Cultural Archipelagos and Immigrants’ Experiences

In his essay in this issue of City & Community, Amin Ghaziani describes cultural archipelagos as providing a “conceptual framework” to explain “the unexpected emergence of new clusters for specific subgroups of queer people” in cities that are known for their distinguishable “gayborhoods.” This essay centers the experiences of transnational immigrants from countries in the so-called global South who relocate to cities in richer countries such as the United States. While transnational immigrants’ distinct experiences pre- and post-migration confirm the usefulness of the cultural archipelagos framework, those experiences also clarify that cultural archipelagos need not be conceived (as Ghaziani implies) as a subsequent stage of gay/queer culture that necessarily and always is preceded by the formation of strong and identifiable gayborhoods. I therefore argue that the experiences of transnational gay/queer immigrants invite us to take a step back and consider how those immigrants relate or not to the notion of gayborhoods in the first place.