Peruvian Lives across Borders

Abstract

Peruvian Lives across Borders focuses on the transnational lives of middle and upper-class transnational Peruvians. Among the Peruvians whose migration trajectories this book examines, return as a possibility, impossibility, or reality looms large. The lens of return provides one way to understand what transnational Peruvians desire, reject, or feel ambivalent about in constructions of home and Peruvianness. Employing return as a critical lens and through an intersectional approach, the book presents an intentional departure from the more prevalent focus on international labor migrants from lower and working classes in migration scholarship, and particularly among anthropologists. It suggests that a critical examination of middle and upper-class Peruvians’ migration experiences reveals as much about individual trajectories and class dimensions of migration as about broader constructions of Peruvianness and home that inform the everyday lives of Peruvians across multiple differences and spaces. A close look at Peruvian individual lives across settings in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Peru, and affective and material attachments to and practices in those settings, exposes the lived realities of everyday negotiations surrounding return to a home that is fundamentally made up of processes of inclusion and exclusion based on social hierarchies of gender, location, language, race, sexual identity, and class.