‘It's not how it was’: the Chilean diaspora's changing landscape of belonging

Abstract

The increasingly diverse character of London's multicultural landscape has shaped how migrants interact with(in) the different spaces of the city. This process entails both settled and incoming migrants' participation in place-making; a mutual imbrication that might promote the long-settled migrants' evocation of a lost terrain. This article unpacks that process by looking at the Latin American social football scene of South London, specifically a space known as la cancha (the pitch). This was founded by Chilean political refugees during the 1970s and it has incorporated Latin American ‘economic’ migrants and ‘local’ Britons through time. Starting from the evocation of a lost ‘golden age’ of la cancha, the paper unpacks this space's contested, complex and changing nature. It presents diaspora space, community and belonging as lived processes. Through this depiction, the assumptions of homogeneous and isolated migrant communities are challenged, as are the diaspora's nostalgic claims that also emerge from them.

Keywords:

• Chilean diaspora
• diaspora space
• Latin American London
• everyday super-diversity
• social scenes
• home

Acknowledgements

My acknowledgments go first to the different people who have participated in la cancha across time and whose voices are included in this piece. I also would like to thank the editors of this special issue, as well as Claire Alexander, Caroline Knowles, Nirmal Puwar and the London NYLON group (particularly Adam Kaasa and Vic Sidler) for their comments and suggestions to earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. In the late 1990 and 2000s the Latin American population has grown significantly. Restrictions of entrance into the USA, and the propagation of neoliberal policies and, hence, increasing inequality in Latin America have triggered these movements (McIlwaine 2011a, 2011b).

2. Approximately 40 per cent of Chilean exiles were working class according to Kay (1987); a figure which contests Jaime's idea of working class exiles as an exception. This is an assumption which also resonates with Chilean exiles' common sense.

3. Macondo is a fictional rural locale in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia-Marquez 1964). As a quotidian expression, ‘Macondo’ is often used to caricature ‘Latina’ and ‘Latino’ forms of expression and modes of comportment.

4. Translated from the community magazine Comunidad Latino Americana, Año 2, Numero 9, Mayo 1985.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carolina Ramírez

CAROLINA RAMÍREZ is a Doctoral Candidate in the Sociology Department (CUCR) at Goldsmiths, University of London