past from several angles, and were invested in uncovering the history of the Gare du Nord. To this end, I examined tribunal records and blueprints from the Paris Municipal Archives, North Railway Company correspondence and meeting minutes from the National Labor Archives, and blueprints and directives from Haussmann-led Paris in the National Archives.
I spent most of my fieldwork hanging out around the station and talking to a changing group of about thirty-five West African men who ranged in age from nineteen to thirty-two, and who strolled, talked, sat, and observed together in the front square and in cafés around the neighborhood. Most of these men had been in France between three and twelve years, and about half of them were undocumented, while most of the others had recently obtained resident permits. The majority came from the western Kayes region of Mali and its adjoining areas across the borders in Senegal and Mauritania, while a few others came from Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea. They spoke a mix of French, Pulaar, and several Mande languages (Soninke, Jula, Bamanakan, and Khassonke) among themselves. Almost all identified as practicing Muslims and, with the exception of the Ivoirians, they had attended Qur’anic schools and did not speak French when they arrived. They worked in subcontracted and temporary labor jobs in construction, cleaning, and food service. In the summer of 2010, I spent two months as an SNCF intern on the high-speed lines, and accompanied railway police on their patrols, offering another perspective of what it meant to see through the lens of the Gare du Nord, and to understand how adventurers were represented and imagined by station workers.
A few caveats: The population of a major city passes through the Gare du Nord each day, and this book does not attempt to offer a picture of its totality. I made the choice to seek in-depth knowledge in order to offer the “thick description” that distinguishes meaningful ethnography, even in our “multi-sited” age of mobility.75 Most of the subjects in this book are West African men, in part because French policies and policing have a particular impact on them.76 Like the adventurers documented here, West African women are also struggling to make their own pathways toward integration—just not through the Gare du Nord.77 I also sought to explore the way that West Africans adventurers see and create a world in the station. This called for time and resources to explore all facets of their lives, including in some cases going back to their villages and meeting their families. It was after I returned from Mali and Senegal that I began to understand what was happening at the station.
I did not have the resources to do this in-depth work with all the people and worlds of the station; the book is focused on adventurers and the networks they made. It bears pointing out that although they are often represented as “Africans,” adventurers are a diverse group: they are multilingual, multiethnic, and multinational. I also chose not to focus on the people involved in drug dealing or crime: they occupied an outsized place in the media and popular representations of Africans at the station, but few of the men I met there were involved in illegal activities.
Research in a public space where I had no status was challenging. For the first six months of my research, many people believed I was a police officer or informant and denounced me to their peers. I was often yelled at and accused of conspiring with the police. I came to understand that these were attempts to situate me within an unstable universe where a single bad encounter could lead to failed immigration projects, arrest, or deportation. As in much ethnography, a “key informant” enabled my provisional integration into the station social scene. Lassana took me under his wing as a social apprentice, vouched for me, and became my de facto field research assistant (a role for which he refused to accept money). In the moments when I became dejected with the feeling that I would barely scratch the surface of what was going on at the station, he would find a new person for me to meet, or a new corner of station life to discover. He knew the place, as he liked to say, like his own hand.
Our relationship illuminated some of the way gender roles played out in this male-dominated social environment. We met because he, like many of his comrades, were using the station to meet women. He approached me to ask for a cigarette—even though he did not smoke. I asked if he would talk to me for my research. He agreed, and ended up acting as my protector, an older brother figure and station guide. This relationship meant that I was rarely hassled at the station, even when he was not present.
My experiences illustrate how constrained women’s roles were at the Gare du Nord: unlike men, women could not hang out and chat—it was assumed they were there to meet men. Any time I sat in a café with Lassana (or anyone else), his friends who came by to say hello and who did not know me asked him in Soninke or Bamanakan whether I was his girlfriend. They were suspicious when he said no and explained that I was writing a book about the station. I did not fit into the categories that women were supposed to occupy. If I was not someone’s girlfriend, they reasoned, I must have been with the police. It was only after I went to the station in 2016 with my son, a baby at the time, that some men I had known for years admitted that up until then, they had suspected I was French and not from the United States, and that I was working with the police. My newfound status as a mother was part of what changed their opinion.
During my research, I took on multiple roles that also helped me to understand the precarious positions these men found themselves in. When they had to find new housing, I became an amateur real estate agent, looking for apartments after assessing their budget and transportation needs. When they legalized their status and decided to make a return visit, I helped them find flights using the internet. I helped edit résumés for temporary construction work and fill out applications for unemployment benefits.
Aside from formal interviews with train station personnel and urban planners, I spent the first year in the field using my tape recorder sparingly. All the men I spoke to knew about my research project and had agreed to take part. I took my cue from other urban anthropologists working among sensitive or marginalized populations and embraced the “unassuming research strategy” of participating in daily life and conversations, and then rushing away to write it all down in a notebook afterward.78 As I built trust among some of the men, I started using my tape recorder or cell phone to record longer narratives and conversations.
Everyone I spoke to knew I was doing research, and many of them were invested in my book project. In the decade since I began, our lives all transformed. Their adventures all turned out differently than they had imagined, and the Gare du Nord could not change the realities of legal, social, and economic marginalization. But it did give them a space to discover “the France you don’t see on TV,” as Lassana put it—which is also what I want to illuminate here.
TRACING BOUNDARIES
The story of the Gare du Nord and the experiences of West African adventurers there are the twin intertwining threads that structure this book. When the station was built in the mid-nineteenth century, it was part of an imperial vision imagining the melding of modern industry, infrastructure, and international exchange. But railway terminals were also feared as threatening spaces of social mixing that needed new measures to separate, control, and police the “dangerous classes” that converged there. Chapter 1, “Dangerous Classes,” considers the Gare’s early days to show how inequality based on ideas of racial difference has been built into this public space, as part of efforts to ensure for smooth transport and circulation while controlling the potential threats to the political and social order of bourgeois Paris. Today, migrants confront the remnants of the station’s guiding imperial ideology as they reconfigure their relationship to the history of public space in Paris.
When part of the Gare du Nord was rebuilt at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it came to embody anew the contradictions between a French Republican narrative of inclusive “living together,” and the policing methods used against people of color at the station. The station’s rebuilding and the 2007 revolt that took place in its wake are the foci of chapter 2, “The Exchange Hub.” After considering how a public space in the center of the capital became a crucible of anti-black racism and French national boundary definition, I examine how African-French young people
