ABSTRACT
In the writings of History, Geography, and Social Theory the United States has long been discursively tethered to concepts of mobility. Zelinsky epically remarked how ‘The love of change and of all forms of mobility, an innate restlessness, is one of the prime determinants of the structure of the American national character’ (1973, 53). Movement, travel, and immigration are key tropes in the national narrative economy (Kouwenhoven 1961; Boorstin 1966; Baudrillard 1988); they are crucial mechanisms through which individuals overcome nature as wilderness (Turner 1947) and cultivate community out of diversity (Agnew and Smith 2003). Despite the United States’ representational affinity with the concept of mobility, making movement meaningful necessarily depends on a host of material social practices emerging from and embedded in grounded spaces (Cresswell 2001; Crang 2002; Blunt 2007). In the following pages we explore two of these grounded spaces where one kind of movement, immigration, is invested with meaning through the practices of regulation and commemoration.
