How did you come to choose your research topic?
Few ethnographic trajectories can be drawn in a straight line and my own is no different. As a PhD Researcher for Dr Valerio Simoni’s project “Returning to a Better Place: The (Re)Assessment of the ‘Good Life’ in Times of Crisis”, I set out to examine Cuban and Ecuadorian return migration from Spain in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. With the sudden arrival of the pandemic in 2020, barely weeks after I had arrived in Madrid to begin my fieldwork, I had to adapt my project to the altered social and sanitary landscape. I relocated to a smaller city along the Mediterranean coast and immersed myself in a tight cohort of primarily Afro-Cuban mothers who departed the island during the “Special Period”, beginning in the 1990s. It was among these women and their close relations in both Cuba and Spain that I ultimately carried out my fieldwork, reorienting my project towards the everyday, highly gendered dilemmas generated by living transnationally across two vastly unequal societies.
Can you describe your thesis questions?
My PhD research was guided by two central research questions. First, I asked: How do Cuban migrants negotiate competing demands, navigate disparate desires, and seek to resolve diasporic dilemmas in their everyday lives? In stepping beyond circumscribed, narrow scripts about migrants’ presumed economic aspirations, I sought to explore the other pursuits, values, and desires underpinning Cuban migration to Spain. Orienting my research was a second, theoretical question: How might adopting an expansive, feminist approach to the “economic” deepen our understandings of gendered forms of migration, further sensitising us to what is involved in becoming a transnational subject?
What was your methodology?
To answer these questions, I utilised a grassroots and feminist ethnographic approach, which exalts emotion, embodiment, and subjective experience as they are revealed in the everyday rhythms of my interlocutors’ lives. Over the course of six field stays – five in Spain and one in Cuba – I embedded myself in the transnational social worlds, including diverse families and circles of friends, of Cuban transnational migrants, returnees, and their relations.
What are your major findings?
Drawing on my thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, I propose transnationalism as a way of seeing, being, and feeling in the world that comes to inform people’s expectations about what makes for a meaningful life and where it can be found, in addition to their perspectives on moral personhood, relationality, and belonging. For Cubans living in Spain, I contend that everyday transnational living involves cargando con Cuba – taking on, carrying, and reckoning with Cuba – a practice that ultimately shapes their orientations pertaining to where they can become, whether to remain or return, and how to engage ethically with the world around them. Inspired by my interlocutors, then, my thesis proposes cargando as a leitmotif that speaks to the inherent relationality and materiality in migrant journeys towards becoming transnational subjects.
How can your research findings serve society?
For the Cubans among whom I worked, the task of carrying Cuba is arduous, entailing emotional, material, and ethical labour that is never complete. Like migration, it cannot be reduced to a singular temporal event, journey, or crossing. As relational subjects immersed in diasporic culture, my interlocutors’ journeys to becoming transnational involve striving to ease the stresses facing kith and kin who remain in Cuba, often through the provision of material support. Thus, one way that people with a mobility background pursue justice is by refusing to leave anyone “behind”. Carrying their dearest ones forward with them – or cargando con Cuba – entails the redistribution of resources, sending of remittances, and provision of care work, intertwined practices with profound affective, ethical, and economic dimensions.
Moving beyond this particular case study, my research emphasises the intersection of migration with the myriad dimensions of people’s individual and collective lifeworlds. Migration journeys unfold in the thick messiness and complexity of life. Decisions about where and whether to stay or go are intimately entangled with people’s affective ties and beliefs about what being a good person, friend, daughter, brother, or mother entail. In my view, “migration” must be studied in all this thickness, without separating it from other social phenomena, systems of power, cultural toolkits, or processes of subject formation.
What are you doing now?
I am thrilled to have been granted a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc.Mobility Fellowship for my project titled “The Affective Horizons of (Im)Mobility: Cuban and Nicaraguan Migrants Travelling along the ‘Volcanic Route’”. With the support of Professor Laura Enríquez in the University of California, Berkeley’s Sociology Department, I will continue my fieldwork in Cuba and Nicaragua, focussing on the mutual constitution of people’s expectations about the future and their migration decisions.
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Elise Hjalmarson defended her PhD thesis in Anthropology and Sociology on 27 September 2024. Professor Alessandro Monsutti presided over the committee, which included Associate Professor Graziella Moraes Dias da Silva and Dr Valerio Simoni, Thesis Co-Supervisors, and, as External Reader, Professor Laura Jean Enríquez, Department of Sociology, University of California at Berkeley, USA.
Citation of the PhD thesis:
Hjalmarson, Elise. “Cargando con Cuba: The Embodied Labor of Becoming Transnational among Cuban Migrants in Spain.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2024.
Members of the Geneva Graduate Institute can access the thesis via this page of the repository. Others can contact Dr Hjalmarson.
Banner image: View of Tarragona and the Mediterranean from the apartment of one of Elise Hjalmarson’s key interlocutors. Photo by Elise Hjalmarson.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.