hosted the political struggles of workers and migrants, as well as state experiments in control and policing. In addition to the meanings it has for many immigrant communities in Paris, the history of the station and its many renovations reveal how racial inequality has been built into urban spaces from their inception. It plays a pivotal role as a site for the government’s efforts to police migration within Paris, connecting the policing of what anthropologist Didier Fassin calls the “internal boundaries” of France to the policing of its territorial borders.35 It is an important site in the social and professional lives of many adventurers and migrants—from nineteenth-century provincial workers arriving in the capital to West Africans like Lassana today. The station is an alternative place for “migrant city-making,” the apt term that Ayse Çaglar and Nina Glick Schiller use to describe how urban areas are produced through the ways migrants build connections across scales (local, regional, and global) when subject to inequality and power differentials.36 There are many railway stations in Paris, but none of them—according to West Africans I met there—provided such a distinctive “international crossroads.”37
FIGURE 1. Aerial photo of the Gare du Nord and surrounding area, 1960. Archives de la Préfecture de Police.
The station’s name designates potential: it proclaims that from here, you can get to the north. All of the trains that leave the station will first pass through Paris’s 10th and 18th districts, both gentrifying areas with halal butchers, sidewalk cafés, a West African market, trendy bars, Turkish sandwich shops, Sri Lankan restaurants, and art deco apartment buildings. The rails then cross under the circular highway that separates city from suburbs and proceeds to traverse the Seine-Saint-Denis, a district that combines high-modernist public housing projects with old town squares. The vast majority of the station’s passenger traffic comes from the commuter rail, built in the 1970s, which brings suburban traffic into the city center. Those train lines include the exurbs or grande banlieue, where picturesque towns and single-family homes give way to rolling farmland. The high-speed lines race through that whole stretch in a blur to arrive in the provincial northern capital of Lille, one hour away, now in commuting distance to Paris. From there, it is one hundred kilometers northwest to the English Channel, where the Eurostar trains will pass through an underwater tunnel, before traversing the English countryside on their way to London. The northeastern route through Lille connects the Gare du Nord to northern European cities of Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Cologne. By the 1990s, over five hundred thousand people passed through the Gare du Nord each day, making it the busiest station in Europe. Today, that number may be closer to one million on some days.38
As a node created by multiple transportation infrastructures coming together, the Gare du Nord has also become a central point of exchange in unsanctioned economic networks and urban hustling, from commerce in stolen cell phones, personal check fraud schemes, and pirated DVD sales to the formalized structures that enable the sale of illegal drugs arriving on the train from Belgium and the Netherlands.39 Networks of Eastern European immigrants have mobilized transportation and related tourism infrastructure to make money from begging practices, which have joined the ranks of “uncivil” offenses (les incivilités) punished by the railway police.40
The station’s social environment has also been produced through the changing legal economy. The establishment of West and North African networks there occurred when migrant settlement patterns in Paris met the process economists call the flexibilization of labor: agencies specializing in temporary day-labor work placements sprang up around the station in the 1970s, and in the morning would recruit construction workers at the entrance. Around that time, African migrants were moving to the cheaper housing in the area and also to the new public housing in suburbs served by the Gare du Nord rail lines. The work agencies are still in the area, though they no longer recruit at the Gare. But many West Africans still meet at the station and use it to find work.
It was no coincidence, Lassana told me, that they ended up at Europe’s busiest rail hub. “It’s an international railway station here,” as he often put it. The potential for movement suffused the station, with fifteen hundred trains coming and going each day and passengers from the world over pouring out of the station’s doors. It is the “true wilderness,” as Bakary, a Senegalese migrant put it, referring to the Gare du Nord as that liminal space of possibility in his migratory rite of passage where, away from his family, he would prove his ability to overcome obstacles and danger.
NEW ADVENTURES: REDEFINING THE MIGRANT’S JOURNEY
When I first asked Lassana what he meant when he referred to his departure from his home village as “leaving on adventure” (partir en/à l’aventure) and to himself and his comrades as adventurers (aventuriers),41 he explained it this way: “We’re all looking for a way to get out of struggle (la galère) and into happiness (le bonheur). But some are not cut out for adventure, and they stay in la galère. But I’m an adventurer. My father was an adventurer. My father was poor. My mother was poor. But my father told me, if you’re born in misery you can end up with happiness, but if you’re born with wealth you can end up in misery. And he told me my pathway would take me far from our home.” The notion of adventure helped Lassana connect his struggles to a tradition passed down from father to son. It offered a framework for interpreting hard times abroad as well as a sense of belonging to a larger community of adventurers.
Adventure was not just another word for migration: it contained a whole world of West African migrant histories.42 Precolonial trading empires and colonial rule have helped shape a flexible cultural idiom for West Africans voyaging abroad. Like all idioms, it is not a deterministic cultural pattern but rather a malleable resource that migrants draw on in different contexts, transforming it as they do so. As Lassana taught me, it provided a template for those who left their families for lands unknown. Sylvie Bredeloup, an anthropologist who has long studied the notion of adventure among West Africans, calls it a form of “moral experience” in which migrants seek personal and social fulfillment through migration.43 Examining how West African migrants understand and express their life course through this idiom sheds light on critical aspects of migratory pathways that are often ignored in policy debates. The adventurer outlook offers a cultural logic and moral template for how life should unfold, and for how people ought to relate to one another.
Seeing migration as adventure does not mean seeing it as a romantic or thrilling odyssey that exists outside of the social realm. “L’aventure” and “l’aventurier” are rather loose French translations of terms from Mande languages spoken by West Africans in France (including the languages Soninke, Bamanakan, Malinke, Mandingo, Jula/Dyula, and Khassonke). The space of this journey is called the tunga/tunwa, an unknown or foreign place, a “space of exile.”44 In Soninke, the word adventure is also translated as gunne (“wilderness/bush”) and adventurer is a translation of gounike/gudunke and other similar terms meaning “the man of the bush” or “the man of the wilderness.”45 These terms point to what makes the West African migratory adventure specific and remarkable: Migration in this case is a rite of passage in which the migrant must confront risk and the unfamiliar to ensure his social becoming. Becoming a marriageable man meant undertaking an initiatory journey during which the migrant is supposed to accumulate wealth before returning home to marry and settle in the village. Migration in this context is seen as a way of reproducing—not dismantling—peasant communities.46
Adventures have a long history. Well before they migrated to France, the importance of commerce and travel among Soninke had already been established through a long history of contact, exchange, and mobility, including trans-Saharan trading empires and caravans that predate European colonization.47 Similar idioms have existed in many parts of West and Central Africa, as Jean Rouch documented in his 1967 film Jaguar about Nigerien migration to Ghana, and as anthropologist Paul Stoller explored in his ethnography and fiction
