As we have already intimated, we propose that migrants’ everyday lives
are negotiated and experienced not just at the level of the city but also within
specific urban sites – in its workplaces, homes, and a range of buildings, streets
and neighbourhoods where divergent and often conflicting formations of the local
are produced (Datta 2009a). This is particularly evident with respect to Centner’s
chapter on the Argentinean economic crisis where workers in elite hotels activated
forms of capital by connecting to locales abroad that are highly valued in Buenos
Aires. This and other chapters in the collection thus destabilize power and social
relationships from the national to a range of spaces which embody affiliation and
loyalties for migrants precisely because of their entrenched inter-scalar relations
with other more distant spaces and places. The city is a fractured collection of
mundane places that produces connections (both social and material) with other
spaces, places and locales within and beyond the city or nation. Moreover, just
as the city shapes migrants’ everyday lives, migrants too construct, rework and
transform the city through their transnational and translocal mobilities across a
variety of spaces and places from the church or mosque to the hotel, and from shop
and restaurant fascias to residential gardens.