Differentiating space invaders: Negotiating ‘the migrant’ through moving difference

Abstract

This article extends and applies the concept ‘space invaders’ to the intersections between processes of social differentiation and international migration. Drawing on empirical research in London that combined an 18-month ethnography in places of leisure with 33 in-depth interviews with Brazilians, it focuses on how different Brazilians try to value themselves within the political environment of the United Kingdom that degrades and stigmatises the racialised, classed and legal category of ‘the migrant’, or ‘the space invader’. The article argues that the concept ‘space invaders’ makes visible the ways in which differences, rooted in the colonial and postcolonial history of Brazil, are reconstituted in new processes of social differentiation and racialisation when Brazilians move to London. This allows us to frame migratory experiences beyond generalising and homogenising representations.

We are seeing heightened levels of criminality when related to the people who’ve come on boats, related to drug dealing, exploitation, prostitution. It is becoming a notable feature of everyday crime-fighting in England and Wales [. . .] there are many towns and cities around the United Kingdom where communities are living parallel lives. They are coming from abroad, they are not learning the language. They’re not embracing British values, and they’re not taking part in British life. And that needs to be identified, we must be fearless in calling that out and that’s my job.

UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman (2023).

There is a connection between bodies and space, which is built, repeated and contested over time. While all can, in theory, enter, it is certain types of bodies that are tacitly designated as being the ‘natural’ occupants of specific positions. Some bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are marked out as trespassers, who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically and conceptually), circumscribed as being ‘out of place’. Not being the somatic norm, they are space invaders.

Puwar (2004: 8)

As illustrated by the above quote from former UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman, when Western politicians and elements of the media construct ‘migration’ as a problem, ‘the migrant’ appears as a stigmatised and homogeneous ‘other’, and ‘migrants’ appear as trespassers, criminals, threats to national security and resources (Bhabha, 2019; Tyler, 2013). Though academic research on migration (with some exceptions) rarely reproduces populist anti-migration sentiment, a tendency towards methodological nationalism means that migration scholarship still often approaches ‘migrants’ and ‘migrant communities’ as homogeneous groups, defined by their migrancy and/or shared nationality (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2003: 576). Within this, it is sometimes assumed that ‘migrant communities’ are bound by a common ‘culture’ and ‘ethnic solidarity’ (Djelic and Quack, 2010: xix). Consequently, the multiple differences existing among and between migrants are often overlooked (Grosfoguel et al., 2014). Nirmal Puwar’s concept of ‘space invaders’ provides an analytic tool to explore such differences.

In ‘Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place’, Puwar (2004) unpacks the colonial legacies that lie behind the construction of certain bodies as unwelcome in particular spaces, through a focus on what happens when women and racialised minorities arrive in white and masculine spaces (domains of power) and take up ‘privileged’ positions from which they have historically been excluded. However, her analysis of women as ‘space invaders’ highlights the fact that women themselves are ‘differentiated along the lines of several axes, and consequently they have not simply been excluded but have been included differently’ (Puwar, 2004: 152). This results in complicated processes whereby ‘outsiders are simultaneously insiders’, constantly negotiating their position through a series of strategies of ‘identifications and dis-identifications’ in their efforts to be included/‘assimilated’. Obviously, not all are equal in their resources/ability to do so.

This article brings Puwar’s concept of ‘space invaders’ and her analysis of differentiated inclusion into dialogue with data from ethnographic observations and interviews with Brazilians in London. In so doing, it demonstrates that Puwar’s work can be fruitfully applied to the processes by which people who have moved from a Global South to a Global North country are not only discursively differentiated from the ‘majority’ population, but also themselves actively differentiate between ‘migrants’, including their own co-nationals. The article shows how social differences, rooted in colonial legacies, differently shape the ways in which Brazilians both experience and negotiate their position as ‘space invaders’ in London. As Brazilians try to ‘assimilate’/distinguish themselves from the stigmatised figure of ‘the migrant’ as space invader in the United Kingdom, social class, ‘cultural’, gender, ‘racial’ and regional differences derived from the colonial and postcolonial history of Brazil are reconstituted in new processes of social differentiation and racialisation.

Researching moving difference

The Brazilian population in London is diverse in terms of class backgrounds, racialised identities, regions of origin, immigration status and genders, and my research explored how such social differences move with Brazilians who travel to the United Kingdom, differently shaping their journeys and their working and affective lives in London (Martins Jr, 2020a, 2020b). The research involved 18 months of ethnographic work (from July 2013 to January 2015) in places of leisure in London, such as nightclubs, restaurants and bars. Parties and places of leisure express a form of belonging to a certain group and are a site in which power relations shape ‘racial’, gender, class and sexual interactions (Back, 1996; Kosnick, 2009). Ethnographic work on Brazilians in places of leisure allowed me to observe Brazilians interacting with different groups, and with each other, often with Brazilians from different class, racialised and regional backgrounds, something far less likely to happen in Brazil due to the size of the country and its intense levels of classed/racialised spatial segregation. In these places, I paid attention to the socialities that developed in encounters between different people.

