Imagining 'Home' An Ethnography of a U.S. Expatriate Community in San Crist�bal de las Casas, Mexico

Date of Award

2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Vesperi, Maria

Keywords

Expatriation, Mexico, Imagined Community, Displacement

Area of Concentration

Anthropology

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnography of a u.S. expatriate community in San Crist�bal de las Casas, Mexico; the research is based on four-and-a-half months of field work involving participant-observation and both formal and informal interviews. As a response to Dennison Nash's ethnography A Community in Limbo: An Anthropological Study of an American Community Abroad (1970), this thesis utilizes contemporary anthropological understandings of space, place, and community to understand issues of cohesiveness, conflict, and the construction of national and transnational identities among the expatriates. I will examine how displacement is experienced by the U.S. expatriates--including their motivations for relocating, success at incorporation into the host community, and imaginings of both the homeland and the site of expatriation--in comparison to the experience of other (voluntary) forms of displacement. Of particular interest are the conditions of privilege which enable the expatriate project, the power relations at hand in processes of place-making, and how this endeavor is contested by the host society's own construction of place.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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