London has a relatively long-standing Latin American population (c. 250,000 in the UK and 145,000 in London, McIllwaine & Bunge 2016). Colombians represent the largest Spanish-speaking group of Latin Americans. The size of the Latin American population is similar to that of other migrant groups in the city, such as the Chinese and the Polish (UK Census 2011).
Latin Americans are primarily inserted into the service sector, chiefly in cleaning jobs under conditions of precarity (Butler 2009). Despite their contribution to the economy much debate surrounds their lack of integration and highlights poor competence in English as one of the main reasons (cf. Meer, Modood & Zapata-Barrero 2016). Yet, government policies such as the halving of ESOL funding (Casey Review 2016) have inadvertently decreased the chances of accessing English language programmes. This has left many Latin Americans trapped in segregated workplaces for which knowledge of English is not, strictly speaking, always necessary and reliant on their ethnolinguistic group for (occupational) mobility.
In this talk, I explore lived experiences of (im)mobility in 40 life story interviews (Atkinson 1988) conducted with Latin Americans, primarily those of Colombian origin. Based on these oral histories, my on-going experience in the community and ethnographic work conducted over the last five years, I discuss the role of language in attaining occupational mobility among Colombians in London relative to the weight that relational connections have.
In the first part of the talk, I present an overview of Latin American migration to the UK, with special attention to London where I briefly dwell on the valorisation of the role of English and dialects of Spanish for occupational mobility within the niche market sector in which Colombians are mainly incorporated. I argue that it is only under certain conditions that language, either English or Spanish, emerge as capital. Instead, I show that the strength of the relational connection between Colombians coupled with their migration trajectory is what determines their chances of obtaining employment and mobility within this niche economy.
The second part of the talk thus focuses on forms of relatedness among Colombians in London with attention to the resituated cultural practice of palanca and its connection to experiences of occupational (im)mobility. A discourse analysis of the participants’ oral histories demonstrates the centrality of the practice for the intra-cultural and, to a lesser extent, inter-cultural relations of Colombian migrants and the ideologies that underpin it. The participants constructed their accounts of palanca as a key aspect of the moral order, that is, a practice in line with the cultural logic of the community insofar as it reveals their expectations of how things and in particular relationships ought to be. The analysis shows how palanca is resituated in London in the form of personal recommendations. In light of the conditions of precarity they live and work in, recommendations entail a reconfiguration of social obligations towards others, expectations of reciprocity towards the recommender and normative expectations with respect to the recommendee’s agency (Duranti 2004), trust and moral worth.