most of my participants, it means not only the possibility but the responsibility to do so.
However, some of them did not have to cope with such an obligation, they just wanted to.
Migrating and improving one’s family livelihood is a way to achieve manhood. Migration thus comes with a lot of expectations to fulfil, personal and social.
Imaginaries of transnational migration as a “collective success” (Uberti, Riccio, 2017), imagery of transnational migration was not created ‘out of the blue’. As elaborated here, Senegalese have achieved a lot due to working abroad and sending remittances back home. Narratives about people who go to Europe and get rich in two or three years are often told by migrants.
Some of my interlocutors have built two or more houses in Senegal by sending their revenues to their families. On top of this, social media gives access to glimpse the ostentatious consumption of the wealthiest people around the globe. Television and movies depict industrialised countries on their wealth, lushness and opulence. Videos and images of fellow nationals enjoying ‘luxury Western life’ circulate among those ‘left behind’. After all, why would one not try his luck abroad?
As presented in this thesis, my interlocutors’ lives in Argentina did not spin around luxury and leisure. Quite the opposite, they expressed to live in precarity, working extensively, suffering from exclusion and often being persecuted and criminalised by local authorities. Research indicates that this situation resembles other countries where they are denied working permits and citizenships. Moreover, most of my participants did not imagine finding such a hostile environment. Most of them expected to find something more similar to the wealth and lush described above. How was such a disjuncture possible? Ethnography has allowed me to approach possible answers to this question. The first consideration is the practice that I have denominated as don’t ask-don’t tell. This way of getting and filtering information from abroad was acknowledged by all my participants. It is something they do. Although research about origins or the genesis of such a habit sparks my curiosity, it was not my main interest. My puzzle around this practice was the practice itself: why would one not ask about details abroad?
And why would a person abroad not tell others about the dangers and difficulties experienced?
I presented different reasons that my interlocutors claimed as valid for this practice; ask too many questions can be disrespectful; people might think that you just want to gossip around and not asking because you want to migrate; people might think you want to put a spell on them, the same reason you should not give so much information when asked; if you thrive abroad and then warn others about difficulties they might think you are greedy and just want
to discourage others to succeed; telling about difficulties or suffering can challenge one’s manhood. I have the impression that I have not exhausted why people don’t ask and don’t tell.
I am confident that this practise enables people to imagine all sorts of possibilities from ‘the elsewhere’ and certainly, played a role in the negative impressions migrants got when arriving at their destinations.
However, I presented that when people have a migratory background, the practice of don’t ask-don’t tell started to blur. The title of ‘migrant’ somehow unveiled the mysterious ‘elsewhere’, granting access to more accurate information than those who never left home. My participants did not express this explanation. Instead, they agreed with my suggestion of people giving and receiving more information when talking amongst fellow migrants. Is it also because the person abroad would not be called a liar or accused of discouraging people from thriving if he tells about difficulties or precarious situations? Is there superstition or sorcery involved?
Unfortunately, in this research, I could not go further in exploring such practices of giving and receiving information from abroad.
Well informed or not, all my participants found themselves in a similar situation after arriving.
The Argentinian state has left them with no option but to perform the most vulnerable and precarious labours. On top of that, their activity is not regularised as legit. Therefore, they are often the target of police persecution. This structural situation affected how they imagined migration and their own performance as migrants. Here is when the migratory status paradox (Nieswand, 2011) took place on analysis. The collective representations of migrants as
“national heroes” (Uberti, Riccio, 2017) and their responsibilities of improving the family’s livelihood mismatched the precarious activity they were left with. My participants’ families invested a significant amount of money to make migration possible and coming back to Senegal with empty hands was not an option for all of them. First, because they have no means to do it, and second, they wanted to fulfil their wish to be a ‘real man’. This involved overcoming any difficulty and providing for the family without disappointing, preoccupying or ashaming their significant others back in Senegal. How did they pursue this aspiration? First, by actually overcoming the hardships and hostilities that came with being illegalised migrants. This was translated into working day and night to send enough money to fulfil the family’s needs. Most importantly for this research, they managed their significant other’s imaginations by managing their self-representation. Through their imaginaries of what migration should be like, they imagined an audience that would not recognise working in the street as typical of a successful
migrant, or even typical of their own social class. This is why they put imagination into practice and carefully select what to tell and what to show to their imagined audience. The ways in which they imagine themselves, and the ways in which they imagine people would react if told the ‘truth’, are translated into the ways in which they communicate with their families their practice of self-representation in social media: Images of wealth and conflict-less. Similar to what they expected to find before becoming migrants.
However, not all of them behaved the same way. By re-signifying his activity as a legit job, Abdoulay is in an ambiguous situation where he does not tell people in Senegal what his actual job is, but he uploads videos and news where one could infer that Senegalese people work in the streets and experience conflicts with local authorities. In other words, he shows but does not tell. Moreover, some migrants are challenging these imaginaries of ‘luxury life’ abroad, by uploading videos of police abuse or posting photos where migrants are depicted peddling.
These contending ideas on migration are proof that collective representations are always on the move. This is to say that imaginaries are not totalitarian and monolithic, there are different ideas around migration. Moreover, people can also ‘change their minds’ due to personal or global events.
Lastly, I suggested that the act of migrating works as informing peoples’ imagination. They acquire different knowledge through experiencing new events. For example, before migrating they had ‘no idea’ what the situation outside Africa was. Now, they sounded very knowledgeable regarding the situation of their fellow nationals in Europe. Moreover, some of them changed their ideas about what migration represents. Like Moussa, when he stated,
“Because now I am living things before I didn’t know anything!”. Migration has informed him about the precarious conditions Senegalese people find themselves in abroad. Therefore, he would not like to repeat the experience.
I would like to finish this thesis with Bamba’s wishes for a better future:
I know that by migrating you learn a lot (...) But I also want Senegalese youth to believe in Senegal and make an effort to train themselves, to prepare for the future of the country. Because many things can be done in Senegal too.