Sistemas y redes migratorias: implicancias socio-espaciales de la migración boliviana en Hilario Ascasubi.

Over the past decades, geography and geographers have studied migration processes on the basis of binary oppositions, such as expulsion causes-attraction features, expulsion areas -target areas, basing themselves, largely, on the analysis of statistical data obtained from official sources. Over time, the characteristics of contemporary international migrations, have revealed that these epistemological positions are insufficient to meet the daily reality of migrants due to their markedly ethnocentric slant. Social networks constitute, nowadays, one theoretical and methodological approach that can be applied to the field of geography and which deals with this problematics as a fundamentally social phenomenon, comprising the microsocial context in which the migrant is inserted. The analysis of relational reciprocity may help us unravel the complex web of networks that are made up between the socio- economic processes and the territorial dynamics of migrants, who are capable of building transnational spaces along time. This is the case of the Bolivian people that settled in the Río Colorado Valley, province of Buenos Aires. The analysis of the narratives obtained from a field work in which Bolivian residents in the town of Hilario Ascasubi have been interviewed, has yielded preliminary results that show the existence of social support networks that stamp their particular style to the surrounding environment. Not only have social networks helped the process of adaptation of immigrants, but they also favoured the continuity of displacement and the formation of transnational social spaces that reflect socio-spatial transformations in the local environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]