Migrantour is in the Netherlands!

Migrantour Utrecht is the first Migrantour in the Netherlands, joining more than 20 cities around Europe (e.g., Barcelona, Brussels, Lisbon, Ljubljana, Milan, Paris, etc.) taking part in this responsible tourism initiative.

Migrantour Utrecht takes tour participants on a meaningful journey around Utrecht’s Lombok neighborhood. The tour has been co-created and is guided by Migrantour intercultural companions with first- or second-generation migration backgrounds. Together with their intercultural companion, tour participants explore ideas about what makes something or someone ‘Dutch’, inclusion and exclusion, undocumented status and privileges we may take for granted, the Dutch colonial legacy, and the significance of belonging to a community.

Get ready for sharing stories, dialogue, learning together, and new perspectives as we journey through layers of migration within and around us!

What is Migrantour?

Migrantour believes that sharing personal stories offers valuable perspective and creates meaningful bonds between people. This is why we set our feet on the streets to discover places through stories and together pave grassroots paths towards greater social inclusion. Our guided walking tours create spaces of intercultural encounter with heart that foster more expansive understandings of cultural heritage, reshaping mental maps and expanding horizons on our shared humanity. This is how we walk the talk of the African proverb, ‘the footprints of people who walked together are never erased’.

Behind the scenes at Migrantour Utrecht

Migrantour Utrecht intercultural companions have been working together since March 2022 to co-create a guided walking tour of Utrecht’s Lombok neighbourhood.

We’ve spoken with many Utrecht residents, business people and community organisers to better understand changes in Lombok over time and its current reality. We’ve explored how over 500 years of migration have shaped Lombok, Utrecht and the Netherlands. We’ve reflected on our own experiences with migration and the ways in which our own diverse heritages link up with — and add to — the layers of heritage in Lombok. We’ve imagined, debated and defined the topics and places we want to include in the Netherlands’ very first Migrantour guided walking tour. We’ve learned from storytelling and guiding experts about how to engage our tour participants.

And we’re now thrilled to be able to share this beautiful tour with you. We started in August 2022 with our first official tours!

Interested in taking a Migrantour Utrecht guided walking tour?

Visit our website: https://www.migrantourutrecht.nl

Contact & bookings: Email Migrantour Utrecht’s local coordinator at migrantourutrecht@devoorkamer.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/migrantourutrecht

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/migrantourutrecht/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/migrantour-utrecht/

Migrantour Utrecht is hosted by De Voorkamer. This initiative is funded by the Utrecht Gemeente, Erasmus+ KA2 Migrantour Sustainable Routes project and Utrecht 900 Jaar. It receives support from Meghann Ormond, part of Wageningen University & Research’s Cultural Geography group.

With no chance to cultivate and create ties with the land, I long felt like a squatter, at best a perpetual guest, at worst a parasite

I’ve lived in apartments in densely populated European cities for most of my life by now. With no chance to cultivate and create ties with the land, I long felt like a squatter, at best a perpetual guest, at worst a parasite. Weary from this, I gifted myself a small community garden plot a few years back. Mostly I work alone with it. It’s the one place in the Netherlands where I can feel in my bones the first place in the world I called home.

Out of the pickup truck and, to my grandmother’s chagrin, out of my mud shoes, my bare toes settle into the moist black earth of the big vegetable patch at the back of the farm. And, like that, grounded in the soil, the evening light and the first cool breeze since morning, while watering the plants, I slowly take in all that is precious in my young world. My grandparents, perpetually in motion, weave quietly between beets, corn, tomatoes and the vines of cucumbers and pumpkins. In the buckeye tree at the edge of the woods, eye-shaped leaves screen discrete birds relaxedly cooing to no one and everyone as the day unwinds. The tall windmill lazily turns to harness fresh groundwater and escort it into the cattail-ringed pond and its plump bass and bluegill that my grandfather and I sometimes fish but mostly feed.

The garden plot was on ‘virgin’ land, I was told. Never having been used for crop cultivation by generations of white farmers, the soil was still full of its own nutrients, making for good vegetables. It was also still full of its own stories.

One evening, early in the growing season, my grandparents were tilling the soil, readying it for planting. And I was walking up and down the rows, greeting the freshly unearthed worms struggling to make sense of daylight and the odd large cream-colored rock that had itself probably not felt sun since it arrived with the glacier that brought it here tens of thousands of years ago.

