Category: SPAIS Migration Research Group

‘Slaves’, migrants and museums: the struggle for places of African memory in Brazil

Posted on by Emily

A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Julio D’Angelo Davies.

Brazil is built on slavery. It was the Americas’ largest importer of enslaved Africans, with Rio de Janeiro serving as the country’s main port of entry. Despite receiving nearly half of these five million enslaved people, Brazil’s former capital (1763-1960) did not have a single museum nor permanent exhibition on this key aspect of its transnational history until December 2021, when the Museum of History and Afro-Brazilian Culture (MUHCAB) was inaugurated in Rio’s Little Africa neighbourhood. The black presence that is a legacy of slavery has historically been neglected or erased in ideological storytelling about the nation (Lopes de Santos, 2023). Brazil’s widespread investment in museums and simultaneous negligence of places of Afro-Brazilian memory is indicative of how it still struggles to overcome centuries of racism and inequality. The federal government’s 2023 announcement of another African heritage museum near MUHCAB suggests that the city’s lack of memorialisation of the history of slavery is gradually being rectified.

Remnants of Valongo Wharf Heritage Site in Rio de Janeiro, January 2023 (image: author’s own)

Until the 1770s slave traders’ human cargo was off-loaded at Praia do Peixe docklands then sold at Rua Direita, the main street in colonial Rio de Janeiro. But in 1774, it was determined that the Peixe docks were not the ‘appropriate’ site to receive ‘Africans arriving full of diseases and wandering naked on Rua Direita’ (Ribeiro, 2020). With a view to ‘protecting Brazilians’ Cais do Valongo was established as an alternative port of entry for the enslaved Africans, receiving around 900,000 of them in total.

Trafficked people arriving in Valongo were transferred to a quarantine hospital built by slave traders known as Lazaretto. The survivors were ‘fattened’ before being sold in commercial houses near Valongo. Those who did not survive were taken to the Cemetery of New Blacks. It is estimated that here, between 1772 and 1830, some 20,000 to 30,000 corpses were disposed of without proper burial or funeral, thrown one on top of the other and eventually incinerated. After the closure of Valongo in 1831, Brazilian businessmen continued to openly import trafficked Africans until the 1850s in remote coastal places despite the international prohibition of the slave trade.

Commercial slavery houses near Valongo, January 2023 (image: author’s own)

Today, the Institute of Research and Memory New Blacks (Instituto de Pesquisa e Memória Pretos Novos, IPN) stands above the site of the cemetery. It is one of only two places memorialising slavery in Rio and was founded in 2005 after an accidental discovery. As explained on a plaque at the museum entrance, IPN director Merced Guimarães originally bought an old house on the plot to renovate as a home for her family. On the first day of rebuilding the foundations, however, a large quantity of human remains was discovered and it was eventually concluded that this was a burial site for enslaved Africans. Dislodged from their residence, Merced’s family moved to the warehouse where their small business operated. They camped out here for four years waiting for support from municipal and federal governments to fully excavate the site and create a memorial. Tired of waiting, they returned to their plot of land. With the support of activists, researchers and friends, Merced’s family worked to create a memorial to the enslaved. Since its opening, IPN has survived with little state support and investment.

The second site of memory also derives from an accidental discovery (Andrade Lima, 2020). In the preparations to host the 2016 Olympics, the downtown streets of Rio de Janeiro were dug up to build a tram system and in 2011 construction workers uncovered the remnants of Cais do Valongo. This was designated by UNESCO in 2017 as a World Heritage Site in recognition of it being the remains of the most significant landing point of human trafficking in the Americas.

The excavations of this site, led by Brazilian archaeologist Tania Andrade Lima, found many personal objects such as charms, ornaments, small children’s rings and sacred objects from Congo, Angola and Mozambique: ‘These urban slaves did not have many belongings and everything of theirs was perishable, made of straw, of cloth. We found some elements of personal use and some objects related to children,’ Andrade Lima said in an interview to O Globo in 2014. However, these important and powerful finds still wait for a home in a permanent museum where they can be displayed to the public.

