ABSTRACT
In this chapter we take up the ways in which a transnational family engages in the between spaces of identities, places and language practices. As a point of focus, we consider the case of Neide, a young mother of two children, who immigrated from Brazil, and who went to great lengths to connect her life in the US, for herself and her children, to her history in Brazil. These between spaces of Neide’s practices with language, home décor, food and other cultural practices are described as movements across intervals rather than as settled blends or hybrids. Neide’s sense-making practices are carried forward in the differences produced by contact, by ongoing movement in an unstable, highly active and affectively charged manner of being both translingual and transnational. A Deleuze-Guattarian approach to thinking and feeling the interval is valuable for sensing the affective intensities of the flows and rhythms of differentiating raw energy in the evergoing creation of people and places. Just as Neide affectively experiences her world in movements across intervals, we consider also how we, as researchers, produce differences across the intervals through which we experience the data. Given our very different sociocultural histories, we bring these intervals to the fore in our writing. This meant not merely interpreting or reading gaps, cuts or intervals, although we tried to suggest the possibilities for movement in as a way of sensing and feeling the data. This process also meant drawing attention to the value of the intervals created by feeling alongside, by knowing alongside, and by doing that as a couple, with intervals between us.
