Migrant Communication Enterprises: Regimentation and Resistance Maria Sabaté i Dalmau

Summary

This unique critical sociolinguistic ethnography explores alternative migrant-regulated institutions of resistance and subversive communication technology: the locutorios or ethnic call shops. These migrant-owned businesses act as a window into their multimodal and hybrid linguistic and communicative practices, and into their own linguistic hierarchies and non-mainstream sociolinguistic orders. Here, socially displaced but technologically empowered transnational migrant populations actively find subversive ways to access information and communication technologies. As such they mobilise their own resources to successfully inhabit Catalonia, at the margins of powerful institutions. The book also focuses on the (internal) social organisation dynamics, as well as on the simultaneous fight against, and re-production of, practices and processes of social difference and social inequality among migrants themselves.

Review:

In her in-depth and, at times, moving ethnography of a Barcelona locutorio, Maria Sabaté i Dalmau affords us a unique and fascinating glimpse of migrants’ multilingual practices, connections and mediations normally hidden from view. This book is an important contribution to the growing literature on languages, mobilities and globalization.
Adam Jaworski, University of Hong Kong

Maria Sabaté i Dalmau’s work is a most welcome contribution to the sociolinguistics of globalization, particularly at the intersection of migration, multilingualism and communication technologies. This book makes a compelling account of how states and the telecommunication industries attempt to control and contain migrants in how they use languages or how they access mobile communications, even as migrants develop their own forms of sociability to cope with these restrictions or circumvent them.
Joan Pujolar Cos, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain