Counter Geographies of Danger: Young Migrants and Urban Mobility in Argentina

VERÓNICA HENDEL

Malmo

Workshop; Dislocating Urban Studies; 2021

Malmo University

Mapping has historically been the task of travelers, specialists and bureaucrats. Considered a science in charge of gathering, making and analyzing measurements and data from different regions to represent them graphically, cartography managed, over time, to “erase” the routes and activities that made it possible. Device of domination, production of knowledge and control, it is possible to trace in contemporary cartography vestiges, elements of continuity, of the ways in which colonialism materially drew the borders of modern geography “with a ruler and compass”. The concern for “the cartographic” in this paper exceeds the practice of mapping as a technique and is conceived as a true category of thought that introduces a specific relationship with signs, temporalities and subjects in urban spaces.In this paper, we analyze the recent deployment of a series of mechanisms and control devices over urban displacement in a neighborhood located in Greater Buenos Aires (Argentina). The protagonists of this research are a group of young people, who are mostly part of families that have migrated, and with whom we have rebuilt their ways of living, touring and experiencing the neighborhood in which their school is located. Ways that are crossed by inequality. Through the production of narrative cartographies and ethnographic analysis, we managed to map what they identify as practices of institutional violence oriented to force or avoid urban displacement. At the same time, this inquiry allows us to explore and analyze the reasons why young people associate their experience of the city with danger and insecurity, deepening the senses that come into play there, which are involved with identification processes, but also processes of marking, stigmatization and border production. This analytical journey allows us to approach the ways in which young Latin-American migrants in Argentina “make” the city, contributing urban studies and to the field of studies on borders and their proliferation, heterogeneization and reinforcement in urban space.The different forms that migrant mobility takes in the city give rise to the production of different modes of governance, which are integral to the liberal logic and which, in turn, produce and affect those same figures that constitute its starting point. Certain patterns of action of the security forces and of society regarding migrants can considered as a proliferation of subtle mechanisms of control and surveillance: This allows us to think of borders in the framework of broader logics of governmentality. The city thus emerges as a place in which certain state policies of surveillance and certain practices of identification and control of the population act in ways that bear similarities to the police function exercised on territorial borders. The production of other narrative cartographies and maps enabled the creation of spaces for dialogue and the production of collective knowledge about the experience of the city and promoted the elaboration of critical stories where reflection from a visual device allowed articulating processes of territorialization and narratives that dispute and challenge hegemonic ways of signifying the city.