Migrant Communication Enterprises

Regimentation and Resistance

Maria Sabaté-Dalmau

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783092208
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

This unique critical sociolinguistic ethnography explores alternative migrant-regulated institutions of resistance and subversive communication technology: the locutorios or ethnic call shops. These migrant-owned businesses act as a window into their multimodal and hybrid linguistic and communicative practices, and into their own linguistic hierarchies and non-mainstream sociolinguistic orders. Here, socially displaced but technologically empowered transnational migrant populations actively find subversive ways to access information and communication technologies. As such they mobilise their own resources to successfully inhabit Catalonia, at the margins of powerful institutions. The book also focuses on the (internal) social organisation dynamics, as well as on the simultaneous fight against, and re-production of, practices and processes of social difference and social inequality among migrants themselves.

1 New Steps in the Sociolinguistics of Globalisation: The Critical Exploration of Migrant Institutions of Resistance in Late Capitalism

By looking at how ICTs are constructed, accepted, adopted or adapted in migration contexts, we are putting forward a new ‘lens’ for analysing migration in the information society.

Adela Ros, Elisabet González, Antoni Marín and Papa Sow (2007: 33)

Well into the second decade of the 21st century, it is not new to state that the current life trajectories, family configurations and work prospects of transnational migrant populations are largely established, maintained and enhanced (although not readily propelled) by ICT (Castells, 2000 [1996]; Urry, 2007; Vertovec, 2001, 2007, 2010), in particular by the mobile phone – the social glue for global trotting (Vertovec, 2009: 54). Indeed, there are, globally, 86 mobile phones per 100 people (ITU, 2012a: 2) and, although technological disconnection has by no means disappeared (Donner, 2008a, 2008b; Edjabe & Pieterse, 2001; Hannam et al., 2006; Inda & Rosaldo, 2002; Sheller & Urry, 2006), internet use has become almost demotic. The extent, intensity and velocity of networked flows of contact and information continue to increase (Appadurai, 1996; Castells et al., 2007a; Goggin, 2006; Horst & Miller, 2006; Ling, 2004; Steinbock, 2005), and migrant populations, now engaged with forms of global capitalist consumption (Bauman, 2000, 2005; Ros & Boso, 2010; Vertovec, 2001), are at the cutting edge in the adoption of ICT (Lam & Rosario-Ramos, 2009; Lam & Warriner, 2012; Panagakos & Horst, 2006).

Thus, over the past few years, ICTs have become a powerful source of social capital for 21st-century transnational survival. They are now a pivotal way for mobile migrant populations to access more material and symbolic resources and to establish and maintain powerful social networks, in the not so new information and communication age (Alonso & Oiarzabal, 2010; Androutsopoulos, 2006a, 2006b, 2007; Castells, 2009; Danet & Herring, 2007; Peñaranda Cólera, 2011; Ros & Boso, 2010; Ros et al., 2007).¹

And yet, by focusing on the benefits of the technological revolution of the late 1990s for transnational citizens, we have neglected the structural barriers (that is, the institutional citizenship regimes and economic and orders) imposed upon the members of migrant social networks, who, being at the bottom of the social ladder, experience all sorts of digital divides as technology ‘have-nots’ (Bertot, 2003) – despite living in societies that belong to the so-called information-rich nation-states.

Indeed, in the area that I investigated – Catalonia, an officially Catalan– Spanish bilingual region with its own quasi-autonomous government located in the north-eastern part of the Spanish state² – many migrants who try to gain access to ICT today find themselves facing a series of marginalising legal hindrances, serious economic constraints and, above all, exclusionary communicative and linguistic hurdles. These barriers constitute the regimentation practices governing the citizenry of the 21st century, particularly for controlling (un)documented migrants, via the close regulation of their conditions of access to their primary tool for successful transnational networking: information and communication technology.

These regimes³ are imposed by two extremely powerful institutions, which exercise their governmentality practices on citizens in very complex, closely interrelated manners, in a post-national scenario where advanced liberal forms of rule akin to those of the free market seem to be replacing the older public welfare state (Castells, 2012; Fairclough, 2006; Inda, 2006; Pujolar, 2007a, 2007b). The first institution is the post-social nation-state and its new market-driven techniques of ‘registration of non-citizens’ (Collins, 2005: 243) via ICT. The second is the telecommunications sector, which is one of the biggest sellers of mass consumption services and products and one of the most important segments of the private business world; it also regiments transnational peoples, by regulating their consumption habits worldwide.

Despite all sorts of obstacles (or perhaps because of them), migrants mobilise their own transnational resources and find subversive ways to access ICT, at the margins of these two powerful technopolitical institutions. Intrigued by their capacity for resilience, my main objective in the research was to investigate where, why, how, in what languages and with New Steps in the Sociolinguistics of Globalisation what consequences particular transnational populations resist nation-state power in present-day Catalonia. More specifically, I aimed to understand how the very different groups of migrants who, undocumented, are largely pushed to social disconnection and stagnation, but nevertheless manage to articulate a series of mundane resistance practices against state-imposed and market-driven exclusion, through their own technological power and their multilingual capitals, overcoming exclusionary social orders.

