Mobile Selves

Book excerpt: Mobile Selves illuminates how transnational communicative practices and forms of exchange produce new forms of kinship, social relations, and subjectivities for global labor migrants. It shows how migrants create and circulate new portrayals of themselves, which work both to challenge the class and racial biases that they had faced in their home country and to shape how they construct and experience their mobility, and reenvision themselves and their communities in the process. In this engaging volume Ulla D. Berg examines the conditions under which racialized Peruvians of rural and working-class origins leave the central highlands of Peru to migrate to the United States, how they fare, and what constrains their movement and their attempts to maintain meaningful social relations across borders. By exploring the ways in which migration is mediated between the Peruvian Andes and the United States-by documents, money, and images and objects in circulation-this book makes a major contribution to the documentation and theorization of the role of technology and, more broadly, of communicative practices in fostering new forms of migrant sociality and subjectivity. In its focus on the forms of person-hood and belonging that these mediations enable, the volume adds to key 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.