Narratives of Transnational Placemaking: Exploring Migrant Workers’ Hidden Histories through Memory-Guided City Walks: A Migrant Woman’s Narrative

Abstract

Abstract:Austria’s so-called guest workers (temporary labor migrants), who immigrated from the former Yugoslavia and Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s, have shaped Vienna for more than half a century, but their histories and present social realities remain politically and socially marginalized. This article uncovers these histories and pays attention to the narrativization of space and its performative dimension—as they emerged in narrative interviews and memory-guided city walks—on the basis of one selected case. It analyzes the intertwining of narratives and places in two ways: how narratives constitute and preserve places, but also how places shape and reinforce narratives about the past, acting as mnemonic devices.