SOLIDARITY THROUGH A NETWORK SYSTEM: THE CASE OF INDIAN MIGRANTS IN MARSEILLE/FRANCE

The urban environment is a space that increasingly encourages communication through virtual social networks. With the aim of thinking about the reality of migration and its relations with a solidarity built in a virtual environment, this article proposes to manage an ethnography with Indian migrants who live in the city of Marseille, region of Provence, southern France. How are these individuals who left India towards France organized? Through the ethnographic method, with techniques such as floating observation and participant observation, an anthropological study was carried out on a Facebook group and in Indian restaurants of the city. In this sense, the text seeks to demonstrate the construction of a social network system based on the feeling of solidarity and cooperation. Divided into two sections, the first part of the article tries to describe the relationships established in a Facebook group entitled “Indians in Marseille”. Afterwards, the text presents an ethnography of the relationships that structure the daily life of the Indian restaurants in the city, with the objective of analyzing the poles of power and the construction of solidarity.


INTRODUCTION
Speaking about networks is a synonym of speaking about a multiplicity of relations that structure a group, a community or an association. Theses relations sometimes build communities, troops and other kinds of social organization whose bases are anchored in the contact with the Other and the difference. Being inserted in a network is being part of a symmetric relation based on reciprocal exchanges.
The concept of network was first inaugurated by John Barnes in 1954, in a periodic called Human Relations (FIALHO, 2015). According to the author, the network is unlimited, without a specific leadership. Then, the network becomes the base to describe the paths and territorialities engendered from a special element, the nationalityas an example. There is no limit between the boarders of these "groups". Each individual is placed in the center of an endless bundle of relations that meets one another at the same time that they go back to the center from where they came. In the words of Barnes (1954, p. 43), each person is, as it was, in touch with a number of other people, some of whom are directly in touch with each other and some of whom are not. Similarly, each person has a number of friends, and these friends have their own friends; some of any one person's friends know each other, others do not. I find it convenient to talk of a social field of this kind as a network.
Nonetheless, the study about a social structure based on relations among individuals comes from the studies of Radcliffe Brown (1968) about kinship in African tribes. He is the anthropologist who consecrates the interpersonal relations as the reason why a grouping conceives their identity and its functions around the relations stablished by people, such as kinship, hierarchy, etc. As stated by him (Ibidem,p. 279; translated by the author), If we examine a community, an African or Australian tribe, we recognize the differences of a social structure: the human beings are individually seen. They are, in this case, fundamental elements for a defined game of social relations in an integrated totality. The permanence of this structure is kept by the social life process that consists in actions and interactions of individual human beings and organized groups that unite each other. The social life of the community is here defined as the function of the social structure.
After realizing my fieldwork along more than eight months, based firstly on interviews and floating observation in Indian restaurants of Marseille, I wondered whether the Indian migrants who live in Marseille might be seen as either a network or a community. How could we classify this group according to these classic categories of Social Sciences? Therefore, the objective of this article remains on exploring the structure that maintains the contact and the relations among these Indians. Would they be a network or a community?
Attempting to get a response to these questions, this article is organized into two sections. At first, I develop an ethnography of a group on Facebook, through which it is possible to perceive two elements that run through Indian migration in Marseille: the virtuality and the cooperation. Thereupon, I introduce you to the restauration field, with the objective of exposing the way it builds and reinforces a communication based on network path which I call "solidarity".

THE VIRTUALITY AND A COOPERATION SYSTEM: A GROUP ON FACEBOOK
All the last decades along, the use of the internetespecially the social networkshas been a fundamental actor for the articulation of the civil society in what concerns the construction of political leaders and social movements. This element, according to the English sociologist Anthony Giddens (2002), is one the greatest achievements of our globalization era when products of human actions are the instruments where networks are formed. Having a capital means having a product, either they are a consequence of the industrialization or a culture capital which aggregates value to migration movements and diplomatic relations. Speaking of migration nowadays is also a synonym of speaking about technology. Marseille, crib of this fusion of arrivals and departures, has the internet as a background for the perpetuation of migrants' daily routines.
It is ordinary to pass by the downtown neighborhoods and see individuals who communicates through a screen, usually speaking Arabic to an Other that remains far away from there. Oftenly, it is someone from the family. This communication which is assuaged by the internetespecially by social networksbecomes an actor that lives inside this phenomenon called "exile". Once affectivity, sorrow and nostalgy are part of the whole called migration (SAYAD, 1999), the communication and the illusion of "being far away" are ways in which migrants often make a language of isolation from the place they are at the present moment. Speaking native language, cultivating the same friends of the past and living another time is a reality among migrants, living the time of those who welcome them.
