of migration—in which the native British flee Joshua Byron Smith [jbs016@​ uark​ .edu] is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas . He is the author of Walter Map and the matter of Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). His research focuses on the multilingual literature of high medieval Britain. Reviews 107 westwards, pushed by the arrival of Germanic peoples from the continent—is in serious need of revision. Surprisingly, in some parts of fifth-century Britain, ‘the dominant migration narrative was one of movements from Wales and the west to the eastern lowlands , rather than the other way around’ (38). Aristocratic migration is the topic of Emma Cavell’s chapter, ‘Emma d’Audley and the clash of laws in thirteenth-century northern Powys’, which is a welcome study of Emma d’Audley, a Marcher noblewoman who married into a ruling Welsh family. Cavell focuses on the later part of Emma’s life, when she found herself widowed and embroiled in legal proceedings that pitted her against her own children and Welsh relatives. Emma, Cavell argues, helped further connections between Wales and England, and she was also an agent of change herself, pursuing justice through an innovative mix of English and Welsh law. Moving from gentry to clergy, Rhun Emlyn’s following chapter, ‘Migration and integration. Welsh secular clergy in England in the fifteenth century’, uses the ordination lists of bishops’ registers to...

Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art: An Introduction

Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary ArtAn Introduction Peter Chametzky The urge to migrate is no less "natural" than the urge to settle. Kwame Anthony Appiah One might argue, in fact, that it is simply irresponsible for European states to continue to allow significant segments of their populations to be driven by nostalgia for homogeneity. There is no longer room to pretend that European countries will return to some imagined, idealized state of ethnic and cultural sameness. Rita Chin ich werde deutsch Ich werde deutsch (I become German) provides the provocative title for a series begun in 2008 of large-scale, staged photographs by German photographer Maziar Moradi. Born in Tehran in 1975, Moradi's series 1979 told the story of his own family's experience in and emigration from Islamic revolutionary Iran and won the German Photographic Society's biennial Otto Steinert Prize in 2007. In Ich werde deutsch each image presents a transitional moment, now experienced in Germany, within extended geopolitical narratives of migration not limited to the artist's family or to Iran. Moradi has described the series: I become German tells the stories of young migrants who have left their homelands and begun a new life in Germany, but through their families have grown up with a different cultural background. I've collected stories from these young people with a migration background (Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund) from childhood to adulthood…They relate problems… but also positive experiences and transformations… This project is a continuation of my work about my family, 1979… but this time it's about the next generation, their children.1 [End Page 655] Many of the photographs in Ich werde deutsch depict single, contemplative figures in evocative settings. Time haunts each image, as their subjects appear to be pondering their current situations in relationship to past memories and to futures about which viewers can only guess. In one, a dark-haired woman sits at a kitchen table. The woman and the naked, uncooked "oven-ready" chicken challenging her appear in sharp focus against a blurry background of modern cabinets and kitchen utensils, and a still life of fruit in a bowl. In another, a surgeon slouches alone in an operating room, holding a standard but illegible German identity card in his hands, as his generic scrubs and surgical mask obscure his specific identity. In a third, a blond woman and a dark-haired, swarthy man brood in the front seat of an automobile, each alone in a shared space, with the physical and psychological gap between them echoed by the sliver of dusking sky dividing the dark trees behind and above them. In yet another, a grown woman sits surrounded by dolls. While she is dressed, made-up, and coiffed as if herself a doll, her brown skin contrasts to the real dolls' overwhelming whiteness. In the bottom left, a little red-haired girl looks up at her along a well-defined diagonal axis. Are these the little girl's dolls? No, more careful observation, particularly of the arms, reveals that she too is a doll whose hands are hidden, in contrast to those of the woman, Click for larger view View full resolution Maziar Moradi, Ich werde deutsch (I become German), 2008–13, 100 x 125cm [End Page 656] Click for larger view View full resolution Maziar Moradi, Ich werde deutsch (I become German), 2008–13, 100 x 125cm Click for larger view View full resolution Maziar Moradi, Ich werde deutsch (I become German), 2008–13, 100 x 125cm [End Page 657] Click for larger view View full resolution Maziar Moradi, Ich werde deutsch (I become German), 2008–13, 100 x 125cm large and prominent. The photograph elicits an uncanny response by momentarily blurring the boundary between the animate and inanimate, as in Eugene Atget's famous photograph of mannequins in a Paris shop window. Since, within this pictorial world, the dolls establish a norm of small-sized homunculi, the real-life woman also appears, like Gulliver amid the Lilliputians, disproportionately large and unnatural, a real person trapped in an imaginary world. Moradi's group tableaus are more...

