Place-making via traces and attachments: African migrants and their experiences of mobility, immobility and local insertion in Latin America. Introduction to the thematic dossier REMHU 56

Abstract

The introduction to this thematic dossier traces existing scholarship on current sub-Saharan African migration to and through Latin America. For analysing this migration, we propose a place-making perspective. Such a perspective enables us to illuminate the articulations between migrants’ everyday experiences and structural conditions of mobility regimes and the migration industry. Going beyond victimizing or essentializing African migrants, this approach allows a better understanding of migrants’ long or short-term engagements with the places in which they live or which they cross during their trajectories, an engagement that entails material, social and emotional aspects.