The two sites that now memorialise the lives and deaths of enslaved people arriving at Valongo are a powerful testimony to civil society and Black struggles for recognition as well as to official neglect. The fact that at the same moment as Andrade Lima’s archaeological findings were in the public eye Rio’s mayor funded the USD 100 million Museum of Tomorrow, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, suggests that this has been a matter of prioritisation rather than lack of funds (Freelon, 2017). The long wait for a museum to house Andrade Lima’s findings, the lack of investment in the IPN and the literal coverage of Valongo by landfill are testaments to the fact that Brazil’s history of slavery has been obscured by private and public actors.

Celebrating Brazil’s ethnic and racial diversity, São Paulo and Rio inaugurated immigration museums in 1993 and 2010, respectively. Both spaces were formerly quarantine hostels for European, Middle Eastern and Asian immigrants, inaugurated in 1883 in Rio and 1887 in São Paulo. But migration has been racialised as white in Brazil. Unlike ‘slaves’, migrants are typically imagined as European bearers of the culture at the centre of the country’s ‘melting pot’. In 2004 the Afro-Brazil Museum was founded in São Paulo thanks to the efforts of Emanoel Araújo, who explains: ‘this story could not be told from the official viewpoint, which insists on minimizing the African heritage as the matrix that forms a national identity, ignoring a saga of more than five centuries of history’ (Araújo, nd). Meanwhile, Salvador, the capital of Bahia, Brazil’s blackest state, only had its Museum of Afro-Brazilian National Culture inaugurated in 2009.

Future museum overlooking Valongo, January 2023 (image: author’s own)

In March 2023, Brazil’s federal government finally announced a USD 3 million project to convert the warehouse facing Valongo into a museum, expected to be inaugurated in November 2026. The building was constructed in 1871 by Brazilian black engineer and abolitionist André Rebouças, who forbade the use of an enslaved labour force in the construction 17 years before the official Abolition of Slavery (1888). Activists and civil society refused to name it the Slavery Museum to avoid further stigmatising and dehumanising of the victims. The long wait for a museum to house Andrade Lima’s archaeological findings, the lack of investment in the IPN and the literal coverage of Valongo by landfill all highlight the fact that Brazil’s history of slavery has been sidelined by private and public actors in the epicentre of the Transatlantic slave trade. Thanks to civil society, activists and academics, the memorialisation of African heritage is gaining increasing attention in the 21st century.

Julio D’Angelo Davies is an anthropologist focussing on migrations, diasporas, gender and processes of nation-formation and racialisation. In 2022 he completed his PhD in Anthropology at Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil). Based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, his thesis discusses the formation of Lebanese diasporas in Montreal (Canada). He worked as Research Associate at the University of Bristol (2022-2024) on the project Modern Marronage?: the Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World led by Professor Julia O’Connell Davidson. 

New questions for the UK’s seasonal worker scheme

Posted on by Emily

A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Lydia Medland.

The pen asks: ‘Need seasonal workers?’ It’s a freebie from a horticultural event aimed at fruit growers. The expected answer is, ‘yes’. On the other side of the pen is the name of an agency that sponsors workers to come to the UK. Where will the workers come from? Neither agent nor grower is expected to care. How will they be recruited? The agency is one of seven licensed operators (six of which recruit for horticulture) legally permitted to sponsor migrant workers for work in UK fields, polytunnels, glasshouses and packhouses.

Promotional pen from a horticultural trade show, 2023 (photo by Lydia Medland)

This Seasonal Worker Visa (SWV) is the post-Brexit scheme to fill the horticultural labour market shortage that occurred after many EU nationals stopped coming to the UK to pick fruit following Brexit. This had followed a period where no visa scheme was in place (2014-2018) when the UK relied entirely on EU nationals via EU Freedom of Movement. Nevertheless, an earlier scheme, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS), dated back, in mostly low numbers, to the post-war era.

