Book Description

Unable to secure a full livelihood in either Mexico or the United States, migrants from the rural village of Napizaro in central Mexico must extend their families, and their community, across the border. The lives of Napizarenos demonstrate the difficulties of reproduction in a transnational context, calling into question the way we think about households, families, and communities. La Casa de Mis Sueños examines the efforts of villagers from Napízaro to build their dream houses in Mexico through participation in transnational migration. New house designs reshape the spatial ordering of everyday life and are part of the recreation of social space in a changing economic and moral landscape. These changes have engendered conflict as migration usurps traditional routes to prosperity and success and as migrant houses become both the locus of growing consumerism and a site for heavily charged and contested ideas about family and community. This book is more than an engaging account of the realities that pervade one small community. It is an examination of the ways in which global processes penetrate the local, the daily, and the personal in rural Mexico. Above all, it asserts the power of place as constitutive of the ways in which people create meaning in their lives.