Tactics in movement: pursuing social inclusion in transnational migration

Within the social webs comprising migratory movement, mutual-help and forms of cohabitation prove to be fundamental for their creation and maintenance. Both in the sphere of national and international migration, overlapping or running in parallel with forms of State agency or even the illegal networks that emerge in this area, these support relations are a crucial axis of the circulation composing the dynamics of migration, as a collective fact and an individual itinerary (Menezes and Godoi 2011; Martes 1999). Whether in search of new forms of family-based economic reproduction, or due to “going out into the world” seeking social experience of a diverse order, migrants create trajectories that are contingent upon exchanges, favours and interactions between relatives, friends from the place of origin and new ones met along the travelled route. This process involves an intense movement of people, assets and information. It continuously redefines and creates the social relations and significance of place that characterise the daily experiences of these individuals (Olwig 2007).

In the debate on transnational migratory mobility, this phenomenon is reflected in the movement of non-institutional actors crossing one or more national, geographic, cultural and political frontiers (Schiller Basch and Blanc 1995; Portes 2006), and creating heterogeneous personal and collective experiences in view of the political and economic asymmetries generated by these frontiers, in complex and non-linear transits (Lee 2008; Sheringham 2010). On this extensive spatial scale, in which circulation is accelerated by the development of transport and communication technologies, a whole procedural mechanism of interpersonal relations is formed, articulating space, time, precariousness or clandestinity, delineating and diversifying social networks in terms of dimension, location and social form (Hannerz 1996; Harney and Baldassar 2007). Crossing the transatlantic distance and that of national frontiers, the networks implicated in this journey between the place of origin and the various destinations involve a daily negotiation of social and translocal interactions in terms of obligations, opportunities and constraints (Olwig 2007, 9). It is in this broad scenario of movements, interests and practices between point of origin, trajectory and place of destination that the migrants construct places and feelings of belonging.

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Written by Simone Frangella