In this paper, I analyze works portraying migration: Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você (2009), by Luiz Ruffatto, a work centered on the story of a Brazilian migrant to Lisbon, and Mar Paraguayo (1992 ), by Wilson Bueno, which recounts the tale of a Paraguayan prostitute living in Guaratuba. Specifically, I argue that contemporary migration- themed novels challenge, stretch and/or interrupt narrative time-space cohesion by obscuring, often gradually, the boundaries between the national and transnational. I examine space both in the concrete sense, in domestic and urban realms, as well as metaphorically. Within this expanded theoretical framework, I argue that these works not only test the idea of space, but also generate new or alternative spatial possibilities from which we can observe the construction and maintenance of identity.
migration; immigration; transnationality; spatial theory