Transnational Religious Spaces

Faith and the Brazilian Migration Experience

O. Sheringham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349445028, 9781137272812
• eBook ISBN: 9781137272829
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the role of religion in the lives of Brazilian migrants in London and on their return 'back home'. Working with the notion of religion as lived experience, it moves beyond rigid denominational boundaries and examines how and where religion is practiced in migrants' everyday lives.

1

Introduction

Ana arrived in London in 2003, aged 23. She had left her home in Aparecida de Goiânia, a small town in central Brazil, where she was living with her parents, Carolina and Manuel, her brother, Rogerio, and her sister, Carla. She decided to migrate because she felt she had no other possibility of paying off the debts she had incurred after an accident in which she had written off her car. The car had been essential for her marketing job, as well as being the family’s only means of transport. A friend from her church mentioned that a girl in their town was leaving for London, where she had heard from other Brazilians living there that it was easy to find work and earn good money. Ana prayed and put the idea to God. Drawing strength from His support, she resolved to embark on her own migration journey. She borrowed money from several friends and family members and went to London.

On arrival at Heathrow, Ana was granted a tourist visa, which she soon exchanged for a student one. Working in a series of low-paid jobs as a cleaner, waitress, and shop assistant, she gradually managed to build herself a life in London, studying English, obtaining a job as a receptionist in an estate agency, and marrying a Brazilian, Alfredo. She still lives in London with her husband and two young children who were born there. The couple are active participants in the charismatic group at London’s Brazilian Catholic Chaplaincy, where they regularly perform songs and participate in a weekly prayer group, as well as attending the more traditional Mass. For Ana, religion has played a crucial role in her successful migration experience, not only because of the friends she has made through her participation at the church who have provided her with a sense of community but also thanks to what she feels has been God’s perpetual protection and spiritual support.

Two years later, Ana’s brother, Rogerio, decided to join her in London to try to make some money to pay off his debts and improve his chances of getting a better job than his work as a petrol attendant back in Brazil. Unlike Ana, however, Rogerio did not make it through UK immigration controls at Heathrow and was instead sent straight back to Brazil without even getting the chance to see his sister. Rogerio was deeply disappointed but said that he had come to realise it was part of God’s plan for him, protecting him from the difficulties he would have faced as an irregular migrant in London, which could have been far worse than his life in Brazil. In 2009, Ana’s mother, Carolina, sister, Carla, and Carla’s young daughter, Yolanda, came to London and, in contrast to Rogerio, were granted a six-month tourist visa. Carolina arrived in London to support Ana, who was about to have her second baby. Carla came to learn English and to work. They all stayed for ten months.

Manuel, Ana’s father, stayed at home in Aparecida as his family members travelled between London and Brazil. He was only able to imagine life in London through the stories they told and the photographs they sent via the Internet. However, he also felt close to them through his prayers and drew comfort from the knowledge that God was protecting them and that there was a church they could attend regularly to nourish their faith. He was grateful to London for the opportunities the city had offered his daughter, the improvements they had been able to make to their family home in Brazil, and the new car they had been able to buy with the remittances Ana sent home. Above all, he was grateful to God for opening the doors and facilitating Ana’s migration, and for keeping her safe.

Ana’s story, and that of her family, echoes those of many Brazilian migrants in London and reveals some of the ways in which religion and migration are closely intertwined. Ana’s migration experience would not have been the same had it not been for her religious faith and that of her family, which provided them with support and spiritual guidance in the face of suffering. Yet Ana’s religious faith would not perhaps have become such a crucial part of her life had it not been vital in helping her cope with many of the challenges she had faced in London. While social and economic factors undoubtedly influenced Ana’s migration trajectory, to focus on these alone would be to neglect a crucial element of her everyday life in London and the nature of the transnational connections she maintained with people and places ‘back home’ in Brazil.

