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The Baia Mare region was once one of Romania's main mining centres, with a significant proportion of the local population engaged in industry jobs. However, the extensive economic restructuring that followed the collapse of the old communist regime and the emergence of capitalist development was characterized by brutal privatization measures and great economic instability. While the transition years brought new opportunities for some, for most they meant unstable housing and employment, debt, and a declining social status. Thus, many workers quickly became ‘surplus populations’ (Li 2017) and were forced into patterns of circular migration abroad. Employing a qualitative research methodology, analysing both interviews and secondary data, this paper will focus on the adaptive responses of workers from Baia Mare to the changes in the socio-economic landscape after the collapse of the communist regime and the advance of neoliberal policies in Romania. In particular, the paper looks at Roma and non-Roma migrants from Baia Mare, attempting to compare their strategies and work histories in the context of migration, to see the extent to which class and race differences play a role in creating specific migration patterns in the post-socialist context. The comparison between racialized people living in improvised shelters on the periphery of Baia Mare and those who are working class but not living in a situation of destitution will show us the role that dispossession plays in creating certain conditions that lead to debt dependency and specific migration patterns.

Tracing the history of the Kowie River in the Eastern Cape, Jacklyn Cock writes: "For me, the Kowie ... connects a personal and a collective history, the social and the ecological, the sacred and the profane" (Writing the Ancestral River. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2018, p. 4). She goes on to detail the initiation and induction practices of the Xhosa people indigenous to the Kowie, and then the historical dispossession of these people after the Battle of Grahamstown in 1819. The colonial construction of a harbour in 1838 was, much later, followed by the capitalist development of a marina in 1989. These "developments" caused both ecological damage to the Kowie and economic devastation for the Xhosa. In this article, Cock's book is juxtaposed against another river-based text, Dominique Botha's debut novel False River (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2013), which centres on the farm Rietpan in what was formerly the Orange Free State. Because water is so scarce in South Africa, rivers are divided and violently contested. Botha's text shares with Cock's book not only a history of colonialism in which indigenous people are dispossessed, but also an ecological vision that offers social solutions to this violence. Cock writes: "Perhaps we can connect with our very different histories through our ancestors, and with nature and justice through rivers" (144–45). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]