their marginalization and make the station into a meaningful site for political action and social relationships.
The revolt trained the floodlights of the national media on the Gare du Nord and reinforced the discourse that Africans were threatening and dangerous to French public order. But there was nothing exceptional about the racialized police intervention that sparked it. In the everyday life of this transit hub, West African migrants were living out their adventures as they were confronted with new laws and policing practices. Chapter 3, “The Gare du Nord Method,” explores the encounters between migrants and police. As West Africans learn to deal with the police, they also produce new survival strategies, refashion social relationships, and confront their precarious position head-on.
Adventurers engage in many kinds of work at the station, from providing services for train voyagers to building and maintaining social relationships. Chapter 4, “Hacking Infrastructures,” explores how they use the station to expand their economic opportunities by seeking encounters across difference and by transforming state transit infrastructures for their own ends. As they are further marginalized by policy and by diminishing economic opportunities, West Africans use tools and knowledge gained on their adventures in an effort to produce new channels for creating value.
The Gare du Nord method is not only a practical set of tools for dealing with the precariousness of migrant livelihoods, it is also the way that West Africans who claim it attempt to forge a new pathway for their uncertain coming of age. Chapter 5, “The Ends of Adventure,” examines how West African migrants seek self-realization through the station’s social world while maintaining patrilineal and village ties. The station transforms their pathways to adulthood as they connect it to transnational circuits of social reproduction.
I end by considering the outcomes of the Gare du Nord method and speculating on the ways that adventurer visions displace ideologies of difference arising from colonial domination, which exclude African migrants from being seen as part of the European collective project. The Gare du Nord cannot save migrants from marginalization. Nevertheless, migrants work to reproduce a world where adventure is still possible, and in doing so, they offer an alternative pathway toward the ideal of mutual belonging, recognition, and living together.
Adventurers undermine the boundaries—between migrant and citizen, center and periphery, neighbor and stranger—that have come to define political debate and the contours of French public space. West African migrants have pulled the Gare du Nord into networks and relationships that neither the French state nor their own families could have predicted. This book is the story of how that happened and what might happen if we consider the histories of border making and difference, urban space and migration, belonging and exclusion, from the perspective of adventurers at the largest railway hub in Europe.
1
Dangerous Classes
The express commuter train barrels into an underground passage beneath the périphérique—the circular highway that divides the suburbs from Paris. It is 6:30 a.m. on a Thursday in mid-March in winter 2010 and the rush hour has just begun. The railcar we are in is standing room only, with the passengers’ bulky winter coats brushing up against one another. The train emerges from the underground tunnel and we travel through the outlying neighborhoods of Paris proper, passing the housing projects built in the 1960s that rise up above the graffitied walls of the train tracks. We enter another tunnel and a pleasant recorded voice comes on to announce our arrival at “Paris–Gare du Nord.” The doors open and it seems as if the entire train will empty onto the crowded platform. We are shuffled out along with most of the other passengers. In the sea of puffy jackets, I almost lose Yacouba, an Ivoirian man in his thirties who is my guide today at the station. He finds me and gives my elbow a nudge, guiding me through the crowd toward an escalator. We step on, moving to the right to make way for people hurrying to catch another train. At the top, we arrive at the mezzanine level, still underground. We walk toward the exit, passing a long strip of clothing stores that are shuttered at this early hour.
As we exit through the turnstiles, Yacouba points out that there are no police checking IDs yet and tells me they will start after the initial rush hour ends. He is running a little late for work, so there is no time to grab a plastic-cupped espresso at the Autogrill, a chain of inexpensive cafés once ubiquitous in French train stations. We take a steep escalator up to the commuter rail area, where Yacouba will board a train to his construction worksite in another suburb north of Paris. The worksite itself is not that far from the suburb where he lives—just six miles as the crow flies—but the centralized urban transit design makes it necessary to go through the city.
When we get to the top of the escalator, we go through another set of turnstiles. This time a group of burly police wait on the other side, in street clothes except for their orange armbands. Yacouba points them out to me with a nod; perhaps it is the two years he spent undocumented before getting a resident permit through his employer that have made him hyperaware of police presence. Yacouba walks past them, toward the platform. “Those ones won’t stop me,” he says to me, “I see them here every day. They’re a special unit, looking for drug trafficking.” Like many of his peers who have spent time at the station, he knows the landscape of police forces and can categorize them by their respective clothing, habits, and location. The officers he has spotted come from an investigative unit of the national police that works out of an office within the station. I bid him farewell as he rushes to board his outgoing train to get to his worksite on time.
I meet Yacouba again that afternoon on the station platform in the quiet suburban town of Enghien-les-Bains after he has finished the day’s work. The commuter train car is almost empty when we board, but it has filled with passengers by the time we reach the périphérique. We arrive at the Gare du Nord, and as we exit the train, I follow Yacouba’s gaze to the three policemen waiting at the head of the platform. Two other officers, a few yards away, have stopped a young black man and are scrutinizing what looks like a French national ID card. Yacouba is walking a few steps ahead of me, and the first group of police wave him aside as we reach them. I slow down and pretend to look at my phone. I cannot hear what they say to him because of the ambient noise. I stop a few yards past them, with the officers’ uniformed backs to me. I see Yacouba take out his carte de séjour—a resident and work permit—and place it on top of his passport as he hands it to the balding officer.
The cop scrutinizes the residency card and pages through the passport. Yacouba fixes his gaze on a point just beyond the cop’s shoulder in an expressionless stare that many men adopt during these stops. The cop gives him back his card without a word, and Yacouba takes it, nods, and then catches my eye and nods toward the exit. I am unsurprised but still incensed at the blatant racial profiling and want to talk about it, but I cannot keep up as he takes off down the platform. When I catch up with him, he maintains a poker face, wordlessly dissuading me from asking any questions. On our way to the exit, he greets a few friends who are heading toward the commuter trains. I follow him to the large, atrium-like arena of the newest part of the station, and I have to hurry again to keep up as we head through the big glass doors to the small plaza outside. Instead of going to get a coffee and catch up with more friends as he often does, Yacouba bids me farewell in the front square, eager to retreat into the solitude of his train journey home. He is frustrated about what has happened, and his reaction suggests the emotional struggle that migrants confront when they are stopped on public transportation. He mumbles something about needing to get home early and then heads back into the station to take his train to the outer-city where he lives, again crossing the circular highway that serves as a boundary line between suburb and city-proper.
A few months after I accompanied Yacouba that day in 2010, the minister of the interior, Brice Hortefeux, gave a speech at the Gare du Nord, unveiling new security measures and calling the station “symbolic of violence in public transport” because of the crime, drugs, riots, and gang fights associated with it.1 The police
