The arrival of new West African, migrants in Latin America can be seen as a response to restrictive European and North American migration policies that, together with the global economic recession in the late 2000s, redirected West African migrant mobility and the search for better opportunities away from “traditional” migration destinations in Europe and the US toward new destinations and emerging economies (Flahaux and de Haas 2016; Heil 2021). From the mid-2000s, Senegalese and other West African hawkers started to reshape the already existing informal transnational street business of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and many came to follow them. Since most enter the country without a visa, they often end up in a legal limbo, despite Argentina's progressive migration policies (Espiro and Zubrzycki 2022).1 Nevertheless, from 2011 to 2015, 4747 Senegalese nationals obtained a residence permit in Argentina, 97.7% of whom were male (IOM 2017). Those who arrived after a regularization program in 2013 could not regularize their stay and the actual number of Senegalese migrants currently in the country is unknown (Freier and Zubrzycki 2021).
In a similar way to how West African traders in other cities around the globe have transformed public spaces and made them into nodes of globalized African networks, Senegalese migrants occupied the city's public spaces and sidewalks (Babou 2002; Carrier and Mathews 2020; Carter 2010; Kane 2011; Kleinman 2019; Riccio 2004). From improvised stalls they carved out a niche for themselves selling jewelry, copies of designer watches, sunglasses and handbags, leather belts and purses, often manufactured in China. In Buenos Aires, alongside other South American migrants and Argentinean hawkers struggling to access the formal labor market, they entered the city's economy of street vending, an element of the informal economy which, at the time, already sustained close to half of the labor force in Argentina (Maurizio 2012).
This article interrogates transnational street business, as defined in this special issue (Ravnbøl, Simonsen, and Korsby 2023), focusing on how the social practices of Senegalese migrants create an infrastructural arrangement that channels newly arrived migrants into the city's prolific economy of street vending, thereby bringing into analytical view the often invisible social infrastructure that shapes and channels migrant mobility. Social infrastructure can be defined as “the complex combination of objects, spaces, persons, and practices” that serves as a platform for reproducing life (Simone 2004: 408). The concept illuminates how, within the physical infrastructure of a city, people of limited means create, in collaborative and innovative ways, a social infrastructure to overcome the challenges of the city (Simone 2004: 407). Yet, as I aim to show, the channeling does not only facilitate mobility. As Anna Tsing has emphasized, motion always implies friction: “Roads create pathways that make motion easier and more efficient, but in doing so they limit where we go. The ease of travel they facilitate is also a structure of confinements” (Tsing 2005: 6). The social landscape that greeted the migrants both helped them along but also, at times, created tensions, as I will show.
The article is based on nine months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork between 2012 and 2015, conducted in the framework of my PhD thesis, among male and female Senegalese migrants working as street hawkers in the vicinity of the Retiro railway station and the commercial area of Once in Buenos Aires. My interlocutors consisted of 55 migrants, and from among this group I formed close relationships with a smaller group of 15 people, whose lives I followed closely over an extended period to explore the politics of mobility that shaped their movements and everyday lives in Argentina. Drawing on their narratives and on everyday events that unfolded among them, I will start by describing the area of Once and then turn my attention to the social practices that help newcomers become mobile and embedded in the large informal labor market. I argue that this social infrastructure relies on unspoken laws of migration that enable and shape this form of channeling but also at times create tensions between the migrants. In the final section I show the flexibility and dynamic nature of this infrastructure, highlighting how it branches out when a group of young migrants explore new, unknown territories for trade outside the well-trodden pathways. But first, I will begin by locating my contribution within the literature concerned with migrant networks and social infrastructure.
