ABSTRACT

This chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork with Latin Americans in Ireland. It explores how they have experienced transnational life, belonging and intergenerational relationships, and how their subjectivities and understandings of the social and cultural changing contexts in which they live have been shaped by these successive migration experiences and transnational circulations. Migrant children find themselves at the crossroads of divergent and contradictory cultural politics and sociopolitical projects. Latin American families in Ireland aim to provide their children with material and symbolic consumption practices belonging to First World modernity, such as international travel and goods, the most enduring foundation of middle-class identities. Ireland became a country of immigration under the particular conditions of EU membership and the penetration of transnational capitalism in the Celtic Tiger story of development. The transformations of Irish society in the last decade are exemplary of the condition of life in contemporary social formations marked by instability, volatile economic conditions, and the transnationalisation of labor markets.