Migration and the Americas  Home as a Process: Everyday Homemaking Practices in North American Immigrant Neighborhoods

This lecture explores the everyday practices through which migrants create a sense of home in North American immigrant neighborhoods. Moving beyond romanticized and static understandings of home, it examines home as an ongoing process through which migrants exercise agency in making everyday spaces homelike, while navigating the structural (im)possibilities to do so. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews conducted in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, she explores how home is produced and negotiated through everyday homemaking practices such as appropriating public spaces, fostering neighborliness, and engaging in community activism. The talk also illustrates how migrant precarity, intensified immigration enforcement, and the "superdiversity" discourse complicate homemaking practices, revealing the political significance of home.