Heritage With No Fixed Abode: Transforming Cultural Heritage for Migrant Communities in Inner-City Leeds

This paper reports on the second phase of the AHRC-funded Translation and Translanguaging (TLang) project, on the theme of Heritage. The Key Participant for the Heritage theme in Leeds is Monika, a young Slovak Roma woman living and working in inner-city Leeds. Monika and her brother Ivan each aspire to setting up cultural spaces for the Roma people in their area. The activities they hope to initiate will safeguard and transmit to others that which is important to them – their heritage – including music, food, dance. As yet, there is no such space for the Roma in Leeds, and in this respect they are attempting to make something happen where there is currently nothing. We follow Monika in particular, as she attempts to bring her ideas into being. With the support of others, Monika tries to transform her available cultural capital into something that will preserve and consolidate heritage but will also earn her a living. This she does by starting to set up a social enterprise. Among other activities this entails the completion of a business plan. We follow her as the plan moves through stages of transformation, and in the process see her dreams and aspirations become both tangible and at the same time constrained. In the later parts of the paper we examine familiar tokens of cultural heritage, food and music, that play a part in the daily lives of Monika and her family, but which (in the case of food) Ivan is attempting to transform from cultural to economic capital, to make something that provides a living.