What are the trajectories of those who migrate? What are they like?
I was recently asked to contribute my reflections for an arts-based and creative workshop on migrants’ trajectories focusing on the themes of work, family, and housing. I wrote about this influenced by my position and experiences as a male Latino-white, South American with European roots, migrant who has had the opportunity and privilege to study, work, and travel in many places across the world. My name is Juan Manuel, but I signed with my pseudonym Juanchila, and the text here is a translated and adapted version of the Spanish and French originals. 1*^
Work. Family. Housing. Realities and imaginaries that encapsulate and intertwine with so many others: languages, identities, foods, music, cultures, politics, public services, climates, plants, landscapes, places, friendships, memories, smells, textures, joys, anxieties, traumas, violence, experiences...
To migrate is to escape. To migrate is to change. To migrate is to try to improve… To migrate is to leave, and sometimes it is to return.
It’s difficult – impossible? – to capture everything which is meant, everything that happens-happened-will happen, what lives, what dies in a migration trajectory, whether it’s through oral stories, drawings, photos, or even in two pages of text like these here.
The same migration trajectory can be remembered and re-lived through infinite representations that vary with the passage of time, the porosity of memory, the latency of emotions, the encounters with other people, the living of other experiences, the formalisms and formulisms of administrative checks, interrogations, and examinations. To forget, to remember, to confuse these trajectories, is also to create them, to relive them, to prolong them… to change them.
Suppose for a moment that a migration trajectory is like a ball of yarn… Yes, a ball of yarn, for lack of another metaphor. The particularity is that the yarn of this ball remains attached to its origin, the sheep. Like the yarn, the migrant’s trajectory is not linear, neither in time nor in space, nor can it return to its origin in the same way it began. For sure, some – but not all – can return to the land where they were born, to the neighbourhood where they played with their friends, to walk the sidewalks they frequented, to remember and imagine the experiences of those past generations who walked those same sidewalks…
But, just as the sheep from which the yarn-then-wool came from is born, grows, fattens, dies and decomposes to earth, the land from which one comes would have changed, their friends would have changed or moved, the generations will have expanded or shrunk, and the sidewalks they walked – I too walked – would have been walked some more, worn out, rebuilt, or left to neglect… Then the yarn would have changed, they would have changed, I would have changed.
Sometimes this change is voluntary, sometimes it is forced, unexpected. Sometimes is welcomed, even appreciated it, and many other times is not.
The questions I have asked, and ask, myself as a migrant
Where am I going? Where do I stay? Where do I come from? When do I arrive? How do I get there? Have we already arrived? Can I go back? Do I want to go back? When will I come back?
How long have I been here? What did I do when I arrived? How did I find work? Where did I take refuge? Did I hide? From what? Who did I come with? Did I migrate alone or accompanied?
Will I migrate for a long period of time? Am I, Was I coming or leaving?
Did I migrate as a full person or have I left a part behind? What part? Can I go back whole? Why, what did we migrate for? Did I like what I found? Do I miss what I left behind?
Did I succeed or did I fail? What is success? And failure?
What is my story? What is our history?
A migrant’s trajectory cannot be stopped, because it never began… it always was. Migrating is a human act.
Work. What does work mean in a migration trajectory? It can be numbers. In France, for example, the unemployment rate for non-EU migrants was 13% in 2021 (compared to 8% of the total population), with lower wages and lower-skilled jobs.2
Work is also about the borders and professional opportunities of those who migrate. These are administrative procedures (the (im)patience of the agent who is processing a resident permit; the colours of the file binders in an office; the copy of a utility bill someone forgot to bring to their appointment; a cold morning queuing in front of some government building). It is the approval of diplomas and qualifications that must be officially translated, certified, and homologated, those that might have been lost along the way.
Questions I am asked, things I have said, things I am told, being a migrant
– [Smile] where does that little accent come from? No, but… you speak rather well. Have you been here long? When did you arrive?
Do you like it here? Do you miss your family?