The aim of this book is to render visible some of the ways in which religion infuses the lives and trajectories of many migrants and their families who ‘stay put’. Taking the religious lives of Brazilian migrants in London as my focus, I explore the interplay between broader processes of global transformation in which religion plays a major role and the ways in which the religious practices and beliefs of migrants adapt to such processes in more specific ways in their everyday lives. This book focuses on two Brazilian religious institutions in London and one in Brazil and scrutinises the different ways in which these spaces provide the means for Brazilian migrants to create a sense of belonging and community in London, to retain connections with their lives back home in Brazil, and to re-adapt to life ‘back home’ on their return. However, working with a notion of religion as lived experience, the study also moves beyond these institutional sites to consider how religion is deeply intertwined in migrants’ everyday lives and imaginaries. I am interested in how migrants, religious leaders, and migrants’ families in Brazil negotiate their religious beliefs and practices in different places and create new connections between them.

While seeking to highlight the localised, embodied, nature of migrants’ religious lives, I am mindful of the potential weaknesses of a ‘lived religion approach’ and the possible failure to ‘connect localized practices to the larger context in which they are embedded, which includes national, transnational, and global economic, political, cultural, and environmental processes’ (Vasquez 2011: 254). This book focuses on what religious leaders, migrants, and migrants’ families do with religion – the creativity and hybridisations that occur through the practice and embodiment of religion in transnational spaces. But equally, it seeks to place the lives of these migrants in a wider context, as deeply embedded in dynamic social fields that involve the interplay of multiple actors with asymmetrical relations of power. Focusing on lived religion and transnationalism from the perspective of migrants and their families reveals possibilities for creativity, resistance, and transcendence, but, as the examples in this book reveal, transnationalism and lived religion do not defy the powerful influence of borders, states, and institutions – all harbouring the potential for exclusion. In the following pages, I will briefly provide some context to the empirical and theoretical premises of this book and outline the empirical study upon which it is based.

Brazilians as a new migrant community in a ‘super-diverse’ city

Migration is an important and controversial issue within contemporary British society. Yet research to date remains selective and often subsumed into debates around race relations or national security. London’s Brazilian community received widespread public and media attention when in July 2005, with the wave of paranoia surrounding the ‘war on terror’, the Brazilian migrant Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead, having been mistaken for a suicide bomber. But apart from this brief exposure, Brazilians in London have remained largely invisible.

Despite the increasing acknowledgement among scholars of the dramatic changes in the nature of migration flows to the UK since the post-war migrations from the Caribbean and South Asia (Vertovec 2007; Cock 2009), migration from Latin American countries, including Brazil, has until very recently been absent from such discussions (McIlwaine et al. 2011; Evans et al. 2011).¹ While large numbers of Latin Americans have migrated to Europe in recent years, partly owing to the increased restrictions on migration to the US since 9/11, existing research that has responded to these shifts has so far focused predominantly on Spain, which has received the largest number of Spanish-speaking Latin Americans (Pellegrino 2004; Peixoto 2009), and on Portugal, where Brazilians now comprise 25 per cent of all migrants in the country (Padilla 2006; Sardinha 2011).

Factors contributing to the invisibility of Latin Americans within both academic and public spheres in the UK include the fact that the migration flows are relatively recent, the tendency for migration research to focus on communities with direct colonial or historical links to Britain, and the fact that a high proportion of Latin American migrants are irregular (McIlwaine 2011a).² With regard to Brazilians specifically, scholars have also suggested that, compared with many migrant groups, there exist few examples of institutional or informal support networks to mobilise or unite the community (Jordan and Düvell 2002).

