Atrapados / trapped in space and time: protracted precarity in the homing of Argentine middle-class temporary migrants in Perth, Australia

ABSTRACT

In the past twenty years, Australia has re-directed efforts to diversify the recruitment of temporary labour and students, attracting middle-class migrants from new sources, such as Latin America. This paper explores how structural, political and socio-economic contradictions in countries of origin and destination shape Argentine migrants’ everyday experiences of trying to create a new home. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper builds on work on temporary middle-class migration to show how a ‘homing’ lens contributes to refining our understanding of how precarity can become protracted for middle-class migrants moving from the Global South to the Global North. The findings demonstrate that feelings of detachment from their past home but difficulty planning a future due to their temporary status exclude such migrants from the ontological stability necessary for homing. Using metaphors of ‘walls’ and ‘skidding’, we show how spatial and temporal precarity discourage emotional and material investment in their present homes.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporary migration
• home
• precarity
• Argentina
• Australia

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the comments we received from our colleagues Dr Catriona Stevens and Dr Rosie Roberts, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their commentary and guidance on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

RA/4/20/6020 – University of Western Australia.

Notes

1 We believe there is a typographical error here, as this quote comes from a section on ‘unhoming’. We have thus added the ‘un’ in square brackets.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Western Australia.