If we think about the Indian migrants of Marseille, it would not be different. I must explain that Facebook was a fundamental tool for all the period when I was doing my fieldwork. My objective is to explain how it has acted as an ethnographic tool, particularly because of the solidary structure that are created by these migrants through Facebook. How could a simple virtual space guide an ethnography that started with frustrated attempts of being inserted in their world?
When I began the fieldwork, I primarily started by going to Indian restaurants where the contact revealed itself as hard and strict. The dialogues in English were ephemeral and an attempt of distancing were justified by the massive labor journey. Nevertheless, two restaurants opened their doors for me to frequent and acknowledge better the life story of the owners. During this relation, there was always one thing that often invaded their narratives, a group on Facebook. This virtual tool, as said by my interlocutors, was a space where cultural activities that take place in the city could be propagated. It was supposed to be an opportunity to "meet many Indians".
"Indians in Marseille" is a group created at the end of 2000s by Kedge Business School students. Composed by 966 members, the group acts as a path towards cooperation and support for the individuals who arrive in the city, coming from India. In its description, there is a reference to four other Indian virtual groups in France: "Indian in Paris", which have 26.108 members; "Indians in Lyon", with 2.519 members; "Indians in Lille", 1.919 members; and finally, "Indians in Nice", 859 members. Another consideration emerges from the integration among these groups: several members are present in more than one; sometimes, in all the groups. The network that connects all these individuals is not restrict within the territory from where it belongs, but to a larger network defined by the residence in France. Likewise, it is notable that the circulation around these cities by these Indians is frequent. As Emmanuelle 2 , one of my participants, who came firstly to Paris for her studies and afterwards moved to Marseille due to her fiancé who lives in a town next to the North region of the city, Thierry arrived in Montpellier for his master's in business. The presence in more than one group does not limit the migrant to belong to a certain network of Indian migrants who live only in Marseille, Lyon or Paris, but to the Indians who are based in France, or to the ones that have already been there.
A great part of the Indians in Marseille group members does not live in the city anymore. Those who left the city and I could talk to through Messenger told me they lived there for a period of four or five years, just aiming to accomplish their studies. After this period, they came back to India and live today either in their hometown or in a big metropole. However, their presence is always there in the group. These "ex-migrants" do not frequently participate in the discussions, although they give a thumbs up for the posts and place themselves as voyeurs of everything that is debated there.
Emmanuellle, for example, is a friend of one of the administrators of the Marseille group, albeit he lives nowadays in Paris and always affirms that the main objective of this resource is to integrate Indian culture and these Indian citizens who have migrated to France. When she talks to me, she states that the group is, actually, just a forum where people can search for a support and to solve out their doubts, complaining that the members do not enforce a culture integration. According to her experience, the Indians who live in Paris often go out for a drink or a picnic, aiming to integrating not only culture but also family. In Marseille, on the other hand, they remain closed in their homes or in a small group of friends from work.
The access to the group is really exclusive and it was necessary more than two months after several attempts to be added, and then I could finally be part of. The finality is clear: tp help Indians in what concerns visa procedures, renewal of titre de séjour 3 and rent. After many attempts to keep in touch with the administrators, I finally had contact with Olivier and Louistwo young Indians who I met during the Diwali party at a restaurant of the citywho made efforts to convince one of the administrators to add me on the network. From this moment on, I had the opportunity to access what I call as a "network path" that may be characterized for not being a collective shared identity, but a network through which is edified a structure based on what can be determined as a "communauté illusoire"making a reference to the book by Marc Augé (2010).
According to the French anthropologist, when it is identified as one same group of individuals who present something in common, considering their desires and its particularities especially when it concerns individuals whose reality is formed by a modern context of globalization where the individuality is reinforced via neoliberal policies 4and creates an illusion in virtue of the need to place a grouping of these individuals into categories. On the other hand, individuals are multiple subjective actors forming their identity, their trajectories around the city, elaborating their relations as result of the borders that represent the Self and the Other who is beside. Hence, although nationality is an element that gathers these migrants in a virtual ambianceclosed and autonomous -, in other words, a group on a social network, the trajectory of each of them is particular, so as their individual projects. The origins are rooted in different regions of India, whose languages and beliefs are different, yet all of them have passed by big metropoles to arrive in France. For this reason, defining them as a community is to unviable the context where they are placed, the reasons why they arrived in Europe besides not bearing in mind the alleged cosmopolitism they come across when already established in France.