I also conducted 33 in-depth interviews (up to January 2016). The inductively selected sample included three different groups: Brazilians who were in London performing ‘unskilled jobs’ in the service sector, such as cleaners and waiters; Brazilians who had previously performed ‘unskilled jobs’ but had experienced occupational mobility in London; and Brazilians who came to the United Kingdom as postgraduate students or to take up professional jobs (university staff, business people, lawyers and doctors) that are not popularly perceived as ‘migrant jobs’. Occupation is an important marker used by Brazilians to talk about divisions within the population of Brazilians in London, and to classify places of leisure (Martins Jr and Knowles, 2017). In-depth interviews were conducted with 11 people from each ‘occupational’ group. In total, I interviewed 17 men and 16 women, aged between 21 and 54 years, coming from different class and racialised backgrounds.

The interviews covered the temporal, personal and family factors that influenced individuals’ decisions at different stages of their lives, attending to the various ways in which their social, cultural and economic capital (alongside their gender and ‘race’) were articulated in those life decisions. Examining the research participants’ life hi/stories allowed me to analyse how their social trajectories in Brazil continuously shape their journeys to/in London (Martins Jr and Knowles, 2017). The data illuminate the many ways in which Brazilians live and negotiate their positioning ‘here’ (in London) in connection with their lives ‘there’ (in Brazil). From major decisions, such as whether or not to return to Brazil, to small and seemingly unimportant, everyday choices, such as where to go on a night out, ideas about both ‘there’ and ‘here’, and the imagined relation between them, shaped people’s plans, emotions, decisions, and how they related to other people and spaces.

Use of both participant observation and in-depth interviews, in addition to historical and contextual analyses, allowed me to problematise homogenised accounts of ‘the migrant’, and uncover how social differences differently shaped Brazilians’ journeys and differently produced ties of affinity and exclusion with bodies and spaces in London. Bodies, spaces and their intersections are central in the development of this article; they carry important aesthetic designators of ‘racial’, ethnic, gendered and classed differences (Puwar, 2004) which help to generate attachments to some bodies and spaces, and repudiation of others.

Becoming space invaders

The Brazilian population in London is composed of people from different classes, regions, genders, and racialised backgrounds, who have different reasons for migrating, and live different lifestyles in the city. Moving from the ‘Global South’ towards a developed ‘Global North’ country exposed them all to situations in which they became the ‘Other’, the space invader in London, yet their different social markers differently shaped their experiences and perceptions of becoming a space invader.

The social markers of the research participants shaped their experience of arrival in the United Kingdom, for class and ‘race’, as well as nationality, affect the ‘repertoire’ of possibilities (Bourdieu, 2014) that the immigration system holds. The entrance of non-British nationals into the United Kingdom is shaped by the level of constraint in the legislative framework of immigration laws, but nonetheless, there are differences between migrants in terms of the types of capital and resources available to them to navigate such constraints (see Martins Jr, 2020a). Brazilians who are descendants of Europeans (mostly lighter skinned), for instance, enjoy greater freedom of movement than others, since they can acquire EU passports that allow easier access to mobility, even in a post-Brexit context. In addition to the national and ‘racial’ capital that an EU passport represents, ¹ speaking the language (cultural capital), having money to pay for a student visa or having a (sponsored) work visa to show at the immigration control (economic and/or cultural capital), or having a partner/family visa or an invitation letter (social capital), all differently shape Brazilians’ migratory journeys, including their experience with the first boundary abroad which might legally and/or symbolically mark them as a ‘dissonant body out of place’ (Puwar, 2004): immigration control at the border.

Brazilians without a European passport and with lower economic and cultural capital are an excellent illustration of how becoming a ‘space invader’ or not is a differential process. The space of possibilities to enter the country ‘legally’ is considerably more restricted for those who lack economic capital. Relying on their social capital and the limited amount of money at their disposal, most such people try to enter the country as tourists. Yet many Brazilians are interrogated for hours at the border, and sometimes are even deported, when trying to legally enter the country, making them ‘feel like criminals for the first time in their lives’, as they told me. In the words of Thiago, a white working-class Brazilian who first came to the United Kingdom in 1999:

They took us to a room, like prison, terrible. They held our passports there and said we should go back next day. When we got outside my friend came to hug me, I told him to keep walking because I felt they were following us.

Elza, a working-class Black woman who did not speak English, was held for 6 hours in an interrogation room, even though she had documents proving that she was married to an Italian citizen resident in London. As she said, ‘they treated me very badly, I felt like I was a criminal’.