Under the current scheme, seasonal workers are restricted to a six month stay in the UK. If workers are unhappy with the farm on which they are ‘placed’, they may request a transfer. Transfers are not guaranteed. When workers are dismissed for any reason (including for working slower than the firm considers normal) they risk being sent home early. The scheme does not permit workers access to public funds or to bring family members. The SWV ties workers to a single employer meaning that vulnerabilities to risks of labour exploitation, debt and other serious challenges are tangible.

One of the big differences between SWV and SAWS is that the new scheme has a global reach meaning seasonal workers are now very nationally diverse. This raises important questions that have not filtered through to public debate:

1. How can workers from a wide range of very different countries be supported?

According to Home Office statistics, in 2022, workers of 62 nationalities came to the UK on temporary visas to do seasonal agricultural work. Such a range of people from different contexts and backgrounds brings an expanding range of needs. Some growers are attempting to respond to needs by, for example, offering prayer rooms. However, other requirements such as linguistic diversity are more difficult to accommodate, particularly in isolated rural locations.

Crucially, lack of effective communication can make it difficult for people to know their labour rights. For example, the retailer-funded Just Good Work App aimed at seasonal workers conveys information about working rights in the UK. However, I found it defaulted to a choice of English or Russian after the registration pages. This is a signal that something as simple as an app is not enough to enable communication between workers, their employers (growers) and intermediaries. Workers often feel pressure from supervisors when they have their hands full with tasks; this is not a context where they can easily use translation apps without losing time and missing targets. The question of how to support the linguistic diversity of workers cannot then be reduced to a smartphone application.

2. Does the distance that seasonal workers travel matter?

The research around the debts accrued by seasonal workers to fund their travel and time in the UK has found distance has important consequences. Workers responsible for paying their own air fares incur high transport costs when they travel long distances. There is currently movement towards an employer pays principle, which would shift the cost of the workers’ visas and flights to the grower. But one of the reasons for the demand for seasonal migrant workers is that growers suffer from the low prices that they receive from retailers (mostly supermarkets). Shifting further costs onto growers may add to this problem. I would like to see the introduction of a retailer pays principle, where costs are carried by supermarkets who receive the highest added value from the fruit and veg they sell. Worker groups are now calling for this.

Moreover, in the context of climate change, we should consider the ecological impacts of a scheme which is global in reach and encourages regular short-term movement of people to the UK and home again. Short-termism is written into the scheme because there is no route to settlement for workers. The practice of recruitment of workers from within Europe not only meant that workers recruited had more rights within the labour market (before Brexit), making them less at risk of exploitation than current visa workers, but it led to a lower carbon footprint for the sector. Regularly flying workers around the world to produce ‘local fruit’ is a contradiction with an environmental cost.

3. Can recruiters be more aware and engaged with contexts of origin?

The SWV has had some early problems. These included the discovery by policy makers, thanks to NGO and journalist research, that many workers from Nepal and Indonesia were paying brokers large sums of money in order to gain access to the scheme, and subsequently accruing large debts to work. The UK government responded to this by revoking a license from one of the scheme operators, and suspending another. In the wake of reports documenting worker indebtedness and labour exploitation, the UK’s Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, arranged bilateral meetings and a signing of agreements on information-sharing and worker protection with the governments of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in May 2023, two major countries of origin for SWV workers.

These responses to problems are reactive, framed as exceptions to a norm. The system is designed for prospective workers anywhere in the world to apply with an email. While on the face of it this is ‘open access’, for those with no English or prior knowledge of the UK or its government, using an intermediary is a logical thing to do. It is therefore no surprise that workers use brokers, especially in countries (for example, Indonesia) where the use of brokers is common and well-documented in academic research. These events are part of a context-blindness in which few efforts are made to understand the situations of prospective workers approaching the system from outside the UK labour market. In aiming to reach workers ‘globally’, the SWV system obliges potential migrantised workers to do all the cultural and linguistic work, and face all the risks of having their contexts, languages and needs little understood.

