ABSTRACT
Transnationalism and more generally transnational studies emerged in the early 1990s precisely as a methodological, epistemological, and political response to the challenge of thinking the brave new world that globalization had produced. It is not surprising that a number of the key texts in the emergence of transnational studies were in fact devoted to Latin American and Caribbean migrations to the United States. Transnationalism's early promise was predicated on a number of possible effects the new field could have on existing social and knowledge configuration. In an early and influential critique of transnationalism, "The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field", Alejandro Portes, Luis Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt proposed to disentangle transnationalism, as a new field of study, from a series of internal contradictions and claims generated by both practitioners and its critics.
