Diaspora and Discourse

Abstract

The regular refraction of one's present life through a prism of counterpoint – or “contrapuntal” – lives realizable elsewhere is an important feature of the social life of global processes such as international migration. This chapter explores the contrapuntal lives of working-class residents of a neighborhood in the Mexican city of Uriangato, which has high levels of migration to the United States. The chapter focuses on “non-migrants”: people with friends and family in the United States who regularly contemplate migration through the imagination of contrapuntal lives. It employs the concepts of “transnationalism” and “diaspora” as ways to think through different types of relationships people form with their contrapuntal lives – where the former entails the construction of a sense of simultaneity and accessibility and the latter entails the construction of a barrier between the life one can realize and the life one feels an obligation to possess. A key site for the production of contrapuntal lives is everyday talk about migration, or “migration discourse.” Uriangatense migration discourse and the contrapuntal lives expressed through it are organized around a modernist binary that constructs the United States as a land of economic mobility and Mexico as a land of moral superiority. As the chapter shows, the relationships that non-migrants establish to their contrapuntal lives through migration discourse express a critical commentary on the failures of socioeconomic mobility in Mexico, articulating a “diaspora at home,” in which working-class people cannot access the lives they feel both a moral and a national imperative to realize.

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