Correction: Banh, J. “I Have an Accent in Every Language I Speak!”: Shadow History of One Chinese Family’s Multigenerational Transnational Migrations. Genealogy 2019, 3, 36

The author wishes to make the following corrections to this paper [...]

Conviviality as Diasporic Knowledge

Based on my time with im/mobile West Africans in Senegal and Spain since 2007, I propose conviviality to conceptualise the complexity of my interlocutors’ local and diasporic tactics and views of living with difference. Simple everyday encounters such as greeting and dwelling in urban spaces serve to disentangle their various levels of reflection, habitual expectations and tactical action. They had local to global reference frameworks at their disposal. Not pretending to represent their knowledge, I discuss the inspirations I received from trying to understand what they shared with me non/verbally regarding living with difference. To start from this decentred set of premises challenges established Western/Northern politics of living with difference. Through conviviality, I show a distinct way of engaging multiple and overlapping ways of differentiating and homogenising practices and raise awareness for the importance and feasibility of minimal socialities in diasporic configurations, transnational migrations and the respective local urban contexts.

“THE FAULT OF OUR GRANDFATHERS”: YEMEN'S THIRD-GENERATION MIGRANTS SEEKING REFUGE FROM DISPLACEMENT

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Djibouti's Markazi camp for refugees from Yemen between 2016 and 2018, this article examines the complex motivating factors that drove a subset of Yemenis to seek refuge in the Horn of Africa. Although the primary reason for their flight to the Horn of Africa was the ongoing war, a secondary but not inconsequential driver of many of these Yemeni refugees’ current displacement was their family histories of transnational migrations and interethnic marriages. This article argues that, for this group, it was their “mixed” (muwallad) Arab and African parentage and resulting alienation in Yemen that made their flight imaginable—and, in their view, imperative. Although “mixed motive migration” is not unusual, this example underscores how spatial and social (im)mobilities in Yemen and the Horn of Africa region have been co-constituted across generations. More importantly, it has critical implications for the recently adopted Global Compact on Refugees, which promotes (among other solutions) the “local integration” of refugees in their proximate host societies.

Emissaries of the Violent Peace

This chapter pieces together a few key elements of mara history that set the arc of their dystopian evolution and made them into harbingers of a new age of violence. Exploring the rise of the gangs in Guatemala means linking irrefutable historical phenomena—U.S. imperialism and Cold War atrocities, transnational migrations and deportations, and so on—with the multiple and contradictory ways people remember and make meaning out of the past. Drawing on the stories of former gang members and gang associates alongside journalists’ and scholars’ accounts, this chapter maps the political and social ferment of Guatemala City when the maras first took root; how decades of U.S. involvement in Guatemala gave the maras’ made-in-America style an irresistible magnetism for some urban youth; and, finally, the ways that this “new way of being a gang” seemed, for a moment, to structure and regulate internecine gang violence before it too fell apart.

Marriage, Gender and Transnational Migrations in Fertility Transitions of Romanian Roma Women

This paper explores how a group of immigrant Roma women are shaping their reproductive lives in the transnational context generated by the migratory flows of post-1989 Romania. The analysis is based on the ethnographic reconstruction of the reproductive lives of 124 women from seven Roma family networks residing in Spain and connected with relatives all over Europe. Although these groups are increasingly heterogeneous, some common patterns seem clear. Primarily, we observe that these women are transforming the tempo and quantum of their reproductive careers in a culturally specific fertility transition that is not based on the postponement of childbearing and marriage. Early, pronatalist and patrilocal marriage followed by adolescent maternity are powerful normative orientations in the groups studied. Spacing the second or the third child and stopping having children in their early 30s seem to be the most common strategies by which they are responding to the increasing costs and setbacks of high fertility. Their transnational experiences in Western Europe are contributing to this process in ideological, structural and instrumental terms. The demographic contrasts of many Roma groups with their non-Roma neighbours are a source of prejudice and ‘ethno-demographic anxiety’ that fuel populist, nationalist and illiberal sentiments and movements.