When Social Networks Take an Infrastructural Form
Migration studies has long recognized that migrant networks and practices of hospitality are important for settlement and livelihood possibilities. In a West African context, communities have historically been highly mobile, and practices of solidarity and hospitality toward strangers are common (de Bruijn and van Dijk 2003: 292). In Senegal, Beth Buggenhagen has aptly described the importance of practices of hospitality and welcoming of strangers, taraanga in Wolof, as a way of bestowing rights and obligations normally reserved for kin onto non-kin in order to expand circuits of exchange (Buggenhagen 2012: 34). Studies of Senegalese and other West African migrants in Italy, France, the US, and Latin America have emphasized the religious nature of strong, self-sustaining networks and social ties, when living with everyday racism and segregation (see for example Abdullah 2010; Babou 2002; Kane 2011; Lucht 2019; Riccio 2004; Stoller 2013). Bruno Riccio speaks of the horizontal ties between Senegalese members of the Murid religious brotherhood in Italy, “by which reciprocal solidarity is ensured and the base for the successful establishment of transnational networks is formed” (Riccio 2001: 587). More recent work on Senegalese migration to Argentina has also emphasized how the Murid Sufi brotherhood has shaped the migrants’ identity, work ethic, and networks within this recent South–South migration (see for example Espiro 2021; Kleidermacher 2013).
While I build on this rich ethnographic literature, I also want to combine it with recent scholarship on infrastructure that has emphasized the social and cultural dimensions, thereby moving beyond the conceptualization of infrastructure as only concrete material and technological systems that both enable and constrain different forms of mobility (see for example Kleinman 2014, 2019; Kleist and Bjarnesen 2019; Simone 2004). Julie Kleinman observes that research on networks tends to focus more on how nodes, persons and places are connected to each other, whereas research on infrastructure as an analytical approach, on the other hand, provides a “powerful focus on the relations that enable connection, the channels of mobility” and how migrants use them (Kleinman 2021: 2). It follows from this that it is not a given that all migrant networks take an infrastructural form that facilitates arrival and everyday life in a new context, but rather that this should be a question for empirical investigation. The specific context and the available material, legal, and technological opportunities offered to newcomers by, for example, the state or civil society, as well as the level of trust or mistrust within and outside a network seem to shape and condition the need for “people to become infrastructure” (Simone 2004).
In Kleinman's work (2014; 2019) on West African migrants at the Gare du Nord railway station in Paris, she shows how migrants create alternative models of solidarity and reciprocity based on common trust and an understanding of a West African cultural repertoire. Otherwise, marginalized migrants rely on “a set of practices and an overall moral orientation through which they seek to create new channels to produce value abroad,” and seek opportunities through building new ties and relationships outside their kin and village networks (Kleinman 2019: 6). Following Kleinman, I seek to bring ethnographically to the fore the social relations and moral ties that shape and reshape the social infrastructure, thereby contributing to the study of “infrastructuring practices” that create “platforms of arrival and take-off” for migrants beyond the “arrival infrastructures of the state, city governments or civil society organizations” (Meeus et al. 2018:1), support which, at the time of fieldwork, was largely absent in Buenos Aires.
The Area of Once
Most Senegalese migrants are in one way or another connected to Once, which is part of the Balvanera neighborhood. Some trade in other parts of the city but they come to Once to buy goods, while others have pitches there or live in the area. The media sometimes refers to Once as “Little Dakar” because of the large representation of Senegalese migrants.2 This echoes the way in which the area was earlier colloquially called “Little Israel” when the Jewish population settled there at the beginning of the twentieth century and created Jewish institutions and a textile industry (Nouwen 2013). Yet this is a simplification of an ethnically diverse location that spans far beyond the Senegalese migrants. There is still a Jewish presence but, today, a range of migrants from other Latin American countries, especially Bolivia, Peru, and Paraguay, and Asian migrants from Korea, China, and India, along with Argentinian traders mix with the recent flow of African migrants.
