Migrant transnationalism and time: divergent trajectories of diasporic political engagement in early 20th century São Paulo

ABSTRACTABSTRACTWhy and how do some migrant groups demonstrate greater engagement with homeland politics than others at particular historical moments? Research has examined both individual-level factors such as migrants' resources and institutional factors such as contexts of incorporation. Less theorised, however, are the ways in which factors are mediated by temporal contexts such as timing and sequence. Drawing on the notion of path dependence, this study analyses how the temporal orders of four institutional factors – 1) the socioeconomic context of reception, 2) incorporative policies of the receiving state, 3) diaspora policies of the sending state, and 4) migrant networks – resulted in divergent levels of diasporic engagement between Italian and Japanese migrants in early twentieth century Brazil. My findings show that the socioeconomic context of reception provides the initial condition on which migrants develop their networks. Second, the timing of when diasporic policies – relative to incorporative policies – reach out to migrant networks affects the breadths of social class involvement in diasporic engagement. This study contends that timing plays a critical role in producing divergent levels of diasporic engagement at the group-level.KEYWORDS: Migrant transnationalismpath dependenceItalian migrantsJapanese migrantsBrazil AcknowledgmentsI am grateful to Robert Smith, John Torpey, Takeshi Tsuchiya, Gaku Tsuda, Brian Van Wyck, and Monica Varsanyi (in alphabetical order) who kindly read earlier versions of this paper and gave me insightful comments.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis study is supported by a pre-doctoral fellowship (2016–2017) at Centro de Estudos Nipo-Brasileiros, São Paulo, Brazil and a Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (2014) by the Social Science Research Council.