Immigration as a Process: Temporality Concepts in Blogs of Latin American Immigrants to Québec

In their weblogs, immigrants from Latin America to Québec document the migration process in narrative reconstructions of personal experiences and discuss them in the blogger community. During this long process of collective identity negotiation and construction of meaning, various concepts of temporality play an essential role. These concepts belong to at least two fundamentally different areas of discourse: On the one hand, they are rooted in the institutional discourse of Canadian immigration policy (which defines immigration as a "parcours"); on the other hand, they arise from the personal experiences of migrants and the emotions that are linked to their own immigration projects.Based on a large corpus of mainly hispanophone weblog posts and discussions and within the methodological frameworks of discourse analysis and interactional linguistics, this Long Essay examines the forms, functions and meaning of the migrants' temporality concepts during migration from Latin America to Québec.


Table of Contents

1. Introduction ......................................................................... 1

2. Immigration Policy and Temporality:
"Votre parcours d'immigration" ......................................... 9

3. The Appropriation of the Immigration Process:
Meaning Constructions of Temporality by Immigrants ..... 32

4. Narrations of the Immigration Process ............................... 46
4.1 Narrative Appropriation of the Temporal Structures
of Immigration .................................................................... 48
4.2 Narrations of Stages and the Collective History
of Immigration .................................................................... 51
4.3 Putting Narrative into Perspective, Positioning
and Constructing a Collective Identity ............................... 66
4.4 Narrations on the Experience of Temporality
in Immigration ..................................................................... 76

5. Blogging about the Immigration Process
as a Therapeutic Coping Strategy ....................................... 82

6. Conclusion ........................................................................... 111

7. Annex: Overview of the Blogs Used .................................. 113

8. Works Cited ........................................................................ 114