Some middle-class Brazilians who arrived without either a European passport or a work visa also experienced the weight of becoming a migrant for the first time at the immigration control, either by being interrogated for hours before being granted entrance (even though they had a student visa), or even, in few cases, by being deported. This was the case with Rose, a white middle-class Brazilian whose first effort to come to London to study English ended in an extremely traumatic experience at the border:

They took me to a room and asked thousands of questions. I had to take off all my clothes, and my fingerprints were taken. Then I was sent to a cell. I was disgusted . . . I never set foot in a prison, I never did anything wrong. The next day, they took us to the airport . . . when you arrived at the airport your suitcases have a lot of papers saying deported, I died of shame. It’s a way of humiliating people. I felt like a second-class person begging permission to enter a country.

Moving geographically ruptured the privilege of many lighter skinned and white middle-class Brazilians, like Rose, who had never previously imagined it possible that they would be perceived as a de-valued inferior Other, a ‘second-class person’. Yet through their daily encounters in London, they realised that being positioned as a ‘migrant’ implied the possibility of classed, ‘racial’ and social degradation. Their reaction to such repositioning is well captured by the following quote from Rose, who managed to return to London where she has built a life, married and had a child. In an encounter with a British social worker concerning her daughter, she was shocked to discover that British people did not necessarily classify her as white:

Can you believe the social worker said Carolina [daughter] is not white British? I got so angry. I told her she was born here, her father is a white, British citizen, from Hungary but his mother is British, and I am white. She said, ‘no, she is other, mixed’. Am I not white? Who does she think she is? She is not even British! I guess she was born here, but she is black. She is a migrant.

The workplace is also a space where middle-class Brazilian research participants in London experienced themselves ‘becoming the other’. Migration often resulted in an occupational downgrade, as in London they were working, or had worked, in so-called ‘unskilled’ jobs in the service sector, something that only ‘poor people would do in Brazil’, as they say. Laura, for instance, comes from an upper middle-class family of European descent in Rio de Janeiro. She was a lawyer in Brazil and came to London in 2007 when she was 30 years old to experience life abroad. By the time I met her, she had endured highly precarious working and living conditions for the first time:

Leaving Brazil working as a lawyer and becoming a glass collector here? I was crying every night! It was too hard. One day a customer ordered a beer from me. I had to say, ‘Sorry but I’m a glass collector, I can’t take your order’. He turned to me and said: ‘Fuck you!’ I left there crying. I was very angry . . . It was hard for me to accept I was in that situation, because I spoke English, looked well presented – why do I have to be there?

Even upper-middle-class Brazilians performing so-called highly skilled jobs in London reported daily encounters in which they felt ‘othered’ for the first time in their lives. Jacob, a 49-year-old, highly skilled white informational technology worker told me in the United Kingdom he felt he was not taken seriously at work. His British colleagues, he said, ‘still have this imperialistic position with non-British people. I’m a project manager and in many cases they didn’t accept receiving orders from a Brazilian, or working with other people in our team, like Indians’.

‘Not being taken seriously’ in the workplace was a very common theme in interviews with Brazilians working in high-skilled jobs, particularly with Brazilian women. Carla, a white 40-year-old lawyer, who has worked in international banks in the United States, Portugal, and London, said ‘every day I felt like I had to prove to my colleagues here that I knew what I was doing when giving them a task. They think Brazilian women are just for sex’. As Puwar (2004) notes, the presence of non-European/non-white bodies in white European places of privilege ‘disturb[s] the sedimented centuries-old natural order of this institution. They disrupt the naturalised relationship between authority, seniority and the associated competences with white bodies’ (p. 116).

Brazilians in London navigate different levels of opportunity and constraint due to their class, gender, nationality, ‘race’ and documental status (Martins Jr, 2020b). However, these social markers are also important to the ways in which Brazilians try to negotiate their stigmatised position as ‘the migrant other’, the space invader in the United Kingdom.

Negotiating the ‘space invader’ through (differentiated) bodies and spaces

Puwar (2004) describes how when women and racialised minorities ‘invade’ predominantly white and masculine domains of power, they try to assimilate with the ‘somatic norm’ of the white masculine body in an attempt to be accepted. ‘Assimilation’, meaning to ‘whitewash’ (or de-feminise) one’s ‘bodily gestures, social interests, value systems and speech patterns’, is ‘encouraged’ for institutional survival and progression (p. 150). This can also be applied to migrant groups, as is the case with Brazilians in London.

