Gurung Tashi W, Amburgey Emily, Craig Sienna R
Dev Change. 2021 Nov;52(6):1277-1300. doi: 10.1111/dech.12670. Epub 2021 Jul 5.
New York City (NYC) garnered significant national and international attention when it emerged as the coronavirus epicentre in the USA, in spring 2020. As has been widely documented, this crisis has disproportionately impacted minority, immigrant and marginalized communities. Among those affected were people from Mustang, Nepal, a Himalayan region bordering Tibet. This community is often rendered invisible within larger Asian immigrant populations, but the presence of Mustangis in the US has transformed their translocal worlds, lived between Nepal and NYC. Seasonal mobility and life-stage wage labour in cosmopolitan Asia have been common in Mustang for decades. More permanent moves to NYC began in the 1990s. These migrations were based on assumptions about attaining financial stability in the US in ways deemed unattainable in Nepal. An ethnographic focus on one translocal Mustangi family frames this discussion of how COVID-19 has overturned previously held ideas around migration to NYC and uncovered new forms of precarity. The authors build on theories of transnationalism and translocality to position migration as a cyclical process whereby the well-being of Mustangis in Nepal and NYC rests on the reliability of global migratory networks and translocal kinship relations - a basis for security and belonging that COVID-19 has challenged and reconfigured.
2020年春天，纽约市成为美国新冠疫情的震中，引起了国内外的广泛关注。正如大量文献所记载的那样，这场危机对少数族裔、移民和边缘化社区产生了尤为严重的影响。受影响的人群中包括来自尼泊尔木斯塘的人，木斯塘是一个与西藏接壤的喜马拉雅地区。在庞大的亚洲移民群体中，这个社区常常不为人所见，但木斯塘人在美国的存在改变了他们往返于尼泊尔和纽约市之间的跨地方世界。几十年来，季节性流动和在国际化亚洲地区的人生阶段工资劳动在木斯塘很常见。20世纪90年代开始有更多人永久性地迁往纽约市。这些移民基于这样的假设，即在美国以尼泊尔认为无法实现的方式实现经济稳定。对一个跨地方木斯塘家庭的人种志研究为关于新冠疫情如何颠覆此前关于移民到纽约市的观念并揭示新的不稳定形式的讨论提供了框架。作者以跨国主义和跨地方理论为基础，将移民定位为一个循环过程，即木斯塘人在尼泊尔和纽约市的福祉取决于全球移民网络和跨地方亲属关系的可靠性——而新冠疫情对这一作为安全和归属感基础的关系提出了挑战并进行了重新塑造。
