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Originally published 29.10.21 by Ann Cathrin Corrales-Øverlid

Whereas the terms ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ proliferate in everyday encounters, in political discourse, and in scholarly literature on migration, what home means to migrants is often taken for granted. In the United States, for example,��people of Latin American origin have often been told to  or to . The hashtag # developed by Latinos in the United States,��as a response to former President Trump’s restrictive immigration policies,��demonstrates that ‘home’ is all but static,��that immigrants’ own experience of home might diverge from the way the state and others perceive it, and that immigrants make ‘home’ also where they are not welcome. 

As legal scholar  describes,��the concept of ‘attachment’ is increasingly employed by states as a legal ordering to regulate entry and membership. Attachment is in this regard often linked to migrants’ relational, economic,��cultural or legal connections to various communities and articulated as national, geographic and personal attachments. Schultz notes that the indicators applied in legal processes to determine a person’s attachment to a country/place are often simplified and prescriptive, and might not necessarily coincide with the person’s subjective feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place. 

To unpack the relationship and possible disjunction between legal approaches to the bonds immigrants develop to countries, people and places, on the one hand, and immigrants’ subjective understanding and experiences of these bonds, on the other, interdisciplinary conceptual work is needed. Whereas the concept of ‘attachment’ is employed in legal reasoning, ethnographic studies often emphasize the notion of ‘belonging’ and more recently also the concept of ‘home’. The relationship between these concepts, as well as the practical implication this disjunction might have in migrant’s lives, is less explored. In this blog post, I look at how the migration literature has examined these bonds from an ethnographic point of view. I particularly zoom in on the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’. 

Continuities and Ruptures  

At an initial stage, the migration project is often temporary in character, as migrants arrive in a new society with the aspiration of one day moving back to the ‘homeland’. Whereas some are forced to leave their home because of conflict and persecution,��others aim to work and save up money or to get an education that they can later benefit from back ‘home’. Still other people migrate in search of a new home and a better future for themselves and their families, and have no aim of return.  

Regardless of initial intentions, migration produces ruptures which sometimes alter these pre-migration aspirations, and return remains a distant dream. For some the ‘homeland’ is not their home anymore, as they have progressively developed strong bonds to their new communities. Whereas many migrants seem to maintain a certain level of attachment to and identification with the place they were born and grew up (), ruptures produced by migration can also lead to feelings of alienation in relation to the country of origin. In an era of precarious immigration statuses,��temporary protection regimes,��as well as intensified deportation and return policies,��people also experience being sent back to a place where they do not feel at home anymore. Some are even deported to a country they left as a child and as adults do not even remember, or they are ‘returned’ to a country where they have never set foot. One example is Afghan nationals born in ���ǰ��� who are deported to Afghanistan. 

Although a range of empirical studies have explored the continuities and ruptures that migrants experience and how they affect people’s sense of home and feeling of belonging, these two concepts are often employed uncritically in scholarship on migration. Recent efforts, however, have tried to remedy this, and ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are increasingly theorized and employed as analytical concepts. 

The transnational turn, place-making and homemaking

The criticism of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller (external link)) and what was seen as the transnational turn within migration studies in the early 1990s sprang out from anthropological and ethnographic research but soon spread to other disciplines, challenging previous scholarship and its failure to capture how new forms of transportation and communication had eased movements and contacts across borders. They also pointed to how these transnational practices affected place-belongingness and a sense of home, as home could be both here, there,��here and there, or neither here nor there ().��

Although the transnational turn has contributed with an important corrective to previous binary assumptions about national boundaries, its paradigmatic position within migration studies has not remained without criticism. Scholars have, for example, pointed to how transnational scholarly approaches often overlook “the critical ways in which immigrants practice place-making and invest meaning and effort into the project of making a new home” (). An emphasis on transnational bonds is also evident in legal reasoning, as judicial decision makers use the possibility to maintain frequent contact across borders through modern means of communication as an argument in deportation cases that lead to family separation. The assumption is that a parent may establish or develop a relationship with their baby from the country of return through modern technologies such as telephone, email and Skype (). Such legal reasoning highlights the importance of exploring ethnographically the relationship between transnational practices, place-making and homemaking, as well as how these practices play out and inform migrant’s everyday experiences of belonging.

Drawing on ethnographic research that I have conducted among Peruvian immigrant women in Southern California who have opened businesses in the culinary sector,��I examine homemaking processes in the society of settlement, particularly linked to the women’s engagement with Peruvian food ().��A woman that I call ‘Pilar’, for example,��told me that not a day went by without the word ‘Peru’ coming out of her mouth. However, despite strong attachments to the country of origin—explicitly articulated in the women’s businesses—their life history accounts emphasized ruptures rather than continuities. Homemaking seemed to be closely related to spatial and everyday practices. 