As Sayad notes, the figure of the migrant is ‘the perfect embodiment of otherness’ inside the nation state. Migrants are part of a ‘different history, (often) coming from a country/continent that occupies a political, economic and culturally dominated position in the world system on the international chessboard’ (Sayad, 2004: 168). As a result, migrants often devote themselves to the quest for ‘assimilation’, by trying ‘to promote a self-image as close as possible to the (legitimate)’ dominant culture (idem: 256). This is also true for Brazilians in London. Interviewees constantly negotiate ‘cultural’, ‘racial’, classed, gender and regional differences, alongside immigration status, when trying to value themselves, or to ‘assimilate’. Yet, the ways in which this happens are contextual and often contradictory as they depend on the different markers available to each individual when trying to define themselves as a distinguished body (Bourdieu, 1984; Puwar, 2004).

Negotiating otherness/‘assimilating’ through culture, ‘race’, class and gender

Reproducing the dominant discourse of existing cultural hierarchies, followed by strategies to get closer to/mimic what they perceive to be the valued ‘British culture’ ² are among the ‘assimilations’ acts employed by Brazilians in London. Interviewees often reproduced and re-signified, in new situations and contexts, ‘culturalised’ and racialised representations, rooted in colonial legacies, that inferiorise Brazilians in comparison to Europeans. The Western European colonial enterprise historically set up, as part of the ‘colonial matrix of power’, racial and cultural myths and hierarchies in Brazil through the imagined divide between rational/civilised/white Europeans (mind) and emotional/traditional/exotic non-(white) Europeans (body) (Grosfoguel, 2007; Quijano, 2000). This ‘matrix of power’ was formed during European colonisation, dividing the world’s population into valued Europeans (conceptualised in terms of mind/reason) and de-valued non-Europeans (conceptualised in terms of body/nature). As demonstrated by Puwar (2004) ‘within the European imperialist project space was normed on three different levels: macro (countries and continents), local (cities and neighbourhoods) and micro (bodies)’ (p. 21). According to its logic, non-European bodies were savage and uncivilised and non-European spaces were wildernesses, both in need of taming, while white European bodies and spaces were associated with spirit and mind (Mills, 1997; Puwar, 2004).

We can see the afterlives of that colonial matrix of power when Brazilians make comparisons between Brazilian and Western European/British culture. Brazilians often speak in ‘culturalist’ terms, in which ‘culture’ is conceptualised as an independent factor that determines the fate of those who ‘possess’ it (Brah, 1996), positioning themselves as being ‘body’ in comparison to the European ‘mind’ (Puwar, 2004). It is common to hear people citing Brazil’s allegedly inferior/immoral culture and lack of ‘civilization’ (marked in their bodies) to explain why they wanted to come to London or why, once they arrive, they do not want to go back. As Rachel, a 42-year-old lighter skinned Brazilian woman, told me:

[Brazilians] don’t know how to dress properly or how to behave themselves: they talk too loud, spit on the floor. they jump into the conversation, they don’t respect queues, they push you and don’t even say sorry. Everyone takes advantage of each other, uneducated people, without culture and morals! That’s why I left [Brazil]. Here they’re civilised, polite. You don’t see people jumping the queue, throwing rubbish on the floor, gossiping about each other’s lives. They respect your space, your opinion, how you dress. They’re civilised. Did you see those (English) ladies sat next to us in the pub? Could you hear what they were talking about? No! Because they have culture, manners, education – something that we don’t have.

By making the division between the civilised, polite and educated people ‘here’ and the uneducated people, without culture and morals ‘there’, Rachel’s comments highlight how Brazilians in London rely on ‘a classifying system of others’ (Skeggs, 1997: 74) that connects the lives of Brazilians ‘here’, in London, to the presence of Europeans ‘there’, in Brazil. Rachel’s comparison is produced in dialogue with colonial representations and imaginings of Europeans and their ‘others’, in which ‘cultural difference’ is essentialised, ranking social groups – with differential access to wealth, power and privilege – in relation to one another. As Brah (1996) argues, ‘the esteemed values and modes of behaviour in society are most likely to be those that are associated with the dominant groups in society’ (p. 19). This dominant group, in Bourdieu’s terms (Sayad, 2004), would be the group that is also ‘culturally dominant’ (whose culture is ‘hegemonic’ in the field) and that claims ‘to define culture to its own standard or contest’ (p. 5). As a consequence, Rachel identifies all markers that could be taken as part of a ‘Brazilian culture’ – ways of behaving, walking, speaking – as uncivilised/inferior. She has internalised the logic of what Charles Mills (1997) described as the racial contract that both established white supremacy and set the standard for ‘non-white persons themselves, establishing morally, epistemically, and aesthetically their ontological inferiority’ (p. 118). The body becomes ‘the geometric locus’ (Sayad, 2004: 260) of a stigma against a ‘culture’, as it carries all the inscribed markers of a ‘culture’: gesture, postures, accent, language, styles, tastes . . . and other actions that ‘go without saying’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 71; Puwar, 2004).

