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Paper short abstract:

This paper takes 3 ethnographic moments from long-term fieldwork carried out in a Brazilian Saturday School in London to describe the affective spaces, shared visions and embodied practices that together make up supplementary schools set up by transnational immigrant communities.

Paper long abstract:

At an end-of-year party in a Brazilian Saturday school in North London, a British father tried to explain to me how this place made him feel. He had been living in Brazil for some years, and recently returned with his wife to the UK. There is a word in Portuguese, he told me: Afastado – it means feeling ‘removed’, like being in a party where you do not know anyone. That’s the ‘Afastado’. That is how they felt on returning to the UK. This Saturday morning school makes them feel at home.

Based on long-term fieldwork carried out in a Brazilian supplementary school, this paper considers how these neighbourhood-based projects create familial spaces of belonging, recognition, connectivity and cultural continuity.

Supplementary schools make new spaces for teaching children their home languages and cultural heritage in migration. Here, cultural heritage amounts to ways of doing that include dressing, cooking, dancing, talking and socialising (Sontum 2021).

Based in insecure premises and responding to ever-increasing rent costs, supplementary schools transform rented classrooms and community halls within a very short time. As well as celebrating traditional festivals and dances (e.g. Festa Junina) supplementary school practitioners also perform cultural heritage in motion in the way they have to pack up, put things away and evacuate buildings on a regular basis.

In London, a city that is paradoxically very transnational yet steeped in its own traditions, supplementary schools offer an alternative theory of place in motion, and a city guide from a transnational immigrant community’s perspective.