Day 235, Year of #Mygration: Present and past ‘go-betweens’

In today's post, we discuss the experience of pioneers, the trailblazers who pave the way for others and connect new migrants with members of the established communities. In the last few months, the experience of the Windrush generation hit the headlines. The Windrush generation were pioneers, and their experiences have been the focus of attention of today’s UK migrant population. The Windrush generation regularly features in debates about the future of European Citizens who have made the UK their home in the post-BREXIT UK, even the Irish citizens otherwise covered by the Common Travel Area.  Today,  Sara de Jong, a visiting researcher at the Open University and lecturer at the University of York offers us an insight into the brokerage role played by pioneers in the migration context.   

The 1990s brought a rising awareness of the spatial and cultural interconnectedness of people, cultural forms and objects as well as economic processes, which impelled researchers from different disciplines to rethink their perspectives and agendas of research from a transnational perspective and develop a social theory that did not use the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis. Transnationalism, as defined by Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, refers to the ‘processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of residence’ (1994, 1). Transnationalism became a conceptual milestone in the social sciences in general and migration studies in particular. Much early transnational scholarship defined the need for the concept on the basis of the new conditions of global capitalism as well as novel modes of transportation and communication. 

However, as Dr Sara de Jong, argues in a recently published article ‘Brokerage and transnationalism: present and past intermediaries, social mobility, and mixed loyalties’, this focus on the newness of transnational exchange as a 20th century phenomenon has blinded us to the continuities with historical agents of exchange, intermediation in brokerage. Responding to Steven Vertovec’s lamentation that ‘a historical perspective is often largely lost’ in transnational studies (2001, 576), she shows that research on brokers in settler and colonial societies reveal surprising parallels with contemporary transnational agents.   

Language interpreting was often a vital task for brokers, but the broker role exceeded linguistic translation and extended to the negotiation of the community's interests and cultural intermediation. As Kidwell argues, ‘there is an important Indian woman in virtually every major encounter between European and Indians [sic] in the New World. As mistresses or wives, they counselled, translated, and guided white men who were entering new territory' (1992, 97). In colonial New York, white settler children were placed among indigenous populations to get training and become cultural brokers (Hagedorn 1994). Later intermediaries were often individuals who embodied the exchange between communities; those considered ‘mixed-blood' or metis. In late colonialism, once colonial administrations became firmly established, African colonial clerks and Indian social reformers became brokers (Lawrance, Osborn, and Roberts 2006; Goodwin 2013). Through archival research, scholars have recovered the fascinating life stories of these actors and the role they played in broader structures. 

Despite the variety of regions and conditions from which cultural brokers emerged, a range of common characteristics and patterns can be identified (Szasz 1994). ‘What links the structures of intermediaries, transcending geographical location and historical period, are the characteristics of ambiguity, mobility and agency’ (Goodwin 2013, 3). When juxtaposing the stories of past brokers and contemporary transnational agents, three converging themes jump out. First, global political processes create a demand for mediation. Secondly, the role of go-between creates opportunities for social mobility. Thirdly, both transnational agents and the brokers of the past are often viewed with suspicion, as their loyalties are questioned.  

Mediation in Demand 

Many studies have shown that transnational actors are increasingly in demand, both by ‘receiving’ and by ‘sending’ countries as key players in international business and development (Lampert 2009; Marabello 2013). As a result, states to attempt to ‘capture the benefits of transnational spaces by devising new institutions, such as ministries for the diasporas and a host of ways to court citizens abroad' (Faist 2008, 37). Ethnohistorians have shown that intermediaries between indigenous and settler or coloniser communities were also much-desired actors. This phenomenon is demonstrated in the cases of people taken captive or exchanged as gifts for mediation. These were organised tactics: ‘to facilitate first contacts [in the Portuguese conquest of Brazil], sea captains continued to use strategies that had worked well in Africa, such as seizing indigenous boys and men to train as interpreters, and leaving behind expendable European men, such as degredados’ (Metcalf 2005, 58). While the kidnapping of early phases of conquest and settlement got replaced by other forms of recruitment and the conscious pursuit of careers in brokerage, what remained stable was the general demand for intermediaries. 

Social Mobility 

Negotiations of social status are a recurrent theme in studies on transnational migration. Uneven and unstable social positions characterise transnational life worlds. Transnational activities, beyond the act of immigration itself, become key to developing and negotiating social status. The ethnohistorical literature on cultural brokerage helps to foreground the dynamic nature of social status as a central component of transnational activities. Brokerage roles generally provided avenues for social mobility. Bierschenk, Chauveau and de Sardan characterise brokerage as ‘a passageway or stage in a social trajectory, usually marked by upward mobilisation': ‘becoming a broker can be, in itself, a form of social promotion’ (2002, 24). For instance, reminiscent of descriptions of contemporary transnational entrepreneurs (Drori, Honig, and Wright 2009), indigenous women in North America who were married to settler fur traders ‘relied on the interface between two worlds to position themselves as mediators between cultural groups. They also assumed leadership roles in religious training, to influence commodity production, and eventually, at least in a few cases, to establish themselves as independent traders’ (Sleeper-Smith 2000, 425–426). 

Mixed Loyalties 

That intermediaries are in demand does not mean that they are uncontested. Brokers’ ‘grasp of different perspectives left all sides to value them, although not all may have trusted them’ (Szasz 1994, 6). Wolf describes brokers as ‘exposed’, because ‘Janus-like, they face in two directions at once.’ (1956, 1076). In French West Africa, African employees of the colonial administration were, for instance, referred to as ‘white-blacks’ to describe their complicity with the colonial state (Lawrance, Osborn, and Roberts 2006, 3). Many historical brokers, including the famous Pocahontas, were cast in a double way: both as ‘traitor to his or her race' and as ‘national hero' (Hinderaker 2004, 360). This dynamic is uncannily echoed in the reception of contemporary transnational migrants, moving from ‘“turncoats” to “heroes”’ (Faist 2013, 11). That Caribbean and Latin American migrants to the United States, are now incorporated as migrants in development and embraced ‘as “hero” is a shift […] from prior representations of migrants as threats to or traitors of the national project of the liberal state’ (Berg and Magalit Rodriguez 2013, 652). 

The demand for mediation, social mobility and questions about loyalty can be traced across different studies on transnational actors, but so far have not formed the focal point of research. The parallels between historical findings and current transnational exchange, for example, the fact that the desire for mediators coexists alongside a policing of boundaries, can serve to sharpen the analytical lenses of both fields. Contemporary transnational studies and historical studies of colonial brokerage should draw on each other to advance their agenda of recognising the significance of borders as well as their permeability and of deconstructing reified boundaries between communities.