Then I saw it. Jutting out of the earth was a smoky gray point. A flint arrowhead. My grandfather had unearthed many over the years in his spring tilling of the fields. There were so many that he had a drawer full of them in the kitchen. But I had never found one myself. It was light in my hand, and my fingers ran over its sharp edges, chipped by other hands hundreds of years ago. As I looked around and took in the familiar landscape around me — grandparents, buckeye tree, windmill — , the arrowhead warmed in my palm.

I imagined the person that had shot the arrow with that stone tip, the quiver of other arrows slung diagonally on his back, the deer that just escaped death at this spot. I had always felt traces of spirits around me there on the farm, and now I held something that connected me to others that had once known this place as home.

… a piece of home willfully taken, a piece of home forcibly taken, a piece of home that no longer exists

The farm, land forcibly taken from the Shawnee people in the early 19th century and settled by my immigrant ancestors around that time under the administration of Andrew Jackson, was mostly sold off 20 years ago when my grandfather died. I haven’t been back to the garden since. And now, belonging to someone else, it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to visit it again. Yet, of course, it’s the one place in the world I’m desperate to take my son.

A few weeks back and an ocean away, I showed him the arrowhead I’d found — a piece of home willfully taken, a piece of home forcibly taken, a piece of home that no longer exists. He showed polite interest for a few seconds, touching it delicately. Then he went back to his Legos.

It’s winter now, but in a few months I’ll take my son to the home I carry with me in my bones. We’ll lay out our seed packets and prepare the first glass cases to host and warm tiny vegetable seedlings. And when the time comes, maybe he’ll till the soil with me, back hunched towards the earth. Who knows what he’ll find.

When I introduce myself to others these days, I always say, ‘I’m American and Portuguese, and I’ve lived in Europe for the last 20 years – that’s all of my adult life’. Generally, this confuses people enough to get a conversation going, accomplishing my objective.
In the summer of 2002, I took a 24-hour bus journey from my then home in Belgium to Portugal. The bus was filled with Portuguese emigrants – mostly men who had been working in construction in Germany and Belgium and were returning home to their families for the summer – and a single immigrant going to Portugal: me.

I moved to Portugal to join my boyfriend, a Portuguese-born geologist who later became my husband. A country shaped by centuries of emigration, Portugal very recently had become one increasingly characterised by immigration. Thanks to my university research job in which I studied the integration experiences of recent immigrants to Portugal (how appropriate!), I had the fortune to be able to travel around the country, getting to know the diverse peoples and places involved in caring for immigrants’ welfare. Over time, I grew familiar with the country’s nooks and crannies better than some who had spent their whole lives there. And, without really realising it, over time, I came to deeply identify with Portugal.

After some years, thrilled at the possibility of making this relationship I had with Portugal official, I initiated the process of becoming Portuguese. Upon arriving at the office in Lisbon to submit my application for citizenship, I enthusiastically produced as much documentary evidence as possible of my connection to my adopted home – in addition to the to-be-expected Portuguese language proficiency certificates and the somewhat-unexpected library card, I brought along my blood donor card. I literally bled on a regular basis for Portugal – what did that say about my commitment to the country?

That odd mix of evidence seems to have worked as, some weeks later, I received notice of my Portuguese citizenship in the post. Unlike in the US or Canada, where there are citizenship ceremonies complete with spoken oaths and grand symbolic gestures to flags, this was just a plain old envelope. A bit disappointing perhaps. Ah, but what was inside, you might wonder? The official proof of my new nationality… a Portuguese birth certificate! After many years of angst about being American, especially in the post-9/11 Bush-era politics, I felt reborn. Imagine the thrill of stepping inside the voting booth in my first Portuguese election and realising that I could vote for the political party that most closely reflected my beliefs, not simply feel that I needed to vote out of fear so that the lesser of two evils would enter office. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was part of a real, functioning democracy!

In 2008, some six years after arriving in Portugal, my husband and I divorced. Instead of staying in Portugal, however, I moved permanently to the UK where I was already doing my PhD. I piled my belongings into 10 huge, zippered and basically indestructible woven plastic bags colloquially known in Portugal – funnily enough – as ‘immigrant bags’ into two taxis heading to the Lisbon airport. Hours later, my belongings and I were warmly welcomed into the open arms and cars of dear friends in Scotland who picked me up from Glasgow Airport and collectively worked to put me back together again.