A broad diversification of formal and informal labor furthermore characterizes the area. In front of the Once train station, rows of passengers wait for the many connecting bus lines that branch out from the green square of Plaza Miserere. At the Plaza, female Dominican sex workers saunter in pairs around the monumental mausoleum of Argentina's first president, Bernardinio Rivadavia (1780–1845), chatting while waiting for customers. In the narrow streets that stretch out behind them, Peruvian trans people with long black hair, wearing tight miniskirts and sky-high stiletto heels, also sell sex. Along the two main arterial roads, retail outlets mainly sell clothes, shoes, and electronic equipment, while Peruvian, Bolivian, and Chinese restaurants and food stalls offer cheap lunches and sweetmeats.
The Senegalese hawkers cover most of the area along the busy main arterial roads and the smaller junctions in the narrow roads behind Avenida Pueyrredón. A block away from the railway station, toward Avenida Corrientes, women—mainly Peruvians—sell food and ice-cold beverages. Close to the large McDonalds, a small group of Nigerian hawkers has settled on both sides of the road, together with the relatively few migrants from Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Some of the female West African traders have specialized in braiding and hair extensions. In the streets that radiate out from Avenida Pueyrredón and down toward Junin, a range of Chinese and Korean-owned wholesale businesses cluster together and have become important suppliers of goods for the West African migrants, as well as supplying business owners from Buenos Aires and the provinces. Further down Avenida Corrientes, a large sign with “Touba-Argentina” written on it marks the location of a kiosk where Senegalese migrants gather for weekly prayer meetings in the basement. The clear reference to Touba, the holy city of the Mourid Muslim brotherhood, shows how the migrants emplace themselves and reconfigure the urban landscape. In addition to the restaurants catering for the tastes of this diverse group of nationalities, a range of other shops provide services that facilitate the needs of people living transnational lives by offering cheap phone calls, Internet access, and remittance-sending services. In front of these shops and restaurants the informal business bustles, and the sidewalk is packed with hawkers from neighboring countries who work side by side with the African migrants, leaving little space to move and slowing down the large flow of people in transit. This is the context within which the Senegalese hawkers have created a niche for themselves, selling mostly jewelry, watches, and leather belts, mostly manufactured in China and procured from already established trading channels.
For the hawkers, the area of Once is not an anonymous transit space but has been a particular location of their remaking of the city; its diversity and the possibilities it contains for multiple encounters hold the potential to launch their socio-economic and existential mobility. At the time of my fieldwork the Senegalese migrants struggled to find a space in the city. Unlike in many European and American contexts, the migrants did not have to fear strict migration governance and deportation, though many of them had entered Argentina in an unauthorized manner and were living in a legal limbo (Espiro and Zubrzycki 2022; Vammen 2019). Instead, their everyday was challenged by urban bordering processes linked to Argentina's particular history of invisibilization and racialized displacement of black bodies that has and still continues to shape contemporary urban gentrification and security policies and police interventions (see also Alberto and Elena 2016; Gordillo 2016; Grimson 2005; Maffia and Zubrzycki 2014).
Street vending is prohibited in Buenos Aires, but it is considered a minor infraction. Weekly bribes were paid to the police, intended to make them turn a blind eye, but this could never safeguard the hawkers, especially when the municipality ordered the police to help clear the pavements of street hawkers, or if local business owners in Once complained that the many hawkers blocked the sidewalk and obscured their window displays, or that they undercut them by selling similar items at much lower prices (Vammen 2020). Furthermore, the Argentine federal police (Policía Federal Argentina, PFA) could easily turn brutal, racist, and violent (Pita 2012). During my fieldwork a special urban taskforce, together with the Metropolitan Police, carried out an ongoing operation with an unusual level of physical violence (see Pacecca et al. 2017 for a detailed account of how the Senegalese migrants in Once were persecuted by the police and how the media further illegalized the migrants’ work while justifying the police interventions). It was within this trading hub of both connections and opportunities but also full of violence and uncertainties that the newly arrived Senegalese migrants had to find their feet.
