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Imagining Destinations

In document Imagining Migration (pagina 44-50)

Imagining Migration

2.3 Imagining Destinations

Based on my interviews, I conclude that once a Senegalese goes through the experience of being an irregular migrant and having to face the obstacles and hardships that come along with it, they ‘unveil the mysteries’ about life abroad. This way, they can talk like

‘equals’ to other migrants, enabling them to receive more accurate information than those who have not migrated yet. Thus, I conclude that migration is not only a way of doing but also becomes a way of knowing. Migrating, therefore, shapes imaginaries of potential life abroad by opening a new field of possibilities and information.

For Moussa it was the combination of hearing rumors and seeing successful migration trajectories materializing in fancy houses that shaped his imagination and made him not ask any questions. He is 26 years old, born in the village of Ndiaye Thioro. He finished high school, and although he wanted to go to university, he had no financial possibility to continue studying.

Like Ibrahim and Bamba, migrating was not something he would wish to do initially, but he started to see that many of his friends were departing. Moreover, he heard people gossiping about how good their friends or relatives were doing abroad. Moussa asked his father for permission to migrate. His dad told him he heard some rumours that Argentina was a good place to work, “better than Italy’’, so he asked his son if he would like to go there. Spoken information about ‘elsewhere’ has been noticed by researchers as potential expectations makers, often leading to imaginaries of status and economic mobility (Seiger et al., 2020:17).

Rumours thus, were often present in my participants’ narratives as a way of informing their imaginaries. On top of that, he witnessed the houses that were being built with money sent by migrants. He admitted that after hearing those rumours about migration goods, and observing the houses built by it, he felt tempted to migrate.

As I showed in the previous section, the practice of don’t ask-don’t tell articulates and shapes migrants’ imaginations. Moussa did not ask what kind of jobs he will find in Argentina. Neither he was informed about it. He told me he imagined Argentina to be “like Europe”, modern, fancy and full of jobs. Back in Senegal, he thought that Argentinian currency was the dollar and that a company would hire him to do some kind of office job or as a handyman. Moussa told me that he made the following calculation before departing to Argentina, “So I say, look, a dollar in Senegal is 500 CFA, when I earn 2,000 dollars, it is a lot of money. If I leave for five years I can stay there and I can come back”. It is interesting to see that before departing, he was already imagining when and how much money he would be returning for good to Senegal. The desire of going back to their homeland was expressed by all my interlocutors.

Ndiaga is 42, he comes from the Louga region. Since he dropped out of high school in his fourth year he has always wished to emigrate. He told me that he used to spend time with friends and relatives who, according to him, did not have any skills, “They don’t know how to do anything, and they have nothing” he said, but then, they went to Europe for two years and they did things that he could not do at all, like buying houses and cars. He did not know what their fellow nationals were doing in Europe but “it must be better than Senegal” he thought. As presented in the previous section, his older brother who was living in Spain went to Senegal to

visit and told him that Spain is full of oranges, that people make money harvesting them, up to a thousand euros he said. Just like Moussa, Ndiaga calculated what he could do with that money in Senegal, and without second thoughts, he started planning his trip to Spain by boat. He did not imagine that life in Europe would be that difficult without a working permit, something his older brother did not warn him about. Like Fallou, he thought he would not need a working permit to work in the fields, but unlike the former, Ndiaga’s ways of knowing were based on his brother’s testimony and witnessing his ‘unskilled’ friends thrive economically after migrating to Europe.

Being in a ‘migratory context’ was influential for my participants’ imaginaries of being wealthy

‘elsewhere’. Friends and relatives departing, rumours about their progress and the ‘proof’ of their success materialised in houses, sparked imaginaries that later would be translated into pursuing their own imagined migration.

Videos & TV

Following Appadurai, “There is growing evidence that the consumption of the mass media throughout the world often provokes resistance, irony, selectivity, and, in general, agency”

(1996:7). Willems recalls that it is not only media that influence people’s ideas about these

‘new worlds’ abroad. The urban landscape of Dakar is filled with large billboards advertising ways of receiving money from the US or Europe. The author points out that “Western Union, in particular, is very creative in devising slogans and pictures portraying ‘happy recipients’ and

‘proud money senders’” (2014:327).

Thierno commented that, when in Senegal, he used to watch photos and videos of his friends in Brazil. Those images were beautiful, he said. Thierno told me that knowing his friends were abroad and getting to watch their videos, “It is as if you have a meal here and you eat it, and the food looks delicious, it will make me want to eat that food, do you understand me?”. As Teo suggests, “(...) migration may further spark the imagination of others” (2003:16). At the same time, imagination may further spark migration as well, creating a ‘snowball’ effect.

