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Making and consuming food are evident aspects in migrants’ construction and reproduction of memory, identity and belonging. Food consumption can also enable migrants to make themselves at home abroad by reproducing aspects of their past and relating them to particular places in the present. This article draws from ethnographic work in Ecuadorian restaurants in Madrid to investigate the ‘domestication’ of space through their material culture. It examines the representation and use of these restaurants to unveil multiple ways of displaying belonging and reproducing degrees of domesticity. Enacting private routines, embodying familiarity through food and decorating backbars are instances that reveal how the material arrangements in migrant-run restaurants facilitate the construction of a sense of home. From a sociological perspective, this article reveals how the boundaries between private and public, as well as migrants’ ethnicity and belonging, are constantly reshaped through material arrangements that operate as forms of domestication of space.

What is the opposite of home? Is it necessarily something ‘negative’? Similar questions, far from having a self-evident answer, make for a fruitful entry point for research into the social experience of home. Central to this article is a novel conceptualization of non-home, against the background of the pre-existing criticisms of the normative, romanticized and depoliticized understandings of home. This article draws from fieldwork on the everyday dwelling experience of migrants and asylum seekers to illustrate the volitional dimension of non-home. Not attaching a sense of home to a dwelling place or set of relationships is not merely a consequence of poor housing conditions. It may also involve an active choice – at least at some points of the life course, in certain household conditions. In this sense, non-home is more than a matter of absence, dispossession, reconfiguration or implosion of home. In questioning the normative view of home as inherently positive and desirable, this conceptualization highlights the reciprocal interaction between home and non-home as mutually interdependent constructs.

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