Shadow mobilities: regulating migrant bicyclists in rural Ontario, Canada

This article explores bicycling practices among migrant farmworkers in rural southwestern Ontario, Canada. Migrant farmworkers are legally authorized to work in Canada for designated farm operations for up to eight months a year. Migrants lack access to cars in rural regions where motorized travel predominates. Consequently, bicycling is an essential yet inadequate and unsafe means of transportation for migrants, part of everyday geographies of what Tim Cresswell calls ‘shadow citizenship’. I use shadow citizenship to refer to the overlapping regulatory and geographical exclusions from mobility rights that create risk and stigma for migrants in Canadian communities. Migrants have become subjects of bike safety education in rural communities. I argue that bike safety regulates and orders migrants’ bicycling conduct rather than addressing the roots of unsafe bicycling conditions. Overall, the article complicates the conventional view of bicycling as a universally healthy and progressive travel mode. Racial and economic forms of exploitation as well as socio-spatial exclusions inflect actually existing bicycling geographies.