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A Literary Anthropology of Migration and Belonging pp 181–202Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Production of the Immigrant as a Perpetual Guest

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology ((PSLA))

Abstract

This chapter inquires into immigration narratives in Spanish-language books for children. After reviewing predominant tropes in books portraying migrant characters that have been published and recommended in different Spanish-speaking countries, the chapter comes to focus on the single autobiographical story that appeared on various recommendation lists. Bully. Yo vengo de Doibirou was written by Bully Jangana, a man from Gambia who has settled in Spain. Using the concept of the “tell-able” (Andrews, M., Narrative imagination and everyday life. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), the chapter investigates the possibilities and limits of testimonial writing to subvert (post)colonial perspectives on what belonging, integration, and a “good immigrant” are. These limits are explored through a practice of relational reading—in which predominant narratives and tropes are put into tension with a text that is positioned as unique and subversive. The debate on the potential disruption of subaltern voices and their authenticity is here, therefore, addressed, even while acknowledging how difference is today produced for consumption in a context of advanced capitalism.

This chapter has been supported by CONICYT-PIA-CIE160007 and Fondecyt 11180070.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These three groups of books stem from different research projects that have inquired into relationships between books and cultural diversity. The first is the corpora analyzed in my PhD thesis, a work later published as a monograph: Origin Narratives. The Stories We Tell Children About International Adoption and Immigration (García-González 2017). The second was formed for an analysis on the production of normalcy and diversity in Spanish-language picture books, a research project conducted with Xavier Mínguez-López, in which we focused on the (mis)representation of multi-ethnic societies. The final group is a corpus I work with in my current research project “Emotional and Literary Repertoires for Childhood” and corresponds to a set of books the Chilean government provides to schools with migrant students. The first group has been conformed following the reading recommendations of the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez between 2003 and 2011, and includes only stories in which human characters interact in what may be considered contemporary realistic Western settings. It includes recommendations under thematic labels: tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism, interculturalism, racism, and immigration, on their former website S.O.L.—Servicio de Orientación a la Lectura—and includes books originally written in Spanish as well as translations. The second group of texts brings together Spanish-language picture books that have been recommended by institutions such as Canal Lector (based in Spain), Fundalectura in Colombia, Banco del Libro in Venezuela, IBBY Mexico, and the White Ravens list created by the International Youth Library of Munich. The third group of books consists of a list of both translated and original Spanish picture books bought by the Chilean government under the initiative Biblioteca Migrante, then delivered to schools with a large foreign population as part of a program to help to address migration and emerging xenophobia at the schools in 2018.

  2. 2.

    Possible relationships between ethnography and literature are addressed more in depth in the chapters of Bindi, Fagerlid, and Stociescu.

  3. 3.

    Whenever an English-language translation is available, this chapter will refer to that version in order to facilitate referencing. Otherwise, I have translated the Spanish titles.

  4. 4.

    Ziba Came by Boat is a book originally published in Australia in 2007 and translated into Spanish the same year. Its Spanish translation was a very popular text about displacement and refugees, at least until 2015, when several other books on the subject were published and translated. It was among the books included in the program Biblioteca Migrante for Chilean schools, and even if Chile’s context is very different from the one depicted in the book, it turned out to be a reported favorite among teachers in my own fieldwork.

  5. 5.

    I write White with capital letters on purpose. If we take Blackness as a mark of ethnicity, we should also take Whiteness.

  6. 6.

    This relationship host/guest appears to be more challenged by the so-called second generation immigrants as Cicilie Fagerlid’s chapter shows.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Educational Justice, Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Macarena García-González

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  1. Macarena García-González
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Correspondence to Macarena García-González .

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  1. Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway

    Cicilie Fagerlid

  2. National Library of Norway, Oslo, Norway

    Michelle A. Tisdel

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García-González, M. (2020). The Production of the Immigrant as a Perpetual Guest. In: Fagerlid, C., Tisdel, M. (eds) A Literary Anthropology of Migration and Belonging. Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34796-3_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34796-3_8

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