Still, how was the access to this group possible to them? This question was always posed by me to my interlocutors. A unanimous answer comes as a concrete fact, there are always Facebook groups made by Indians for all the cities that gather a great number of migrants. Their justification is to try finding their pairs at the place where they are moving to. The simplest way of being shrouded by a kind of cooperation is the contact through the internet. All the research collaborators say that it just needs to tape "Indians in" followed by the city they want to know on Facebook to find a group. The presumption that there would be an Indian group for the Indian citizens who live in Marseille on social network was already present when they arrived in the city. Many of them affirm that even before landing in Marseille they had already searched for the group; others have looked for a support after being hosted in the city.
According to the Mexican anthropologist Larissa Lomnitz (2009), social networks may be considered as a solidarity network implicating an exchange of goods, services and information. In this sense, Facebook, in this case, is seen as a sociability space that may be defined as an "informal social security system" (LOMNITZ, 2009, p. 20). Thus, marginality is a phenomenon through which the individual comprehends their position towards the context where they try to be inserted and search their pairs as a way of greeting based on two feelings: solidarity and reciprocity. Migration being a process of geographic, psychic and affective displacement, the search for possible interlocutors in this new space becomes an intrinsic need of the act of migration, especially whether it concerns migrants from origins in the South.
As I was added to the group, I contacted these members in order to justify my interest to be there. As a result of that, I posted the following message: Hello This message received some thumbs up and comments by some Indians who were interested to help a young student, such as Emmanuelle, Laurence and Thierry, even though the number of Indians who could have been available to be part of my research did not satisfy my attempts. This fact, however, becomes a concrete data from the moment where I think this group not as a collective construction tool in a foreign cultural context, but as a practical tool to live in France. Rare are the moments when I could notice that there were posts regarding cultural events. Two occasions in specific took place and must be cited: the Holi festival in April 2019 and the first run of a Bollywood movie that was about to be released at a movie theater. All other moments, the messages are addressed to share information about the visa or to turn public amongst them rooms to be rented. The group is not necessarily a space of sociability inside a "community", but a channel of security and information. Castells (2009) affirms that online social networks are not a concrete space, once the positions of these individuals in the center of social dynamics are what defines their relations per se. These networks, therefore, are flux spaces. So, it's through this flux where they are plunged, the migratory movement, that they create a communication and solidarity platform which, in its turn, does not gather these individuals in a way to edify a common routine. The interests themselves are the flux that leads to exile, nourishing a communication structure based on virtual networks.
A great part of the members of this group does not know each other personallyin special because the number is constantly increasing along the time and it will soon achieve 1000 members -, but know someone that, at the end, knows the first one who is, at a first sight, unknown for the last. From these links, I conclude that the shared feeling on the group is what we call solidarity. This feeling is proved from the moment one of the members does not know the administrative procedures for the demand of their titre de séjour or has not found a room. Even if the interaction accomplished on the group is not intense, there is always a response to each question or even some intervention to help. The marginal character of its presence in the city reinforces what I stated above about the theory by Lomnitz; marginality edifies mechanisms of sharing an ad hoc solidarity.
I was indeed object of this attempt of getting help. Three times Emmanuelle posted on the group that there was an Anthropology student in Marseille interested on studying Indian culture. In her last message (30 th March 2019), she wrote the following text: Hope everyone is doing good. On 16th January, our group member,(author) had asked us to help him gather information on Indians for his thesis. Till date not many people have agreed to meet him.
I request you to take 30-45 minutes out of your busy schedules to help him gather information for his research on Indians living in Marseille. He isn't from the police or immigration office (for those who doubt him). He is in France only since a few months and has no social group either to present him personally to you unfortunately.
I hope people reading this will reach out to him. Through the analysis of these ethnographic data that I can wrap up that the structure on which Indian migrants who live in Marseille build their links to each other cannot be defined as a community, a group of individuals whose identity is common and moral patterns are formed by collective representations shared by all. According to Cohen (1985), a community is a symbolic resource constituted by one and only way of thinking, acting and self-recognition. It is the challenge to cross this symbolic border between identity of one and the other that establishes what the author defines as community. The largeness of Indian territory and its variety of languages, cultures and religions is another aspect that confirms the dispersion of these migrants spread all over the city. They live in fluxes.
