Identidades en desastres prolongados. Escenarios transnacionales desde los campamentos de refugiados Saharauis

Abstract

This article analyzes the construction of memories and identities in longstanding refugee camps. The prolongation of conflicts radically changes the perception of refugee camps as temporary settlements. This situation transforms such spaces, according to some authors, into "waiting spaces", "anomalous spaces", or "places lost in time and space". Through the concept of "chronotope" developed by Bajtín, we argue, on the one hand, that what we define as "chronotope of disaster" passes through time (generations) and spaces of settlement (refugee camps and diasporic spaces), entangling with memories and identities; and, on the other hand, that the cohabitation of several generations, mobility of people, goods, and information change refugee camps into transnational spaces, reconfiguring this chronotope and the politics of belonging from the local to the global. Looking at the Sahrawi case through a multi-situated ethnographic approach (face-to-face and virtual), as well as interviews and visual analysis, we analyze two stages of identity construction: the first one, related to exile and the national project; the second one, clearly influenced by mobility processes and the impact of new technologies where new subjectivities emerge.