ABSTRACT

One by one, El Morro1 collects empty Modelo beer cans and places them in the Modelo carton, gliding languidly about the room on this seemingly endless Sunday afternoon in July. With all of the Modelo cans carefully arranged, the skinny teenager begins to target abandoned Bud Light bottles, and gently places each one in a Bud Light box. Behind him, the bare white walls are adorned with green and red paper Christmas decorations that are draped in two long loops and one long festive tail above the dining table. Just beside the table, a quiet man has commandeered the single comfortable over-stuffed chair and intently studies an English phrase book, turning the pages slowly and deliberately. A stick-style vacuum cleaner leans against a television stand which itself is shoved against a fuzzy brown air mattress in the corner. Three plastic lawn chairs, an ironing board, and two 20-pound dumbbells provide the rest of the furnishings in the room. ‘Anything but Los Temerarios’ shouts Uriel, above the drone and static of the television, waving his hand in the direction of the music. Interrupting his activity of organizing empty beer bottles and cartons, El Morro walks over to the ironing board, where a boom box is perched, and begins flipping through a wallet of CDs. ‘What do you want to hear? How about Los Tucanes de Tijuana?’ El Morro’s household, his mundane activities, and those of his roommates’ provide a window on the complexities of transnational living for unauthorized Mexican immigrants in central North Carolina. Their lives, in turn, illustrate profound changes in the state and in the region known as the United States South. This region of the country, the southeastern part of the United States, has a distinct social history and character. Contemporary observers apply the label ‘New South’

as a way to accentuate recent changes in this seemingly unchanging place. Mexican migration and rapid demographic change are transforming urban and rural places in central North Carolina and indeed throughout the New South region. What does daily life look like from the perspective of El Morro’s apartment? Caring relationships are palpable in his crowded male-only residence. Still, there is a fragility and fluidity to some of these homo-social relationships which derive from makeshift arrangements that are subject to change when other opportunities, or when different specific needs arise. Of course, the teenager and his roommates also have intimate and caring relationships that ‘stretch’ many miles beyond this household to spouses, children, parents, and other loved ones in other locations, in central and southern Mexico (Massey, 1994; Massey and Jess, 1995). The translocal geography of these complex circuits, webs, and networks of local and ‘stretched’ relationships influences the way El Morro and his roommates live and the ways in which they seek to provide for themselves, their families, and loved ones. A key facet of these complex geographies is the way in which these geographical connections trace circuits of consumption and networks for social reproduction, particularly the social reproduction of labor. This chapter explores transnationality, transnational ways of living and transnational lives through a discussion of Latino and Latina (especially, yet not at all exclusively, Mexican) working-class social networks and social spaces. Transnationality involves living intimately in two or more places at the same time. The stories that follow illustrate ways in which daily needs and activities are affected by transnational living. As migrants endeavor to meet their own needs and sustain the integrity and health of their bodies, they draw upon and create geographically extensive networks of care and care-giving. These networks often include local and distant households that share resources as we see in El Morro’s and Luis’s narratives. Many migrants maintain close linkages among distant households with frequent phone calls and regular remittances of money to parents, children, and others in Mexico. In Luis’s case, we see that migrants also make elaborately planned return trips to Mexico when finances, resilience, and time permits. Trips, phone calls, remittances knit together the personal geographies of sustenance for individual migrants and their families and communities. In central North Carolina and throughout the U.S. South, migrants also create new Mexican social spaces that exist as a kind of parallel world that is sometimes nearly invisible to long-term southerners. In Lorena’s story, we observe how her troubled social life unfolds in the Latino nightclubs and bar scene of central North Carolina and how, in turn, this network of Mexican social spaces provides a location for emotional expression and release. All of these personal narratives highlight the complex activity spaces that unauthorized Mexicans occupy in the U.S. South. By using space in a profoundly novel way, this transnational way of living has a radical impact on space itself. As parallel worlds are constructed around Mexican and multiple Latino identities, local spaces are fragmented and scrambled in ways that might result if the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle had been tossed into the air to fall freely where they may. On closer inspection, however, one can walk through the correct parallel door and

