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-àvis 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. © 2010 by the american anthropological association. all rights reserved.

discourse Gender and socioeconomic class Modernity Social positioning transnational migration Chronotope

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