ABSTRACT
The following article discusses the transatlantic constitution of couples and their mobility in the framework of encounters and passionate convergences between European tourists and Brazilian women in the neighborhood of Ponta Negra, the main international tourist destination in the city of Natal in northeast Brazil. The analysis is structured by means of two central principles: (i) a gauging of how some of the intimate bonds forged in the context of mass tourism are maintained from a distance and further developed upon the tourists’ return to Europe; (ii) and an understanding of strategies for managing the travel and residence solutions required by the maintenance of such bonds and their consolidation. By means of a roving and multi-location ethnographic study carried out on both sides of the Atlantic, empirical data sustaining the analysis demonstrates that the European-Brazilian couples and their degrees of mobility considered here are intrinsically associated with flexible and far-reaching bonds of intimacy, residency and, even, citizenship.
international couples; tourism; migrations; flexibility; Brazil-Europe