Not all seasonal migration programmes work this way. Canada, France and Spain use bilateral agreements that give both states of origin and destination responsibilities to temporary seasonal workers. Canada’s scheme is open to citizens of 12 countries (from Mexico and the Caribbean). Spain and France are subject to the EU Seasonal Workers Directive and have bilateral agreements to govern specific relationships. Spain’s system involves seven countries; France’s relevant bilateral agreements cover 19 countries. The UK’s open market approach is subcontracted through labour agents so bilateral arrangements including safeguards for workers rarely occur.

My pen keeps asking its question: ‘Need seasonal workers?’ The world does need seasonal workers. Harvests are seasonal, our food is seasonal, and we need our food. However, do seasonal workers need to be pro-actively recruited from a global rural labour force? I am not sure. Reports continue to emphasise needs for reform, particularly removing the tied nature of visas and allowing workers to access public services. Is this enough? Building a workforce requires continuity, reliability, exchange, connection, understanding and the development of skills. A better way of building such connections needed in the SWV could also include better linguistic support, verified intermediaries who are not sponsors, and a systematic role for trade unions to facilitate freedom of association as one of the core labour standards, so easily overlooked in the market-orientated UK context.

Lydia Medland is a Research Fellow in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She is currently the Principal Investigator of the British-Academy funded project Working for 5 a Day: Research on risk and resilience in the changing food system, which explores work in the horticultural sector in England.

In a previous MMB blogpost Lydia has asked ‘Does it matter that the UK relies on migrant workers to harvest food?‘

Read the introduction to this special blog series from the SPAIS Migration Research Group here.

Moving as being: introducing the SPAIS Migration Group blog series

Posted on by Emily

A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Samuel Okyere.

Welcome to the MMB special series by the SPAIS Migration Group, a collective of researchers in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol who are engaged in researching and teaching topics related to migration and mobilities. Many members of the group are themselves migrants with first-hand knowledge of the vagaries of border controls and other experiences associated with the migrant status. Since its establishment in October 2023 the group has worked hard to establish a community for migration researchers in SPAIS as part of its remit to develop migration research and teaching within our School, University and beyond. This has been achieved through seminars, peer-support for draft scholarly publications and grant applications, and mentorship for early career scholars among other efforts. This blog series showcases some of the remarkable migration research and scholarship by our members and in so doing expresses our group’s unique identity. 

(Image by Karen Lau on Unsplash)

The phenomena of migration and the movement of people have always been inherent to the human experience. Contrary to the narrative that portrays these as recent occurrences, for centuries many groups and individuals across the world have migrated temporarily or permanently across geographic, cultural and socioeconomic borders for purposes such as education, marriage, exploration, avoiding socio-political conflicts, responding to climatic events and humanitarian emergencies, and seeking better life opportunities. The difference is that the politics, practices and attitudes towards the phenomenon of continued global migration in this era have become extremely polarised as shown by the dramatic surge in far-right parties and groups in Europe on the back of anti-immigrant sentiments and the ongoing anti-migrant riots in parts of the UK at the time of writing this post. Tensions can arise from concerns about strain on public services and infrastructure. However, the polarisation and growing antagonism towards migrants as characterised by the ‘us’ and ‘them’ sentiment is majorly underpinned by exclusion, race and racism, nationalism, islamophobia and other kinds of religious intolerance. 

The SPAIS Migration Group’s MMB blog series examines these themes and other complexities surrounding the fundamental human right and need to move. The series is timely for several reasons. Firstly, it draws on findings from recent, extensive research conducted by the group’s members in various regions including Europe, Southeast and East Asia, South America and Sub-Saharan Africa to show the globally significant nature of the issues under discussion. The contributions collectively reveal that the portrayal of migration as a crisis and the resulting moral panic are deliberate tactics aimed at limiting migrants and their rights, rather than supporting them. The series brings into sharp relief some of the anti-migrant systems that have emerged as an outcome of the portrayal of migration as a crisis.

