50
between an aura of another people and the local, as a kind of floating entity that moves
and transforms like a cloud, never quite existing, never quite vanishing, but always there
and adept in its particular mode of interaction (1985:13). Undocumented migrants use
advanced urban navigation skills and understanding of local people, structures, and
economy, to interact with and move around the city. As a result of this, their lives are
also ordered around economic cycles, fluctuations of consumer desires, and the ebb and
flow of political opinion; however, they act on the verges of these phenomena, in
anticipation or in prevention, so as to ensure their relative invisibility and anonymity.
Settled undocumented migrants are masters of the quotidian and the unimpressive,
following particular modes of special interaction and temporal practices characteristic of
their complex motion to remain safe and successful just outside the candid experience of
local people and comfortably within the latter’s normative expectations.
Yet despite this evanescent presence, settled undocumented migrants living in
Athens, and generally in the Attica plain, are limited to a particular territory both by
choice and because of the dangers of moving. This has a number of important
implications for both undocumented migrants and local people. First, undocumented
migrants see Athens as the site where a vision of a successful, revised, life-away-ffom-
home can be realized indicating a space-based commitment to a particular imagined
subjective reality. That is, most individuals recognize the transformation Athens has had
on them and, moreover, that this change was necessary in order for them to live in the
city they have chosen to remain in. Second, despite their lack of investment in the city in
terms of property etc., undocumented migrants are not likely to leave even when
pressured to do so; rather, they will adapt and continue to live in the way they have