Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour

Linking the Past with the FutureConference on Slavery, Indentured Labour, Migration, Diaspora

and Identity Formation.June 18th – 23th, 2018, Paramaribo, Suriname

Org. IGSR & Faculty of Humanities and IMWO, in collaboration with Nat. Arch. Sur.

IDENTITIES IN TRANSIT IN RETERRITORIALIZATION PROCESSES

Maria Cristina Dadalto - Federal University at Espírito Santo, Graduate Program in the Social Sciences, Social Sciences Department

Patrícia Pereira Pavesi -Federal University at Espírito Santo, Graduate Program in the Social Sciences, Social Sciences Department

AbstractThe objective of this research is to understand the cultural representations and cultural meanings that emerge from experiences of estrangement and recognition in transitory and complex processes of (e)migration. It understands that these movements are permeated by feelings of estrangement and transitorialities that affect the (e)migrants societies of origin and destination. This debate is presented in a context in which the various dimensions of the identities in transit in and by the movements, the symbolizations acquiesced through consumption and the crossing of local and global exchange models, are emphasized by the complexity of meanings and impacts found in the daily life of the (e)migrants.

1 – Migrant Territories and Territorializations (E)migration experiences in processes of spatial movement are generally marked by

repositionings and reformulations of categories that mark identities. This rewriting of history by social actors represents possibilities for profound symbolic reseatings that result from cultural renegotiations. This is because subjects reconstruct a city to the degree to which they incorporate it to their own use (Certeau, 2000).

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Migration involves different groups of belonging of origin and destination. In this perspective, it involves rational and emotional choices that compose potential actions and strategies that seek to provoke rearrangements that may first allow subjects insertion and later integration and inclusion.

In this process, daily life is constituted by a web of personal, virtual and audiovisual contacts that are disseminated in different geographic and cultural spaces. According to Mondardo (2012, p.1), the diversity of these contacts “and the deep awareness of self as a being in constant mutation, in movement to the inside, the outside and over oneself, composes the identity and territoriality of the migrant”.

Movements of fitting in and accommodation in new interactional contexts have symbolic and material expressions that conceive the substantialization of identities in transit. Relatively transitory, these identities also represent the delineation of territories and circuits of complex action. As Mondardo (2012, p.1) affirms:

An identity is a territoriality that is tirelessly elaboratedin re-constant re-accommodations and adjustments made by the multiple transit between such distinct contexts and places.

Enmeshed by memories, habits, knowledge and practices, including consumption, the subjects discover themselves living and experiencing the ambiguity of being in places that are manifest daily as situations of belonging and estrangement for themselves and for others. They are thus shaped as hybrid subjects constituted by a sense of transitoriality and of living on a frontier.

These identities, whose hybridized forms combine in the territorialities born at the interstices of conviviality between two cultures, maintain relations circumscribed between multiple spaces and places. This creates increasing opportunities for invention and reinvention of forms of spatialization. These forms become tangible through simple daily practices such as conviviality in spaces of leisure, work and consumption.

The migrants occupation of their places of destination takes place at the frontier. According to Hannerz (1997), in a confrontation of alterities, new identities are produced that are established in flows and hybridations. Frontiers are universes in which the identities in course meet and mix, concomitantly with the emergence of effervescent territorialities. As Mordoni (2012, p.1) affirms:

Hybrid territoriality is, therefore, that which manifests “translation effects (effects of the dissonance caused by unfinished translation processes, a relation of transference orof passage that does not terminate in a naturalized “acculturated” product, but that leaves traces of the first territoriality in the new, constituting a transterritoriality.

At the frontier, migrant subjects are protagonists of the invention of a new world where new identity flows and new veins of territoriality emerge. We call this new world, woven in the

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condition of a frontier, migrant territorialities, which are the result of the meeting of distant homeland cultures, in the resignification of native categories, the reconfiguration of notions of time and space and of subjective rearrangements. They are virtual and material expressions of identities in transit, which are hybrid and complex in devir.

