While my PhD research focused on Senegalese migration to Europe, arriving at the Latin American Institute is for me a meaningful way to reconnect with my earlier passion and preoccupation for what Eduardo Galeano (2004) calls Latin America’s colors, smells, and pains (olores, colores y dolores). This is how the Uruguayan poet refers to the diversity, inequality and historical injuries that characterize the subcontinent. I will share here the pathways that brought me to the Latin American Institute. Anthropology and Latin America are indeed in my heart and in my mind since I was an 18-year-old Belgian backpacker in quest for new horizons.
I arrived in Ecuador in October 2010, during an attempted coup against Rafael Correa. I soon left Quito and headed to the Amazon region of Napo, where I was immersed in a Kichwa family and volunteered in an organic farm. I was captivated by the Amazon, its cultures, and its rivers. Traveling along the Brazilian Rio Negro, I met a local graduate student doing research on indigenous languages. This meeting and the long exchanges we had about anthropology in Brazil further enhanced my desire to deepen my backpacking experience by undertaking studies in the continent.
I reached Haiti later in this initial journey. Discovering Port-au-Prince in 2011, shortly after the terrible earthquake that hit the country, was a shock. Taking part of the euphoric and desperate crowd gathered in front of the collapsed presidential palace, I attended Michel Martelly’s presidential inauguration. The countryside of Artibonite - the farming and voodoo hearth of the country –taught me contrasting and deep lessons of humanity. I came back from this nine-month journey through the Andes, the Amazon, and the Caribbean with the feeling that Latin America was still calling me.
Back in Belgium, I met a friend who had returned from decades of work in international cooperation in the Argentine and Bolivian Chaco. Relying on his experience and connections in Argentina, I undertook my undergraduate studies in Anthropology at the National University of Córdoba. I arrived in the rural Chaco in 2012, where I was welcomed by my friend’s indigenous Qom in-laws, in a region of Argentina far from the reality of Buenos Aires.
The National University of Córdoba is known for being vanguardist. Since the 1918 University reform and the 1969 Córdobazo of resistance against the dictatorship, the city has cultivated a strong tradition of militancy. My undergraduate experience started in this inspiring environment of post dictatorship democratization. At the time of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner presidencies, Argentina also recovered from 2001’s economic crash and invested in education, healthcare, human rights, and culture. As a legacy of Peronism and Kirchnerism, the access to education and healthcare is free in Argentina, while the country accounts for some of the world’s largest rates of trade unionism. The 2003 groundbreaking Migration Law extended these rights to immigrants, without discrimination based on nationality or legal status. In this context, Córdoba was receiving many Latin American students, especially from Chile and Peru, but also from Haiti.
Haitians are highly racialized in generally “white” or “brown” Argentina, a country often depicted by migrants as a “racist.” This representation is rooted in the 19th century massacres of the Argentine indigenous and enslaved populations and the current invisibilization and discrimination of their descendants. The mostly black Haitian population was this way hypervisible in the phenotypical Argentine urban landscape.
Refugees from the Haitian Duvalier’s dictatorships (1957-1986) and students composed the first and more privileged migration flows to Argentina. Starting in 2012, less privileged migrants began arriving in the country. After the devastation caused by the 2010 earthquake, many Haitians were pushed to Chaché la vie (in Haitian Creole, looking for life) and leave Haïti Chérie (beloved Haiti). This is the way Haitian migrants express their sentiment towards migration and their homeland. Brazil, Chile, and Argentina emerged then as alternative destinations to the US, Canada, and France. During the presidency of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil began granting humanitarian visas to Haitian migrants arriving at its Amazonian borders. In Argentina, the Cristina Kirchner presidency developed a similar but smaller program, which did not require Haitians to have visa to enter the country. My interest in the Southern Cone complex migration routes undertaken by Haitians brought me to Rio Branco, on the Brazilian side of the Amazon border with Peru. At that time, the Brazilian government was not only granting shelter to Haitians, (and to a lesser extent, also to Senegalese migrants) in this border region but also providing them with bus transportation to reach São Paulo, their main destination, located some 2200 miles away.