From Apple to Orange: Narratives of Small City Migration and Settlement among the Urban Middle Class

As large cities become unaffordable, some people in the urban middle class are moving to small cities but risk replicating gentrification and its harms. Based on a qualitative research project on Newburgh, a small city north of New York City, this paper examines the narratives that middle-class urbanites construct to make sense of this migration, their new urban environment, and their place within it. These narratives describe their decision to move (migration) and their everyday lives in the city (settlement). Most importantly, their narratives are shaped by their social positions as both displaced residents and gentrifiers and as both consumers and producers of space. But despite being self-aware gentrifiers, their settlement narratives lack reflections on their own displacement from New York City, and instead emphasize how they try to mitigate gentrification’s harms. The paper concludes with a discussion of what makes gentrifiers in small cities distinct from those in large ones.

Ten Years of Participatory Cinema as a Form of Political Solidarity with Refugees in Italy. From ZaLab and Archivio Memorie Migranti to 4CaniperStrada

This paper introduces the context of European mobilizations for and against refugees and how participatory cinema has become a way of expressing political solidarity with refugees in Italy. We present and discuss ten years of the artistic work of ZaLab and Archivio Memorie Migranti and focus on two film projects of 4CaniperStrada. Central to the production of participatory cinema in Italy is challenging the mainstream narrative of migration through the proactive involvement of asylum seekers, with their political subjectivity, by using a self-narrative method.

Stress, migration, and allostatic load: a model based on Mexican migrants in Columbus, Ohio

BackgroundImmigration is a disruptive event with multiple implications for health. Stressors, including family separation, acculturation, job insecurity, restricted mobility, sojourns, dangerous border crossings, stigmatization, and marginalization, shape immigrant health in ways we are only beginning to untangle. Around the world, there are over 200 million international migrants. In 2015, there were 43.2 million immigrants living in the US, 26.8% of whom were born in Mexico. Investigating how stress affects health among migrants facilitates better understanding of their experiences.MethodsHere, we review existing research on stress and how allostatic load varies among migrants with specific attention to Mexican migrants in the US. Next, we explore research incorporating biomarkers of allostasis and narratives of migration and settlement to examine disease risks of Mexican migrants residing in Columbus, Ohio. This mixed-methods approach allowed us to examine how social stressors may influence self-reports of health differentially from associations with assessed discrimination and physiological biomarkers of health.ResultsThese data sources are not significantly associated. Neither narratives nor self-reports of health provide significant proxies for participants’ physiological health.ConclusionsWe propose, the pairing of objectively assessed health profiles with narratives of migration better illustrate risks migrants face, while allowing us to discern pathways through which future health challenges may arise. Immigration and acculturation to a new nation are biologically and culturally embedded processes, as are stress and allostatic responses. To understand how the former covary with the latter requires a mixed-methods bioethnographic approach. Differences across multiple social and physiological systems, affect individual health over time. We propose incorporating physiological biomarkers and allostatic load with migrants’ narratives of their migration to unravel complex relationships between acculturation and health.