Get started with el maletín
It was easy to spot newly arrived Senegalese migrants in Buenos Aires, as many of them carried the hallmark of a new trader, el maletín: a black suitcase with red velvet lining which, when opened, displays different types of jewelry and fake designer watches. Its handy size fits well with the mobile life that most of the newly-arrived were compelled to endure until they found a more permanent spot in the city and could expand their businesses. Like most of the other commodities that the Senegalese migrants bought and sold in Argentina, these suitcases were made in China and either borrowed from an already established migrant or bought in Once. More established, migrants showed newcomers the commercial zone of Once where they could buy inexpensive goods in the large Chinese supermarkets, or introduced them to other migrants who had left the street and specialized in the wholesale of goods from China or Brazil. The compatriots specializing in wholesale trade would often accept a delayed payment if one of their regular clients vouched for the newcomer. Unlike in other destinations, Senegalese hawkers in Buenos Aires do not trade African goods. It is difficult and costly to get them through Argentinian customs, and circular migration was limited to migrants with documents who could afford to keep going back and forth.3 In the beginning the suitcase would often look more empty than full, compared to the rich display of goods more established migrants could present to their customers. The quantity of goods available depended on how much money the migrant had arrived with, as well as on the relationships with, and the generosity of, other Senegalese migrants who often gave or lent compatriots the goods to get them started.
The maletín was not the only way to detect new migrants. Their hesitant steps with much less self-confidence and their evident struggle to find their way into the informal sector of street vending also marked them out. One summer day, while I was hanging out with Aliou, he pointed toward one of the newly arrived migrants. In contrast to Aliou, who had a large table filled with goods in a place where many potential clients would pass every day, the stocky young man with a half-empty black suitcase in his hand had great difficulty finding a spot in the large crowd of people going home from work. “Look, look, he just arrived a few weeks ago, I feel sorry for him,” Aliou said.
I asked Aliou why he felt sorry for the newcomer, and this led him to reflect on his own first months in Argentina with el maletín. Aliou was twenty years old when he had arrived two years earlier. He was the youngest of five siblings in Senegal and used to trade cloth between Mauritania and his hometown, where he lived with his family.
It was not like I was really happy when I came to Argentina. I was actually very anxious, and I could not stop thinking about all the things that were ahead of me. I knew I had to make it and work hard; I had to help my family—they depend on me.The first months I only thought about going back, it was so difficult. Everything was very complicated! I did not understand any Spanish, the house I lived in was terrible and very unpleasant, and I did not know people or the city. I had one thousand US dollars when I arrived. One of the guys helped me to go and change the money and then buy goods to get started with selling. We went together to Once and bought a small maletín and the goods to fill it with. He told me where I could work and showed me some bars where many people go. But it was such a surprise. The maletín! It was very sad to realize that that was all there was in Argentina, a maletín. You go back to zero! I had a large shop in Touba and now I had the maletín! I thought “What can I do with this maletín?—I can't do anything with it.” But I was wrong. I thought “I have paid so much to come here, and this is all there is! Is this really the only kind of job I can do here to make a living?” It was very hard. But the others told me “Wait! You will make money from the maletín, just wait and see.” So, I spent all day walking the streets and slowly getting to know the city a bit better. And slowly, slowly, I started to sell and could see that they were right, that you actually could make something for yourself. But you must make sacrifices, and be on the street all day, every day, even though you are tired and your body aches. You just get up in the morning and start again, because you have to—there is no other way.
Aliou's story points to the anxiety that many migrants experienced upon realizing what street trading had to offer them. His new role as a migrant, burdened with all his own as well as his family's and social network's expectations, put further pressure on him when he realized that he had to fulfill them all by walking the streets of Buenos Aires with the small maletín. Initially this appeared to be a clear backward step from his former position in Senegal. Argentina seemed nothing like the promises which his migration broker had made, especially since he was now supposed to be one of the main providers for his family. His family had placed their trust and money in his journey: he had only been able to save half of the three million CFA needed to go to Argentina so his mother as well as other family members had contributed. He was compelled to make sacrifices so he could pay them back and show that their trust in him was well-founded. After a year, Aliou's maletín was full of goods and a new friend had showed him his now more permanent spot where he could start to expand his “shop” beyond the black suitcase, and display a big, attractive array of goods on two fold-up tables. Although he struggled with the municipality's efforts to clear the area with regular police raids that potentially could confiscate all his goods, he clearly considered himself to be in a better place than the young migrant with the maletín who he had pointed out and felt sorry for.
