1. Identity Dance: Negotiating Membership and the Contours of a Transnational Community.
- Author
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Citeroni, Tracy B. and Cervantes-Carson, Alejandro R.
- Subjects
TRANSNATIONALISM ,UNITED States emigration & immigration ,IMMIGRANTS ,INTELLECTUAL cooperation ,CULTURAL relations - Abstract
In this paper, we explore processes of identity formation in a community of transnational Mexican migrants. We analyze a Pre-Hispanic secular dance ritual unique to the people of one municipio in southern Puebla that is practiced in both the Mexican and U.S. contexts. We see the dance as a metaphor for the transnational community that exists between these distant locales, and we see it as an important cultural vehicle and strategy for consolidating identity and membership as well. We make the argument that, with its introduction to transnational migrant communities in the United States, we are witnessing a new era in the history of this living ritual. The cultural processes of identity formation embodied in the dance are open, fluid, and contested as the ritual is constantly being reinterpreted. We find evidence of this in disagreements over meaning, interpretation and performance. Our analysis is based on ethnographic research we have been conducting in this transnational community over the past three years. We have generated data through participant-observation, formal and informal interviews, and visual sociological methods. In this paper we weave together these various, and sometimes quite divergent, narratives and apply a sociological interpretive frame to them in an effort to better understand the construction of transnational identity through this public dance ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2005