Week 5_Miguel Flores_ASA 114

As the class goes into the interrelations of transmigrations, globalization, and transnationalism, Michael Peter Smith’s piece made all the concrete linkages to the following concepts above. He considers the world as a giant space that witnesses exchanges and flows of people, money, and the politics of emerging imagined homelands and mobile ethnoscapes. Smith proposes that through the movement of people via transmigration, “borders” extend its boundaries and it reemerges in communities where transmigrants recapture the essence of home. In this process, people create a sense of “bifocality” through their movement of going back and forth between their homeland and the United States (20). As people move from spaces to spaces, economic flow goes hand in hand with these movements. The interconnection of social networks initiates cash remittances in which stimulates the circulation of money. Smith explored the case of Mexican workers who goes back and forth to the United States, in their course of traveling and working, a Mexican border crosser can save up money to buy a house and to become a middle-class homeowner (21). This proves that regardless of people’s affixation to one place, for example, their homeland, push and pull factors motivates people to move and find opportunities in other spaces. Despite the mobilization of social networks throughout the world, there also seems to be an emergence of hybrid communities that observes the bifocal cultures in which thrive and fight to exist in dominant spaces.

In the case of Madison Nguyen, a San Jose council member whose intention is to highlight her community’s prospering small-town businesses faced a controversy when the business district was named Little Saigon. Generations of Vietnamese living in the city of San Jose felt that naming a business district after Saigon brought back triggering memories about the fall of Saigon and the thousands of people who were displaced because of the war. Many felt compelled to rally against her and urged her to rename the business district to something else other than “Saigon.” This case study echoes Smith’s conceptualization of borderless spaces, through the deployment of social networks in various places, people develop their own bifocals and recapture their own sentiments, struggles, and deficits in spaces they call home. The Recall Campaign ridiculed council member Madison Nguyen for not fulfilling her duties as the representative of District 7, San Jose. In the current political climate, especially with the great divide on people about politics, many are compelled to rally against the current administration. Democracy plays out when many are feeling repressed and ignored. However, the role of power in both cases: Recall on Nguyen and Impeachment for Trump underlines people's power and their struggles to be fairly represented. This addresses a question on whether we can trust those who are in power who is supposed to represent us? It seems that with all the news of harassments, assaults, and corruption, the word “trust” is becoming an attribute that is close to fiction.

Citations:

Kieu-Linh Valverde. “Whose Community Is It Anyway?: Overseas Vietnamese Negotiating their Cultural and Political Identity –The Case of Vice Mayor Madison Nguyen.” Transnationalizing Viet Nam.

Michael Peter Smith. “Transnational Migration and the Globalization of Grassroots Politics.”

“What Madison Nguyen has done for the District 7, San Jose??” YouTube, uploaded by Nguyen304, 28 Oct 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeEPZmastjo