Did You Say Transmigrants? Anthropology and the Practices of Global Politics.

SILVINA MERENSON

Denver

Congreso; 144th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting; 2015

American Anthropological Association

At the beginning of the 1990s a debate about the need for a new paradigm to address migration studies emerged among scholars. In this context, when this theoretical approach was emerging in migration studies, these authors also considered that it would be necessary for a growing number of migrants to be conceptualized as transmigrants. In this way they tried to overcome the emigrants-immigrants binary since it limits the understanding of their daily practices within two closed geographical spaces (origin and destination), wrongly considered distant and independent from each other. This communication describes and analyse the term "transmigrant" in connection with the global politic and the native´s discurse, taking for case the political activism of uruguayan immigrants in Buenos Aires.