ABSTRACT
The pivotal theme of this chapter was to answer a straightforward, yet complex, question: what strategies did a group of Portuguese truck drivers put forward to cope with a geography of harshness? In other words, how did the drivers cope with a spatiality that was fundamentally characterised by rigid routes and routines, added to the uncertainties of robberies, police inspections and severe delays in loading cargo? The data produced during a three-month ethnographic fieldwork pointed towards one direction: the drivers turned to their origins, to their locality, to their country, so as to create safeness and familiarity in an extremely unfriendly environment. They produced and reproduced telluric identities of Portugueseness, re-lodging them in/for a context of mobility. Rather than engaging in cultural exchange, the drivers transported their previous belongings onto the road, reproducing them, deepening them, so as to empty mobility of its transnationalising or hybridising agency. This delivered a treasured ontological security to them. In the process, their mobility became the antonym of the exciting, modern and cosmopolitan mobility envisaged by models of European citizenship. It was a non-empowering movement. A mobility of confinement. A practice of mobility in Europe, but not of European mobility.
