This paper uses qualitative data conducted in São Paulo, Brazil with those who possessed the capability to emigrate yet had chosen to remain in place. It explores the strategies these 'stayers' employed to create and reproduce a sense of belonging to place in the midst of political disruption and alienation. This is in the context of Brazil's lava jato (car wash) political corruption scandal which culminated in the election of President Bolsonaro and affected many Brazilian citizens' sense of belonging. Particular attention is paid to the way articulations of subnational and supranational scales of belonging relate to the national. Belonging at the national scale remains salient but through a process of interpolation with affective, local, urban and cosmopolitan forms of belonging. Immobility thus becomes an active practice through the (re)imagining and re-scaling of a sense of belonging. Developing this concept of 'active' immobility recognises immobility as a phenomenon that is driven by individual and structural elements that are as diverse and dynamic as those that affect mobility. The paper contributes to debates about the relationship between forms of local national and cosmopolitan belonging.
This article employs a qualitative, biographical approach, to explore the motivations and subjectivities behind migration of middle‐class Brazilians to London. It uses the concept of the geographical imagination to understand how migrants imagine not only their destinations and places of origin but also how their own identity is shaped by their imagined relationship to these places. The paper argues that for many middle‐class Brazilians, their motivation to migrate is couched in terms of “societal alienation”: a feeling of distance from the place of origin resulting from a lack of identification and trust in its institutions and the very culture of the place itself. This is in contrast to the more popularly understood concept of migrating due to “material alienation”: migrating to access a higher level of material consumption or to acquire financial capital to use “back home.” For those who migrate due to “societal alienation” what is “fetishised” is the cultural and less material aspects of the ‘quality of life’ of the migration destination, which become a kind of commodity in their own right. It argues that social class which often intersects with regional and racial divisions within Brazilian society, is a key marker of difference in these two types of imaginary.
Lifestyle migration is a growing field of interest. Traditionally, research into lifestyle migration has focused on either "North to North" or "North to South" migration. This article analyses middle-class Brazilian migration to London together with examples from the lifestyle migration literature to argue that there are instances of movement from the Global South to the Global North, which should be classified as lifestyle migration according to how the term is used in the literature. This is important because there is a tendency in migration studies to implicitly classify all voluntary migration from South to North as "economic." The article compares the similarities in terms of motivations to migrate and identity as a migrant, between "lifestyle migrants" as characterised in the literature and many Brazilian middle-class migrants to London. Rather than economic gain, individualist ideals of anonymity and mobility are often central in the discourse. Mobility is conceived not only as mobility across space but also in terms of mobility of identity, specifically as a disavowal of a transnational identity in favour of a more individualistic ideological stance. The article goes on to examine how the dichotomy between lifestyle and economic migrants is operationalised within the discourse of middle-class Brazilian migrants to demarcate their situation from their "transnational" compatriots who they view as "other." This act of distancing themselves from the "typical migrant" and often from Brazilian "culture" more generally is often stratified by class and race. Distancing becomes especially important in cases when differences may not be so apparent to an outside observer. The article ultimately argues for an understanding of lifestyle migration that incorporates movements from South to North and thus for a greater emphasis on social class, which, in the context of Brazil, is bound up with issues of racial and ethnic identity.
The United Kingdom now boasts the largest Brazilian population in Europe (Margolis, 2013) but so far the processes behind this relatively new migration stream remain under theorised (Kubal et al., 2011).. In response, this article analyses the relationship between class, capital and ideology. The topic of Brazilian migration to London will therefore serve as a lens through which to examine questions around why people emigrate and why, especially to cities like London. Although increased access to economic capital certainly plays a role, this article argues that what is often overlooked is that what migrants do with this acquired capital can differ significantly and further, that these differences are related to social class and ideological outlook. The likelihood and manner in which they choose to settle or return is also linked to how closely that migrant identifies with the dominant ideology of the destination society.
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