Jurate Radaviciute, Devoid of (E)motion: Farah’s Story

Abstract This essay investigates the theme of emotionlessness in Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame; the research is carried out within the theoretical framework of postmodernism. In the novel, otherwise filled with strong emotions such as love, hate and shame, one character, Farah Zoroaster, can be singled out as a person characterised by a lack of emotion. The question raised in this research is about the place of emotionlessness in the narrative of the novel and the functions it performs. It is discovered that although Farah has a unique position in the novel, her story is intertwined with those of other migrant/ peripheral characters such as Bilquis Hyder, Eduardo Rodrigues and Omar Khayyam Shakil as opposed to the protagonists of the novel Iskander Harappa and Raza Hyder, who are local/central characters of the novel. However, alongside the narrative lines of her father and Eduardo Rodrigues, Farah Zoroaster’s story explores the topic of migration from a perspective of personal freedom and spirituality, which is different from other migrant narratives in the novel. The postmodern nature of the narrative plays with the reader by offering contrasting connotations of the freedom and spirituality attributed to the emotionlessness of Farah, such as narcissism and the absence of personal qualities.

El camino menos transitado: Escritura expresiva autobiográfica con migrantes Norte-Sur a Guanajuato, México

<p>This article parts from the assumption that some common notions about migration are “narrative” in nature - both half-fictions and socially constructed “realities”. It looks at a trend frequently neglected by hegemonic narratives of human movement, namely North-South migration. More specifically, it focuses on some migrants to the state of Guanajuato, Mexico and their writings produced during two intercultural expressive and autobiographical writing workshops. The study draws from an interdisciplinary methodology, including migration studies with a sociological, anthropological, economic and psychological outlook, expressive writing studies, and narrative analysis of texts created. The workshop writings revealed both an emergent sense of a “common humanity” among participant movers, and the significant complexity of individual migrant experiences. Many of the tales told indeed questioned common “migration narratives” like neat nation-state to nation-state movement and North-South divisions, thus opening spaces for re-imagining migration in its full human universality, diversity and complexity.</p>

(Re)negotiating transnational identities: Notions of ‘home’ and ‘distanced intimacies’

Transnational migrants negotiate the multiplicity of ‘here’ and ‘there’ and contested notions of ‘home’ between home and host countries. As transnational migrant women in Australia, we explore these notions and our intimacies with ‘home’ as a complicated, ambivalent set of imaginings, biographies and emotions in relation to place, people and socio-cultural expectations. Using evocative autoethnographic accounts through ‘intimate landscapes of self-confessions’ based on personal experiences our narratives articulate ‘intimacies’ as something other than a direct relationship between self and other. Intimacies become a space within which self and home can be sought and experienced through emotional reflexivity (Holmes, 2010) generated by memories, practices of relationality and place-making through sociocultural encrustations. Skrbiš’s (2008) emphasis on migrant narratives rooted in emotions, Bradatan, Popan and Melton’s (2010) concept of fluid social identities and Ahmed's (2000) challenge to the notion of home as a ‘fixity’ underpin our discussion on identities and positionalities. Reflecting on a ‘notional home,’ we touch upon our ‘practise of emotions and intimacies’ (MacLaren 2014, Everts and Wagner, 2012) in relation to home and host cultures, with reference to gender, race and class in renegotiating our transnational identities.

Between Khet (Field) and Factory, Gaanv

This paper examines the intersections of caste and gender in the context of migration, industrial work and urban spaces. Drawing upon fieldwork in two cities in North India—Delhi and Ludhiana, it explores what inter-state migrant workers articulate about identities, work, and urban/rural spaces. Migration narratives display a strong undertone of negotiating with traditional village-level hierarchies of caste and gender. In several accounts, while prima facie, the process of migration is strongly represented as a means of breaking away from traditional hierarchies, the intersections of caste and gender underlie the narratives, and these traditional identities often provide context and meaning(s) to how the migration process is envisaged. Migrating for industrial work—from how it is envisioned to how work in the urban context is seen—is not independent of these identities; rather they are reinforced and reconstituted in varied ways. The accounts are also marked by prioritization of particular identities over another in specific contexts—such as the workplace and the urban neighborhood—which I argue, offers valuable insights for understanding workers’ agency and politics.