The Madness of Migration: An Ethnographic Account of Senegalese Migrants’ Mobility and Lives in Buenos Aires

This thesis sheds new empirical light on a recent case of migration from Senegal to Argentina, by exploring the lives and mobility practises of Senegalese men and women who seek new terrains for social becoming in Argentina. Building on nine months of fieldwork in Argentina and Senegal, it shows how increasingly restricted European migration management regimes and the economic recession, have limited the possibilities for successful migration to Europe. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Argentina has emerged as a destination for Senegalese migrants, especially since the mid-2000s. When the opportunities to enter Europe are reduced, it seems that hope for a better future is redirected towards new destinations and emerging economies in the Global South. The central argument of the thesis is that the lives and mobility of Senegalese migrants are shaped by different intersecting and multi-scalar politics of mobility. Following Tim Creswell (2010), politics of mobility is here understood as the ways in which mobilities are both productive of social relations (involved in the production and distribution of power) and produced by them- They become an analytical lens for exploring how the migrants (im)mobility is shaped and experienced. To locate these politics, particular emphasis is put on where the migrants’ trajectory encounters friction. The thesis is structured as a journey from Senegal to Argentina – a journey through the different politics of mobility that migrants face in their most intimate family relations, when they run up against national borders, and in their everyday struggle to make ends meet in the Buenos Aires. The first two chapters draw attention to how the migrants’ mobility is launched in Senegal and show how the recent flow of Senegalese migration to Argentina has to be seen in the continuum of shifting global and local socio-economic processes in Senegal’s recent history. Processes that have influenced increasing international migration and created specific social imaginaries and material manifestations of what successful migration can lead to. The thesis calls attention to how different mobility brokers make migration possible by rerouting and channeling the migrants to Argentina. From Senegal, the analysis follows the migrants en route to Argentina. It identifies how the journey is shaped by different forms of migration governance and draws attention to how the migrants lived experience increasingly have to undertake long fragmented and precarious journeys that mirror the particular form of mobility and experience of present- day African migrants on their way to Europe. In Argentina the thesis give an ethnographic account of the migrants’ struggles in the city and show how the men and women’s mobility is channeled into specific areas of the large informal economy of street hawking through a social infrastructure. I highlight how Senegalese migrants perceived the opportunity to transcend their irregular status in Argentina by entering a regularization program for undocumented migrants. The case illustrates how the migrants navigate in a fairly new context and how they try to gain momentum by following a known religious path, but seem less interested in becoming new citizens within a state-governed framework of rights and obligations. Yet, the social landscape and religious path cannot safeguard from the intersecting forms of frictions that threaten to put a stop to the migrants’ livelihood and trajectory in the city. By illustrating how the particular city space of Buenos Aires and its history influence present-day forms of urban governance and race and class tensions, the migrants’ struggle is given analytical depth. The last two chapters zoom in on how the migrants experience their mobility to Argentina. By exploring different processes of disenchantment and enchantment, the chapters highlight how the hope the migrants connect to their mobility to Argentina changes, as they are struggling along and enduring life in the city. The existential experience in Argentina is frighteningly close to the experience of not moving ahead in life that made them leave Senegal. Yet at the same time, the experience of enduring hardships and struggles is infused with religious meaning and the migrants suffering is reworked into a worthwhile endeavor. These forms of continuous enchantment of the everyday become a way of shaping individual practises and regaining a feeling of agency while simultaneously reaffirming existing power hierarchies. By looking at this relatively new migration trend through the lens of politics of mobility and friction, the thesis shows how the migrants’ trajectories and lived experiences are inflected with different contradictory global and social forces; that both want to stop and displace them but also, continuously, infuse hope that their suffering and resistance to their everyday problems is worthwhile. In short, showing the conditions for why the madness of migration will not stop. The thesis overall contributes to migration research as it stands in a time of new global disconnections and connections. It provides new empirical insights into a progressive form of West African mobility, new critical perspectives on transatlantic histories, and innovative analytical engagements with the mobility literature.