Migration may be viewed as an economic movement, but migrants are also social agents imagining change and progress. This article describes some the of ways in which migrants struggle to convert their migration into a new form of symbolic capital. This process requires migrants to focus on their social personhood within the transnational circuits of migration as they strive to enact their new status and contest the gossip aimed at devaluing that personhood. Transnational migration is a social space that engenders new possibilities. The production of locality is now linked to movement as opposed to place. While transnational spaces may allow social subjects a way to resist the disciplining processes of modern nation-states, they also contain and reconfigure power relations. My concern here is to show how different participants in the transnational space are positioned to challenge these power relations. In order to illustrate how these power relations persist in spite of the changes provoked through migration, I consider how individuals, in particular migrants who are present in Mexico, attempt to construct their social personhood. As opposed to beginning with a new social movement of transnational political organization, I begin with the household and its social roles, relating this to other social changes. I argue that this unit is essential to the construction of self, personhood, and status within these circuits while showing how it allows for power and inequality to be both contested and reproduced throughout the transnational space. © 2004 Latin American Perspectives.

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Mexico [North America] social movement North America migrants experience social status immigrant population