Marseille is then the passage flux through which they acquire capitals, either affective, cultural or economic. Tomorrow perhaps it will be Paris or another European city, just like yesterday it may have been Montpellier or Lyon. The flux of present life is centered in achieving a goal: a diploma, a family, some money. This objective delimitates these Indians into small groupsthose who study at Kedge Business School, those who work for an Indian boss at a restaurantthat become their friend, or even they stay closed to their familythe wife, the mother-in-law and the network provided by these relations.
In short, the relation between the virtual space and the daily life is based on a cooperation. It is because I have needed help before, to be hosted in France, that I need to be present when my pairs demand help. Although this flux does not enlighten a common identity that shares a belonging sentiment, the group has agency in what concerns the trajectories of all these migrants around Marseille and India.

THE RESTAURATION CIRCUIT: WORK AND INDENTITY FLOURISHMENT
The restauration field of Marseille is a space where the migration phenomenon is constantly notorious. The city center is the crib where remains this mixture between different food habits. The local economy is furthermore instigated, since the 17 th century, by foreign labor from migrants who arrived there in the search for a place of refuge. Since then, restaurants have been a profitable opportunity for the insertion of migrants in the local labor market.
All along the book by Simeng Wang (2017), it is distinguishable that the network which is engendered by Chinese citizens in the restauration circuit of Paris. For the author, these circuit is not only a way of providing host, but also a way of providing work and a social circle among other Chinese migrants. The relation between the suffering caused by the migrant condition and the way how it edifies expectations within the affection construction of these citizens who usually come from poor and agricultural regions of China. These expectations, that erstwhile caused a threat to hope and euphory to these individuals who nurtured expectations about job opportunities and better conditions of life in France, ended up being transformed into illusions and precarious jobs; such as overwhelming work journeys that made life closed around the restaurant. It is through the work opportunities that these migrants find their accommodation, commonly inside the products stock. Regarding Indian restaurants in Marseille, it is possible to notice that there are two groupsjust like the Turkish, African and Chinese restaurantsthat build the dynamic around the work space: the boss and their subordinates. The relations ordering these establishments are inserted in what is called by Larissa Lomnitz (2009b) as "boss-client relationship". Following the words of Lomnitz, this relationship [...] indicates that a hierarchy is not only an abstract organizational cadre where posts are filled by mutually exchangeable workers (…). In each articulation there is a flux of resources downward (job, protection, bureaucratic sponsorship) in exchange for work and loyalty. The boss provides security in the work, politic protection and personal support based on work, political accession and ideological loyalty (Ibidem, p. 48, translated by the author).
My fieldwork in Marseille had its beginning at the restaurants. This issue was a theme that was always shrouding the dialogues with my interlocutors. These establishments became the insertion environment whereby I could have access to the network that my interlocutors were part of. Through the observation of the daily process of these restaurants I could notice how the business operation is also nourished by a network course. It is through the technique of a floating observation that I put myself inside this network (PÉTONNET, 1982). The way in which one restaurant leads to the other in such a way that all of them are integrated in a space of information fluxes is what edifies the structure of these relationships.
From that, I think it is important to expose how one restaurant is linked to another and how their achievements had influences one upon another.
One of the first restaurants that I could visit was located in a neighborhood around Vieux-Port, the city landmark, where it is possible to find restaurants whose meals would cost five euros and others where we pay more than thirty or forty euros for dinner. At first sight, I was noticed by a Pakistan man, around thirty years old, who told me that the restaurant was going to be closed for the following months. It was, however, not true. During all the supposed renovation period, I passed by and noticed that everything was in full functioning as nothing had been previewed. In reality, it was a way of keeping me away and refusing my presence. Still, this man ended up suggesting many other restaurants in the same neighborhood where I could find other migrants that were not necessarily Indians, but Pakistanis or Bengalis who worked at those restaurants whose image was focused in a main identity: India.
