Mapping Migration, Identity, and Space

Migration, identity, and space are entangled and mutually influential. The question “How does migration take place” not only demands an examination of the causes, consequences, and depictions of migration in different parts of the world and different moments in history, it also calls attention to the crucial role that space and place have in such an examination. The approaches and methodologies in this collection differ with regard to the questions these ask and the evidence they use to substantiate their claims. Yet in spite of these differences, a number of shared themes emerge. While differentiating voluntary migration from forced migration is important, what makes these very diverse experiences comparable is the undeniable relationship with the physical and imaginary space that they traverse and eventually occupy.

The end of the sixteenth century witnessed large movements of indigenous populations from the Mesoamerican center of New Spain to the northern imperial borderlands that were opening up to mining industries. The literature often portrays this migration as a simple phenomenon, as a movement from one point to another, and as a recreation of home communities in a foreign land in the form of ethnically segregated communities of laborers. Mapping migrations renders another view of these movements, one that is much more complex, and that illustrates multicultural spaces and reveals multiethnic communities. This chapter will explore how encounters and adaptation influenced the creation of new indigenous identities in the mining town of San Luis Potosí at the turn of the seventeenth century.

On the example of two towns in the multiethnic former Prussian-Russian borderland, Musekamp provides an insight into the entangled history of trade, migrations, cultural encounter, and barriers between the “Self” and the “Other.” After the construction of a railroad in 1861, Eydtkuhnen and Verzhbolovo facilitated trade between Eastern and Western Europe. For travelers crisscrossing Europe, the place was a continental divide between the Russian Empire and Western Europe. For Russian Jewish emigrants passing health inspections here, German Eydtkuhnen was a safe haven and an important stop on their way to North America. Between 1933 and 1945, the area underwent dramatic population movements, with many inhabitants killed or expelled and others resettled—a process that destroyed this thriving European borderland.

Sommer offers a new perspective on the musealization of immigration in settler societies, focusing not on institutions of national significance but instead on a small volunteer-based museum located in Puhoi, New Zealand. Employing multimodal analysis of the permanent exhibition—presenting the exploits of a group of Bohemian immigrants—and qualitative interviews with staff and visitors, he shows that dominant multicultural narratives on a national level are not readily embraced by smaller institutions; rather, the focus lies on creating hybrid identities and fostering of local ethnic narratives. Faced with representing an immigration story touched by expulsion and conflict with indigenous groups, the museum employs a nonalignment strategy and shows the potential and pitfalls of community representation in a nonprofessional environment.

In their attempt to flee from fascism, Jenny Kehr and Walter Benjamin clandestinely crossed the border between Spain and France. A study of their route paths leads to three questions: (1) What do we learn about border crossing by studying specific experiences of refugees during World War II? (2) How do route paths of exiles fit with the memory of World War II in different national contexts? (3) How did individuals experience the locations that they crossed? Mapping the exile routes makes it possible to tackle these questions. These two instances of border crossing that turned deadly reveal common patterns that emerge when considering the borders that shape the lives of migrants far beyond the moment when they cross them by sea or by land.

Chester traces the origins of the 1930s–1940s campaign to create Pakistan, a homeland for South Asian Muslims. Paying particular attention to the role of maps, she argues that calls for Pakistan combined specificity and ambiguity. Debates over this new Muslim state foreshadowed key elements of the 1947 India-Pakistan partition, including retaliatory violence, mass migration, and assaults on women. These implications received little attention, due to internal contradictions in Pakistan proposals, the widespread assumption that minority populations would remain in place, and British and secular nationalist reluctance to engage with Muslim separatism. “Image and Imagination in the Creation of Pakistan” shows how this combination worked against serious discussion of the way that migration, identity, and space could—and would—collide in the event of partition.

Kenya has endured periodic outbreaks of violence over land which arose primarily from new meanings that land and space took on at independence. Kenyans have struggled with the legacy of the colonial regime’s attempt to link collective identity with specific physical spaces. Their choices shaped violent communal conflicts over land since 1963. Some people became targets of violence but others did not. As identity is shaped by a person’s place within broader social systems, there are risks and opportunities in migration and boundary crossing. Media reports depicting Kenyan communal violence as the result of tribal friction miss a key point. Due to the inherent flexibility of identity in East Africa, it was possible for marginalized people to acquire land by blurring, if not changing, their identities. But land is finite. Overly successful landed people, particularly if they have “foreign” origins, in marginal societies are often dangerously exposed.