It took years for me to return to Portugal – six, in fact. I avoided the country because I didn’t believe that I deserved to be there any longer. I had seriously taken to heart a flippant but devastating question someone posed to me during the course of my divorce: ‘Will you give up your Portuguese citizenship now that it’s over?’ They were suggesting that my only legitimate claim to ‘Portuguese-ness’ was through the bonds of marriage; that, in divorcing from my husband, I had divorced from Portugal, too; that I wasn’t entitled to it just as the person I was. And, for a long time, I believed that.

It was my current partner’s family that eventually brought me back to my Portuguese ‘roots’. My partner is from Galicia, that north-western part of Spain that sits atop Portugal, and the language spoken there (Gallego) is very close to Portuguese. When I first met him in Scotland, we used Portuguese and Galician to communicate, and I still use these languages to communicate with his family. In our summers with his family, we began to spend time in Portugal and they came to learn about Portugal through me. In becoming the ‘local Portuguese’ guide for them, I was again able to rekindle and express my bonds to a country to which long ago I had explicitly chosen to belong.

So, today, when someone asks me where I’m from, I’ll give the answer that started this story: ‘I’m American and Portuguese, and I’ve lived in Europe for the last 20 years’. In so doing, I’m making a very specific political claim about the nature of national belonging and entitlement to it. The exiled Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once asked during his time in Lebanon, ‘Who am I after my exile in you?’ In the years following the challenge to the legitimacy of my relationship with Portugal, I routinely asked myself that very question. Who did I become during and after my time in Portugal? The answer is far from simple. No, my claim to ‘Portuguese-ness’ did not come about through birth. It came about through rebirth, through the conscious decision to claim a connection with a place on the planet and – like many migrants with strong transnational ties to multiple places – to make it not my only home but, rather, one of my homes. And that, I believe, is cause for celebration.

In 2015, I gave birth to my son in The Netherlands. While he holds multiple passports, a Dutch passport is not among them. Though born in that country, because his father and I are not Dutch, Dutch law doesn’t permit him to automatically acquire Dutch citizenship at birth. But he does have the extraordinary birth-given privilege of possessing three other passports: Spanish, from his father, and from me, American and – I’m proud to say – Portuguese. Should we stay in the Netherlands, he’ll have the opportunity to make a decision when he becomes an adult as to whether he wishes to acquire Dutch citizenship – and, by law, consequently renounce his other citizenships – or not. And I’m proud to say that will be his choice one day.

For migrants, answering the question about where we come from is never simple: we are the products of the different places in which we have lived and the people who have surrounded us. We are not from this or that place. We are from and in-between this place, that place and the other… and I long for the day when our identity cards and our conversations will be able to reflect that complexity.

And like a number of his forefathers, my grandfather was a soldier in his youth – he was a pilot stationed on the Pacific island of Guam. Many of his local contemporaries also ended up on the frontlines in Asia during the Second World War. One of the Wapakoneta boys drafted to fight like my grandfather was William ‘Hafey’ Lietz, a man who later became my grandfather’s brother-in-law and the mayor of Wapakoneta. Hafey was a bricklayer by trade and a friendly family man, and it was at his house that my extended family and I would regularly gather for birthday parties and Fourth of July celebrations. He was also a man haunted by the terrors of war, someone who watched his close friend being slaughtered and held him as he died during the Japanese bombardment of his ship near Okinawa. It’s not surprising then that, in the 1980s when the American auto industry was entering into decline and many in my part of the United States turned to the rising stars of the auto industry – Japanese makers like Honda and Toyota – to bring stability and jobs to local people, the presence of Japanese in the US was extremely upsetting to Hafey. When requested to go on a trade mission to Japan to attract Japanese business to his community, he resigned from the mayorship. In a People Magazine article from 1988, he made it clear that “I just didn’t want anything to do with the Japanese personally. I don’t hate them; I just can’t forget what happened 125 miles off Okinawa.”

"...he made it clear that ‘I just didn’t want anything to do with the Japanese personally. I don’t hate them; I just can’t forget what happened 125 miles off Okinawa’."

