Episode 15: Neither Here Nor There
In this episode of the Therapeutic Landscapes podcast, Rebecca Burns speaks with Maria Laguna, who works with immigrant patients in private practice and teaches about migration issues from a psychoanalytic perspective.
The conversation explores diasporic placemaking, and how migrant communities create spaces of belonging while living with the complexity of feeling neither fully here nor fully there. Drawing on examples from New York, Los Angeles, Montevideo and Rome, Maria reflects on the ways people recreate familiarity, connection, memory and cultural identity in new and sometimes unfamiliar environments.
Maria’s work is informed by the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, particularly his ideas around transitional spaces, play, creativity and culture. In the episode, she connects Winnicott’s thinking with the experience of migration, suggesting that diasporic spaces can function a little like transitional objects: they carry something of home into a new world, helping people feel held, recognised and safe enough to express themselves.
Maria discusses community gardens in New York, Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, Candombe in Barrio Sur, Montevideo, and Las Leonas, a documentary about migrant women playing football on the outskirts of Rome. Each example opens a different way of thinking about how people make home through shared practices: planting, dancing, drumming, cooking, speaking, gathering, organising, playing and remembering.
A central theme in the episode is belonging. Maria describes belonging as relational, something that requires safety, recognition and a welcoming environment. It is not only about nationality or cultural heritage, but about where we see ourselves reflected, where we are allowed to take up space, and where we can bring different parts of ourselves into relationship with others.
The episode also explores cultural mourning, and the many losses that can accompany migration: language, food, familiar sounds, plants, neighbourhoods, humour, rituals, ways of dressing, and the everyday sensory details that help a place feel like home. Diasporic placemaking becomes one way of tending to that grief, a way of creating living spaces where memory, adaptation and new belonging can coexist.
Maria also reflects on safety and activism, and the ways migrant communities often have to defend the places they have made, especially in the face of gentrification, racism, xenophobia and displacement. In this sense, placemaking is not only therapeutic, but also political. It is a way of saying: we are here, we belong, and our cultures, bodies, languages and histories matter.
Towards the end of the conversation, Maria returns to the importance of play. In Winnicott’s work, play is not frivolous or secondary; it is central to creativity, culture and psychological life. Maria invites us to think about what we loved as children, when we felt most alive, and who made us feel that what we put into the world mattered.
This is a conversation about home as something creative, relational and multiple.
Home can be remembered.
Home can be carried.
Home can be mourned.
Home can be remade.
Home can appear in a garden, a song, a football field, a drum rhythm, a meal, a language, a colour, a shared joke, or a place where we are safe enough to play.
It is an episode about migration, belonging, cultural memory and the spaces we create when we need somewhere, and someone, to help us feel human again.
Bio
María Verónica Laguna is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, educator, and clinical supervisor based in Uruguay. With over a decade of clinical and social work experience in New York City, she worked in transitional housing, outpatient clinics, and private practice. She lectures internationally on Social Work, Critical Psychology, migration, and intersectionality. Founder of The Bicultural Collective and curator of Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, she supports bicultural individuals and clinicians at the intersection of practice and activism. She has authored chapters on immigrant self-states (Nomos Verlag, 2025) and Ferenczi’s psychoanalysis in dialogue with Critical Psychology (INM Editora, forthcoming)
Links
Find out more about Maria’s work:
Instagram: @mariaverolaguna and @migrantes UY
Conference Panel: Diasporic Placemaking as Healing and Resistance