2 –The research subjects, methodological orientation and questionIn this movement, new modes of territorialization develop and new significations related

to the notion of kinship and well-being emerge, as well as other things. By means of these significations, new delineations are developed that concern the emotional associations and perceptions of comfort and quality of life that can implode or reaffirm institutions, especially marriage, causing to emerge new forms of pleasure, which are materialized in various practices such as consumption.

Women, depending on the configurations of cultural systems of origin, and or destiny, undertake a reformulation of their roles, becoming the protagonists of positionings that are quite particular in the local social order. In this study, independently of the condition of gender, we focus our attention on the dynamics of socialization and on tensions in the order of emotions involved in the construction of kinship and the consumption practices from a female perspective.

This focus is the result of the imperatives of fieldwork conducted with Brazilian women who protagonized experiences of migration in Italy and Japan between 2012 and 2016. In this period, we interviewed 24 women using an oral history methodology. This article focuses on the statements of three migrants whose discursive emphases are on the weight that kinship and consumption perform in their agencies in the cultural context of the destination countries; and how challenging it was to manage their emotions in their experiences and exchanges.

As we investigate the collective and individual histories, we understand that it is in the common practices and daily and most simple rituals that identities are revised and reconfigured. According to Certeau (2000), it may be useful to emphasize the importance of the domain of this “irrational” history or of this “non-story”.

Thus, migration, from a female perspective, seeks to comprehend, through observation of daily life, the meanings related to the management of the emotions in the reconfigurations of the notion of kinship and in the experiences of consumption in processes of migrant territorialization. This is because these women left Brazil under different conditions, and established themselves in their destinations in Italy and Japan, confronting difficulties that influence a reconfiguration of their person as based on a redefinition of models of family, marriage, kinship, work and consumption. The focus is on the forms of ordination and organization of the life of these women and their perceptions as marks for their agencies in as migrants in cultural realities designed by their representations of a set of experiences, which are not usually emphasized by their institutional narratives.

The exploration of this secondary territory from the perspective of the official reports of the history of migrations highlights the strength of the social fabric in its multiple forms (Clastres, 2011). It indicates how much the living, visceral social relations that are subterranean

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to official registers and the privileged hierarchical forms of power and places can be developed and even countered to the dominant institutional forces.

2.1 Excess BaggageThe three women were between 20 and 40 years old at the time of the interviews. They

are all trained professionals and signal their identities by mentioning ancestry in many various cultural matrixes. In this sense, we sought to conduct a programmatic comparison without the objective of producing hierarchies by making judgments exterior to the statements of the subjects.

The intention is to emphasize the native theories and reflect on the role performed by Maria, Joana and Luana1 as agents in the production and reproduction of life in contexts of migrant territorialization, considering various sources and historicities. This is because we understand that the experiences of these women, as cultural practices that permeate daily life, can support the interpretation of the lived process. They also help to understand the social interactions established in the new world, in a way that reveals the social reality constructed in the constitution of daily life and the meanings related to the exercise of identity and to conformation to the local.

The interviews were usually conducted in the residences of the informants – without the presence of family members – or by using technological resources, such as e-mail, Skype and chats on digital social networks. They guide our understanding of the experiences of domestic/private life, beyond the ethnographic fact that calls the attention of the common observer, organizing informal spaces that have a determinant influence on the construction of ethos.

3 - NarrativesMaria, 40, was born in Linhares, Espírito Santo. She emigrated to Florence (Italy) in

2005 and continues to live in there. She is married to a Florentine man, has two children and works as a fashion blogger.2 Joana, 32, Brazilian, was born in Santa Teresa, Espírito Santo,  emigrated to Vicenza (Italy) in 1999, returned to Brazil in 2006, and went back to Vicenza in 2014. She is a single journalist.3 Luana, 38, was born in Sorocaba, São Paulo, emigrated to Japan in 1999, and returned to Brazil to live in Vila Velha, Espírito Santo in 2011 due to the trauma caused by the tsunami that year in Japan. She is divorced, has two children and is a teacher.4

We work with the idea that interviews trigger memories and help to construct the narrative. Although the stories told about life are attempts to give order to experiences through a profile of time and space, they dialog with the moment lived in the narrative as an act. To reach the more complex meanings of the text of the interlocutor, a researcher must in some way plunge

1The names are fictitious.2Interview conducted on 15 December 2016.3Interview conducted on 18 March 2012 in September 2016.4Interview conducted on 19 October 2017.