Though only 8 or 9 years old at the time, I can still clearly remember how upset I was to first see the magazine story’s accompanying photo of Hafey’s smiling face and the brick wall he was building. I couldn’t comprehend how he could harbour ill-will for people from an entire country for more than 40 years. It’s only now, some 30 years after his resignation and the publication of that article, that I have even begun to grasp how difficult the situation would have been for him in light of his war trauma. But, as a young person, I simply didn’t understand. You see, by the time Hafey resigned, my mother and I had already moved to the nearby town of Bellefontaine, coinciding with the arrival of many young Japanese executives and their families settling there following the construction of a Honda factory a 20-minute drive away. Some of my closest friends in Bellefontaine were Japanese kids around my age. The war that, a generation ago, had killed millions of people on either side of the geopolitical divide was not relevant to us when we were playing together in each other’s homes. Yes, we were kids eating different food for dinner and speaking a different language at the dinner table – but we were just kids and we liked each other’s company. For that reason, I was deeply dismayed by Hafey’s actions. I vowed to myself then that I would work hard to see people, wherever they were in the world, as individuals – people shaped by culture, language and politics very different from those in which I was steeped, yes, but first and foremost as complex individuals. I promised myself that I would try to be open to and learn from the diversity around me, and I did so with the mindset that it is only through mindful communication and open exchange that we can end misunderstanding and the violence that follows in its wake.

"In simply moving from a rural to an urban area of Ohio, my entire experience and understanding of ‘America’ was transformed – ‘America’ was suddenly so much more diverse and accommodating than I had ever imagined it to be. My new vision of ‘America’ was far richer than Hafey’s ‘America’, and I was terribly grateful for that discovery."

Throughout my schooling in the US, I was drawn to people who came from abroad for their studies, jobs or to escape war and other kinds of hardship. I wanted to know what similarities and differences they identified between life back home and life in the US. Often, they provided fresh perspectives on things that I took for granted. For example, at the end of the Cold War, a teacher from Hungary, visited my school district as part of an exchange programme, and my mother and I hosted her. She was astounded at the way a 10-year-old American kid like me could consume can after can of Coca Cola. In accented but perfect English, she bluntly remarked on this while I was guzzling my second or third can in the backseat of the car. Her observation took me aback. At first, I felt that I had been scolded, but then I realised that I had never before really considered how I – and countless other Americans – take abundance for granted, giving little consideration to how or why so many things were so easily accessible to us. She had just emerged from a communist regime where Coca Cola was a luxury, something extraordinarily hard to come by and, thus, something to be savoured, not guzzled. She taught me an invaluable lesson: to not take one’s actions, beliefs and behaviours for granted and to critically examine what circumstances contributed to producing them.

Over time, a steady stream of ‘foreigners’ came into my life in rural Ohio: after the Hungarian teacher, I had the fortune to spend time with a Japanese teacher trainee and a German exchange student. But it was only after I left rural Ohio to complete high school in the capital city of Columbus, that I befriended kids with migrant parents of extraordinarily diverse origins – the son of Coptic Egyptians who had done their university studies in the US; the son of Russian Jewish refugees escaping persecution in the Soviet Union; the son of Chinese refugees escaping Mao’s Cultural Revolution; the daughter of an Uruguayan academic and the grandchildren of a multilingual German anthropologist who had escaped the Holocaust and sought refuge in the US. In Columbus, I also began to learn Balinese dance from an American artist who had studied dance for years in Indonesia, and I performed in a troupe together with Indonesians who had come to the Ohio State University for their postgraduate studies. In simply moving from a rural to an urban area of Ohio, my entire experience and understanding of ‘America’ was transformed – ‘America’ was suddenly so much more diverse and accommodating than I had ever imagined it to be. My new vision of ‘America’ was far richer than Hafey’s ‘America’, and I was terribly grateful for that discovery.

"Sadly, however, it has really only been by travelling abroad that I gained insight into the extent to which the US government was itself involved in many of these struggles and conflicts."

