This dissertation explores the lives of clandestine Brazilian migrants who seek socioeconomic
opportunities in French Guyana. The migrants’ discourse is used as a platform to reflect on
the field of social representations in this context as well as the meaning of cohabitation in a
pluriethnic and multicultural society where social subjects construct their identities from
knowledge--without necessarily knowing one another--and difference. This ethnography,
then, focuses on economic, social, and identitarian aspects of Brazilian mobility, and aims to
analyze the experience of undocumented workers, the obstacles they face, and the strategies
they deploy to move in the city and obtain work, food, accommodation, etc. This study builds
upon fieldwork undertaken with Brazilian migration networks between the Brazilian border at
the city Oiapoque and the police control leading to Cayenne.
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