What Migration Taught Me About Identity I Wasn’t Ready to Face. “On migration, silence, indigeneity, and becoming in a bicultural world.”

Arise Stories

Still image from my hometown São Paulo.

I came from Brazil in 2015. Leaving forced me to question who I was in the society I came from, and who I am becoming as an immigrant in New Zealand. This questioning did not arrive fully formed. It surfaced slowly, often uncomfortably, and sometimes painfully. At 33, I found myself realising how little I knew about my own identity, and how much of what I believed about myself had never truly been examined.

Migration did not give me answers. It gave me distance.

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Belonging, Biculturalism, Brazil, Colonialism, Communication, Critical Consciousness, Cultural Identity, Culture, Diaspora, discourse, Edward Said, Ethnocentrism, Frantz Fanon, Habitus, Homi K. Bhabha, Hybridity, Identity, Indigenous Studies, Intercultural Identity, internalised hierarchy, Intersectionality theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Michel Foucault, Migration, Māori, New Zealand, Paulo Freire, Personal Essay, Pierre Bourdieu, Privilege, Self-Reflection, social capital, Stuart Hall, Symbolic Capital

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