Desire, work and transnational identity

Abstract

This article explores the daily lives of Latino/Latina transnational migrants in the United States South who live and breathe alternative discourses of globalization. I argue that regulatory regimes lower migrants' social reproduction costs (to employers) by ignoring, exporting and/or confining social reproduction to smaller geographical scales, while migrants undertake their own social reproduction at many different geographical sites and scales in dynamic social fields of their own creation. Migrants deploy expansive social fields to mobilize vast complex geographies of support. In doing so, migrants develop new social networks of care and care giving and engage and reshape desire and sexuality in various sex/gender systems in multiple social spaces; in bars, nightclubs, pool halls, flea markets, as well as workplaces. In these ways the intimate relations of sexual expression are caught up in the harsh objectifications of labor markets.