Channelling mobilities: migrant-owned businesses as mobility infrastructures

Abstract

Migration infrastructures have usually been identified with stable sociomaterial arrangements controlling migration (e.g. airports and detention camps), stressing highly stratified power geometries and hierarchies. Recent debates about arrival infrastructures, however, have highlighted the informal, ephemeral and improvisational character of 'bottom-up' infrastructures. Departing from a widened understanding of infrastructure, this paper looks at migrants' businesses as urban infrastructures assembling various kinds of mobilities. In particular, we address small businesses established by Senegalese migrants in Brazil, and Brazilianowned cafés in Portugal. We approach these businesses as urban infrastructures where different forms of mobilities overlap and interact, exposing various trajectories and scales of circulation. While the businesses in Brazil cater mainly for Senegalese and other migrants' needs (money transfer, ICTs, and job offers), the Brazilian-owned coffee shops in Portugal function as sites of co-working and sociality of tourists, digital nomads, and other urban creatives. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of São Paulo and Caxias do Sul (Brazil) and in Lisbon (Portugal), this paper makes innovative connections between migration research, mobility studies and urban theory. We discuss the infrastructural production of transnational and local mobilities and how these businesses both result from and facilitate the existence of mobile lifestyles.

Inter-Organisational Entanglements in Migrant Support Ecologies: Action and Collaboration Supporting Labour Market Integration

“…Both studies sought to identify and assess (1) practices that various individual and organisationally embedded actors engaged in to support migrants' or refugees' transition into and through the labour market; (2) different forms of value they created for diverse actors through those practices; (3) challenges they encountered; and (4) strategies and tactics that actors deployed in exercising their agency to address those challenges. Similar to Jung and Buhr's (2022) multisited research, studying organisations, actors and their practices in different contexts enabled us to appreciate the dynamics of analogous phenomena without conducting a comparative analysis.…”

The Spatial Mobility Trap? How Urban Contexts Shape the Spatial Mobility of Male Undocumented Youths

“…. central to community life" (Jung and Buhr 2022). In contrast, collective memory of arrests or police raids (Martinez and Ortega 2019).…”

“…Immigration status may compel male undocumented youth workers to remain mobile in spaces far from home (Meneses‐Reyes 2013; Vidal and Huinink 2019). In addition to urban ethnic communities spatially supporting informal work, their “shops, the restaurants, and cafés … are nodes in the circulation of … goods … central to community life” (Jung and Buhr 2022). In contrast, collective memory of arrests or police raids (Martinez and Ortega 2019).…”

Migrant Visibility, Agency, and Identity Work in Hospitality Enterprises

“…Nevertheless, these economic domains also provide opportunities for migrants to develop entrepreneurial ventures, which facilitate their individual settlement and create wider impacts for other migrants and members of receiving societies (Harima et al 2021;Lugosi and Allis 2019). Studies have shown that migrant-owned-or-operated hospitality businesses become part of wider mobility infrastructures, acting as social focal points and informal marketplaces, where social capital is built while information and cultural goods are transferred (Jung and Buhr 2022;Sabar and Posner 2013;Sammells 2016). Migrants' entrepreneurial ventures are also enrolled in the leisure and tourism economies of cities, becoming attractions that entice visitors and provide experiential consumer services (Jung and Buhr 2022;Lugosi and Allis 2019).…”

“…Studies have shown that migrant-owned-or-operated hospitality businesses become part of wider mobility infrastructures, acting as social focal points and informal marketplaces, where social capital is built while information and cultural goods are transferred (Jung and Buhr 2022;Sabar and Posner 2013;Sammells 2016). Migrants' entrepreneurial ventures are also enrolled in the leisure and tourism economies of cities, becoming attractions that entice visitors and provide experiential consumer services (Jung and Buhr 2022;Lugosi and Allis 2019).…”