Andean transnational migration in Belgium: decolonial attitudes at the heart of Europe

This doctoral dissertation analyses the knowledge generated by social actors of Peruvian origin in Belgium through their embodied practices, understood as performances which constitute both an act of transfer and a way of knowing. Against a Eurocentric narrative that has used the migration–development nexus paradigm to direct migration studies and has ignored subjectivities, I propose as part of a decolonial stance to analyse these practices from a perspective generated by South scholars— with concepts belonging to the modernity/coloniality framework such as the coloniality of power and decolonial attitude, which arise from the particular historical experience of people in Latin America— and to understand places such as Brussels through theoretical perspectives developed in Latin America. The core proposition is that the embodied practices examined here constitute subaltern knowledge generated within the heart of Europe, which emerge as decolonial attitudes that challenge the very centre of Western power and Eurocentric knowledge. No study of Peruvian migration has as yet considered a decolonial perspective; nor has focused on the knowledge generated and transmitted by Peruvians through their embodied practices in a transnational migration context. In this dissertation I am identifying a dimension of migration studies that has been overlooked and that calls for another kind of critical approach. 

The ethnographic material analysed in this dissertation refers to embodied practices which are part of the Andean repertoire and which relate to our human senses: dancing, singing, feeling, tasting, speaking, and listening.  Each chapter is organized around different spaces of participation and cultural expressions of Peruvian social actors in Belgium, specifically in Brussels: display of Andean dances and music in Bruxelles-Les-Bains and in the city centre; Peruvian food festivals and solidarity meals; Quechua literacy course; political participation and activism based on the ancestral notion of Pachamama. The practices examined here connect us with an identity that appears in a global Andean-scape, linking us with a non-patriarchal vision of the world, and connecting us to the world of knowledge that arises from our bodies, subverting other hegemonic worlds through communal practices of eating, celebrating, communicating, expressing solidarity and respect. At the same time, these practices are in dialogue with current issues affecting our societies given the contemporary reality of displacement and migration in the face of neoliberal restructuring, and continued inferiorization of the knowledge and devaluation of the life of people belonging to the global South.

As discussed in this doctoral dissertation, the decolonial attitude cannot be limited to the project of intellectuals built on theory; it emerges from the experience, from the life-world of the subaltern subject at the margins of the border. In this case Andean Peruvian social actors recreate, resignify and transform Andean knowledge at the border of the global North, and in doing so they stand as epistemological subjects. The transmission of Andeanity appears in this global context not as a unilateral translation but instead through the mediation of knowledge expressed in things common to all of us, food, voice, body movement, and so on. This mediation of knowledge is also the result of alternative spaces that are constitutive of an epistemological border in Europe, in which subaltern communities, in this case Peruvian social actors, re-appropriate and bring to the fore their knowledge, creating understandings which confront the hegemonic creation of knowledge and power, affirming the value of life, and attempting to build relations of revalorization and equality.