Like many of the other migrants I came to know, he started by repaying the debts to the people who had helped him to establish himself in Argentina, most often in goods. From there the migrants slowly start to save and become able to send money back to their families. In this way, some of their initial anxiety is reduced because they can reproduce the image of successful migration that has been associated with international migration for decades in Senegal (Riccio 2001; Kane 2011) and thus live up to family expectations, albeit having to live with the uncertainty of hawking in a hostile environment.
The Contours of the Social Infrastructure
One tranquil Once summer morning, on a corner where one of the narrow streets meets Corrientes, a new young migrant showed up and started to set up his pitch where Souleymane would normally trade. The young migrant was clearly inexperienced and struggled to put up a large, fold-up table next to one of the other Senegalese migrants, in front of a popular shoe shop. Souleymane was standing on the other side of the road talking to two of the other established Senegalese hawkers, Mohamed and Bernadette. He was clearly upset.
“He is taking up all my space” said Souleymane, visibly annoyed. “I have tried to talk to him, but he will not listen.” Mohamed commented, “Some of these guys think nothing can happen to them and that they can do whatever they want.” Bernadette said, “He doesn't understand trading and the rules here; look, he is putting up his table in front of the shop's entrance . . . they [the shop-owners] will not like it, they can complain to the police and then we will all have to leave!” Mohamed asked Souleymane if he should try to talk to the young man, but Souleymane told him to wait. At first, the young guy continued manning the large table at a steady pace but, after enduring twenty minutes of direct stares from the other traders he got the message and abruptly decided to withdraw and pack up. The others were happy and Souleymane crossed the road and immediately started to set up his table in his normal spot.
This short disruption to the normal order of things offered a welcome opportunity for me to talk about the social rules applying to trading in the city. I knew from other migrants that there was an expectation of solidarity toward fellow migrants and especially newcomers. “The Senegalese all eat from the same plate—if we fight over food, we will all end up hungry,” I had been told some days earlier, when one of the migrants had moved his spot a little to make room for a new migrant selling sunglasses. However, this more recent incident showed that there were limits. The young man had apparently not approached the others in the right, respectful manner and was perceived as “too full of himself,” as Mohamed told me, emphasizing that he was supposed to show more humility. In other words, it seemed that the newcomer had to accept a position of inferiority as a prerequisite for the solidarity of other migrants to kick in.
While waiting for customers, Mohamed, Bernadette and I composed a list of “ten unwritten laws of migration” as they jokingly called it. They emphasized that the rules were unwritten and unspoken because they constituted a general, almost habitual, set of social practices one was expected to adhere to universally and not only in an Argentinian context. Mohammed, for example, explained that he expected to rely on them if he one day managed to get to Europe or the US, and Bernadette gave examples of how she had used them when helping newly arrived migrants in Spain: they cut across geographical space and time.
These “unwritten laws” were:
- 1.If you meet a Senegalese migrant who has just arrived and needs assistance, you let him or her rest for a few days in your house. They do not have to clean or cook but should just relax and recover from the journey and try to sort out their business.
- 2.In the beginning, the newcomer can stay without paying for food for up to two months. In the meantime, they must start undertaking housekeeping chores and help cook. After around two months or so it is normal for a house meeting to be called and, from that day on, the newcomer must take turns at grocery shopping, cooking, and sharing the costs of food and rent. The head of the house is usually the oldest person or the one who has been in Argentina the longest. They enforce the house rules: that you must respect the others; that you should not drink or fool around nor spend frivolously; that you must always think of your family in Senegal first.
- 3.You help newcomers to get started in business and show them where to buy goods.