In the mid-twentieth century, Algerian Jews who left their home country forged a transnational community with their former countrymen that spanned France, Israel, and Algeria. As these émigrés moved from a colonial to a nation-state context, they brought with them an expertise in traversing “in-between” spaces they had cultivated in Algeria across religious, cultural, and geographic lines. In contrast to prior histories of migration, this chapter contends that integration into new host countries involved contacts and economic opportunities that connected people across state territorial boundaries via cultural and religious ties, and that these ties were often far more important to the lives of the émigrés than the top-down visions of governments.

East Jerusalem today has become a space populated by “migrants in suspension.” The major group is composed of approximately 50,000 residents who have been left on the Palestinian side of the Separation Wall but are still within the official municipal boundaries of the Jerusalem. These individuals have crossed over to the Israeli side out of fear that Israel might transfer this liminal space to the Palestinian Authority and consequently revoke their legal residency. This anomalous situation is the direct result of the struggle for space as Israel attempts to “Israelize” it, and the Palestinians struggle to preserve their rights to reside in it.

Sredanovic analyzes the case of refugees who crossed the Channel of Sicily to reach Italy between 2011 and 2015, first from Tunisia and Libya and then from other African and Middle Eastern countries. He shows the ways in which the borders of Italy and the European Union (EU) were redefined in answer to these arrivals. He shows how sea borders are disciplinary areas on which states both exercise control and hold the responsibility for rescue operations and how the activities of border management can be concentrated in limited areas or extended to a larger portion of sea and land. The period considered further saw a Europeanization of the Channel of Sicily, with direct interventions of the EU in border management and asylum operations, but also repeated crises of the Schengen Agreement limiting border controls within Europe. The symbolic importance given to arrivals by sea in Italy in the last 25 years contributed to a rapid politicization of the asylum issue in the country. While refugees had almost no public image in Italy before 2011, their identification with the figure of the irregular migrant arriving by sea brought a rapid emergence of xenophobia directed specifically at refugees.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which assumptions about who “migrants” and “expats” are and how long an individual or a community needs to remain “migrant” are shaped by a series of important institutions and technical practices. The chapter focuses on the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), created in 1993 to coordinate discussion and elaboration of migration categories (as irregular, trafficked, refugee and asylum seeker, and legal, both permanent and temporary) and new spatial imaginaries to guide migration and border management institutions. In addition, ICMPD’s development of its mapping tool—I-Map—has been particularly important in reshaping contemporary geographical spatial imaginaries of the European border and the resulting externalization of the border/migration/asylum apparatus. We focus on I-Map’s effect on the Euro-Mediterranean (primarily the states bordering the Mediterranean Sea and neighboring states to the South) and on the EU initiative called the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED).

This chapter examines the relationship between migration and urbanization by exploring how female domestic workers (called Household Service Workers or HSWs), hailing from the Philippines, use and influence urban space in both their host country, the Arabian Gulf, and their home country, the Philippines. Since many HSWs work as nannies and are tied to exit visas, they are seen as employees of servitude and are kept separate from local citizens through social, spatial, and infrastructural segregations. Due to their precarious employment, HSWs are always second-class non-citizens with limited human, social, and spatial rights. The latter right, that of spatial access, or “right to the city,” is at the core of this chapter. By systemically examining the process of pre-migration training, the migrant’s limited mobility in the host country, and the impact of migration in the home country, this chapter focuses on the role of gender, identity, and citizenship on spatial mobility, migration, and urbanization in both the Gulf and the Philippines.

This chapter examines the interlocking notions of migration, space, and identity through a study of a suburban district, Box Hill, in Melbourne, Australia. It argues that the evolving spatiality of Box Hill, perceived as an emerging Chinatown in public narratives, is an outcome of international migration and domestic immigration policies. The case of Box Hill is illustrative of global formations of multiethnic neighborhoods, particularly revolving around public politics about space and identity. This study sheds light on the discursive production of Box Hill, as a place, through its discursive relation with Chinatown, as a space; by applying the notion of place-making, this study reveals tension with public politics of space and identity as well as agencies and impetuses under which multifaceted ethnic spaces were produced in a translocal terrain.

King, a geographer committed to interdisciplinary research, provides the book with a concluding essay that elaborates on the theoretical and methodological insights into the study of migration and space, on the aspects related to mapping and on the highlights of each chapter. The conclusion also assesses the overall contribution of the book to the study of migration as a spatio-temporal phenomenon. The conclusion shows that the book historicises migration in its diverse forms and in a variety of spatio-temporal contexts. The book speaks to a global audience of migration researchers and students who are fascinated by the study of human migration and its connections to a whole range of broader processes such as globalisation, inequality, geopolitics, multiculturalism, ethnicity and identity.