Empires we lose: why an English woman in Boston has nowhere to go

Following Latvian migrants to Boston, Lincolnshire, I met Zhenya, a Russian-speaking man who referred to himself as someone with migration in his blood. Zhenya came to Boston in 2004. He spoke good English and was once praised for doing so by an English woman who said: 'You can pick up and leave, go back to your country if things here are not good, but we don’t have anywhere else go to.'

This talk is an anthropological and historical interpretation of the woman’s lament that she does not have 'anywhere else to go.' I show how studying Latvian mobility in relation to the actual and imagined immobility of the disintegrating working class in the East Midlands and North England enables analysis of the spatial distribution of labour, dispossession, and the good life in a post-Cold War imperial landscape.

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