THE TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL
FIELDS OF MIGRATIONAs a postmodern architectural style of fragmen-
tation, historical reference and pastiche jump-
started the theoretical conceptualizations of
postmodernism, so transnational migration
theories kicked off the recent wave of thinking
about transnationalism. A number of migration
scholars working in the 1980s conducted empiri-
cal work on immigrants in the US and then traced
them back to their sending countries. After
researching the movements of the migrants over
time, it became apparent that older migration
frameworks emphasizing either a unilinear
migration pattern (movement from one place to
another and settlement there) or circular migra-
tion (brief circular movements with an eventual
return ‘home’) were simply inadequate in
describing all of the migration flows that were
occurring.
In the former framework of unilinear migra-
tion, migrants leave one contained and defined
spatial territory, cross one or more borders, and
arrive in another identifiable national space, to
which they must then assimilate. This way of
thinking began to be challenged with the new
social morphology of movement within trans-
national theory. Borrowing from some of the ideas
of poststructuralist theory, especially the critique
of boundedness and fixity, and the celebration of
mobility and hybridity, several theorists postu-
lated new ways of thinking about migration that
could supplement pre-existing theories.^3 Accord-
ing to Roger Rouse,^4 the assumptions implicit in
many of the older theories needed to be
addressed, including a moral undertone in US
migration research which seemed to infer that
migrants could and shouldonly be truly involved
in one place. Rouse links this assumption to the
‘dreamscape of the bourgeois state’ where the
territorial state and citizenship are forever locked
together, and the image of the national landscape
is as a separate, territorially bounded entity that
remains constant through time.
Transnational theory in migration research
developed a less rigid view of sending and
receiving nations and of migrants’ relationships
to them. The idea of ‘social fields’, advanced ini-
tially by Glick Schiller et al. (1992), captured a
dynamic of migration and of migrants’ lives that
was multilocal – the idea that social ‘places’
could be tightly woven together across borders
and across space (see also Guarnizo, 1994; Rouse,
1991). They, along with a growing numberof others, argued that with the technological
innovations of electronic banking, telephones,
computers and jet planes, physical distances
could be collapsed, and it was possible for
migrants to participate simultaneously in the
events and activities of different national sites. In
numerous empirical case studies, migrants were
shown to live fully and actively in two nations,
and often to conduct business, political and
family affairs in both.
In one example of political activities crossing
the borders of nations, Basch, et al. (1994: 2) relate
the story of Grenada’s ambassador to the United
Nations, who was also a leader of New York’s
West Indian community for a number of years,
and took a major role in electing mayors of New
York City. In a different example, they discuss
the formation of a ‘tenth’ department within
Aristide’s Haitian regime, composed entirely of
overseas Haitians. A third, frequently cited
example from Sarah Mahler’s (1998) research is
of the odd case in which the El Salvadoran
government provided free legal assistance to
political refugees in the US. Owing to the great
economic importance of their remittances home,
the government provided aid to those citizens
who were fleeing its own oppressive regime (see
also Vertovec, 1999: 455). In all of these cases,
both the state and its citizens stretched beyond
conventionally defined territorial borders and
engaged with each other and with national affairs
from a multitude of locations.
This spatial stretching is often theorized as a
form of national ‘deterritorialization’. However
‘respatialization’ may be a more accurate term,
as it indicates a reworking of spatial arrange-
ments that had previously been more localized.
The respatialization of the state and of individuals’
lives does not suggest either a loss of power or a
liberatory process for either entity. The particular
state practices of a particular nation may become
more or less extensive and far-reaching, more or
less controlling and disciplining, and more or
less powerful depending on the conditions in
which that nation was and is inserted into the
global regime of flexible capitalism. Similarly, a
transnational mode of life for an individual
migrant cannot be necessarily equated with
freedom (from family or state), but must always
be examined in context. As Guarnizo (1997) has
shown vis-à-vis the experience of Dominican
migrants, for example, the implications of the
transnational movements back and forth between
the US and the Dominican Republic are vastly
different for men and for women; the experience
of living and working in a social field across80 RETHINKING THE SOCIAL3029-ch03.qxd 03-10-02 4:50 PM Page 80