‘Carolina’, another immigrant woman that I interviewed in Los Angeles, reflected upon these ruptures, as she explained to me how she had discovered that her relationship with Peru had changed. Recalling her experiences with traveling back to Peru, she relayed: “My house didn’t feel like my house anymore. My street didn’t feel like that anymore… I found myself counting… that on the fifteenth day tears were pouring down my face. You dream so much… Without realizing it you have started to grow roots here. To me this [the US] is my country, this is my world. It sounds awful, but it’s true”. 

As ‘Carolina’ and other Peruvian women’s stories illustrated, everyday practices and experiences were spatially situated, and their sense of home and belonging was not articulated in a deterritorialized “transnational social field” (). This resonates with other studies that demonstrate how everyday life is experienced and grounded in specific places (,��). Some also note how increasingly fortified borders and stricter immigration regimes seem to have prompted a trend of declining transnational circulation and increasing permanent settlement among groups who used to be highly engaged in circular migration, such as Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States (), severing the ruptures and impeding return, particularly for undocumented immigrants.

What these and other studies also reveal, is that people do make home, even in very harsh circumstances and under a variety of precarious legal statuses, as human beings have a basic need to attach belonging to their surroundings (; ;��;��;��). In line with these studies, I found that whereas precarious legal statuses conditioned and shaped Peruvian women’s homemaking processes in Southern California in profound ways, it did not prevent those who resided without authorization from developing a sense of home and feeling of belonging to the societies in which they found themselves.

This is particularly important given that attachments developed while residing in a country as undocumented or even under temporary immigration statuses seem to be granted less weight in legal reasoning (). Again, we see how understandings of attachment in the legal realm diverge from the findings from ethnographic research on migrant’s experiences of home and belonging, underscoring the need for interdisciplinary approaches to these concepts. But how are notions of home and belonging theorized in the migration literature?

Home as a process, not a static structure

A recent spate of scholarship has tried to bring home and homemaking into migration studies, in order to capture immigrants’ daily experiences and explore what home means in an era of global migration. Sociologist Paolo Boccagni has highlighted the “home-migration nexus” and argues that the notion of home is at the core of the migration experience. In his book Migration and the Search for Home (), Boccagni provides us with a theoretical framework for the study of home in migration. He defines home as “a special social relationship, based on an emplaced (tentative) attribution of security, familiarity, and control to one’s living circumstances” (9). As such, he draws the attention away from home as a static structure, and reframes home as “a relational, processual and context-specific social experience” (13).

Similarly, in their work on forced migrants in protracted displacement, human geographer Cathrine Brun and anthropologist Anita Fábos () challenge sedentarist notions of territorial belonging in narratives of forced migration. As a response they offer a conceptual framework through which they demonstrate how particular constellations of home (everyday homemaking practices; values, traditions, memories and feelings of home; as well as broader political and historical context in which home is understood) produce “specific notions of home and specific strategies for making home that challenge perceptions and policies of fixity and limbo and unsettle the dichotomy between stasi and movement” (14).

Moreover, in a co-authored paper,��Boccagni and sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo () draw on their respective ethnographic research and advocate for adopting homemaking as a way beyond the stalemate of assimilation vs transnationalism in the United States and beyond integration frameworks often employed in Europe. They highlight the importance of understanding how migrants interact with specific local structures of opportunities and their struggle to turn space into “our” place. A view of homemaking as hard labor is also present in the work of sociologists Nathanael Lauster and Jing Zhao () who underscore that immigrants invest physical and emotional efforts in making home, as they move through different stages of settling in,��settling down and settling for,��in the encounter with circumstances that may differ from those initially anticipated. In these studies,��the agentic aspect of settlement processes is highlighted,��and the labor of homemaking is presented as something migrants actively engage in. 

The Peruvian women’s stories in my study also demonstrated the hard work that was put into making a new home in a new place. I immersed myself into the Peruvian community and food scene in Los Angeles with the initial assumption that the culinary entrepreneurs’ reproduction of material and sensory elements from the ‘homeland’ manifested their longing for a ‘home’ left behind. I came to understand, however, that their reproduction of home-like environments and culinary specialties meant so much more and formed part of the women’s homemaking practices in the US. These findings resonate with anthropologist Ghassan Hage’s work (). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Lebanese migrants in Australia, Hage criticizes migration scholars for portraying migrants as passive, pained people who yearn for the ‘homeland’, as they often strive to maintain or reproduce certain cultural aspects in the place of settlement. He argues that “not all intimations of homeliness are memories of lost homelands”. These should rather be seen as “building blocks used by migrants to make themselves feel at home where they actually are” and form part of migrants’ settlement strategies rather than an attempt to escape the realities of the host country” (419).

