The politics of conviviality: On-the-ground experiences from Spanish-speaking Latin Americans in Elephant and Castle, London

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to studies of social relations among Spanish speaking Latin Americans (SsLAs) in the London based diaspora. In public discourse, members of this social group present themselves as an ‘ethnic community’. However, reported tensions among themselves suggest that this image of unity is not necessarily consonant with their on-the-ground experiences of one another in diaspora. The regeneration of Elephant and Castle (E&C), one of their cultural enclaves in the city, and the arrival of onward Latin Americans (OLAs) from other parts of Europe, after 2008, exacerbated some of these tensions. The data for this paper come from linguistic ethnographic fieldwork conducted over one year (2014-15) in and around the E&C area. An examination of the reflective accounts gathered in interviews with two SsLAs retailers based in E&C since the 1990s, reveals that (i) the tensions are caused by the struggle to access scarce economic resources at a time of socioeconomic change, and (ii) the social hierarchies established by the history of settlement of members of the group. Together they signal the ambivalence in the way that convivial relations are experienced by different social actors and lead us to consider the situated nature of conviviality (Rampton 2015).

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ORCID for Adriana Patino: orcid.org/0000-0003-1950-3954

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