In this work, we reflect on some ways in which critical Applied Linguistics can contribute to the reception of refugees and asylum seekers in Brazil. The research is theoretically based on the idea that the 'refugee' category is produced performatively (Butler, 1990) in discursive practices in which asylum seekers, social actors in the field of eligibility, media representations and institutional frameworks participate. Here, we intend to observe at least two dimensions of this process.
The first one comes from fieldwork on the Brazil-Venezuela border, one of the critical points of the biggest exodus in recent Latin American history: The recent displacement of Venezuelans due to the massive impoverishment of the population. In 2020, Brazil became the Latin American country with the largest number of recognized Venezuelan refugees, with a total number of more than 46,000 people.
Throughout our ethnographic incursion, we conducted interviews with Venezuelans, state agents and NGO volunteers involved in the reception of migrants. Through the lens of narrative analysis (De Fina, 2021) we identify the main discursive disputes emerging from the first contacts between Venezuelan asylum seekers and the Brazilian population. In this context, we could highlight in the narrative construction of their journeys and their process of insertion and adaptation in Brazil a constant tension between cordiality and hostility.
In the second dimension of the study, we focus on the formal process of determining refugee status in Brazil - a process that fundamentally depends on the applicant's narrative competence and his/her possibility of conforming his/her experience of displacement in a normative matrix about the refugee experience. Based on interviews carried out with different actors involved in the institutional eligibility process (Castro; Salles, 2021), we observe, once more within the framework of Narrative Analysis, how linguistic ideologies (Silverstein, 1979), especially the actors' beliefs about the nature of narrative construction, operate as protagonists of this institutional process. The research results point to the fragility of the category of refuge and the need to think about the discursive-interactional processes of labeling (Becker, 1963) in this field.
References:
Becker, H.S. (1963). Outsiders Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York, Free Press.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge.
Castro, F. R.; Salles, D. (2021). Subjetividade e reconhecimento do refúgio no Brasil. In: Liliana Lyra Jubilut; Gabriela Soldano Garcez; Ananda Pórpora Fernandes; João Carlos Jarochinski Silva.. (Org.). Direitos Humanos e Vulnerabilidade E O Direito Inernacional Dos Refugiados. 1ed.Boa Vista: Editora da Universidade Federal de Roraima, v. 1, p. 312-339.
De Fina, A. (2021). Doing narrative analysis from a narratives-as-practices perspective. Narrative Inquiry, Volume 31, Issue 1, Mar 2021, p. 49 – 71.
Silverstein, M. (1979). Language structure and linguistic ideology. In: The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels (R. Cline, W. Hanks e C. Hofbauer, eds.), 193-247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
