Date:
Location:
"The Economic Side of Social Remittances: the Circulation of Money and Ideas between New York, Paris, and Dakar”
Speaker:
Ilka Vari-Lavoisier, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), University of Pennsylvania.
"Chicano Spirituality in the Construction of an Imagined Nation: Aztlán"
Speaker:
Renee de la Torre, Professor, CIESAS Occidente-University of Guadalajara, Mexico.
Discussant:
Peggy Levitt, Associate. Chair; Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Wellesley College.
Contact:
John Arroyo
arroyojc@mit.edu
Chairs:
Peggy Levitt, Associate. Chair; Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Wellesley College.
Jocelyn Viterna, Faculty Associate. Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Harvard University.
Abstract (Vari-Lavoisier):
This paper shows how economic remittances undergird the circulation of social remittances between New York, Paris, and Dakar. It compares the transnational practices of Senegalese-born migrants living in France and in the United States during the 2012 Senegalese presidential campaign to demonstrate how economic and political transnational practices mutually reinforce each other. This project thus brings together studies of economic remittances on the one hand, and studies of social remittances on the other, two bodies of evidence that have been separated thus far. It claims that a theoretical approach drawn from economic sociology can encompass and further conclusions produced by the scholarship investigating the migration-development nexus.
Abstract (de la Torre):
The Mexican-Americans living in the southern states of the U.S.A. have created an imagined nation named Aztlán. Their movement, known also as the Chicano movement has been classified as politico-cultural, since it aims at both the protection of their civil rights and the defense of their binational identity. However we wish to highlight its spiritual content. Through the practice of ritual dances, myths and sacred symbols the Mexican-Americans or Chicanos have been able to generate the consciousness of a spiritual nation that today unites Mexican populations living on both sides of the U.S.–Mexican border. We shall describe how this account of an imagined nation is in turn sustained by cultural strategies for rescuing folklore, as well as by a conquest of memory, and of public spaces like the Chicano Park in San Diego, California. These spaces, the same as artistic demonstrations and political actions, have acquired an almost religious mystique, based on the postcolonial utopia of a return to Aztec origins, and the current construction of the promised land of Aztlán. In particular, the case of the anniversary of the most important sanctuary of Mexicanism in the United States, Chicano Park in San Diego, organized by groups of Chicano Aztec dancers, will provide us with ethnographic material to demonstrate the symbolic efficacy of these cultural strategies.
