An explanation of how Peruvian migrants maintain meaningful social relations across borders.

In this engaging volume, Ulla D. Berg examines the conditions under which Peruvians of rural and working-class origins leave the central highlands to migrate to the United States. Migrants often create new portrayals of themselves to overcome the class and racial biases that they had faced in their home country, as well as to control the images they share of themselves with others back home. Migrant videos, for example, which document migrants' lives for family back home, are often sanitized to avoid causing worry.

By exploring the ways in which migration is mediated between the Peruvian Andes and the United States, this book makes a major contribution to understanding technology's role in fostering new forms of migrant sociality and subjectivity. It focuses on the forms of sociality and belonging that these mediations enable, adding to important anthropological debates about affect, subjectivity, and sociality in today's mobile world. It also makes significant contributions to studies of inequality in Latin America, showcasing the intersection of transnational mobility with structures and processes of exclusion in both national and global contexts.

A key resource for understanding the experiences of racialized and indigenous migrant populations, Mobile Selves demonstrates the critical role that ethnography can play in transdisciplinary migration studies and exemplifies what comparative migration studies stand to gain from anthropological analysis and ethnographic methodologies.

Ulla D. Berg is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Latino Studies at Rutgers University (NJ). She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in the central highlands of Peru and among migrants from this area in the United States. She is the co-editor of Transnational Citizenship Across the Americas.

Contents

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

Part I. Cosmopolitan Desires

1. Salir Adelante: Migration, Travel, and Aspirational Economies in the Central Andes 43

2. Paper Fixes: The Making of Mobile Subjects in Peru's Migration Industry 73

Part II. Transnational Socialities

3. Remote Sensing: Structures of Feeling in Long-Distance Communication 105

4. Unfortunate Visibilities: The Transnational Circulation of Image-Objects 141

Part III. Discrepant Publics

5. Enframing Peruvianness: Folkloric Citizenship and Immigrant Personhood 177

6. Phantom Citizens in El Quinto Suyo 209

Conclusion 231

Notes 247

Bibliography 263

Index 293

About the Author 304