“Listisimo para los #XVdeRubi:” Constructing a chronotope as a shared imagined experience in Twitter to enact Mexicanness outside of Mexico

Abstract

Communication technologies aid transnational communities in maintaining their relationships and strengthening their identities across borders. For example, by using digital media, communities can transcend both place and time to enter social spaces where they co-create shared experiences. This article explores how transnationals who do not belong to one single social network employ language and online participation in the micro-blogging site, Twitter, to co-create a chronotope, an imagined space that transcends geography and temporality, and in doing so, signal their belonging to a Mexican community. Using an online-discourse approach, I examine the participation of Mexican immigrants and children of Mexicans living in the US in an online viral cultural event: XV de Rubí, a celebration that marks the fifteenth birthday of a girl coming of age. I show that individuals use Twitter to co-construct an imagined experience in which they perform, negotiate and police ‘Mexicanness’. This article argues for more inclusive understandings of transnationalism that account for the ways in which people use the affordances of social media to enact cultural practices, keep in touch, forge ethnic identities, and display their sense of belonging to a wider Mexican culture.