The stories and narratives that we impose on migration play a key role in formulating how we imagine the problems it presents, and, thus, which solutions are possible. A typical narrative, bolstered by a long history of French sociology, from Emile Durkheim to Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, highlights that migration is produced by the inequalities of a capitalist market world system that forces people living in collectivist communities to be uprooted and then transplanted as wage laborers to a context where they suffer on the margins.26 Sayad used his sociology of Algerian immigrants in a powerful critique of French modes of integration and immigration management, but French xenophobic rhetoric has recycled the uprooting thesis to blame sub-Saharan African immigration for many problems in French society, from the national debt and rising unemployment to crime and insecurity.27 The infamous 2005 banlieue “riots”? According to several politicians and intellectuals, African family structure and polygamy was to blame.28 The problem, they said, was not with “African culture” but rather with its importation into France. According to this logic, cultural practices became problems and explanations for violence when they left their acceptable place in the “African village” and came to occupy French urban spaces and public housing.29
Another story about migration, used to describe European immigrants to the United States and recently applied to African migration, imagines that migrants are heroic individuals realizing their dreams by breaking away from oppressive conditions and social constraints.30 Both of these stories begin from the assumption that migration is defined by a breaking away that ruptures kin relationships and can lead to social pathology. In both cases, the problem is located in the sending country (it is underdeveloped or uncivilized, or perhaps the social environment is stifling), and so the solution must be focused on migrant culture and sending countries, removing European responsibility for reproducing inequality.
Where will new models and narratives come from? I propose that they come not from academic and policy debates but from the migrants themselves, from the way they see the world through their notion of adventure and the way they configure themselves as adventurers through the public space of the Gare du Nord. From this perspective, they are not ethnographic objects providing evidence of the effects that capitalist market logics and French/EU migration policy have on West African migrants, but rather offer new theorizations of migration and French urban public space, and predictions of what the future might hold.31 If migration is recognized instead as a potential form of social continuity, a normal part of the life course, then the problems that migrants face today in France can be exposed for what they are: produced by French and EU policies that arrest and constrain the mobile pathways of migrants. The solution, then, needs to help enable these pathways instead of further limiting them or making them more dangerous.
The frame of adventure has become a way for West African migrants to make sense of and act in a world of enduring risk, where migrant death on the road has become an ordinary occurrence. Where they could go from employed and “legal” to jobless and “illegal” overnight.32 Where their own capacity to meet their needs and their social obligations to their family are tenuous. Where they are marked by the color of their skin as threatening and fundamentally unlike white French citizens. In the face of border deaths and precarious existences, the Gare du Nord has become a key site in their efforts to make meaningful social ties to help them not only survive in Europe, but to “become somebody,” as Lassana put it, against the odds.
Across the world, migrants are using new strategies to confront difficult circumstances. Much recent work has explored how migrant communities create social networks and community among co-nationals or co-ethnics. Such strategies play into what the French state deplores as “communitarianism,” by which they mean the ways that migrants create enclaves that bar their integration into “French” ways of life.33 Adventurers suggest that this version has it backwards. Instead of building their networks of “co-ethnics” and extended kin in France, West African migrants at the Gare du Nord depart from their kin and village communities to create social ties and families across national, racial, ethnic, and class boundaries. Meanwhile, it is rather the French state that promotes communitarianism through racial profiling, urban redevelopment, and regulations aimed at curbing marriages between French citizens and non-nationals. The adventurer imaginary and Gare du Nord method offer a critique of the French politics of difference and the marginalization it produces, as well as an alternative model for what migration management, migrant integration, and the elusive goal of urban living together might look like.
WHY THE GARE DU NORD?
My attention first turned to the Gare du Nord during the French presidential election campaigns of 2007, when the French nightly news reported that a riot had taken place there following the violent arrest of a Congolese man who had entered the commuter rail area without a ticket. Politicians and news media used the event as evidence that an incursion had taken place: from their perspective, African residents of suburban housing projects had succeeded in bringing the “disorder” of their worlds to the international train station, a vital center of French capitalism. The event sparked a debate over what kind of order the French state should maintain and who could legitimately occupy French public spaces. It helped to confirm right-wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy’s victory a few weeks later by bringing the themes of insecurity and immigration back to the center of political debate.34
As I began to examine the station and its history, I found that the Gare du Nord, operating as a critical urban space and border zone within Paris, provides an extraordinary site for the exploration of the way borders, state policy, urban public space, and migration intersect in France. Since its construction in the mid-nineteenth century, the station has hosted the political struggles of workers and migrants, as well as state experiments in control and policing. In addition to the meanings it has for many immigrant communities in Paris, the history of the station and its many renovations reveal how racial inequality has been built into urban spaces from their inception. It plays a pivotal role as a site for the government’s efforts to police migration within Paris, connecting the policing of what anthropologist Didier Fassin calls the “internal boundaries” of France to the policing of its territorial borders.35 It is an important site in the social and professional lives of many adventurers and migrants—from nineteenth-century provincial workers arriving in the capital to West Africans like Lassana today. The station is an alternative place for “migrant city-making,” the apt term that Ayse Çaglar and Nina Glick Schiller use to describe how urban areas are produced through the ways migrants build connections across scales (local, regional, and global) when subject to inequality and power differentials.36 There are many railway stations in Paris, but none of them—according to West Africans I met there—provided such a distinctive “international crossroads.”37
FIGURE 1. Aerial photo of the Gare du Nord and surrounding area, 1960. Archives de la Préfecture de Police.
The station’s name designates potential: it proclaims that from here, you can get to the north. All of the trains that leave the station will first pass through Paris’s 10th and 18th districts, both gentrifying areas with halal butchers, sidewalk cafés, a West African market, trendy bars, Turkish sandwich shops, Sri Lankan restaurants, and art deco apartment buildings. The rails then cross under the circular highway