enter entire coherent worlds that exist beneath one’s nose, like the imaginary Bizzaro world of Superman comics. The social spaces of Mexican nightclubs, rural flea markets, and local and distant households are bound together by the relationships and movements of Mexican migrants themselves. The focus of this on-going and extensive ethnographic project in central North Carolina is on Mexican unauthorized migrants. Specific spaces and circuits of activity include: dancehalls, flea markets, workplaces, churches, households, apartment complexes, tiendas, public streets, bars and social service agencies. An ethnographic approach explores ordinary daily activities in these social spaces in an effort to engage and extend social theoretic debates about social reproduction, gender, globalization, and transnationality. The research draws on participant observation as well as open-ended interviews and surveys, first having focused on rural and agricultural immigrants and shifting over time to urban sites. The southeastern United States is of particular interest because of its unique social history and because of the rapid pace of change in the region as Latino immigrants establish communities throughout the region. It is useful to underline the importance of the places in which people support and sustain themselves: households, neighborhoods, spaces for socializing and leisure activity. These places, and the geographies that link them, are important analytically because they are sites of the social reproduction of labor-power, or in other words the very production and maintenance of life itself. In Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction (2003), Mitchell, Marston and Katz emphasize the importance of the social reproduction of labor-power with the simple yet revealing title ‘life’s work’. These theorists emphasize the significance of the unpaid, often undervalued, and sometimes-invisible realm of work that we must do on a daily and generational basis to sustain our families and ourselves. Mitchell, Marston and Katz also underline the usefulness of coming to terms with the “formation of the ‘neoliberal subject’ in relation to the current regime of accumulation and in relation to the state” (p. 3). In this chapter, I suggest that Latinos in North Carolina and in the U.S. South are buffeted by a neoliberal logic that undercuts social support systems and devolves social support to smaller and smaller geographical scales. In response, working class Mexican immigrants wage a politics of geographical scale as they construct transnational geographies, especially translocal networks of support and sustenance. In doing so, these immigrants use space creatively to counteract neoliberal dynamics and maintain vast transnational networks that they can mobilize as needed. There is an expanding literature on transnationality (Schiller et al., 1992; Pries, 1999; Goldring, 2001; Leavitt and Waters, 2002).2 The interdisciplinary nature of these investigations is an advantage that can turn to disadvantage when researchers delve into concerns as diverse as identity formation, postnational politics, the reorganization of the relationship between the local and the global through the logic of late capitalism, and the processes by which transmigrants link their societies of origin and settlement and through which they create transnational social fields that span national borders (Leavitt and Waters, 2002). The focus here on transnational social spaces in the lives of transnational migrants is an effort to

see and understand the politics of daily life in ways that engage and extend feminist understandings of globalization (Nagar et al., 2002; Eschle, 2001; Freeman, 2001). Transnational migrants are among the neglected ‘subjects and spaces of globalization’ that merit wider attention in social science debates (Nagar et al., 2002). I believe further elaboration is possible through gleaning insights from the most ordinary activities of transnational migrants. Specifically, as documented below, the enactment of care-giving and the expression of gender and sexuality are tightly bound up with migrants’ efforts to compensate for systems of state social provision and household support that have been left behind in the move from Mexico (or elsewhere). The transnational search for work requires abandoning certain channels of support; while one’s physical and emotional survival necessitates the construction of new social networks of care and care giving. In constructing these social fields, migrants encounter and engage multiple sex/gender systems in households, social spaces, public sites, workplaces and other circuits of daily routine (Rubin, 1993). The interaction of these multiple sex/gender systems provides ongoing challenges to migrants while also serving as a source of creativity and self expression (Cravey, 2005). Thus, gender and sexuality are crucial analytical issues for understanding Mexican transnational experience (Hirsch, 2003; Hogdagneu-Sotelo, 1994). Generational and geographical shifts are transforming the nature of Mexican marriage and sexuality and immigrants themselves distinguish Mexico from the United States in gendered terms (Hirsch, 2003; Hogdagneu-Sotelo, 1994). In these ways among others, changing notions of masculinity and femininity are clearly caught up with ideas of modernity and experiences of migration (Hirsch, 2003; Gutmann, 1996). Explaining gendered notions of identity as well as gendered divisions of household labor can illuminate some of the contours of these transformations (Hogdagneu-Sotelo, 1994). The chapter proceeds as follows. I begin by describing the general situation of Latinos and Latinas in the United States South and, more specifically, in North Carolina. These recent migration flows are directly tied to contemporary global production change, and are distinct from earlier migration flows to the United States in several ways. From this contextual background, I turn to an examination of some specific places that extend and substitute for household and family relationships-I focus on dance halls, bars, apartments, and households to illuminate some of the everyday ways transnational identities and social relationships are sustained and reproduced in order to shift the angle of view to the scale of daily life. Mainstream corporate, government, and academic representations of globalization tend to neglect this scale. To take that same stance as a critic of neoliberal globalization discourses is to reify this one understanding of globalization. On the other hand, a shift in scale can reveal crucial dynamics that, when examined closely, suggest an alternative version of globalization, one based less on governmental and economic understandings and more on personal, day-to-day lives of individuals swept up in globalization processes. (Cravey, 2005).