UC Berkeley

Itinerant Belonging analyzes migration, race, and globalization in relation to the small but diverse community of Koreans in Mexico City: temporary workers brought to manufacturing enclaves fueled by growing South Korean investment; re-migrants from South America drawn northward; and the descendants of Korean contract laborers who came to work on Yucatán peninsula henequen haciendas in the early 20th century. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, 60 semi-structured interviews, and archival research conducted in Mexico, South Korea, and the United States, I argue that migrant identity formation is mediated by transnational global fields that exceed the homeland-settlement country binary. While nearly invisible on the global stage, Koreans in Mexico must constantly respond to shifts in U.S. trade policy, changing economic relations between Mexico and China, and fluctuations in anti-Asian sentiment. To manage these risks and uncertainties, they build transnational social infrastructures that produce lived experiences of the global in their local contexts, transforming Mexico into a nodal point for transpacific and hemispheric Korean migratory networks and a switchboard location between the Global North and the Global South.