Read here how I got interested in working with undocumented South Asian men in Greece
My interest in researching the lives of undocumented South Asian migrant men began in 2015 when I visited Greece, as a tourist, with my daughter and my husband. While the history buff in me was attracted to the ancient ruins, my researcher and filmmaker side could not help but notice the presence of large numbers of men from India, Bangladesh, or Pakistan selling trinkets or selfie sticks around tourist hubs. My ability to speak Punjabi, Bengali (Bangla), and Urdu, coupled with my desire to know more about these migrant men made me stop, sit down, and initiate conversations with them.
Who would have guessed that my love for Bollywood songs and the use of corny song metaphors to illustrate love, desire, and separation would actually encourage many of these migrant men to speak about their undocumented status, desire for companionship, their yearning to be reunited with their families left behind, or to start new families of their own. They discussed how the burden of ‘masculine’ duty to provide for the family had driven them to migrate and how heavy this burden was proving to them as they lived their lives as undocumented men in Greece.
Interestingly, often, I noticed that many of the men’s eyes were immediately drawn to my then seven-year-old daughter who would sit next to me with a bored look that only children can have that clearly stated, ‘here goes my batty mom again’. The men’s opening question, ‘how old is she’ initially made me wonder why they wanted to know her age but then as conversations unfolded, I realised that they sought to visualise their own children through her immediate physical presence – to imagine how old or big their own children, thousands of miles away, had grown up to be in their absence. Many a times, we would get hailed by total strangers who asked if it were okay for them to buy our daughter a sweet from a grocery store. While clearly recognising these overtures as signs of displaced affection for their own transnationally-located children, I could also sense their deep loneliness in being apart from their families. The men saw my husband, daughter, and myself as a ‘complete’ family – one that they aspired to or one that had been fractured due to their migration overseas.
The conversations that I had with the men in 2015 resulted in the formulation of a research project where I study how love, masculinity, and aspiration for family reunification intersects with the South Asian men’s undocumented status and Greece’s temporary labour and deportation regimes to shape their everyday reality as racialized migrant workers. My endeavour, through this research, is to provide a platform for undocumented South Asian migrant men to share with others about what it means to be an undocumented male in Greece. By doing so, I hope to dismantle the ‘pesky and irritating’ hawker of cheap mementoes and ‘free loader’ tropes that they seem to embody at the moment.
In sum, the impetus behind this on-going research in Greece is best underscored by an undocumented Pakistani man I met in Megara and who said to me:
“Let the people know we are humans too. Let them understand how we live our lives here. We don’t come here because we want to. It is the situation back home that forces us to. Sister, if are able to do just that, it is enough for me.”