Countries of departure, of passage, of destination

Here, in Argentina, a project began that has already been going on for several years, and I can say that I stand on one of the sides of the bridge.

In these very particular times the world is going through, movement occupies the central place, for it is the engine of everything that happens. Migrations of every kind are today one of the strongest expressions of that movement, which produces, among other things, transformations that can be observed in the physiognomy of countries: of those of arrival, as well as of those of passage and of departure. Transformations that are the object of our reflection.

For the countries of departure, the formula that warned that “to leave is to die a little” has been overtaken by the hyper-development of communication networks. It is possible today to communicate in real time, almost at the very moment things happen. Letting those who stay behind in the country of departure know how one arrived, where one is and how: it is immediate, and it is within everyone’s reach. Telephones, mobiles, the internet and even television news carry that information.

In certain countries, young people and less young ones, men and women, leave behind, in “going away”, the mark of a new physiognomy, of a new picture of resources. They are countries that resemble trees whose fruits are already ripe and do not fall; and if they do fall, they do not stay there, for they are picked up — they are persuaded — to move away and deposit their nutrients elsewhere, that is to say their skills. In the countries of passage, an automatic selection takes place, for not all manage to continue on their way; these places then offer a landscape that is transformed by it.

But in the countries of destination, everything happens as if the receiving country slowly formed a matryoshka, those Russian dolls each of which contains a smaller one: thus the different cultures each occupy a space, from the smallest group up to the dominant culture of the place, which contains all the others within itself.

And it is on that moment that I concentrate this work: the arrival in the new place, the entry and the adaptation.

What is at stake on arrival

In order to help the people who come to consult, in order to be able to work with them and with what they have lived through, one has to understand what is happening to them. One way of explaining it is to be found in the definition of the emigrant or immigrant person, which is illuminating for grasping this process.

An emigrant or immigrant person is one who moves from one country to another, or from one region to another, sufficiently different, sufficiently distant, and for a period so prolonged that it entails having to live there and to carry out a daily activity — working or studying — that allows or ensures subsistence. To say “I am leaving” is not the same as to say “I live elsewhere”.

Leaving, with all that it entails in the way of losses, mournings, abandonments and angers, is part of the person who, in the new place, will be a foreigner.

To emigrate means losing at a stroke a whole context that acts as a baby walker: the culture that is our own allows each of us to walk, being supported in our psychological identity, continuity and consistency.

The “fact of arriving” makes the “fact of having left” weigh more heavily, and it is only there that the heart of the process begins, the one that places the emphasis — in order to help oneself overcome it — on inner resources, on a solid, active and dynamic self which, through life experience, has strengthened its self-esteem.

In this period, after the first and fundamental phase of subsistence, situations begin to follow one another which practically determine what the future of the whole undertaking will be.

Finding oneself in the new culture awakens in the immigrant, as the days go by, the sense of all that is new that will have to be faced. The person comes face to face with a reality that strikes them through the curiosity they arouse in others:

• Where are you from?
• How long are you thinking of staying?
• What work do you do? Because you do work… don’t you?
• Are you on your own?
• Why did you come?

And the most dreaded of all the questions: are you here legally?

One understands very quickly how difficult it is to be different…

Postscript: particular thanks to Lic. Graciela Blanco, whose conceptual contributions and objective criticism have helped in the construction of this work.