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into the images described. For this reason, there were many moments in which as researchers we were affected by different feelings. We will now present the narratives, understanding that the very selection of the fragments is the fruit of this confrontation of trajectories (Favret-Saada, 2005)

3.1 MariaMy process of going to Italy began in 2005; my decision to go, together with my husband – we met here in Vitória in 2002, we got married in 2005 and decided to begin life as a married couple in Italy –was due to his work.

Maria’s words present the reconfiguration of her marital status as a mark in her migratory experience. But she protagonized the geographic movement by living in London, in a process that was based on the consolidation of a professional affirmation. Once she left for Italy, she was guided by an emotional bond.

Not that there is a less rational appeal in one case than in another. Joana even emphasizes that the departure had been “a decision made, with considerable wisdom with tranquillity...” Obviously the calculations of migration motivated in marriage are not only constituted by an economy of emotions.

The conditions of survival and maintenance of material life within the criteria and expectations of the protagonists of the association are extremely important. Maria herself qualified the choice as a rational and objective fact, as well as an affective and emotional one, by indicating the maintenance of her husband’s work connections as a determining factor and more advantageous in that context, which also assured some accesses to material goods and services. Her concern to not associate migration to a poorly considered and purely emotional decision was notable.

I had already been to Italy before meeting my husband. I had always travelled alot (...). So it was not something new for me. Even because my own family is Italian (sic), I already had an Italian passport; my mother’s family is all Italian.

Maria made an effort to emphasize her departure as an one more step in an autonomous trajectory. Despite the option to remodel her condition in the world, from the perspective of the migrant, freedom of choice appears to be associated to a larger life project prior to the relationship with her husband. This allows us to glimpse the accentuation of the traits of a confluent relationship in terms much more than based on romantic love (Giddens, 1993).

In the model of the confluent relationship, the free negotiation of individualities is what establishes the tone of the romantic association. In this type of administration of intimacy, when protagonized by male and female genders, the woman does not consider the relationship of the two as the most important support for her personal trajectory. The more radical choices such as changes in geographic location, in professional life, and even in religious options, cannot be exclusively justified by impositions of the new marital status.

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Maria profiles herself in a position in which the option to temporarily abandon her professional project and give preference to the roles of wife and mother are not associated to any type of personal frustration or of being seduced by the condition established by marriage. The fact that she had a previous experience with an attempt to emigrate to Great Britain made the new world known to her, and she was relatively familiar with the dynamics of the migrant territories.

Her narrative emphasizes the planning and control in the movement of identity. She is not a migrant who feels “lost”. She affirmed her control of the situation, which was made possible by a familiarity with processes specific to migrant territories. One resource triggered by this informant is an emphasis on the command of the language as a determining element of her differentiated insertion in her destination. When questioned about the perception of any discrimination from natives towards her condition as a foreigner, the command of language appears as an important element of distinction.

I sincerely never felt any of this personally, to the contrary. When I went to look for the job where I am until today – even if I got the job because of English – they needed someone who spoke and wrote English.

In this case, a command of the English language indicates the potentialities of action as mediators of the migrants. Her presence would not be limited to a condition as an exploiter of local resources. In some way she is recognized as a foreigner who adds value to local relations. The reduction of space of equivalence between the migrant and native, indicated by the world of work and by the command of the language, is a significant aspect for the constitution of the self-perception of the subject in a situation of dislocation. For Maria, this emerges as a foundation for her representation of herself in the new socio-spatial situation.

Although her way of thinking of her condition as a foreigner is not preferentially anchored in her marital status, Maria recognizes the importance of matrimony as an element of integration to the local cultural arrangement:

Of course my husband, because he is from there as well, helped me alot. I did not arrive there alone, I did not arrive without references, so I thus had...I was, we can say, taken in by the people with whom he lived, his family. Perhaps that helped the process of me feeling either included or integrated to society.

The reflexive posture in relation to her position in the new socio-spatial context is recurrent. The opening to relativization appears as an important element, expressed in a frequent concern to not negatively qualify the conduct of the Italians and in the recognition of her position as an outsider (Simmel, 2005).

