ABSTRACT
Experiments in economic development, contingent to fl ows of transnational investment and disinvestment, set up the particular contexts for different ways of traveling in history. A focus on the everyday experiences of children and youth offers a critical site for theorising the links between past, present, and future and for discerning the unexpected, contradictory, messy yet inventive ways in which communities navigate political and economic agendas. This chapter explores the experiences of children and youth in a Mexican peasant community that has been recently incorporated into transnational circuits of undocumented labor migration to the United States. It is concerned with the ways in which Mexican rural youth are being uprooted from subsistence activities in their local communities and incorporated into transnational spaces and global consumer practices and identities. In doing so, it also uncovers how youth negotiate the incorporation of new material social practices while struggling to forge new forms of belonging to rural spaces and social life.
