The Impact Of Globalization And Transnationalism

The world is rapidly changing, globalization and transnational interconnections between nations’ economies, the flow of people, goods, and ideas have sparked a wake of scholarship and ethnographies that try to record these rapid changes. Yet, globalization has is reshaping the organization of transnational communities and when scholarship focuses on the economic impact of globalization or immigration , scholars tend to lose sight of the people caught up in these rapid changes (Chavez 2013 ). Communities that do not belong to the hegemonic movements are caught up in other components of transnational problems attracting the attention of researchers’ interested primary on economic roles, while neglecting to focus on sociocultural aspects of these

According to Dirlik, “transnational literatures present a challenge not only to historical ways of thinking, but also to the ways we have organized the study of the world in terms of nations, areas and regions” (Dirlik 2002:209). Transnational identities provoke a reconceptualization of the understanding of identities in relation to being attached to just one geographical location, but does not ignore borders, for undocumented immigrants in the U.S. not being able to legal cross the border is a fundamental marker of their identity (Chavez 2013). When autobiographic due to their subjectivity serve similar purpose of ethnographies, it allows writers from non-hegemonic groups to communicate their experiences while conveying anthropological information (Dirlik 2002:218).This correlated with American anthropologist, Paul Stoller, argument that personal ethnography serves as a bridge that connects two words and interweave the distant lives of others to more familiar (Stoller 2009). Understanding narratives written by conscious mestizas as ethnographic work allows the study of the process of identity formation and their political consciousness that serves as a vehicle of knowledge about their

Sandra Cisneros has a longer trajectory, is closely associated with the Chicanx movement and has greatly influenced Grande. Her novel Caramelo (2002) has being used in the study of transnational literature. Caramelo (2002) due to its weaving of storytelling as a way to recovery, reinventing and sustaining the history of the Reyes family through storytelling is an example of decolonized and transnational novel (Szeghi 2014). Juanita Heredia stresses that “Cisneros challenges the perspective of official national culture by legitimizing a mestizo, hybrid culture created in the US/Mexico borderlands, exemplified by the perspectives of Zoila and Lala, who contest condescending attitudes towards them” (Heredia 2007:354). Caramelo (2002) as a transnational novel that gives a voice and validates the identity of those individuals that do not fit into the hegemonic national identities (like Mexican or American). Similarly, Heather Alumbaugh highlights the liminal identity of Cisneros and Lala along with its complexities and due to her in-between-ness she is able to inform her readers about both cultures (Alumbaugh 2010). Cisneros depictions of her identity journeys in her novel and in her memoir serve as ethnographic quests that validate those individuals that share similar