Although a vision of the confluent relationship prevails in her discourse, the sensibility to positively value and use the marital condition as a strategy for fitting in emerges as a skill in the handling of categories from the local cultural repertoire:

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And I knew first to observe, to understand how things functioned and began to follow their rhythm, because its no use for us to have a custom, to want to be what we are in our country, in a foreign country, because they are different things.

Reverence and informality are indicators of strategies Maria used to control the situation. Domestic space is the universe of expression of the female in the modern context. It is part of the presentation of self in the language and tradition in which her trajectories are inscribed. Caring for the home and showing that she is attached, among other attributes, confer authority and legitimacy to the exercise of her role (Giddens, 1993).

In her statements, the images of local kinship also influence her agency, indicating the existence of a network of silent exchanges, which preferentially materialize in the domain of the home. In discourse, the meanings related to notions of family and kinship do not always connect to institutional demands. This indicates that they can serve appeals to socialization, entertainment and material and symbolic well-being that are as valuable to those who experiment them as the formal rites.

Kinship, in another orientation, is also the autonomy of the foreigner on the horizon of social expectations traced for her conduct in that context: the possible moment for public life, the space of affirmation of the family and exhibition of acquisitions made thanks to work, the possibility to leverage marital capital. In other words, places apparently privileged to the inclusive performances only exist in relational terms.

3.2 JoanaJoana’s experience helps to understand how the immediate kinship circumscribed by

marriage with a native (Maria’s case) has stronger influence than descendancy based on ancestry and is reflected in the sense of territoriality of the migrant and on identity signification. 5As a function of the methodological option that we use to explore these statements, we proceed with their presentation in dialog with Maria’s trajectory.

Joana moved to Vicenza when she was still an adolescent; she returned to Brazil in 2006 to study and in 2014 went back to live in Italy. At the time of her first departure from Brazil, her father was unemployed and saw in migration the possibility of a better life for the family, particularly because he was a descendent of Italians and had an opportunity to gain Italian citizenship.

Even if the search for better conditions for material survival, as the element that guides Joana’s narrative, appears to be quite different from Maria’s motivations, it remains in the background in both cases. The transfer of a family already constituted in Brazil (Joana’s case), and the initiation of another in Italy (Maria’s case), are both strategies for insertion by different means of handling kinship.

While Joana’s family seeks a recourse to ancestry as an element for integration, Maria sees in her family tie an opportunity for more effective inclusion. Although Maria also enjoys the

5 Maria has dual Brazilian and Italian citizenship.

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privilege of Italian descendence, she envisions more promising opportunities for insertion through an amalgam of martial capital (Goldenberg, 2010) with a command of the language and prior professional ability.

Joana’s process of fitting in in Italy is marked by challenges that make explicit the awareness of the limits of the appeal to ancestry. Her narrative activates memory as a tie of belonging. Even having arrived in Vicenza during puberty, the integration was difficult. The negative dimension of the migratory process appears to have greater prominence than descendence.

In this sense, one element that exacerbated a dissatisfaction with “outsiders” among natives was certainly a lack of command of the language. When asked about gaining citizenship, Joana clarified:

It was horrible, we had to get up in the early morning, face the cold, line up with all those people, the Questura opened at 8 am and we had to be there at 6am; thank God I only went a few times to the Questura. Later I only had to go to get my visa, because it seems that the police woke up in a bad mood. In my case, not so much, because we had someone who already spoke Italian well to explain to them because what happens: the people would go there and they didn’t know what they wanted, didn’t know what to ask for, in most cases they did not speak Italian well…they were nervous with everyone who was in their path. For me the word Questura de Immigrazione means terror… to be treated poorly, but by being treated badly every time that I was there I was able to do what I needed.

The cold, the hunger, the discomfort are experiences shared on various levels, times and spaces by migrants from different origins. This type of experience represents one of the most significant forms of materialization of the migrant territory and all its complexity. It is indicated by the vision of the lines at the doors of the Questuras – although they became a nearly naturalized fact, they are not always capable of materializing a territory of the Other in the world. The line engenders a world. It is literally a flow of people constructing themselves between worlds.

