Making community under shared conditions of insecurity: the negotiation of ethnic borders in a multicultural commercial neighbourhood in Santiago, Chile

Abstract

Multicultural commercial neighbourhoods are key spaces where individuals learn to relate to cultural difference in increasingly diverse cities worldwide. Host countries’ pre-existing social dynamics and environmental conditions mutually shape everyday interactions between people from different ethnonational backgrounds within specific spaces. This article examines two kinds of community-making practices consisting of both intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic exchanges and collaborations, under conditions of shared insecurity in a multicultural commercial neighbourhood in Santiago, Chile. Drawing on ethnic Chinese experiences and responses to crime, we discuss how inhabitants of multicultural sites create more hospitable spaces by building and overcoming boundaries with co-ethnics, other migrants and ‘locals’. Our ethnographic study finds that Chinese residents engaged in what we term ‘strategic ethnic groupism’, which aims to prompt the solidarity of an ‘ethnic-based’ collective in order to politically organise towards long-term solutions. Yet, simultaneously, with other migrants and citizens, the Chinese negotiated everyday intercultural conviviality through creating relations of trust and care to address more immediate insecurity concerns. Discussing both strategies, this article contributes to understanding the productive frictions between ethnicity, community and belonging, under shared conditions of insecurity, in multicultural urban spaces.