Yet, as Puwar (2004) reminds us, drawing on the work of Pateman (1988), the Eurocentric thinking that divides the world’s population between civilised, valued cultures (‘minds’) and racialised, uncivilised cultures (‘bodies’) also relies on certain assumptions about gender and sexuality. This too is important to Brazilians in London when they imagine themselves in comparison to Western Europeans and British culture. Colonialisation, for instance, was accompanied and followed by essentialised representations of women in which European white women appear as good wives and mothers, and indigenous, Black or mixed women from former colonies appear as sinful and ‘hypersexual prostitutes’ (Puwar, 2004; Stolke, 2006). It is very common to hear Brazilians in London, both women and men, reproducing and re-signifying this stigma in a new context. Adriano, a Black Brazilian man, put it like this:

Brazilian women, only for sex. They are all prostitutes here. Look at the way they behave in the clubs, the way they dress. They relate to you only if they can get something from you, like a [European] passport, and you will be corno [cheated on]. British women are top for me, in the world. Since I was a child, I used to watch TV and see them, all pretty coloured eyes with their sexy and charming accent. Comparing British and Brazilians would be a massacre, in culture, studying, behaviour. English women, if you see them on the tube, you notice how into study they are, the amount that they know about the current economic and political situation of the country. They are politicized; they are cultured, civilised. They have a mind which I consider superior to other races.

Puwar’s (2004) discussion of female MPs in parliament being exposed to a form of ‘super-surveillance’ (p. 92) also rings true in relation to the body of migrant women, expressed through its image, femininity, style, behaviour and sexuality. Adriano’s representation of Brazilian reproduces assumptions of racialised (hyper) sexuality and sexual desire that also lie at the heart of processes of stereotyping and the construction and representation of [gendered] racial difference (Alexander and Knowles, 2005; Beserra, 2007). As Sayad (2004) highlights, the body of the female migrant is invariably ‘an object of an intense and dramatic cathexis’ and surveillance, which focuses on the way ‘they dress, ways of holding themselves, speaking and behaving in public’ (p. 117). This surveillance is carried out by the society of origin, the host society and by migrants themselves. Racist and stigmatised notions of culture/morality, sexuality and (white) beauty ³ intersect in Adriano’s disdain for Brazilian women and desire for British women, as respectable female bodies are historically represented as white, heterosexual, and middle-class (Puwar, 2004; Skeggs, 1997).

Mimicking the hegemonic culture (Bhabha, 1994; Fanon, 1986; Puwar, 2004) is another common strategy used by Brazilians to try to negotiate their ‘space invader’ positioning. Interviewees often spoke of changes in their bodies and behaviours, including feelings of revulsion for ‘Brazilian culture’, that indicated they had ‘civilised’ themselves by moving to the United Kingdom. Many confided different formulations of the sentiment that ‘I am no longer fully Brazilian’. As demonstrated by Puwar (2004: 150), bodies marked out as ‘different’ and as ‘other’ in a negative way are under pressure to minimise any signs of cultural difference, as if they want to be accepted, they have to deny or erase such signs by means of a great expenditure of effort on transforming what is socially inscribed on their bodies: physical appearance; clothes; ways of walking and behaving; accent; manner of speech; and lifestyle (Bourdieu, 1990; Puwar, 2004). Manoel, who told me that Brazilian culture is corrupt, described this as follows:

I have been living here for 11 years and I can see the changes . . . I see the difference in how Manoel – the one who arrived here – used to see things and how I see them today. My culture is no longer the same, so my habits are no longer the same – the way I see the world, my style, way of walking, behaving, dressing up, everything. Today, I think before doing. Manoel is wiser now. I use my intelligence more because here, you learn what’s right and what’s wrong. Even Manoel speaking English is more polite than the Manoel speaking Portuguese, because language is part of our culture. [Changing] is a challenge for us, it’s not easy, but I’m always improving.

Although Brazilians do celebrate some aspects of cultural difference (Martins Jr, 2020a), most of the time they are ‘under assimilative pressure to conform to the behavioural norm’. They are expected to mimic and take on the ways, means (social codes), norms and values of the British (upper/middle class) whiteness (Puwar, 2004: 150), the hegemonic culture, as almost a condition of being in the country. Here language and ways of speaking take an important role. Manoel, as for many other Brazilians, emphasises the role of how one speaks, and in which language, as a sign of assimilation, for ‘civility is measured via the body and most especially through how the body speaks and interacts’ (Puwar, 2004: 12). Those able to speak the ‘legitimate state language’ (Bourdieu, 1991), or the ‘imperial mother language’ (Fanon, 1986) are more likely to be allowed into ‘civilised spaces’ (Puwar, 2004: 150), since dominating ‘the imperial/legitimate language (which is an expression of cultural capital) enables racialised minorities to become human’ (p. 12).