Joana returned to Italy in 2014, although she had previously affirmed that she would never go back, because her experience had been so traumatic. The years passed in school as well as in the world of work, were filled with discrimination and rejection. However, the return to Italy was motivated for reasons similar to those of Maria: the conjugation of emotional, kinship options and rational calculations in relation to guaranteeing material well- being.

I did not consider the possibility of returning because of all the prejudice that I underwent. They were years when I suffered in school and at work. But, the low salary in Brazil, the difficulty of getting ahead even earning approximately R$1,500 reais a month, the cost of life, the violence, the risk of getting shot on any corner, were factors

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that made me think. Moreover, there is the family factor. Since I am very connected to my family, my sister and my brother-in-law were here, along with my 2 ½ year old nephew.This gave me more strength to return here, This was combined with some personal problems and in my marriage.

Once the first migration passed, the experience of return was different for Joana:

The return was the exit door that I found for various issues. And today, the reality that I live is quite different from that of a few years ago. I have a job where I am respected, I am not discriminated against and I am treated as an equal. I can maintain my house and my life on my salary. And I can get home safely, late at night, without risk of violence. As much as I miss Brazil, and love my country, the situation there is increasingly bad.

The narrative indicates that the minimal horizontality and equivalence in the interactions in the destination country are fruits of a trajectory in which matrimony/kinship, command of the language, a prior professional qualification and the desire for access to certain goods and services act as determining elements. Even if they do not operate as absolute criteria for inclusion of the foreigner, they certainly influence the process.

We thus understand that the approximation of the experiences of Joana and Maria help problematize the processes of inscription of migrants in distinct socio-spatial contexts based on a reflection on the administration of intimacy and personal projects. Although attributes such as professional education, relational abilities, an openness to dialog and cultural relativization, autonomy and intellectual and material self-sufficiency act in equivalence and in frank interface with kinship and matrimony, the latter exercises a decisive role for the reception of the migrant women by the natives.

3.3 LuanaIn 1999, at the age of 18, Luana migrated to Japan. She had become pregnant and

understood that the recourse to ancestry, on the part of her dekassegui6 husband, would allow the construction of a new life. Soon after the baby was born she moved to Japan, with a confirmed

6 In the late 1980s and early 1990s the term dekassegui began to be used in Brazil to denominate Brazilian descendents of Japanese, who emigrated to Japan looking for better work opportunities. The word dekassegui is no longer used by the Japanese because it is discriminatory. The Japanese now call Brazilians who live in Japan foreigners or simply Brazilians.

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job and many financial commitments that she and her husband had assumed with the company that arranged for their travel and settling in their city of destination.

Soon after she began to work, Luana had an accident and was required to continue to work even with a doctor’s recommendation that she rest. She later filed a complaint against the company that contracted her migration for slave labor. She returned to Brazil two times with her family to attempt to re-begin life in her country of birth, until she decided to remain in Japan. Finally, she experienced the trauma of the tsunami of 2011 and returned to Brazil. Her narrative is symptomatic of the entire process she lived through.

You do not become part of the local community; you lose contact with your community of origin, which is your homeland, and you wind up living in another society basically composed of immigrants who have their own dialect: they speak dessakesseguês.You mix Portuguese and Japanese words and create a vocabulary. And you are not understood in Japan or Brazil if you become accustomed to speaking that way; and you wind up not fitting in.

The notion of space is symbolically constructed, both in terms of virtual territories, and in material territories. Luana highlights in her migratory experience in Japan the circumscription of Brazilians in a sui generis space that is marked by language and by a circuit traced in the trajectory in the material city, which includes apparatus from the world of work, consumption, food and leisure.

The dessakesseguês and the particular Brazilian forms of occupation of the material space in the circuit that they transit are rich expressions of the notion of hybrid identity (Hannerz, 1997). According to Luana, in Japan:

You buy Brazilian products, go to places where there are Brazilians, work in factories with translators because there are lots of Brazilians. And you wind up living in this society and not belonging to Japanese society, which is a society that is strongly exclusionary. Any characteristic that is different from them [triggers] a type of exclusion.