Yet there is little doubt that London’s Brazilian community has grown rapidly in recent years.³ This is evident in the emergence of a growing number of Brazilian shops, restaurants, beauty salons, and, perhaps most significantly, a diverse range of new religious institutions. Indeed, the UK, and London in particular, has become an important destination for migrants from Brazil, with recent figures from the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations (MRE) suggesting that the UK receives the highest proportion of Brazilians in Europe, with estimates at around 180,000 (MRE 2011).⁴ Brazilian migrants thus represent a significant ‘new migrant community’ in London (McIlwaine et al. 2011; Evans et al. 2011; see also Kubal et al. 2011) whose presence contributes to the extensive diversification of migration flows to the city; this has led to Vertovec’s (2007) coining of the term ‘super-diversity’. London’s ‘ethnoscape’ (Appadurai 1996) no longer comprises merely officially recognised minority ethnic groups in Britain but rather encompasses ‘more migrants from more places entailing more socio-cultural differences going through more migration channels leading to more, as well as more significantly stratified, legal categories (which themselves have acted to internally diversify various groups), and who maintain more intensely an array of links with places of origin and diasporas elsewhere’ (Vertovec 2007: 1043). Moreover, as McIlwaine (2011a: 126) argues in her discussion of London’s Latin American population, ‘super-diversity’ exists ‘within “new migrant groups” ’ as well as ‘between them’ (see also Willis 2009: 144). Indeed, with regard to Brazilians in London more specifically, recent studies reveal a diversification of this migration flow in terms of factors relating to both the emigration context – such as region of origin, level of education, and reason for migrating – and the receiving one – such as employment experiences, legal statuses, and, indeed, religious affiliations (Evans et al. 2011; see also Kubal et al. 2011: 9).

Yet since the first wave of Brazilian migration to the UK in the 1980s and the dramatic increase in numbers in the early 2000s, the global economy has undergone some major shifts. While the damaging effects of the global financial crisis have hit many developed countries, Brazil has experienced an economic boom in the last decade, and its economy now represents the sixth largest in the world, overtaking the UK in early 2012 (The Guardian 2012). This economic success has been coupled with increasing political and cultural influence, evident, for example, in Brazil’s leading role in replacing the G8 with the G20, as well in the country being chosen to host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games (Vasquez and Rocha forthcoming). However, although Brazil’s new position as an important global player has witnessed some changes in migration patterns to and from the country, there is little evidence to suggest that emigration has decreased significantly. Brazil is still one of the most unequal countries in the world and home to some of the world’s most violent cities. As Vasquez and Rocha (ibid.) remark, ‘while the poor emigrate in search of better working opportunities, many middle-class migrants have left the country escaping violence and fear in everyday life’. Thus, rather than a halt in Brazilian migration flows, the migration picture seems to have further diversified.

Transnationalism, diaspora, belonging

The increasingly complex and ‘super-diverse’ nature of global migration flows has challenged well-established paradigms within the study of migration and revealed the need for new forms of theoretical analysis and research methods (Levitt and Jaworsky 2007). Analyses of migration that pointed to linear movements from one nation state to another have increasingly been revealed as insufficient in describing realities in which migrants in fact have ‘complex relations to different locales […] involving social, symbolic and material ties between homelands, destinations and relations between destinations’ (Anthias 2000: 21–22).

The emergence of ‘transnational studies’ in the early 1990s reflects one response to the conceptual challenges created by the practices of individuals and communities who live their lives across borders and who maintain diverse links with their ‘places of origin’ and with ‘diasporas elsewhere’ (Vertovec 2007: 1043). Early conceptualisations of transnational phenomena emerged in the US in relation to the practices of labour migrants whose lives involved multiple connections that spanned international borders. The term ‘transmigrants’ (Glick Schiller et al. 1995: 48) was coined to denote those ‘whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relation to more than one nation-state’.

Despite their highly significant contributions to migration studies, these early iterations of transnationalism were critiqued on a number of grounds. While some scholars questioned the novelty of the concept, arguing that migrants have always had multiple cross-border engagements (Foner 1997; Levitt 2001; Waldinger and Fitzgerald 2004), others argued that the scope of transnational phenomena had been exaggerated – through the tendency among scholars to focus on specific case studies (usually Latin American or Caribbean migrants in the US) (Portes 2001). With a view to providing more clarification to an increasingly ‘overstretched’ concept, Portes argued that it was perhaps ‘more useful to conceptualize transnationalism as one form of economic, political, and cultural adaptation that co-exists with other, more traditional forms’ (ibid.: 183).