Nevertheless, as highlighted by Puwar, the process of trying to become/assimilate is also dynamic and complex. Class, ‘race’ and gender interact to produce possibilities and generate constraints that regulate people’s attempts to be closer to the dominant culture. Each individual has to navigate the layers of oppression of the matrix of domination according to how their particular social markers interact together and in relation to each other (Brah, 1996; Puwar, 2004) in order to feel more or less ‘at home’ in (white, upper/middle-class male and European) spaces (of power). Thus, not everyone can be as close to it as they wish.

Manoel, for instance, is aware that these cultural changes to his bodily habitus are not straightforward. They are ‘a challenge’ for him, because the body is not only a physical individuality, but also a social product (Bourdieu, 1990). In this sense, as Sayad (2004) observes, though ‘the body is most amenable to modification when social pressures demand it’, it is also the most difficult thing of all to modify’. To ‘assimilate’, Manoel is tirelessly correcting his bodily behaviour to approximate to the dominant culture. But, his body itself is the expression of his subjective and spatial experience of the continuous connection between the present and past, the ‘here’ and the ‘there’. He can rely on class to display cultural capital and speak/act the imperial/legitimate language, but he is aware that he is ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha, 1994: 89) when mimicking ‘Britishness’. As a white Brazilian, he cannot ‘become exact copy’ (Puwar, 2004: 15) – he will never be fully white European.

Karine, another white (in Brazil) and highly educated Brazilian, is a 35-year-old upper-class medical doctor who speaks three languages, is married to a French man and lives in London. Despite her linguistic skills, she remarked that she will never be completely European: ‘you can tell that when people hear your accent, they start not taking you as seriously. This also happens at my work, both the management of the hospital as well as the patients’. Moreover, ‘the fact that you are a Brazilian woman makes it worse, you can tell Europeans do not respect us, they think we are all available bodies, we’ll have sex with everyone’. Although Karine can rely on her cultural capital (and ‘Brazilian whiteness’) to navigate spaces of power and privilege in Europe, her ethnicity and gender often place her in an inferior position. Nonetheless, her possibilities for inclusion are far greater than a Brazilian who does not have such extensive cultural, economic and ‘racial capital’. Elza, for example, comes from a working-class background, works as a cleaner, does not speak English, lives and socialises predominantly with Brazilians in London, and is racialised as Black. She is aware that racialised and classed markers make it worse for people like her, as she explained, ‘especially when they see that we do not speak English, and then they think we have no documents. And I have a darker skin, I know it makes thing worse, people treat me worse than other, light-skinned, Brazilian women’.

Producing, and distancing from, ‘the real space invader’ through class, race, gender, documental status and region

Playing with their different social markers is also a common feature in strategies developed by Brazilians when trying to value themselves in relation to the degraded ‘migrant’ (and their spaces) in London. Interviewees were constantly differentiating themselves from and avoiding relating to ‘real Brazilian migrants’ as well as other migrant groups, and told me that they avoid going to ‘uncivilised’ or ‘migrant’ places in London. They often emphasised the desirability of as much contact as possible with British people and their ‘civilized places’. Bia, a lighter skinned 30-year-old Brazilian woman from Rio, stated,

I don’t go to Brazilian places. I lived in Willesden. It was my worst nightmare in London. There are only Brazilians there. You hear more Portuguese on the street than any other language . . . a bunch of uneducated people living in the ghetto, gossiping about everyone, exploiting you for every penny – terrible! Nowadays, I live in Highbury. It’s another level. Just English people speaking English on the street. Everything is clean, beautiful people. You don’t hear Portuguese on the street, or see rubbish on the floor, or a bunch of ugly, smelly people like in Willesden. Because, you know, besides Brazilians, it’s full of black people there. It doesn’t even look you’re in Europe, but in Africa.

Others too claimed they avoid all that is ‘Brazilian’ – whether neighbourhoods with a high concentration of Brazilians, such as Bayswater (central London) and Willesden Junction (North-West London), or specific restaurants and clubs. This is because Brazilian places, as well as ‘migrant communities’, carry the markers of otherness. The architecture, smell, and sounds of a place as well as the style and clothing of bodies, their skin colour, habits and manner of occupying or moving through space are aesthetic markers of ‘racial’/ethnic difference in the city (Puwar, 2004). These markers are often used in processes of ‘stereotyping, racialisation, and representations of defilement’ (Levine-Rasky, 2016: 62), resulting in ‘racial’/ethnic spatial segregation even among migrants themselves. As my conversation with Bia highlights, Brazilian and other ‘migrant communities’ are seen as ‘non-modern’ aberrations inside the ‘modern world’.