Just one street behind this first restaurant, I found another one whose specialties were named as "Northern India food". The owner was a man, aged more than 70 years old, who lives alone in France. When I met him for the first time, he was being interviewed by another student (Indian just like him). For many times, I had the opportunity to meet him, even though our meetings were quick due to his obligations as a manager of a restaurant. As the routine is always placed inside the restaurantsin the morning, they open at nine o'clock, remaining in function till midnight, including holidays and weekend -, the contact with the cooks and the other workers was extremely difficult, once their lives have sense around this job. Alone at the restaurant, this old man told me that his life wouldn't be interesting to be studied by an anthropologist. He lives alone in France and all his family is in India. Indicated by him, I visited another restaurant placed just a few steps far away from this one. One restaurant leaded me to another. The owners knew one another and were used to establish relationships among them. They all knew the opening time, the time when the restaurant is closed for the customersbetween 2 pm and 7 pm. They turned out to be what is denominated above as a "communauté illusoire", as it is defined by Marc Augé (2010). The contact is always established because of the restaurants, only with the objective of being on the eye of their pairs.
Because of the indication of these old man, I was leaded to another restaurant whose ambiance is a family environment where I listened to the story of Gabrielle, 21 years old, student, born in France, daughter of Indian migrants. Firstly, we talked through the Facebook page of the restaurant. I sent them a message and, casually, it was her the responsible to manage the social media of her father's restaurant. Student in International Commerce at the École de management, she was born in France, one year after her parents' arrival, in 1998.
One of the reasons why they left India is due to her mother's origins. She was born in Pondicherry and she held the French nationality whereas her father had no other nationality than the Indian nationality. Aiming to found better job opportunities in Europe, both of them decided to come to France with the project of having a restaurant in Marseille, where her mother had part of her familythat had already emigrated to France. In this case in specific, migration takes place because of a network structure, kinship. It was the family and the consequent contact that is built through these relationships that opened the first door for this couple to come to Marseille at the end of the 1990s. 5 Despite French by nationality, her mother does not speak French at all. In fact, she does not even speak English, what keeps her closed in their apartment. Her father works every day, without any exception, at the restaurant. Gabrielle sometimes helps him serving the costumers and managing the restaurant websites. She affirms being always busy with her studies and reinforce that her friends are mostly French students. She does not know about the Indian population in the city, suggesting that the relation among her father and the other restaurant owners is only for work discussion. The exercise of promoting Indian food around the city is what nourishes their relation. Other examples can clarify this relation among Indian entrepreneurs.
Some weeks later I had the opportunity to meetthrough the contact with Baptiste, Bengali, 22 years old, refugee in France, René, 48 years old, Indian without French nationality who has been living in France for more than 26 years. Nowadays he is the owner of a grocery store in Noailles neighborhood, one of his brothers is the partner of Gabrielle's father in the restaurant what is located just a few meters away. It was ordinary along my fieldwork this shuttle back and forth among my interlocutors. This malleable condition edifies this network path we can categorize as a social network. Eventually, René's store is placed beside another "Indian and Pakistan cuisine" restaurant whose owner is Baptiste's uncle. Both Baptiste and René know each other because of their business. Whereas the first one is Muslim, the other is Sikh. What links them is one and only reason: work. One is beside the other. While Baptiste serves the customers at the restaurant, which is really simple and is similar to the kebabs of Belsunce neighborhood, René is at the grocery store. The contact with the two of them leaded me to another restaurant on the same street, where the majority of the workers is from Bangladesh. All of them knew each other due to the work journey, also because one is not far away from the other. Around the same area, I finally found another restaurant where, on the other hand, the workers were Pakistanis that at first sight demanded whether I was looking for a cook.
The Diwali party 6 came to me through this network path, bouche à oreille. It was Sunday afternoon and I decided to visit a restaurant on Avenue du Prado, a great boulevard that connects the city center to the most expansive neighborhoods, where the "bourgeoisie marseillaise" lives. The restaurant was crowded, there were many French people having their lunch there, experimenting the most different delicacies served. On the counter, an Indian worked. Living in France for more than 10 years, he has been working at the restauration circuit since his arrival. He decides then to indicate me a "party of Indians". On a small sheet, he writes the address and the hour. The party were going to take place at another restaurant by the beach. The owner of this restaurant, in his turn, was the owner of the same restaurant that had been visited by me the day before. These two establishments were managed by the same family. The space through which they transit is then restricted to some names that are spread throughout the city, for more than one restaurant. The owner of one restaurant, after his installation in the city, invest his money in another restaurant in another area of Marseille. For this reason, several restaurants are visible in the city, even if the owners are the same. It is another network, the network of the restaurant circuit.