– No, but I’m a migrant, I’m not an expat, what does it mean to be an expat?
– It’s not the same thing, you’re here as a legal migrant, he arrived ‘illegally’ and he doesn’t know how to integrate.
– If it bothers you, go back to your country.
-Che, Juanchi, when are you coming back? We miss you.
Work is about traditions and schedules, social etiquettes, and cultural norms that are uncomfortable and not always understood. It is the events that one cannot always attend because one works ‘unsociable’ hours. « How is it that they pay me if I’m unemployed? » « How do I get housing benefits? » « No, I can’t claim the allowance because I work ‘cash-in-hand’, so I can ‘earn more’ and send more money back home. » Work is sick leave. It’s catching the wrong bus. It is opening bank accounts. It’s the proof of address to open a bank account. It’s the accents that one sees. It’s the colour of skins one hears.
Work is about realities, perspectives, and imaginaries… These are the hopes, the frustrations, the chances and misfortunes encountered across migration trajectories.
Family. And when it is Family, what does one talk about? In 2022, it was estimated that around 94,000 people had arrived in France as family members of non-EU migrant workers, including accompanying family members, retrospective family reunifications, family formations, and international adoptions.3
Yet, Family is also about the people one comes with and the people one meets, the spaces and moments shared (a grandmother’s stories, the laughter between sisters, the smell of a stew, a radio show in the morning, the shelves of a supermarket, the opening hours of a cybercafé). Family are recipes, and the discussions or silences over meals. Family is humour and sadness, frustration and hope. Family are those who are, those who are not, those who left too early, those who come, and those one imagines will come.
Family we bring, family we leave, family we build… Families of friends, family of families.
Housing. At the end of 2022, 45.1% of active non-EU migrants aged 20 to 64 were at risk of poverty and social exclusion, while 32.9% lived in overcrowded conditions.4
How, where, with whom, how long for, in what conditions, and at what costs one lives during a migration trajectory?… Housing and its forms shape employment opportunities, educational options, social interactions, the possibilities of reuniting a distant family, or of creating a new one. Housing is about wellbeing, physical, mental, emotional wellbeing. Housing influences creative processes, access to culture, sports, sense of belonging, joy. What do we talk about when one is about to migrate and leave home? It’s first a question of uprooting oneself from within, because one has to leave a home… a life, even if only momentarily. Through Housing one stays, others meet, some get evicted, many look for each other, one gets lost only for them to find each other.
Housing are echoes and contrasts: uprooting-belonging, precariousness-prosperity, from sidewalks to roofs, from detention centres to refuge apartments and studios … from houses to cardboard boxes.
Work. Family. Housing. As balls of yarn stretch, fray, tear, intertwine, get shredded, and entangled, migration trajectories are the ever-lived stories of those who undertake a search, a change, and who do not stop trying.
by Juanchila
- *These reflections were prepared for the event Parcours… Une présentation artistique du parcours et de l’intégration des migrants dans le Bergeracois (Trajectories… An art-based representation migrants’ journeys and integration in the Bergerac). The event was a collaboration between the Atelier de Formations du Périgord Pourpre (AF2P, a regional organisation providing language, digital literacy and inclusion training, and social work support), and Le Collectif es Arts à Souhait (an artist collective that works to democratise and make art-based forms of expression more accessible and inclusive). The event, which explored migrants’ trajectories, challenges and opportunities through the themes of Work, Family and Housing, was part of a series of creative participatory workshops destined to open welcoming and safe spaces for migrants with varying ‘legal’ status and circumstances to develop their imaginaries and creativity.
^A first version of this text was written in Spanish Ovillos de Lana, and then published in French as Pelotes de Laines on September 24. ↩︎ - INSEE (2024). The essentials on… immigrants and foreigners. Report accessible here. ↩︎
- OECD (2023). International migration perspectives. Report accessible here. ↩︎
- Eurostat (2023). Statistics on the integration of migrants – housing. Report accessible here. ↩︎