Among the responses to these critiques of transnationalism was the emergence of more fluid conceptualisations of transnational social fields (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004) or social spaces (Faist 1998, 2000; see also Pries 1999), which encompass the multiple levels of transnationalism and the multi-faceted interactions between wider socio-political contexts and concrete changes in people’s everyday lives. Rather than being bifocal – incorporating just host and home countries – such spaces are conceived as ‘multi-layered and multi-sited’, incorporating multiple places around the world that ‘connect migrants and their co-nationals and co-religionists’ (Levitt and Jaworsky 2007: 131). The notion of ‘simultaneity’ is evoked to suggest that migrants can be simultaneously embedded in networks that function ‘within and beyond the boundaries of a nation-state’ (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004: 1006). In a similar way, the concept of ‘transnational social spaces’ denotes ‘dynamic social processes, not static notions of ties and positions’ (Faist 2000: 45–46).

Highlighting the importance of a spatial perspective on transnationalism, Jackson et al. (2004: 3, emphasis in original) go even further, suggesting that as well as encompassing transnational connections, ‘transnational spaces’ incorporate the ‘symbolic and imaginary geographies through which we attempt to make sense of our world’. Thus the scope of transnationalism stretches beyond the activities of those who migrate as transnational spaces also incorporate the practices and imaginaries of those who stay behind, influenced by the information and ideas that flow across borders (see also Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). These insights are useful for my study, which is concerned with how religion is practised, experienced, imagined, and embodied by migrants as they create and inhabit spaces that span multiple scales.

Another key contribution to theories of transnationalism is the concept of ‘social remittances’, coined by Peggy Levitt (1999) to refer to the transference of practices, ideas, and values across borders as a result of the migration process. Social remittances are, she suggests, ‘the tools with which ordinary individuals create global culture at a local level’ (Levitt 2001: 11). The concept represents an important intervention as it moves beyond economic and material understandings of migration as referring to the movement of people and goods, and considers, rather, the less tangible aspects of the migration experience and the impacts on the lives of ‘ordinary people’ in both host and home contexts. The concept has also been developed further by scholars elsewhere. Thus, for example, Flores (2005) critiques and expands Levitt’s notion of social remittances, positing instead the term ‘cultural remittances’, which, he argues, better encapsulates the ways in which ‘transnational diaspora life … necessarily stretches the idea of national belonging by disengaging it from its presumed territorial and linguistic imperative’ (23). In this book, following Flores’s line of argument, I put forward the notion of ‘religious remittances’ to reflect not only how new religious practices are ‘remitted’, or flow, across borders but also the ways in which the migrants themselves (and their families back home) create and experience such ‘remittances’ in different ways in their everyday lives. Before elaborating further on the relationship between religion and transnationalism, I will now turn briefly to the related concept of diaspora and consider how it provides different, though interrelated, insights for thinking through some of the multiple ways in which religion functions across borders through practices, bodies, and beliefs and how it is ‘shaped and reshaped through constant movement and contact’ (Levitt et al. 2011: 469).

The emergence of widespread interest, across a range of disciplines, in the concept of diaspora also reflects responses to the analytical challenges created by the practices and relationships of individuals and communities living their lives across borders or in places distant from their ‘homelands’ (Cohen 1997; Clifford 1997; Dwyer 1999; Vertovec 1999; Vertovec 2008; Kalra et al. 2005). Moreover, scholars have noted historical and conceptual links between diaspora and religion and, as Vasquez (2010: 128) asserts, ‘because religion and diaspora operate in similar ways in the management of time and space and in the articulation of individual and collective identities, they have historically been closely intertwined, often buttressing and reinforcing each other’.⁵

While the origins of the term ‘diaspora’ lie in the notion of forced dispersal of people from their homeland,⁶ in recent decades the meaning of diaspora has expanded to embrace migrant communities, leading Tölölyan (1991: 4–5) to describe diasporas as ‘the exemplary communities of the transnational moment’. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Glossary
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Theoretical and Contextual Frames
• Part II: Living Religion Transnationally among Brazilians in London and ‘Back Home’
• Appendix 1: List of Research Participants
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index