Previous migration studies tend to draw an implicit line between the place and time of migration (past) and the current place and time (present). Yet this approach fails to address how pre-migration memories emerge and appear in migrants’ daily lives. In particular, research has not addressed: (i) how migrants’ present lives evoke memories of their past, or how consumption may reproduce pre-migration routines and knowledge, and (ii) how consumption is used in recalling past memories into the present, even if this leads to conflict between what is remembered and what is experienced. We explore these questions through migrants’ pre- and post-migration memories, and how they manifest through consumption. In doing so we address research calls to understand how people encode and retrieve memories (Hastie and Dawes 2001) and identity-based consumer memories (Mercurio and Forehand 2011)
