The present work aims to deduce information about the function of successive moves of people at the Migrants House. The Migrants House was founded in São Paulo, Brazil in 1974 as a civil society entity called Volunteer Association for Migrants Integration (AVIM) – designed to provide assistance to Brazilian migrants. ...
(Show more)The present work aims to deduce information about the function of successive moves of people at the Migrants House. The Migrants House was founded in São Paulo, Brazil in 1974 as a civil society entity called Volunteer Association for Migrants Integration (AVIM) – designed to provide assistance to Brazilian migrants. Currently, it maintains partnerships with São Paulo City Hall and with Cáritas, an organization which, by its turn, has set up partnerships with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees- ACNUR. The latter keeps protecting Brazilian refugees and migrants, particularly from Colombian and African, besides immigrants, specially Latin Americans who find difficulty in their process of moving.
A reflection is conducted on the demand of recurring migratory moves of the people at the Migrants House, counterpointed by the appeals for recognition and the search of a social locus that serves as basis for their identity. Identify issues and the wish for recognition in Immigration are approached through the two ways according to which immigrants deal with new cultures: the unexamined adoption of symbolic cultural references or its rejection. Identity suspension resulting from immigration encompasses a number of aspects such as the softening of laws and values that would favor the desiring dimension, but which make it difficult to mark from where they can form bonds with the other. Furthermore, identity shocks may generate narcissistic disturbances. Though they can be libertarian, they can also be disorienting. The identity issue, allied with housing and work issues, make immigrants fragile and facilitate the acceptance of the minimum for subsistence, which may take the shape of conformism and submission.
The difficulty locating oneself in the world and the dimension of the lost occupy a primordial place and can promote effects of uprooting or deterritorializaton. Vis-à-vis what has been lost, there is a first moment that can be thought of as referring to the concept of anguish followed by a silencing that impedes the transmission, necessary for the maintenance of a subjective history.
It is necessary to emphasize that immigration is a process that articulates social, political, economic and subjective motivations. The condition of being a migrant favors, undoubtedly,– and this is what has been observed– all sort of manipulations and abuses. Thus the relation with the new land will have the marks of those processes. Some migrations reveal the very move in search of diversity of for becoming the other, but migration concerns errancy as condemnation. The figure of the Wandering Jew, Ahashverus (Xerxes) is a metaphor of the excluded who, by imposition of the other, “will forever roam” .
The space at the Migrants House is revealed as special and subjectively strategic. It is verified that its user have appropriated themselves of this space in their own way. This work aimed to make word circulate in this differentiated space, where people from different cultures, classes and origins interact.
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