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Description
Throughout the past three decades, a tremendous growth of international migration has coincided with the conceptual development of a transnational perspective among scholars in the social sciences. Increasingly, particular interest has been devoted to understanding the various connections and linkages that extend beyond national borders and tie distant individuals to one another. A great deal of literature now highlights how transnationalism provides social, political, and economic support for migrants in multiple and seemingly detached places. Although much work in migration studies now acknowledges and addresses some dimension of a transnational perspective, much less has explored its numerous dimensions and diversity, especially its more injurious varieties, which accordingly, are disproportionately experienced. In an effort to extend such an analysis, I trace how transnational networks, between indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico and migrants in Southern California, materialize and are experienced in multiple and contradictory ways, many of which exhibit inequitable and exclusionary characteristics. Such an aim also includes exploring how differences are individually lived and felt through processes of transnationalism and migration. I argue that transnational networks between communities and individuals, in places such as Oaxaca and Southern California, are much more divergent and heterogeneous than previously theorized. Consequently, a more robust analysis of transnationalism and transnational networks — as heterogeneous, ephemeral, or uneven — is necessary to account for the complexity, difference, and plurality of transnational processes in the everyday lives of migrants and their families.
