Mediating self and community: Membership, sociality, and communicative practices in Peruvian migration to the United States

This dissertation examines the role of communicative practices in shaping social cohesion in the context of contemporary Peruvian migration to the US. By comparing older techniques of "community-production", including compadrazgo and membership in cofradias devoted to saint's images, with newer ones including internet communication, phone calls, and circulation of videos, I analyze how US-based migrants and their families in Peru engage in long-distance maintenance and reproduction of social ties and accomplish social obligations in various locales. In particular, I show how "older" and "newer" technologies work simultaneously to produce new forms of sociality and reproducibility, which, in turn, legitimize migrants' claims to belonging at various scales including the family, local communities, nation states, and diasporic political constituencies.;The connection of people to places in contexts of mobility is thus a central thread running through this dissertation. Taking my point of departure in a historical analysis of the role of mobility in the production of livelihood and community in the Andes, I show how contemporary migration of Peruvians to the US is continuous with previous practices of mobility characteristic of Andean life. I also argue that the scale and meaning of this mobility has changed. "Time-space compression" and the new global economy of flexible accumulation have transformed contemporary migration and the possibilities of maintaining links between places, but have not reduced the challenges implied in asserting membership in various social contexts simultaneously. This dissertation shows how migrants of rural and working-class extraction and their family members in Peru undertake hard work to produce specific kinds of agency, subjectivity, and sociability, which in turn are shaped by complex politics of affect, loyalty, and belonging. Throughout the dissertation, I attend to how factors such as class, gender, generation, regional origin, and the political economy of everyday life shape such attempts to claim membership and belonging.;By studying how migrants, their families, and the Peruvian state use communicative practices to produce social cohesion across transnational space, this dissertation offers new ethnographically-based insights not only into the constitution of collectivities in contexts of mobility, but also to the nature of contemporary migration itself.