Imagined lives and modernist chronotopes in Mexican nonmigrant discourse

The globalization literature spotlights the way that the experiences of transnational actors are refracted through lives inhabitable elsewhere. In this article, I examine this process in spoken discourse about U.S.-bound migration produced by nonmigrants in the Mexican city of Uriangato. This talk is organized around a “modernist chronotope” that pits “progress” against “tradition,” producing images of space–time grafted onto images of persons, or social personae. I show that acts of position taking vis-a-vis these social personae are fundamentally expressed through the ways speakers deploy the modernist chronotope and, thus, become emplotted in its imaginative sociology—a practice that constructs speakers as certain gender and class types. [discourse, chronotope, transnational migration, modernity, social positioning, gender and socioeconomic class]