���dz��������Ծ���() contends that home is a distinctive emotional experience, different from other forms of place attachments,��such as belonging,��since it implies claiming visibility, recognition,��participation and ownership. The way he employs the concept of belonging in his book, however, is not so different from his conceptualization of a feeling of home. In fact,��when revising the literature, one realizes that definitions of home often contain the concept of belonging without further conceptualizing it;��the same can be said for definitions of belonging which often rely on the concept of home. While this may be confusing, it also highlights the close relationship between these two terms.

‘Belonging’ vs. ‘The Politics of Belonging’

Human geographer Marco Antonsich () claims that although extensively employed in the literature, belonging is a “vaguely defined” and “under-theorized” concept. Sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis (), is among the few who have developed a comprehensive analytical framework for the study of the notion of belonging. She makes an analytical distinction between ‘belonging’, and what she calls ‘the politics of belonging’. ‘Belonging’, she notes, is about “emotional attachment, about feeling ‘at home’ and (…) feeling ‘safe’” (197; Again, we see the notion of ‘home’ being used uncritically when defining ‘belonging’). The politics of belonging, on the other hand, refers to the maintenance of boundaries that “separate the world population into ‘us’ and ‘them’” (204), it is about mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion produced by political powers, but also about how these are contested and challenged. Hence, it also includes struggles for determining what it means to belong, to be a member of a community, and the role played by specific social locations and narratives of identity.

Antonsich builds on Yuval-Davis’ theorization, but offers a more detailed analysis of the personal dimension of belonging. He points to belonging as an emotional feeling that individuals attach to a particular place and which generates what he calls place-belongingness in a way that place is felt as home. He highlights five factors that contribute to generate individual feelings of place-belongingness: auto-biographical (past history, memories, experiences), relational (personal and social ties), cultural (e.g. language), economic (material conditions) and legal (e.g. citizenship/resident permits).��He underscores, however, that a sense of place-belongingness does not exist outside the realm of power and mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion, as the ability to feel at home is a personal, but also a social matter. Hence, personal, intimate feelings of belonging to a place are conditioned by discourses and practices of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion that are at play in specific places at specific moments. Developing a sense of belonging is hence a process of negotiation between those who claim belonging and those who grant it,��and is articulated on both individual and collective scales.

Interdisciplinary approaches to notions of attachment, home and belonging

The discussion above highlights the need for further ethnographic scrutiny of subjective notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ and the relationship between these two concepts. However, it also underscores the importance of bringing together legal scholars and ethnographers in order to fully understand the bonds migrants develop to the different contexts they straddle throughout the migration trajectory and in their everyday lives. Such collaborative interdisciplinary work may contribute to unpack and even challenge the use of simplified and prescriptive indicators of attachment in legal reasoning and to explore how sensitive these may or may not be to the way migrants develop subjective feelings of belonging and to their agency in creating a home for themselves and their families, as is done even in harsh circumstances and under precarious and temporal legal statuses.

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Abrego,��Leisy J., and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales. 2020. We Are Not Dreamers. Durham  and London: Duke University Press.  

Alarcón, Rafael, Luis Escala, and Olga Odgers. 2016. Making Los Angeles Home – The  Integration of Mexican Immigrants in the United States: Oakland, California:  University of California Press. 

Bygnes, Susanne, and Marta Bivand Erdal. 2017. “Liquid Migration, Grounded Lives:  Considerations about Future Mobility and Settlement among Polish and Spanish  Migrants in Norway.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43 (1):102-118. 

Erdal, Marta. 2014. “’This is My Home’.” Comparative Migration Studies 2 (3):361-383. 

Griffiths, Melanie, and Candice Morgan-Glendinning. 2021. Deportability and the  Family: Mixed immigration-status families in the UK Report. Bristol: University of  Bristol.   

Hage, Ghassan. 2010. Migration, food, memory, and home-building. In Memory : histories,�� theories, debates,��edited by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz. New York:  Fordham University Press. 

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, and Manuel Pastor. 2021. South Central Dreams: Finding  Home and Building Community in South L.A. New York: New York University Press. 

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 2017. “At home in inner-city immigrant community gardens.”  Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 32 (1):13-28. 

Lauster, Nathanael, and Jing Zhao. 2017. “Labor Migration and the Missing Work of  Homemaking: Three forms of Settling for Chinese-Canadian Migrants.” Social  Problems 64 (4):497-512. 

Levitt, Peggy, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2004. “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational  Social Field Perspective in Society.” International Migration Review 38 (3):1002- 1039. 

Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2003. “Methodological Nationalism, the Social  Sciences, and the Study of Migration; An Essay in Historical Epistemology.”  International Migration Review 37 (3):576-610.