Importantly, as Bia considers herself white, with Italian ancestry, she uses ‘race’/colour to distinguish herself as superior also to London’s Black ‘African’ migrants. Here we can see how ‘a multi-axial performative conception of power highlights the ways in which a group constituted as a “minority” along one dimension of differentiation may be constructed as a “majority” along another’ (Brah, 1996: 186). Both white/lighter skinned and Black/darker skinned Brazilians often compared themselves favourably to other migrant groups, but Black or darker skinned Brazilians tend to not mention colour directly when talking about other ‘inferior groups’. Instead, they reference ethnicity or religion, as when Roberto, a Black Brazilian man, told me that London would soon be ‘the middle-east because of the invasion of Muslim terrorists’.

The ways in which Brazilians relate to the idea of the inferior Brazilian migrant body as well as Brazilian places (‘community’) is, however, also strongly shaped and differentiated by narratives of class, intersected with documental status, gender and region. For middle-class Brazilians, the uncivilised Brazilian migrant, the space invader, is ‘the person getting fucked over, poor, illegal, doing sub-jobs, living in the community. They need help to survive here without speaking the language’ as one interviewee put it. Middle-class Brazilians disidentify with the category ‘migrant’ by stressing they are not poor, uneducated, low skilled, ‘illegal’, promiscuous, or criminal like the other Brazilians in London. Yet, to deal with the stigma and degradation against the racialised, classed and legal category of ‘the migrant’, Brazilians from different classes also transport and re-arrange racialised, gendered and classed regional differences from Brazil to London.

Regionalism is taken as a primary marker in the materialisation of the (inferior) Brazilian migrant body in London, for both middle- and working-class Brazilians. The Goiano, a person from the state of Goías, is the regionally ‘inferior’ Brazilian in the city. Goianos are taken as body - morally ‘dirty’, rude, ignorant and poor, or as Laura told me, ‘they’re the kind of person that makes you feel embarrassed of being Brazilian, because they do everything wrong: listen to bad music, dress very badly, speak wrong’. The Goiano, however, is constantly manipulated by Brazilians in London in a continuous process of redefinition and appropriation in different moments by both middle- and working-class Brazilians as well as by Goianos themselves.

Particularly for the middle-class Brazilians whose migration resulted in an occupational and economic (and often ‘racial’) downgrade, Goiano represents the (classed) mass of immoral and inferior bodies that invaded London, as Maria told me:

people started coming more because of economic reasons, no longer the middle class from the South who liked travelling. They [Goianos] came here in large numbers, and they were living and eating very badly, didn’t want to study, didn’t learn English, bringing the whole family and living and sleeping all in the same room in bad conditions. Goiana girls, they work as cleaners or prostitutes and the boys, they are couriers and/or deal with fake documents, bank frauds. This is the Brazilian community in London.

Within this logic, for the middle class, the Goiano is characterised through classed features and becomes the crystallised image of the Brazilian migrant worker living within the community, a body that does not display valued ‘middle-classness’ (they have bad clothes, bad taste, bad living, bad accent (Lawler, 2005). Within this logic, the representation of the Goiano transcends regionalism itself, becoming a floating signifier (Hall, 1997) which can be applied to anybody who defines what the white middle class ‘is’ by opposition. As Manoel told me, the Goiano in London is not necessarily someone from Goías, ‘it’s the stereotype of that type of citizen who is in the lift in a hospital talking on his mobile, speaking Portuguese, with doctor, patient beside him, and he’s there, talking bullshit, saying bad words, not behaving himself’. Thus, the Goiano is the consecrated materiality of the ‘other’, used not only to reconstruct class, and regional boundaries, but also to reassure the middle class that despite their precarious situation in London, they are still valued, moral, distinct: they are still mind and not degraded body, like ‘the Goiano’.

However, for the working class, the Goiano becomes a marker used to deal with the classed stigmatised representation of ‘the Brazilian migrant worker’. The Goiano is the one to blame for everything bad that people say about Brazilians in London. After telling me about his experience without regular documentation in London, for instance, Adriano, a Black working-class Brazilian, explained that he was living in more fear of deportation due to recent changes in policies towards ‘illegality’. However, he nonetheless supported the government’s stricter and more punitive immigration policies because, ‘there are a lot of Brazilians tricking the system and destroying this country, like a lot of Goianos here. This is why I don’t mix with them’. As Adriano comes from a working-class background and migrated, in large part, to improve his economic capital, and because he is racialised as Black, he cannot use class or ‘race’ to try to distinguish himself from the stigma of the ‘migrant’. The option that Adriano has to play with is Brazilian regional differences.

At the same time, Goianos themselves also rely on their available social markers to try to negotiate their stigmatised position. Andrea, a 34-year-old light skinned woman, from Goiânia, the capital city of Goias State, for instance, relied on class to try to distance herself from the stigma against Goianos. She told me she was Goiania, but ‘this Goiano who’s not honest here is the one from the Novo Mundo [a neighbourhood of Goiânia]. They are the typical Brazilian here, when they open their mouth you feel like vomiting. They are from the poor periphery’. By identifying class differences – the (poor) ‘real’ Goianos in London and their nauseating lack of cultural capital expressed when they ‘open their mouth’, Andrea is trying to re-signify the ‘floating signifier’ with a ‘class cut’.

