A whole world in a room

I clearly recall the impressions I got when I first entered into one of the migrants’ rooms at the housing unit. Stepping inside one of these rooms was like entering into a migrant’s private life. Each one of these rooms was a world unto itself; a space intensively used, as the second room I visited showed:

Chamé’s room is nicely decorated. There is one bed positioned along one of the side of the room occupying the full length of the wall. The space underneath the bed is used for storage. The wallpaper is a colourful wrapping paper. Several decorations hang from the walls. There is one powerful stereo set placed on a shelf fixed to the only solid wall in the room. From the other wall hangs a big portrait of the Chilean Virgin del Carmen, lighted by a lamp. This is his Tony’s devotion, as Chamé said to me.

Chamé has her own small picture of the Peruvian saint el Señor de los Milagros. This image is also lighted but with a small red light and hangs from the opposite wall. Electric plugs are all connected to the same outsource in one wall, which feeds the lights, the music equipment, the TV set and the fan, making the chances of an electric overload and fire an everyday possibility.

There is a wardrobe were they keep their clothing, and in the other corner, next to the door, is the kitchen area with a small stove on a table and a gas container placed

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underneath it. Plates, pots and pans hang from nails to make better use of space. A mirror is also placed in that corner.

There is a sofa placed in front of the wardrobe and this can be unfolded to become a double bed. Next to it is a small table with a picture of Chamé’s son kissing his grandmother who looks after him in Peru. In the centre of the room, a small stool is used as a centre table as well as a seat. Besides the four people who live in the room, Chamé’s sister arrives every Sunday to spend the day in the room with them, after attending morning services at the Catholic Cathedral.

Field notes, October 2002

Through our household survey, we found that, on average, migrants shared their rooms with 3.2 permanent residents. However, as a pattern of these shared housing units, there were always an undetermined number of occasional visitors, who would come to spend the night, after a party. Newcomer migrants often moved in temporarily until they found a job or other means to rent a room of their own.79 The survey also showed, with few exceptions, permanent and occasional inhabitants were all of Peruvian nationality. On average, they lived in 12m2 and 12% of these rooms do not have windows. In the housing unit on Bandera Street, as in almost all the buildings included in the survey conducted, the bathroom had to be shared with a variable number of residents. Their rooms were the spaces where these migrants slept, cooked, ate, and rested. Their rooms were also the preponderant locale for sociability. Of the migrants surveyed, 93% said it was either in their own room or in a friend’s room where they spent most of their free time.

Regarding migrants’ possessions; we found within the small space of the room- house-home, there were numerous electro-domestic items. The majority owned a cooking stove, but only a few had appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines. The survey also showed the majority of people had a television set, stereo and a mobile telephone. A less often owned item was a video/DVD system. These items are essential equipment for migrants. They substitute linkages with the Chilean society and also, allow migrants to keep in touch with their country, with their families and homes.

These various items perform as technologic devices, making possible the flow, production and exchange of what has been called “social remittances”. These are “ideas, behaviours, identities, and social capital that flows from host-to-sending- country community” (Levitt 2001:54) that circulate in the transnational space triggering transformations here and there. At the core, triggering changes in migrants’ frames of reference. These changes are neither visible nor obvious, besides that of being variable, as Levitt has stated it: “the degree to which migrants’ interpretative frames are altered is a function of how much they interact with the host society” (ibid:56).

Among those surveyed, it was found that the interaction with Chilean society took place within the micro space of the workplace and at the macro level, through the inter- media space of television. This raises the question of what frames of reference result from such a very restricted and imbalanced space of interaction with the Chilean society?

79 _{Payment arrangements were made so that those who came regularly, to sleep over the weekends, had to}

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