Moussa and Thierno’s narratives are examples of the social character of imagination as “(...) a constructed landscape of collective aspirations” (Appadurai, 1996:31) mediated by social media and a context where migration is, in Moussa’s words, “the topic of the day”.

As presented in section 2.1, Ibrahim’s imagined migration started with his family’s obligation and his agreement to it. He soon started to imagine ‘the new world’ and himself living in it.

Ibrahim told me that soon before departure he was very excited about going to Argentina, he never really watched the news about Western countries, but he would watch movies depicting luxurious and lustful Western lifestyles, making him wish to go abroad. I asked him to describe in more detail what he was watching in those films:

(...) the places that they were showing within the film and the world that they are showing you are very different. Cars are the newest cars, the newest, clothes too and a lot of things, cell phones, they were always showing you the newest things (…) the panties that the women put on here in the square, the films they were showing, they were kissing, I liked that. And I liked meeting new people too, who are all white, like you.

Ibrahim thought he expected him and his brother to be the only black people in the city and did not imagine encountering so many Senegalese in La Plata. Drawing on his initial aspirations, he also thought he would go to a football club to try luck or that he would get hired by a sewing company. Television and movies are huge producers of visual inputs. Industrialized countries are massive creators of images of their nations depicted as material paradises, stimulating the imagination with their promises of wealth. Appadurai’s notion of “mediascapes” describes capabilities of production and propagation of information through different media sources. This information, either visual, written, spoken or combined, creates “images of the world” that are consumed “throughout the world”. As the author states, the bigger the distance between audience and the experiences of metropolitan life, the bigger the chances for the consumer of imagining “(...) chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects, particularly if assessed by the criteria of some other perspective, some other imagined world” (ibid:35). More locally focused, Kabunda explains that:

The advertising pressures from the North and the imposition of the western way of life on the African peoples also explain the phenomenon of migration. Subjected to

‘advertising imperialism’ or cultural Eurocentrism, African villages and suburbs are invaded by cultural values and images of the North, which present Europe as

paradise on earth and an obligatory reference for development (Kabunda, 2006:26, emphasis in the original)21.

The influence of media in migration is indeed an important relation to consider when analysing imaginaries of ‘elsewhere’. We cannot ignore how frequently we are bombarded by images of luxury and wealth. We are just ‘one click away’ from watching the richest and most famous celebrities enjoying the fanciest clothes and driving the latest cars. Moreover, through social media we can watch not only celebrities but also friends and relatives depicting images of

‘exotic’ landscapes and wealth from Abroad, just like Thierno commented about his friends in Brazil. However, we cannot understand the relation of media and migration just as a top-down equation.

Migration

After five years of working as a street vendor in Spain, Ndiaga got deported back to Senegal and spent the next two figuring out where and how to migrate again. One day, he heard from a relative living in Argentina. It sounded strange to him because he met several Argentinians in Spain, “(...) they all had the worst jobs”, most of them in phone parlours. “Probably Argentina is not such a wealthy country”, he thought. Despite this, he phoned his contact person there and, as explained in the previous section, he got informed that Senegalese were working as street vendors. His uncle told him, “it is not like Europe, but it is better than Senegal”. It was enough information for him to fly to South America and try his luck there. For Ndiaga, the very act of migrating before worked as a way of informing his imagination about Argentina. He got access to more accurate information than the ones who did not migrate before, and also, he imagined what Argentina would look like based on his experience in Spain. I conclude that migrating is a way of informing imaginaries of onward migration.

As presented throughout this chapter, imaginations about migration are informed by cultural &

personal values, media and being in a migratory context. I showed how aspirations, obligations

& decisions interplayed within each other and contributed to the ways my interlocutors started to imagine migration before departure. Moreover, cultural practices such as don’t ask-don’t tell are at the fore Senegalese imaginations. The little information given by the person abroad

21Translated from Spanish.

leaves room for migrants to interpret migration and destinations in ways that would match their aspirations of a ‘better life’ abroad. Their subjectivities were informed by a set of cultural and individual values, and affected by TV & media and a ‘migratory context’ where mobility is ingrained in everyday life.

Next, I will present how their imaginaries about migration started to shift after arrival. Much of its change was due to structural regimes of mobility that condition their entry to the country, condition their activity and criminalise them. I will demonstrate the ways in which they self-perceive and therefore the complex ways in which they self-represent towards significant others, putting imagination into practice. Lastly, I will explore their ideas about Europe and their fellow nationals living there. Their imaginaries will show the ways in which migration has informed them about what to expect from migration.

Chapter 3

In document Imagining Migration (pagina 44-50)