Notably, the post by Nicole Hoellerer and Katharine Charsley underlines how bi-national couples are increasingly being pressured into marriage by the UK’s restrictive spouse and partner immigration regulations. Hoellerer and Charsley demonstrate that although the British government claims to oppose ‘forced marriage’, the timing and choice of partner for migrants are not ‘free’ but instead largely influenced by migration policies designed to address the migrant ‘crises’ or control the number of immigrants. The same systemic challenges are created by the UK’s seasonal worker visa (SWV) as Lydia Medland’s blog shows. The SWV scheme, created to fill the horticultural labour market shortage after a lack of EU nationals coming to the UK to pick fruit following Brexit, ties workers to a single employer. As widely documented with other ‘tied’ work visas, the SWV scheme, which is also aimed at preventing migrants from settling in the UK, has similarly exposed migrant workers to severe labour exploitation, worker abuse and debt. 

Secondly, this blog series provides valuable insights into how attitudes to migrants and the associated notion of who belongs or not to the nation state and under what terms are underwritten by racism and ethnic discrimination. This is revealed in Minjae Shin’s post, which discusses how debates around military service in South Korea are closely intertwined with the notion of race, ethnicity and masculinity. Popular rhetoric casts Korean nationals with dual heritage as being ineligible for the country’s mandatory military service, a way of rejecting their equality with ethnically ‘pure’ Koreans and hence their right to equal citizenship. In Brazil, Julio D’Angelo Davies’ shows that notions of ‘race’ and ‘belonging’ are implicitly inscribed through the omission of the country’s African heritage from official nation-building narratives. Migration to Brazil and the founding of the state is presented as an activity that involved white Europeans despite the evidence of the country’s multi-racial make up. The racial politics of migration in Brazil is further exemplified by Maeli Farias’ blog on the Bolsonaro administration’s approach to Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers in that country.

Meanwhile, Magda Mogilnicka’s assessment of attitudes towards racial minorities among Polish and Ukrainian migrants in the UK offers further lessons on the inextricable links between racial or ethnic discrimination, migration and belonging. Her blog shows that some Eastern Europeans hold crude racist and Islamophobic stereotypes. However, Mogilnicka cautions against rhetoric that casts East Europeans as racists, struggling to fit into a multicultural Britian. This is not just because racism and Islamophobia remain rife in Britain itself, but also because many East Europeans eventually embrace cultural diversity and make efforts to either live in diverse neighbourhoods or make friendships with those they perceive as racially or ethnically other. 

The blogs in this series also underline how migrants in the different regions and cultures where contributors conducted their research are seeking to navigate the systems of exclusion and fundamental human rights violations that have become a normalised part of their experience. Here, our contributors interdisciplinary research and case studies reveal the ways in which experiences of migration and attitudes towards migrants are strongly linked to factors such as racial and ethnic discrimination, homophobia, Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination that construct some migrant groups as a threat and systematically exclude them from access to welfare, rights and justice. Maite Ibáñez Bollerhoff’s blog on the experiences of Muslim refugee women in Germany shows how these barriers occur at the intersection of gender, religion and refugee status. This theme is also the focus of Natalie Brinham’s post on how Rohingya refugees seek to make life liveable in a context where they have been issued ID cards that make a mockery of the principles of ‘freedom’ and ‘protection’, which the cards are supposed to offer.  

 This blog series above all underlines the SPAIS Migration Group’s identity as:  

  1. a group of scholars committed to collaboratively expanding the current theoretical, methodological and empirical boundaries for studying and understanding the lived experiences of migrants; and
  2. a group of migration scholars committed to exposing the creation and value of borders as an affront to the right to move and the wider experience of being human. 

Samuel Okyere is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bristol where he leads the Migration Research Group in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS). His research interests include child labour and child work, migration, trafficking, ‘modern slavery’ and contemporary abolitionism. He is currently Co-I on the five-year European Research Council funded project Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World.

Samuel has written previously on the MMB blog about ‘Migrant deaths and the impact on those left behind’.