When there is a significant estrangement on the part of subjects in a situation of dislocation/relocation, the strategies they create to adapt are practices that help to consider the interstices of identities that become hybrid in the encounter. When speaking of frontiers, Hannerz (1997) suggests their formation not at the rupture of worlds with substantive identities, but at the intersection. This is because it is at the interface between two different cultural veins that the identity flow in which migrants travel arises. It is constructed at the frontier. By not becoming converted into the Other the symbolic world of the host - they become isolated. They are the Other of two worlds.

In Luana’s case, she looks for Brazilian food products. This apparently leads her to revive taste culturally constructed throughout her life. In this sense, a refusal to integrate through this path, and the supply of services that allow the maintenance of this strategy, are in themselves the

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expression of the migrant territorialization. The hybrid and genuinely migrant identity can only be expressed at the frontiers with already constituted worlds, in an interplay of affirmation-rejection of the typically I and of the Other.

Therefore, it is at an imagined space that migrants must recompose their mental and affective maps. Luana, Maria and Joana experienced their anguishes in relation to a new life where the foci and expectations were circumscribed to marriage, family and kinship. The hope for a more peaceful domestic life was presented as a particular and direct objective of Maria and Luana, while it was initially indirect for Joana:

I got pregnant and my mother was in a complicated situation, my mother-in-law was not very willing to help even because it was not only up to her. And we wanted financial independence. So we went there. I had an uncle there who had already gone, and he said it was very good there.

Luana believed that kinship and ancestry would be sufficient elements for supporting the new life, without focusing on other factors that intervened in the process – for example, the Japanese culture and language – and which would restrict her access to goods universal to that society.

The improvements in the conditions of family, conjugality and kinship appear as the larger horizon of expectations. But these three women wind up discovering at the frontiers that the entire process involves an intense and challenging negotiation of meanings, above all from an emotional perspective. Luana’s difficulties are manifest in quite complex personal experiences.

My husband is a descendent, I am not a descendent. My view of the culture is that of a culture that has traditions, a strong respect for their history. But this prevents them from accepting different people as human beings.

The Japanese descendence of Luana’s husband – like Joana’s dual citizenship – are not elements that positively alter their insertions in the destination societies. But for Maria, the fact that her husband is a native Italian works as a favorable resource to her fitting in by means of immediate kinship, while for Luana there is no immediate kinship and the recourse to ancestry attenuates the challenges in the migrant experience.

Kinship, command of the language and access to consumer goods in migrant territoriesThe conjugal and kinship ties, even if they some what help the accommodation of Maria,

Joana and Luana in their destinations and new residences, constitute one among a number of important elements that must be reconfigured in the frontier experiences. Like Joana, Luana’s trajectory was marked by a series of trips between Japan and Brazil. Material and affective conditions influence the choices.

Joana went back to Brazil, and then returned to Italy because she missed her family and concluded that while it was bad there, it was worse in Brazil from an economic perspective and in terms of consumption opportunities. Luana had a similar process: she accompanied her

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husband and saw in Japan a better opportunity to raise her daughter. Meanwhile, Maria emigrated to Italy to construct a new life in her husband’s country.

There are a variety of difficulties in the hybrid territory: restrictions and rejection by natives, new forms of association, hierarchization and conflict among fellow Brazilians and the administration of material life. Luana reported, for example, that the decision to stay in Japan after comings and goings to Brazil, was motivated by the lack of adaptation of her daughter who had grown up at the migrant interstice and who was a good representative of identity in this territory.

Language as a factor of integration to the destination community is another element for considering the migrant territoriality. Each of the three women point to command of the language as a condition for association with the natives. And they affirm that if there is difficulty with language, the migrants maintain the interstitial territoriality, remaining in the transit of the mother language.

Sahlins (1997), when considering transnational identity, understands that conviviality among migrants and the maintenance of kinship ties in the country of origin mark the preservation of a certain symbolic structure. In Hannerz’s (1997) logic of hybridization, we can see that language feeds migrant territorialisation. It does so in an anachronic manner, because migrants are imperatively challenged to guarantee their material survival.

