Unsettling the American Dream: Mobility, Migration and Precarity among Translocal Himalayan Communities during COVID‐19

Tashi W. Gurung, Emily Amburgey and Sienna R. Craig

Development and Change, 2021, vol. 52, issue 6, 1277-1300

Abstract: New York City (NYC) garnered significant national and international attention when it emerged as the coronavirus epicentre in the USA, in spring 2020. As has been widely documented, this crisis has disproportionately impacted minority, immigrant and marginalized communities. Among those affected were people from Mustang, Nepal, a Himalayan region bordering Tibet. This community is often rendered invisible within larger Asian immigrant populations, but the presence of Mustangis in the US has transformed their translocal worlds, lived between Nepal and NYC. Seasonal mobility and life‐stage wage labour in cosmopolitan Asia have been common in Mustang for decades. More permanent moves to NYC began in the 1990s. These migrations were based on assumptions about attaining financial stability in the US in ways deemed unattainable in Nepal. An ethnographic focus on one translocal Mustangi family frames this discussion of how COVID‐19 has overturned previously held ideas around migration to NYC and uncovered new forms of precarity. The authors build on theories of transnationalism and translocality to position migration as a cyclical process whereby the well‐being of Mustangis in Nepal and NYC rests on the reliability of global migratory networks and translocal kinship relations — a basis for security and belonging that COVID‐19 has challenged and reconfigured.

Date: 2021
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