I explore such resistance practices in an alternative institution of bottom-up subversion and empowerment whereby variegated migrant networks establish their own ICT businesses in order to overcome the precariousness that they encounter in hostile host societies.⁴ This space is the locutorio, essentially a type of ethnic call shop that sells telephony, internet, fax and money transfer services which, gradually established in many Catalan urban areas at the turn of the 21st century, became a unique informal meeting point for all sorts of transnational migrant networks seeking transnational survival.

From a socially engaged, critical approach to the sociolinguistics of globalisation (see Blommaert, 2003, 2010; Coupland, 2003, 2010; Duchêne et al., 2013; Fairclough, 2006; Heller, 2006 [1999], 2010a; Pennycook, 2010, 2012; Piller, 2011), I argue that locutorios are an excellent research space where to examine various sociolinguistic phenomena related to these pauperised citizens’ daily resistance to structural social inequality. More specifically, I show that locutorios allow for the analysis of the unparalleled emergence and consolidation of truly alternative institutions of transnationalism, whereby migrant populations can gain a certain degree of individual and collective social agency,⁵ in connection to, but from the margins of, what we may call mainstream society. I claim that these ventures show how different migrant populations have subverted anti-migrant regimes and, largely successfully, relocalised and inserted themselves into economic and sociopolitical orders in their own self-regulated, but highly hierarchised, social spaces, in the unexplored worlds of cosmopolitan Catalonia.

By providing an ethnographically grounded, fine-grained analysis of various locutorio phenomena, I hope to advance our knowledge of how migrants’ ordinary resistance techniques and subversive tactics emanate from, and get inscribed into, their particular languages, mobilities and institutions – the three anchoring themes of the series in which the present volume appears.

Regarding mobilities, I present new findings concerning what transnational living actually consists of, but from a migrant-centred, participatory perspective which allows for the reflexive problematisation of hegemonic or taken-for-granted conceptions of the migrants’ movements and interconnections, as well as of their ‘demobilisations’ and their stages of ‘mooring’ (Hannam et al., 2006: 2). In trying to understand their ‘here and there’ life trajectories, I hope to make a contribution, too, to the investigation of the ‘internal’ social structuration processes⁶ of these highly diverse groups of transnational populations, providing a picture of the workings of the power dynamics and of the in- and out-group distribution of transnational resources. This includes, crucially, a detailed picture of their actual ICT-mediated communicative practices, particularly in relation to family configurations and physically distant relationships, and, finally, of their work prospects in Catalonia, at a time when the globalised new economy was seriously troubled (Castells, 2012; Harvey, 2010) and the Spanish state was dealing with a sovereign debt crisis.

Secondly, regarding institutions, I claim that locutorios also allow for the problematisation of our assumptions regarding what counts as ‘institutions’ today, since they definitely do not sit well with traditional notions or well established classifications of institutional settings, particularly those which draw classic distinctions between private institutions (related to the marketplace), public institutions (related to governmental bodies) and non-governmental institutions (mostly NGOs and volunteer agencies). Although locutorios have to follow the rules of the private business sector – its market rationalities and its commercial objectives, like any other ICT business (mobile phone operators, fax and photocopy shops or money transfer agencies) they are not directly dependent on the Spanish telecommunications market, since they are regulated, in an intra-group manner, by transnational networks of migrant entrepreneurs. Thus, locutorios may sustain (and may be sustained by) informal managerial work forms and grey market practices, for many sell or hire legal goods and services outside the formal circuits of commerce and outside the official distribution channels.

Besides, locutorios provide many vital resources (like food, information on legalisation procedures, job offers, or even shelter) that would normally be attributed to the help or the donations of either the public administration of a welfare state (and its ancillary agencies) or else to pro-migrant non-governmental organisations or associativism initiatives, for instance. Nevertheless, this provision of precious resources in these spaces is carried out from the margins, without following any public social responsibility or any altruistic or altermondialist agenda. Instead, locutorios are an alternative public ‘resource centre’ (Peñaranda Cólera, 2005; Roca i Albert et al., 2009) self-regulated by and for diverse groups of migrants, according to their own largely under-researched social stratification rules. Therefore, they are neither fully private nor fully public institutions, for which they point to a phase of ‘late capitalism’ (Heller & Duchêne, 2012: 3) that speaks of a shift New Steps in the Sociolinguistics of Globalisation towards the informalisation of nation-state economies, propelling the birth of altogether different, 21st-century hybrid institutions of migration and transnational living.