- 4.You give or lend goods or offer a small loan so that they can start up their business. This also applies when people go to the coast during the summer—you can help them take out loans so they can buy larger quantities of goods in order to make a better profit.
- 5.If a migrant needs medical assistance you take them to the hospital or a doctor and help them with the cost (often together with other migrants) if they cannot afford it.
- 6.If a migrant is sick, people must help them economically and provide food. In the worst case, they should help someone to go back to Senegal—for example, in the case of mental or terminal illness.
- 7.If you get robbed, the people around you should inform other migrants and everybody should contribute in whatever way they can—they may feel, for example, like offering goods or giving a small loan to help you back on your feet again.
- 8.If a person dies, you contribute financially, ideally so that the body can be flown back to Senegal.
- 9.Groups of people also sometimes have a box—la vaca or tontin—for savings. Every day or once a week you put a fixed amount of money in the box. Every ten days you take turns to collect what has been saved so that, if everyone puts 100 pesos each day in the box and there are ten people, you have 10,000 pesos in your hand when it is your turn to collect.
- 10.As a last resort you can choose to help each other out with legal matters, lending your document out to people who do not have access to legal documents for travelling or for taking a formal job. Unlike the other, above-mentioned points, this particular one only applies for people you are close to.
After we had composed the list, Bernadette told me with a laugh, “the Senegalese need a soft carpet to land on, so we don't leave only to step from pee into poo.” The image of a “soft carpet” together with the “unwritten laws” intrigued me as they brought to the fore the social infrastructure consisting of a range of services in the form of hospitality, help with business set-up, micro-saving schemes, social security, and ways of staying mobile that enable newly arrived migrants to be mobile and to produce value in a new context, but also that reduced risks for already established migrants. The list clearly indicates the social script that glued together people with no direct ties. The responsibility of experienced migrants toward inexperienced migrants was clear. Moreover, it specified that the newcomer role was that of apprentice to established migrants in the city, who became teachers not only in relation to how to do business but also in the house, showing them how to be responsible for chores such as cooking and cleaning, which, in Senegal, are mostly female labor. After the first few months, the learning period is over, and the newcomer is expected to contribute to the household tasks as well as share living costs.
The young man in Once clearly did not embrace the role of humble apprentice coming into a new area of the city, as was pointed out by the other migrants in a bid to justify their contestation of his presence. The reality is that the transnational street business was highly competitive, and it often took time, and the right connections and attitude, to negotiate a good spot in the city. The list also fitted well with how I had observed migrants arriving in Buenos Aires with very little or no money but, nevertheless, anticipating that they could rely on the help of other migrants. Several times I witnessed how more established migrants offered housing, lent goods to help newcomers get started with the maletín, or raised money for new goods when a migrant was robbed on the local train. People also helped each other when they fell sick; in other words, these practices did not only safeguard newly arrived migrants but ensured to a certain degree that life could be reproduced in the city. They helped the migrants to connect more easily with their new environment and pick up speed more smoothly by lowering the cost of living, providing inexpensive housing, facilitating business start-ups, and helping newly arrived migrants to become part of the sub-proletariat of the large informal labor market of entrepreneurial street vendors. In sum, this flexible social infrastructure, created from the bottom up, helped migrants to fulfil their familial obligations as well as their own ambitions more quickly. But at the same time it ascribed clear roles to people.
As such, the ten rules are like a practical moral behavioral blueprint, encouraging the migrants to treat their Senegalese compatriots as family or close kin (a mentality of solidarity, the migrants often emphasized, that stood in sharp contrast to Western individualism and the tendency toward self-centered thinking, as the toubab [a white person] would always put him or herself first). Instead of being alienated and reduced to the status of a lost stranger in the city, the migrants could, by helping each other, safeguard each other against blows from an unfamiliar context. Much as in Senegal, it was clear that people did not expect opportunities, security, and different forms of social services to come from the nation state, but rather from social relations with other people. This aligns with observations in existing scholarship on Senegalese migration, which also shows how the migrants’ social organization adapts to wherever the migrants travel. Indeed, in Buenos Aires the organization also did not seem directly dependent on the particular context or geographical setting but rather on bonds of solidarity and mutual interest. As such it was part of a transnational moral economy that surrounded the everyday, here understood as “the production, dissemination, circulation and use of emotions and values, norms and obligations in the social space” (Fassin 2009: 1257).
