Collective memory and amnesia: explaining continuities and discontinuities in the history of the Belgian sans-papiers movement

The Belgian sans-papiers movement succeeded in politicizing migrant illegality in the last few decades. The mobilization of undocumented migrants played a decisive role in pressuring the Belgian government to organize collective regularization rounds in 1999 and 2009. Despite ongoing actions, the movement achieved little victories since then. This tends to be blamed on the unfavorable political climate or dwindling public support. What gets far less attention is the fact that successive waves of mobilization seemingly cling on to tried-and-tested recipes without learning lessons from the past. In this paper, we draw on longitudinal ethnographic data gathered at ‘SP-Belgique’ (2010-2014), ‘CollectActif’ (2015-2017) and the ‘Coordination des sans-papiers en Belgique’ (2014-2020) to examine how collective memory and amnesia, or the relative presence or absence of institutionalized forms of memory transfers, affect organizing dynamics within the Belgian sans-papiers movement. Combining insights from the literatures on collective memory and immigrant rights organizing, we argue that collective memory work helps to explain continuities and discontinuities within the Belgian Sans-Papiers movement in the 2004-2020 period. More in particular, we argue that ‘memory agents’ and ‘memory interfaces’ serve as mnemonic infrastructures that help to store, preserve and transfer strategic, practical and other forms of knowledge within and between self-organizations. When such infrastructures break down due to external factors like state repression or internal factors like dwindling leadership or opposing challengers, the threat of collective amnesia becomes imminent. These findings underline the importance of effective collective memory work for the high-risk struggles of marginalized and oppressed communities.