Another restaurant I had the opportunity to keep contact with is placed around the neighborhood of Cours Julien, a bohemian quartier, on a street where we can find many other bars and a yoga center whose guru is a French woman who studied her method in India. At this restaurant, all the people who work there are from Pakistan, even the name of the restaurant refers to Pakistan. However, the food that is sold there is presented as Indian food. The owner of this last is also the owner of another restaurant placed just a few meters away, on the Place Notre Dame du Mont, where the waiter is Pakistani, where there is always an Indian cook working the kitchen. The food is the same that is served at the other restaurant placed around Cours Julien, what differentiates them is only location. At another restaurant settled at the other coin of the city, I knew Michel, owner of a small restaurant where he cooks himself and serve the customers alone, too.
In France for around 10 years, he firstly lived in Paris after his arrival with a tourist visa. Soon he found himself in the condition of an illegal migrant, called in France as sanspapiers. In Paris he worked for years as an electrician and could be regularized through his project of opening an Indian restaurant. His name came up during interactions with other interlocutors and also appeared in posts on the Facebook group. He is known for his restaurant and his food, but unfortunately, he has almost no relationship with the other Indian migrants who live in Marseille. On the same day when I was informed of the Diwali party I met him. Michel was also aware of the celebration that would occur the following day because of the contact of the other restaurants' owners. Nonetheless, he didn't know if he could be present.
The contact is thus the base on which they build their spaces within the restauration circuit of Indian food. Still, these links are restricted to work discussions. I know my market concurrents at the same time that I make myself to be known by them, but I do not nourish a relationship. That is the structure. It is through their "personal networks" in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh that the employees are hired. 7 The only link commonly stablished by all these interlocutors is the fact that they are inserted in the same job field, the restauration circuit.
In short, the connection among these restaurants and the owner can be interpreted as what is named, according to Barnes' theory (1987) as a partial network. In other words, a network whose conjoint of action is delimited to the activity they perform at work. The owners know each other and their subordinates are also in this acknowledgement movement because of the same element: the restaurant. All of them living especially in a city where migratory waves are part of its imaginary, migrants often know other migrants who have the same origins, come from the same country or region. On the other hand, business is an intermediate where richness, products and customers pass through. This movement all along these elements is the base of the network phenomenon. Mitchell (1971), in his study about urban networks affirms that an aspect such as gossip sharing if extremely elated to information exchange, nourishing the contact among individuals who see themselves in similar positions. In the case here analyzed, information regarding a new concurrent, concerning a new unemployed migrant who arrives in the city, are the ways to build a space where these migrants can circulate cooperatively.
In this sense, constructing a network among the restaurant means to be visible and highlighted within this cluster. Even though the relation is usually based on subordination between boss and employee, the information flux about the arrival of a new Indian in Marseille or a brand-new restaurant are the keys to develop a contact. Anyhow, these relationships remain closed to the professional environment, without a further affective complexity. From the own condition of "specialized" labor, that is a migrant capable of reproducing the food which he is used to, that the position he will occupy is conceived.

CONCLUSIONS
The observation of these networks shows us that it is notorious that the contact accomplished by these Indian migrants on a virtual environment is significant for a dynamic based on cooperation and solidarity. It is their common origins that gather them, even if their trajectories are different. At the restaurants, acknowledgment touches the economic sphere. In other words, I know my concurrent and circulate around this network whose roots are forged in the act of providing an original "Indian food". The origins of those who work at these restaurants are not, however, all the same.
The links that are part of this network are kept through the contact with institutions such as family and marriage. Hence, social networks act like a propitious space to information exchange. Thinking about migration from the marginal reality that is present before the immigration society is essential for us to build a solidary perspective in urban contexts, as a way of maintaining not only affective relationships, but mainly economic and job relations.
Along this article, I searched to construct an ethnography based on the contact with migrants that had common origins which reassemble to the colonial period, an identity based on the Indian subcontinent space. Howbeit India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are a mighty nationalist conflicts area, cooperation and solidarity emerges as a nourishing way of edifying an Eurocentric imaginary regarding orientalism and cultural hybridism.
The first section was dedicated to describe lived experiences in the virtual environment, from an ethnography on a Facebook group. As the narrative follows, throughout the second section I bring up restaurants as a particular environment in what concerns culture promotion, the construction of an affective place, and a power game over job relations. In this sense, this article comes up as an entrance for different ethnographies accomplished in different contexts in order to enlighten an image of different solidarity forms in urban contexts, which surpasses borders, classes and origins. Thus, it is the marginality lived around the migrant condition that provides an environment where affects are based on otherness.