“The centre cannot hold because the centre never was.”
So often in Migration studies, the center is not only taken for granted, but also the main object of study. The center is understood to be cohesive, homogenous, and well-defined. There’s an idealistic vision of it as the ultimate goal, the place where migrants can become “full members” of a society, and thus access the sources available to members of the body politic. Movement is then understood to be from outside to inside, from the fringes to the nucleus. Natasha Iskander and Loren B. Landau set out to unsettle the idea of the margins, and consequently, the center as well. Their goal is to recognise margins as politically generative spaces, vital socio-political objects of study, and ultimately, sites of contestation, membership-claiming, identity formation, and boundary production (100).
Early theories of margins, such as those of the sociologist Robert Park, interpreted margins as places where the migrant man could discover new possibilities for identity, solidarity, and action, all of which work to move civilization forward. They had generative power: “It is in the mind of the marginal man – where the changes and fusions of culture are going on – that we can best study the processes of civilization and progress. (101)” Later explorations of margins and marginality were not as sympathetic, and instead highlighted the marginal man’s exclusion from the social order and the world he was seeking to enter. Marginality was viewed as “the antithesis of integration, and margins were tracts of no-man’s-land at the edges of cities, settled by people who were unable to join the economic and social life of the urban centre”(102).
Margins, then, are often viewed as negative spaces, characterized by the lack of access, and existing only in relation to, and dependent on, the center. But at the same time, they allow for a clearer view of the nucleus, a better understanding of the processes unfolding inside. They are places of arrival, of negotiation of identity, of care, of transformation. It is at the margins that people define the center. The work by the scholars in this issue focuses on the margins, and uncovers the remarkable position that the centre does not in fact exist: “While it is preserved as ideal and potentially as social fact, centres as cohesive spaces occupied by a secure, relatively unified population with defined boundaries are rare if almost non-existent” (106).
With this framework, the work of Diana Zacca Thomas in the squats of São Paulo serves to disrupt the dynamics between the margins and the center. Their ethnographic work illustrates a key tension between Brazilian housing militants and international migrants living together in squats (ocupações). These squats are abandoned buildings in the center of the city that often get occupied by militants who seek to “reposition squatters from the urban margins to the very center of urban life”(216). They seek to teach squatters/migrants about their rights and about politics in order for them to become “full citizens”, or participant actors in the city. But some housing militants believe that international migrants don’t want to join the movement, or fully integrate into the city, and instead use these spaces as stepping stones in their journey to a richer country, which is true for some of them. Thomas, then, interrogates the social hierarchies that exist within citizenship, and unsettles the idea that all marginalized city dwellers will want to claim their political belonging to the city. This puts forth the question: What does it mean to be a citizen? Who gets to be a citizen?
Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl explore this theme in The contentious politics of refugee and migrant protest and solidarity movements: remaking citizenship from the margins. Through the lens of contentious politics, they examine the ways in which citizenship is enacted globally, “with refugees and migrants demanding rights as a form of enacting themselves as citizens and doing so globally”(529). The contentious politics approach aims to connect social movements transnationally, and allows for differently positioned participants to come together to challenge dominant systems of authority, in order to promote and enact alternative imaginaries”(530). This approach enables people to, through their acts, become activist citizens, following Isin’s concept of citizenship as more than a legal status, but a set of practices and identities that differentiate and rank groups of people within political communities, as well as across and beyond these communities. This perspective offers a great example of how to think about people at the margins defining the center, and different ways of imagining citizenship. Through occupation, or the reclaiming of spaces, for example, refugees and migrants are positioned as important political actors who strategically mobilize resources, claims, networks, and develop political strategies (540). It shows the importance of political action by social movements, and opens new ways of understanding citizenship, or belonging, through agency and action.
The project Lxs Otrxs Dreamers truly feels like the culmination of all these texts together. The book, co-authored by Jill Anderson and Maggie Loredo, is an ode to the translocal community, a celebration of being ni de aquí, ni de allá. When it comes to understanding a topic, academic theory might offer a glimpse, but coming into contact with a work like this really flings the door open. The book carries the testimonials and stories of real people, real agents in issues that we often discuss from the outside (or, should I say, from the inside? Not assuming anyone’s position, but simply taking into account the place where most of us are reading these texts from: a higher education institution in the United States). In a way, reading it transforms the reader into a witness; it implicates us. To quote Castañeda, from their work Disappearing Rooms, bearing witness to something invites us to “resist the isolating effects of social violence (...) We break down barriers between the affected and the supposedly unaffected, the subject and the object, the inside and the outside” (14). Reading the stories of Azul, Patricia, and Miguel felt to me like accompaniment, like being invited into their stories. Like witnessing the horrors of the deportation regime, tampering with borders and margins, and blurring the divide between “us” and “them”.
“I am a foreigner for the way that 'God Bless America' still makes me cry and how I feel conflicted about celebrating Thanksgiving or ever returning to the US.”
(Excerpt from Azul’s testimony, from Lxs Otrxs Dreamers)
WORKS CITED
Landau, L. & Iskander, N. (eds.), (2022) The centre cannot hold: Arrival, margins and the politics of ambivalence: introduction to ‘Arrival at the margins’, special issue, Migration Studies.
Case study in Sao Paulo: “Urban citizenship for all? Exploring the limits of an agenda in São Paulo’s squats”, by Diana Zacca Thomaz
Stierl, Atac and Rygiel, “The contentious politics of refugee and migrant protest and solidarity movements: Remaking citizenship from the margins”
Lxs Otrxs Dreamers book - Introduction.
Castañeda, M. Disappearing Rooms. Introduction and Ch. 1.