Those who come from a working-class background in Goías are not able to use class as a distinctive mark. Yet they still try to distance themselves from the stigma against Goianos and to create a position of value for themselves in London through other markers they have available. I asked Amanda, a 31-year-old darker skinned woman, also from Goiânia but from a working-class background, how she feels when she hears Brazilians saying things about Goianos in London. Amanda said she always felt embarrassed in these situations, and tried to defend herself. Yet she then told me that the Goianos who people talk about ‘are the ones from the countryside – the country boy who wears boots, caipiras [rednecks] who come from the middle of nowhere. They are the ones here doing fraud in banks, exploiting people, dealing drugs’. Thus, even though Amanda must deal with the stigmatised representation of Goianos in her everyday life, she also reproduces the stigma by trying to re-signify the ‘bad’ Goiano. She cannot rely on class to distinguish herself. Yet, space still works for her as a marker of distinction when she, as someone who lives in the capital of the state, distinguishes herself from these criminals in London, the ‘country boy[s]’.

Discussion: differentiating ‘space invaders’ through moving difference

Although their disgust is expressed ‘here’, in London, the feeling has its origins in the colonial presence of Europeans and enslaved Africans ‘there’, in Brazil – a past that has historically shaped Brazilian projects of ‘race’ and nation and continued to inflect the lives of Brazilians in London today.

After abolition in 1888 Brazil embarked on a whitening project – influenced by eugenic racial assumptions – which incentivised European immigration as way to ‘civilise’ the new nation by ‘improving’ its mixed ‘blood’ (Schwarcz, 1993). This new population of European (and Japanese) migrants was concentrated almost entirely in the south and south-east of Brazil, regions that, since independence, had acquired the central position in the national economy, especially with the production of coffee and, later, industrialisation. At the same time, without access to land or any form of state compensation, an entire class of Black and ‘mixed’ people – the formerly enslaved and their descendants – as well as lighter-skinned poor Brazilians (often from the Northeast) have been marginalised both in the configuration of urban space and in the labour market, dealing with daily exclusion, discrimination, degradation and state violence (Guimarães, 2002).

Living as ‘sub-citizens’ in the urban poor peripheries and/or slums of the southern cities, they have been used by the middle class and the elite as a cheap, precarious labour force to undertake the most ‘unqualified’ activities – ‘dirty’ and ‘heavy’ activities for men and domestic and sexual labour for women. They are socially imagined as repulsive bodies, blamed by the middle-class and the elite for Brazil’s supposed failure to become fully developed/modern/civilised, and often executed on the streets by the police. As a way to deal with such historical exclusion, Brazilians constantly negotiate racism through hierarchies of colour/hair and class positioning, attempting to distance themselves from any trace of Blackness/poverty that could lead to their identification as a ‘degraded body’(Guimarães, 2002).

Today, Brazil’s colonial and racial histories play an important role both in generating the desire to travel and determining whether and how journeys are undertaken. While many Brazilians believe that moving to London will allow them to achieve the material and cultural ideals of a ‘modern’ Western lifestyle that is impossible to attain in ‘not fully modern’ Brazil, the lighter-skinned descendants of European participants in Brazil’s whitening project enjoy greater freedom of movement in Europe and so find it much easier to realise their ambition to move to London. But once in the United Kingdom, they find themselves realigned in the constellation of ideas about race, modernity and human worth in such a way as to stand precariously close to those who are socially imagined as disgusting, degraded, uncivilised – they are the ‘space invaders’. Meanwhile, darker skinned/Black and working-class Brazilians who do manage to move to London come to perceive that their physical mobility (previously imagined as a straightforward marker of progress and privilege) also carries the threat of social (and racial) immobilisation: they might be fixed ‘here’ as a ‘space invader’ in ways that they are not rigidly contained ‘there’ – they are ‘the migrant other’, ‘does not look like us’, ‘does not speak the language’; ‘the poor worker’, ‘the illegal’, ‘the criminal’, ‘the threat’; the social problem daily displayed in mediatic and political discourses.

Connecting ‘past’ and ‘present’, ‘here’ and ‘there’ helps us to see the processes through which ‘space invaders’ are created and reproduced across borders as well as within, resulting in new processes of (differentiated) inclusion and social differentiation. We can see, for instance, how privilege and marginalisation are often produced, inscribed and read in the same body through many layers of categories of difference which move in space and time and are also negotiated at the interactional level. This infuses the experience of migration with contradictions, constraints and anxieties as those who move must constantly manage their new social positioning in dialogue with historically entrenched social markers and representations of valued and devalued ways of being in the world.