Therefore, the mother tongue acts in the amalgam of identity in transit in its entire hybridity. The remaining instead of returning establishes new rhythms in the identity flow that is denominated here as migrant territorialisation. Self-image comes to be defined by other efforts and movements. It is not simply being converted into a native. It is to live the condition of transit in another way. Thus, for natives to be natives, foreigners must be foreigners.

The space of meaning of “being Brazilian in Italy” or “Brazilian in Japan” is a new place, a territory constructed daily, even in the more simple emotional experiences of domestic life. To be a Brazilian in Italy and Japan is a self-implosive condition: the (e)migrants are others in both worlds (the one they left and the one where they arrived). A new subject is born, new emotions, in other words, new identities and territories.

The expectation for a better family life is the initial motivation that marks the departure from Brazil. In turn, in the process of reterritorialization, the initial notions of marriage, family life and well-being are significantly altered. Narrating their trajectories, Maria, Joana and Luana concomitantly reflexively reorder their emotions, indicating marks, ruptures and strategies.

Even if our criterion for analysis is not based on the identification of common recurrences and experiences, the register of this perspective was inevitable, because in a very explicit and emphatic manner, the issues of work, kinship, language and consumption of goods and services that provide social access are treated by the three women. In turn, more than organizational elements of their narratives, these lines of focus constitute the very dynamic of migrant territorializations. In these three dimensions of identities in transit, many of the dilemmas experienced by the migrants are articulated in their comings and goings.

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The personal dilemmas of these three women indicate, in turn, the anguish in the process in which they place the family first and their individual desires second. Work favours the affirmation of the self in public space, expands the circulation of meanings and opportunities for interaction. And the restriction to the domestic realm for women who certainly move more freely in Brazil, leads to intense reflexive processes.

Another tangible indication of migrant territorialisation takes place at the frontier, where the selection and hierarchization of migrant workers takes place in a more specific circuit. This territorialisation involves a network of material exchanges for the provision of immediate consumption needs such as food, residence, clothes and related items, which, because of the ambiguity of the condition in transit, reaffirms the migrant territoriality. The migrants themselves, in direct and indirect associations with natives, come to constitute a world of work with its own rules.

Final ConsiderationsTerritory and identity can be experiences of deep, nearly unpronouncable interiority.

This is why the use of interviews that elicit the telling of life stories is highly valuable. The plunge into private experiences allows accessing subterranean worlds that are not always explicit in more direct and objective dialogs. The examination of daily life, ordinary life and feelings helps researchers to understand inaudible cultural and historic processes. This is precisely what allowed us to listen from the home or the “factory floor”, which is the domestic world of these three women.

The narratives of Maria, Joana and Luana imperatively point to the agenda of demands for the agencying of emotions as subjects in transit, they include: kinship, language, work and consumption. We understand that each one of these terms is not only an agenda of personal experiences. We sought to consider them as lines of focus that are sketched in and by the networks of interaction that are constituted in the processes of coming and going of (e)migrants. The very subjects of the movements indicate which are in fact their most pressing issues.

The narratives presented here express recurrences and similarities, as do others gathered and analysed by various researchers. Although the concern here was not to search for regularities, and even if it was, we glimpsed a much broader and complex process unfurling, which passes through the interface between identities in transit and emerging territorialities. This interface, as we repeated many times in this paper, resides at the frontier, more precisely at the threshold where (e)migrants become the other, in both their world of origin and destination. Hybrid and genuine identities emerge at the frontier. Territorialities in flux also emerge.

We understand that this space-time – in which the identities of the subjects of dislocation are coined at and by the frontier – constitutes what we call migrant territorialities. We understand that more than similar or recurrent experiences in the histories of Maria, Joana and Luana, what takes place is a movement of migrant territorialisation. What these three women share is the field for planting, the arena and condition in the world. In this new world, the common is the ambiguous condition.

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We are not speaking here of substantive and definitive territories or identities. The anguishes lived in experiences with the construction and or recognition of kinship, insertion in the universes of work and consumption and even in the free circulation propitiated by the command of language, are dilemmas of the production of existence of and by the (e)migrants. And the space-times in which they are embodied is the world that these subjects construct in the experience of dislocation; in other words, the migrant territories.

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