Aesthetic Immigrant Environments

Abstract

How can aesthetics be understood from the perspective of the ethnicminority migrant subject or the ethnic-minority migrant community? The mainstream paradigm of migrant settlement is one of deprivation, conditioned by hardships, financial struggles, and bare functionality. But migrant aesthetic production transcends this narrative of thrift and survival. It is underscored by desire and agency, beauty and inspiration. A taxonomy of identifiable migrant architectural types – housing, worship structures, street and retail spaces, gathering spaces – evolving in the migration histories of Australia and New Zealand, as in other settler nations, outlines the interface of migration and aesthetics. This Forum invited these short texts to offer provocations to mainstream aesthetic framing in architecture and its conventional understandings of migrant architecture. A powerful narrative of “remittance” economy frames the discourse on migrant architectural aesthetic production in homeland sites. In The Remittance Landscape, Lopez details structures including sport stadiums and cultural facilities, in addition to housing, that result directly from emigrant economic flows. Images in postcards and magazines, and of iconic structures discovered by migrants are just some of the complex aesthetic sources of this architecture. In contrast, migration studies often assume the aesthetic sources of migrant architecture in destination sites to be homeland vernacular architecture. Singular directional flows of architectural aesthetics are problematic for migrant architecture as for architecture generally. Visibility/invisibilty is important to ethnic-minority migrants, as is the narrative about that visibility. As Lopez illustrates below – a material reference to the homeland and a right to exist and to be visible in the US city – are both part of the objective of using stone transported from Mexico into the United