Being a migrant: territorial and existential implications of migration

Abstract

Migration and mobility are determining phenomena of contemporary experience. Living in today’s world means having to deal with mobility and migration, with all the implications this process involves. From an existential point of view, migration is a disconcerting experience where spatial and sociocultural references must be reconstituted in a process that shakes up the core of an individual’s personal identity, namely, his or her existential security. We start off here with the question of “What is it to be a migrant?” From there, we discuss the existential and territorial implications of migration and look at it as a phenomenon that is experienced on different spatial and temporal scales. Phenomenologically, this experience has a single constitutive essence that leads to an ontological way of thinking about the strategies and consequences of the phenomenon of migration. This, in turn, leads to a reflection on the role of territorial identity and on involvement with places and social networks when a person leaves her or his place of origin and settles down somewhere else, that becomes their place of destination.