Some migrants would link practices of solidarity with what was considered “good Muslim behavior” and “the Murid way,” which embrace values of hard work and solidarity. Several other authors have emphasized how Murid religious associations not only cater for the migrants spiritually but also give them access to knowledge and resources (Bava 2004; Kane 2011; Riccio 2001; Zubrzycki 2009). Just like back home in Senegal, they knew that practices of solidarity could be an efficient way to deal with change and crisis, only this time in a new context. Furthermore, as marabouts (religious leaders from Senegal) started to visit more frequently as the community grew, they actively reminded the community of Murid migrants to practice solidarity with their families at home, but also re-enforced that they should do the same with their community of fellow migrants in Argentina.
However, it is important to emphasize that the behavioral blueprint was an abstraction and is a reduction of the social interplay between the migrants that, despite practices of solidarity, was often much more ambivalent and complex, as the example of the young man shows. Practices of solidarity sometimes came into conflict with migrants’ self-interest. It was common, for example, for migrants who during the summer went on long trips to trade on the popular beaches along the Atlantic coast or shorter trips to the recreational areas closer to Buenos Aires, to only share their new knowledge about fertile trading spots and business opportunities with their close friends. Success was a double-edged sword, I was often told, as it could attract envy and bad spirits. In sum, although migrants used and maintained the social infrastructure through practices of solidarity and assistance, it did not stop individuals from looking out for their own personal business interests by creatively applying different tactics to optimize their business and expand to new areas. In the next and final section I focus on the dynamic and transforming nature of the infrastructure that facilitates new economic opportunities as well as new adventures.
Seeking New Alliances and Creating New Paths of Mobility Beyond the City
In the literature on West African migrants, the search for new livelihood possibilities through migration is often linked to the figure of the adventurer (Bachelet 2019; Bredeloup 2013; Kleinman 2019; Manchuelle 1997). Sylvie Bredeloup traces the genealogy of the figure back in time and argues that individual agency and the desire to seek new horizons and adventure existed long before colonial rule and post-colonial conditions in Africa (Bredeloup 2013: 171). In many aspects, especially in some of the younger men's ways of navigating outside the established social infrastructure, the street hawkers in Buenos Aires resembled the contemporary adventurous migrants Kleinman describes at the Gare du Nord in Paris (Kleinman 2014; 2019). Over time I observed that some of the younger migrants, although initially channeled into the city, began to find and create alternative paths, by joining together with other young migrants with whom they worked or lived or by seeking new opportunities on their own, as a way to renegotiate the role ascribed to them. They sometimes complained that the older migrants would try to control their actions and did not show youth the respect they deserved—now that they were on their own working in a foreign country and helping their families in Senegal, they felt they had gained maturity and a more adult status. Some, for example, complained that the older migrants or the heads of household would not tolerate it if they smoked, went out at night, or were perceived to be using their money on new clothes instead of reinvesting their income in goods and remittances—in other words, practices that were not considered properly Muslim. But as well as looking out for their family and kin in Senegal and strongly identifying with “the Murid way,” being a young person in the city was also about gaining new experiences, making one's own decisions, and meeting new people. To ease some of the tensions, some preferred to live together or on their own and not with the older generations.