Finally, concerning the third domain, language, I suggest that locutorios allow for the privileged ‘insider’ observation of the migrants’ management and organisation of their own (and of other migrants’) heteroglossic language practices and ever-changing linguistic ideologies,⁷ when these social players mobilise their myriad multilingual literacy and numeracy capitals in local interactions taking place solely among themselves. In particular, I argue that the discursive spaces of locutorios let us carefully explore the workings of the migrants’ non-elite (i.e. non-valued and silenced) multilingualisms,⁸ not only when they present themselves as transnational navigators in their host societies but also, more revealingly, when they fight for a voice of their own from within their social networks. These migrant-regulated language battles and these competitions of linguistic capitals, which, of course, constitute the migrants’ multiple fluid identity construction projects, also bring us closer to the language-mediated establishment of highly complex translocal social relationships of affinity and support, on the one hand, as well as of unseen rivalry and hatred, on the other. Thus, my third contribution in this book consists of an in-depth investigation of the migrants’ particular sociolinguistic hierarchies and of their unconventional identity dialectics. I analyse how their self- or other-ascribed social categorisation tactics are mediated in these empowering institutions, where they can take the ‘communicative floor’ (Goffman, 1981) and, in fact, start to appropriate and colonise the ‘urban linguistic landscapes’ (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010: 13) of Catalan towns, and indeed global cities like Barcelona (Martín-Rojo, 2012: 289–290).

With these three research avenues in mind, I ultimately attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of what locutorios actually mean for these migrant populations. And I do so by critically questioning, reformulating and going beyond deep-seated trivialising assumptions or preconceptions concerning present-day technology-endowed migration movements in Europe. I provide a new account of how multilingual transnational citizens fight anti-migrant citizenship regimes and make sense of, and voice, who they feel they are and of what piece of the global map they feel they inhabit, in the context of the Catalan network society.

At this point, some clarification is required concerning the use of six terms frequently used in this text: migrant, ethnic business, transnationalism, globalisation, resistance and locutorio. I employ the term migrant (rather than ‘immigrant’) for two reasons. Firstly, many mobile citizens in the Spanish state experience a series of unfinished migration trajectories which are highly complex. These journeys may imply living in various nation-states simultaneously (or paying long and short visits to multiple places), beyond leaving a ‘home’ to become a naturalised citizen in a ‘landing country’ (Solé et al., 2007, 2008; Vertovec, 2001). I believe that the term migrant avoids dichotomous emigrant/immigrant distinctions and better gathers the idea of 21st-century demographic movements. Secondly, the term immigrant or inmigrante, respectively used in the Catalan and the Spanish languages, have been connoted in very negative ways, and have at times become a racialised exclusionary term of address. With the use of the term migrant I try to dissociate myself from these pejorative connotations and from more ethnocentric approaches to mobile citizenship.⁹

By ethnic business – a term coined by a group of American economic sociologists in the early 1970s¹⁰ – I mean ‘those commercial ventures run by persons of foreign origin […] independently of the characteristics of the services and products commercialised and of the geographical distribution of such businesses’¹¹ (Parella Rubio, 2005: 258). Thus, they are small or medium-size enterprises owned and run by both low- and middle-class reterritorialised populations whose main objective is to attract transnational migrant clients, though they may be convenient, too, for tourists and for a local clientele who are attracted by the cheaper products and services (Feliu et al., 2012; Íñiguez-Rueda et al., 2012; Moreras, 2007). In the present context, ‘ethnic’ businesses include migrant-tailored shops such as Chinese bazaars, Moroccan halal butcher shops, Latino hairdressers and Pakistani locutorios, which today are part and parcel of the Catalan local economy. The term, as one may expect, is controversial, since it has frequently been used to stress the ethnocultural (cum racial) ‘differences’ or ‘exceptionalities’ of these commercial ventures, again from an ethnocentric perspective (Beltrán et al., 2007; Glick Schiller & Çağlar, 2013; Parella Rubio, 2005; Pecóud, 2000; Rath & Kloosterman, 2000). However, ‘ethnic’ is the most widely accepted adjective employed, in Catalonia and elsewhere, as a descriptive category (not as a social category) simply indicating the origin of the entrepreneurs and that of the targeted clientele as well (nonetheless, the term is generally presented in inverted commas to denote these reservations).¹²

Following Vertovec (2009: i), I use the term transnationalism to make reference to ‘the multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states […] within the study of globalization’. That is, I employ it to talk about the sorts of interconnections which simultaneously have an effect on tiny localities and on big nation-states and which transform the new ‘here’, the old ‘there’, and the altogether different ‘here and there’ of these social players. I use the term globalisation only when I want to focus on the scale and scope of global interdependencies, and when New Steps in the Sociolinguistics of Globalisation I need to stress the increase in the quantity, rapidity and intensity of such linkages (Da Silva et al., 2007; Inda & Rosaldo, 2002). Thus, I do not employ it to highlight the newness of the phenomena, for I do not see mobilities and flows (or immobilities and spatial stasis), per se, as new phenomena (see discussions in Coupland, 2010; Pennycook, 2012; Sheller, 2011).

I do not understand the migrants’ resistance to be a well articulated revolutionary anti-system movement. Rather, I see it as a pragmatic series of self-protective mundane reactions against institutionalised forms of social order (Gal, 2001; Horst & Miller, 2006; Kohler Riessman, 2000) or, more specifically, against given exclusionary governmental practices which, on a daily basis, are imposed upon repressed ‘non-citizens’ by nation-state bodies and by the global markets. These migrants’ subversive attempts to skirt the bureaucratic machinery of power are not about victories,...