The MotM Monthly
May 2023

A look at how the MotM migrant community
keeps up connection + unity. 

As you hear it time and again in the stories of the heroes in the Journey Story Archive, the migration experience is incredibly transnational. In such a landscape, we are thinking about how people in the migrant community create a sense of heritage and belonging. In 2015, UNESCO declared May 5th African World Heritage day, in order to celebrate African cultural and natural heritage, accounting for the lack of representation of African countries on what’s supposed to be a world heritage list.

There are many ways to celebrate African heritage: conserving the continent’s beautiful sites, as organizations like UNESCO do, and providing a platform for people from marginalized communities to share their stories, like we do here at MotM. But on a more personal level, how can people celebrate their heritage, not only on one day, but during the entire year? 

When people in the migrant community move, they bring with them their cultural values, traditions and means of expression. MotM’s Lead Correspondent and Founder, Pamela Kerpius, recalls conversations with the “family” of friends in Frosinone, Italy in 2021, when our international reporting began after the height of the pandemic ended. Lamin (Gambia; pictured above) shared the difficulties he and the others faced in expressing or engaging with their heritage. Camara echoed that, invoking his memory of the Ramadan holiday when he was crossing Niger and the Sahara Desert on his journey to Europe.

For individuals who are moving from a culturally supportive setting into foreign territory, how do we see them make cultural connections and affinities? Camara is still living in the Frosinone, Italy area, where he maintains the traditions of this holiday with friends – even if it’s far from widespread in the Italian context. And Lamin always shares the highlights of his Eid celebration, when the intense prayer and fasting period of Ramadan are over, where he and the “family” don traditional attire and roast a whole goat for their collective feast.

How people reshape and redefine important cultural moments is one of the questions and realities that drive our coverage. In fact, in many of the stories we see that our heroes have built long standing relationships with one another – it’s a way to create unity. We see people move in groups, whether they are Gambian, or any other nationality in Europe. Our work contributes to the humanization of people in the migrant community through increased visibility of life’s ordinary moments, an essential task given the segregated nature of western nations, of which people in the MotM migrant community now count themselves a part.

Take the recent TikTok video that captured a racist incident on a train from Como to Milan, two cities in Italy’s north. Racism in Italy is not uncommon, especially now as people are emboldened to spew racial epithets with proto-fascist figureheads like Matteo Salvini and the current Prime Minister Georgia Meloni promoting white supremacy.

We have acknowledged this before at MotM. We cannot guarantee that someone’s experience in Europe, whether that be as a tourist or as a migrant, will be one free of discrimination or other more subtle forms of racism. We can, however, bring this dehumanizing behavior to light while simultaneously amplifying the voices of people who may be, and usually are, the victims of this bullying act of intimidation that is by any measure violent and unacceptable.

By sharing our Journey Stories and updates from our migrant community, we are kicking out existing, outdated narratives from the spotlight and replacing them with those that have for too long been ignored, the ones that fairly represent who we are as a global society.

–Ayomide Badmus, Iselle Diaz

“The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it’s the only way forward.”
–Ijeoma Oluo

Where's he's at. What he's doing now.

Hello, Moussa! How awesome it was to find this familiar face after so much time. It may have been five years since we saw him on June 9, 2018, but once we were together, it felt like only a day had passed.

He’s been a special contact for us, always staying in touch and sending warm greetings, and especially so during the pandemic lockdown. In February 2020 he made his first trip home to see his family in Gao, Mali. In the end his trip was extended until June of that year, after Italy lifted the travel restrictions that had kept him grounded for so long.

From continents and an ocean away during that time we always heard about how he was coping, and the things he was facing – namely, the lack of work that was totally put on hold while he was away from Italy. Years later, he is now working at DHL, the express mail and package delivery service, and has his own apartment in the Milan, Italy area.

We talked about the luck of being transferred north, where the economy is stronger, after his landing in Sicily in 2014. But then, he added, it was also about ambition. Moussa is smart and driven. He has a touch of grace in the way he communicates. We are proud of everything he has accomplished in his life in Italy and can’t wait to see what comes next.

What's coming up.

The month of May brought us back to reporting in the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, and you can see the latest as the updates roll out, as always, on Instagram. If you are in the Brussels, Belgium area on Friday, June 2nd, we’ll see you at the Migration Museum (Musée de la Migration) for a special screening of the 2016 film Fire At Sea and a conversation with the MotM founder and a local member of the MotM migrant community. Tickets are available on Eventbrite. Live somewhere else on the globe? Forward to a friend! We appreciate your support to help spread the word. See you in June!