While one may be drawn to one’s culture and spaces that echo the sounds and sights of the homeland, one must also question why migrants from the so-called Third World are not structurally at home in mainstream public places. The issue is not cultural; it is a function of structural factors (Anderson and Kirkham 1998). The term enclaves has been used in the literature to conceptually explain the way in which racialized groups have been confined within their own communities to address the long-standing ambiguity within Canadian society. On the one hand, Canada needs the labour of non-white people, but at another level, it wants to remain Eurocentric. A way out of this ambiguity is to ensure that racialized minorities remain contained within particular spaces, a shining example of which is the Chinatown in Vancouver. As Anderson (1991) has argued, “Chinatown” was not the product of an ethnic community’s desire to stay with its own kind. Instead, it is at once a geographical and a social construct (also refer to Lee 2012). Enclaves in the market sphere serve yet another purpose: they facilitate the exploitation of racialized minorities. Within particular lowpaying and no-benefits labour slots, such as nurse’s aides, domestic workers, and garment workers, minority labour (including women of colour) is used for the benefit of the larger society (Li 2003). A third aspect of enclaves concerns social invisibility. Certain groups of people are placed in locations where they are structurally overlooked . . . But social marginalization does not translate into passivity. Adopting a pragmatic stance, marginalized people remake their worlds, even if this means taking small steps at a time . . . These strategies are of value as they do not only point to elements that can lead to grassroots–level change, but they also identify the fundamental fault lines of the system. For example, how can the biomedical model with its focus on individual pathology broaden its parameters to include social and political factors (Scheper-Hughes 1992)?
Parin Dossa, Afghanistan Remembers: Gendered Narrations of Violence and Culinary Practices, 2014, pp. 76-77.