After conducting exploratory fieldwork in Rio Branco, São Paulo and Buenos Aires, my undergraduate dissertation focused on the intercultural nexus of relations and representations shaping Haitian migration and the practice of street vending in Córdoba, Argentina. Haitians were active in very diverse settings, ranging from graduate studies to associations, radio streaming, and street vending. My ethnography looked at the complex dynamics operating between Haitians street vendors, City Hall inspectors and the police. It revealed that street vending is a practice often associated with studies and community building. The networks Haitian migrants developed in Córdoba actually intersected with indigenous and afro descendant struggles, revealing the political opportunity structure operating in this setting. Multiple and complementary strategies were mobilized by Haitian migrants to overcome the many challenges they encounter in the racialized Argentine society. Facing regular crackdowns, one desire of the street vendors was to build an organization. It was also the time of neoliberal Mauricio Macri presidency, which led to the rising criminalization of migrants. A visa regime was implemented for Haitians, jeopardizing the human rights narrative displayed by the previous government.
This first research experience brought me afterwards to Spain to undertake MA studies on migration in the European context. It is then that I realized that Haitian street vendors’ aspiration for organization had already been implemented in the city of Barcelona by Senegalese migrants. They built their collective, the Street Vendors Popular Syndicate of Barcelona, a bottom-up organization fighting for street vendors’ dignity in context of multi-faceted discrimination. This collective was successful in including anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and decolonial narratives in its political agenda, while mobilizing original artistic expressions, such as rap music and clothing design. That is why I shifted from my initial interest on Latin America to analyze Senegalese migration, political participation, and social protection in Europe. This was the topic of the MA thesis I wrote, focusing on the political narratives and repertoires of actions of the street vendors’ collective of Barcelona.
In 2018, Mame Mbaye, a Senegalese street vendor died after being chased by the police through the streets of Madrid. His death led to a large local and transnational mobilization, in which civil society, local and consular authorities engaged through conflict to fund the repatriation of his remains to Senegal. The death of Mor Sylla, another street vendor who died in 2015 in Barcelona, was the driver for the aforementioned syndicate creation. My PhD thesis used ethnography to examine the transnational and multiple interpretations that are given to the dead in the case of Senegalese migrants’ death in Europe, especially when it happens under violent conditions. The main argument of my PhD thesis is that different actors mobilize at different scales for and through deaths in migration to grant, control and access the economic, political, and moral resources necessary to manage the repatriation of bodies and survivors' pensions.
After this European and Senegalese experience, I realized that Latin America was still calling me. I was able to travel to Ecuador and Argentina in 2023, in a very changing context than the one I had experienced in the early 2010s period, characterized then by the “new left” governing Latin America. Both countries were amid presidential elections. On the one hand, Ecuador was facing increasing violence linked to the strong presence of narcotraffic cartels in the country. The contradictory feelings toward Correism and the presence of the exiled former president in Belgium was in every conversation I had with locals. Neoliberal businessman Daniel Noboa won the election. On the other hand, Argentina was confronted with choosing between Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian candidate, and Sergio Massa, the Peronist candidate. Milei won the election, confirming the far-right populist influence of Donald Trump in the Americas. Using the metaphor of the chainsaw and criminalizing social protest, Milei is challenging traditional Argentine politics and to a larger extent, the pillars of democracy.
The ascension to the presidency by the unconventional Milei is the result of the influence of young voters, the general discontent of Argentines with corruption, and the major hyperinflation the country has faced since the 2001 economic crash. Argentina is confronted by the juxtaposition of constraining internal and external macroeconomic factors: the post pandemic crisis, unprecedented droughts jeopardizing soya exports, and above all, a 57-billion-dollar debt to the International Monetary Fund, contracted by Macri in 2018. Around 40% of the Argentine population is living below the poverty level (INDEC, 2023). With Milei’s program based on large public shortcuts, one can objectively predict that poverty will get worse. In this unfavorable context, many Haitians left Argentina following Macri’s government restrictive measures towards migration, and especially after the pandemic nine-month lockdown and the related economic crisis. Many of them first left Argentina for Chile, before crisscrossing the continent to reach the United States, undertaking perilous journeys through the Darien Gap, Central America, and Mexico.
My arrival at the UCLA Latin American Institute as a Fulbright Fellow is intimately connected with my research and living experiences across Latin America. My current project deals with the regulation of street vending in Los Angeles County. The large-scale phenomenon which characterizes street vending in the megalopolis and the groundbreaking changing policy implemented in California since 2018 attracted my attention. My objective is to use ethnography to study the unequal paths migrant encounter when applying for a legal permit, interrogating the effective implementation of the new framework as well as the diversity of positions occupied by street vendors in the field. Being hosted at the Latin American Institute is therefore the opportunity for me to address not only the mostly Mexican and Central American origin of street vendors, but also to deepen my larger preoccupation with Latin America’s olores, colores, y dolores.