Moving encounters: Latinas/os about town in East Boston, MA

Latino and Latina migrants experience the urban in ways that are often more challenging, complex, and stressful than naturalized or native-born citizens, yet work in the US on Latino experiences has lagged behind the changing complexity of Latina/o geographies. While scholars have analyzed the emotional dimensions of the encounter, this research claims that immigrants' everyday socio-spatial mobilities are entangled with emotional encounters they have with people in the city. It therefore considers how participants' urban socio-spatial mobilities are formed in relation to real and imagined emotional encounters with others in the city. I analyze these encounters through Henri Lefebvre and Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptualizations of encounters as moments of dialogue important in better understandings of what is meant by the 'self'. Further, their concepts help to consider the interpretations and presence of broader social structures. Therefore participants discussed how opportunities for and limits on certain activities, areas, or modes of transportation were formed in part through emotional encounters. Thus fear, sadness, relief, joy, anger, and surprise result from moving encounters with others in the city impact they ways in which participants feel like they have access to or are excluded from urban spaces and relationships with other residents. The research was conducted in East Boston through semi-structured interviews with 26 with immigrants mostly from El Salvador and Colombia, 12 months of participant observation, and informal interviews with other community members.