When I myself began to travel abroad and became the ‘foreigner’, however, my sense of cultural humility expanded enormously. I lived for six months in Montreal, Canada, using my school-acquired ‘standard’ French to communicate but struggling to understand the Quebecois-accented French around me. My Japanese-American internship supervisor at the landscape architecture firm at which I was doing an unpaid internship, was born in one of the US internment camps set up for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Her family had lost everything because of those camps – her father’s successful dentistry business and family heirlooms had to be sold off hastily and could not be recuperated after the war’s end. Another member of the firm, when only a small child, was smuggled out of Haiti in a wooden crate by her parents seeking refuge in Canada. A new friend’s Zoroastrian family fled Iran during the Revolution, with him spending the first part of his youth in India and, later, Canada. It was through these experiences with individual people in Canada – and in my subsequent travels, study-abroad experiences and life as an economic migrant in places like Mexico, Morocco, Belgium, Portugal, Scotland, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Japan – that I gained an even greater appreciation for the geopolitical struggles and cultural conflicts that have forced people to leave their places of origin.

Sadly, however, it has really only been by travelling abroad that I gained insight into the extent to which the US government was itself involved in many of these struggles and conflicts. Somehow my American public-school education quietly glided over centuries of American colonialism and geopolitical intervention in places like the Philippines, Central America and the Caribbean. Somehow Japanese-American internment camps and the Cold War were overlooked in my history classes. So, to borrow a phrase from the influential American travel writer Rick Steves, I came to see travel as a political act – an act of recognising and holding myself and my contemporaries responsible for understanding and accountable for what is happening and has happened throughout the world as a result of what we and our ancestors have done. Like Steves, I’m convinced that it’s our responsibility to get to know people as individuals and to understand what conditions have made them see and act in the world in the way they do because this means that it will be far harder for an ‘us’ to simply bomb a ‘them’ as distant, faceless and nameless populations. This belief has likewise led me to gladly enter into conversations with people who at first just see me as ‘an American’ – representing things good and bad perpetuated by the US government – and not as an individual. I see it as my responsibility to – through my actions, behaviours and interests – try to understand what underlies stereotypes about peoples and places and then work to foster a greater multifaceted grasp and acceptance of humankind.

In 2014, my husband and I travelled to Japan for the first time. Needless to say, I was thrilled to finally visit a country whose richness I had come to learn about through Japanese friends and American friends who admired Japanese language and culture. We went to Tokyo and Kyoto – both mind-boggling fascinating and beautiful – but I am most touched by our time in Hiroshima. Just prior to travelling to Japan, I read John Hersey’s collection of survivors’ harrowing accounts of the immediate aftermath of the atomic bomb being dropped on the city in 1945, and I again felt the weight on my shoulders of coming from a place whose government at the time thought it appropriate to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people in an instant and that unapologetically wreaked havoc in countless other places around the world before and after 1945. Given my great-uncle Hafey’s Second World War-triggered anti-Japanese sentiment, I couldn’t wrap my head around how it seems that, despite entire cities and multiple generations of families having been destroyed by atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese people today rarely demonstrate similar sorts of anti-American sentiment. How had they managed to move on? Upon reaching the withered skeletal remains of a steel dome in the Hiroshima Peace Park, the most symbolic ruin of the atomic disaster, I wept. I wept for the violence and loss of life there and then, and also out of frustration that we have still apparently not learned enough from that terrible day that violence cannot be resolved with more violence.

The next day, perhaps to partially relieve some of the heaviness of what we had experienced in the Hiroshima Peace Park, we went to a baseball game. Yes, the American occupation after the end of the Second World War led not only to the introduction of bread and beef into Japanese diets but also a profound love of the ‘all-American’ game. That night, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp were playing the Nagoya Chunichi Dragons. We managed to get nose-bleed seats in a completely packed stadium. Speaking no Japanese, we at first struggled to communicate with the local Hiroshima fans sitting next to us but they quickly, warmly welcomed us with wordless hospitable gestures, sharing typical baseball game snacks and showing us how to cheer at the right times. As we cheered, ate and laughed together, I thought about my great-uncle Hafey who has long since passed away. I wished that I had been able to share my experience with him, to help him see how good people – regardless of their origins and countries’ histories, or perhaps precisely because of an awareness of them – can be to each other if only just try. Just as travel is an important political act, so – I wished I could tell him – is the hospitality shown not only to one’s neighbours but also to people who have come from afar, like the traveller and migrant I have become.

Meghann Ormond is a cultural geographer living in The Netherlands. Her research and teaching focus on questions of heritage, care and responsibility. She is co-founder of the Heritage-from-Below Education and Research Collective (HERC), a new initiative that aims to bring together heritage practitioners, artists, teachers and scholars to creatively and collectively re-envision how mobile lives can be better integrated into the ways in which history is understood and taught in schools.