One of these young migrants was Samba, who had chosen to stick with the mobile life of the maletín even after he found his feet in the city, in preference to having a more fixed post. He chose to move away from the other traders in the run-down and highly competitive environment of Once that he was initially channeled into and now worked more independently in the tourist zones and parks of the city, where the risk of police chasing migrants away was much higher. Samba knew that he needed smart clothes to better blend in; he could read the landscape of middle- and upper-class areas. Over time he developed a sense of how the police moved within these zones and, harnessing this knowledge, he became able to make more profit by working the tourist bars and restaurants. Samba's business venture was not a solitary endeavor; he worked together with two other young migrants whom he had become friends with after arriving in Argentina. They had diversified the risk and labor: One was selling bags at a good spot in Once and the other was trading in the province of Buenos Aires. They were working to save enough money to buy a car together. Their dream was to seek new adventures and business opportunities outside the capital, in places with little or no competition from fellow Senegalese migrants.
During fieldwork I observed how young migrants moved to territories and new areas where there were not necessarily other migrants to channel them, in the knowledge that they could come back to Once should their adventures fail or be obstructed by the police. In their everyday conversations, experiences and rumors of new, undiscovered possibilities were often discussed. They would, for example, engage in lively debate about whether it was worthwhile going to the Atlantic coast in summer or to one of the many travelling markets at the weekends in the provinces of Buenos Aires. Trying their luck in Brazil was also an option, especially during the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in Rio in 2016, where many talked about trying to take advantage of these mega events. The younger migrants were, like the older migrants, largely there to help their families create a better future but, at the same time, they wanted to gain new experiences and find new paths, often by creating an alternative social infrastructure together with other migrants, while still being connected to, but less dependent on those who had facilitated their arrival in Argentina.
Conclusion
In this article I have foregrounded the social infrastructure that not only channels newly arrived Senegalese migrants into the informal street economy of Buenos Aires but also mitigates uncertainties for migrants already there. I have argued that migrants rely on social practices of solidarity that guide their social emplacement and initial steps in the metropolis to quickly bring them up to speed and somewhat closer to the social imaginary of successful migration while, at the same time, providing them with a familiar milieu. In the social landscape of their compatriots, new migrants were not perceived as strangers in the city. Instead, Senegalese already in Argentina would emplace them as fellow Murid Muslims and help them through the initial challenges that the encounter with an unknown context threw at them. As such, the infrastructure helped newcomers get down to business quickly with el maletín, facilitating and reproducing their mobility into a niche of the bustling transnational street economy of Once. It gave them a bearing in the city—while, at the same time, ascribing certain roles to both new and old migrants. However, as well as helping the migrants along, these forms of channeling also, at times, created friction by restricting people to certain roles and expectations. Some chose to resist by applying different, more adventurous tactics, creating new branches of the infrastructure, especially when they felt that the infrastructure held them back rather than taking them forward. It is a way of moving in the world which the literature on West African migration often links with the trope of adventure.
Furthermore, this ethnographic example underscores that as long as they remain connected to the social infrastructure the migrants not only move within the new context but largely, and at the same time, keep moving within a social field that has travelled with them from Senegal. The way in which the migrants’ mobility was channeled into the city mirrored that in which they had previously learned to live through hard times and the challenges of Senegal. The migrants thus applied familiar strategies of building new alliances in the Argentinian informal economy; they knew the value of investing in reciprocal ties that could offer them security and facilitate their livelihoods, thereby alleviating some of the risks involved with migration to a new destination like Argentina and the uncertainty of an urban environment hostile to informal workers claiming their right to the city space. Furthermore, the migrants expected that beyond supporting them through hard times, it allowed them a base from which to branch out and build and activate similar social infrastructures for future mobility.
Notes
See Vammen 2019 for a detailed account of the migrants’ journeys to Argentina.
See, for example, “Once: La pequeña Dakar de los nuevos inmigrantes africanus,” Clarín.com, https://www.clarin.com/ediciones-anteriores/once-pequena-dakar-nuevos-inmigrantes-africanos_0_HJ_ZvI_RTte.html (accessed 9 March 2023).
A few of the well-established migrants with papers do sell African products and handicrafts brought back from visits to Senegal in commercial galleries in the city center; see Zubrzycki (2017).
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