Social Suffering and Embodied States of Male Transnational Migrancy in San Francisco, California

Abstract

Through the analysis of a social program for migrant and homeless labourers, this article focuses on embodiment, suffering, and the changing nature of masculinity in a specific Latino migrant population in San Francisco. It highlights particular aspects of personhood while relating migrant narratives of this singular “lonely” population to aspects of current political economy and articulations of social suffering. It explores how spatial and temporal conditions such as “shifting suffering,” “being stuck,” being betrayed, and “conformarse” (conforming) highlight embodied states of changing masculinity and transnational migrancy. Through an examination of belonging and exclusion, continuities as well as discontinuities of representations, self-validation, and a nostalgia for a possibility of a future that cannot be and a present that still remains, this article presents a much-needed ethnography of embodied affects emerging in different arenas of transnational migrancy. The fieldwork was supported by a Nuffield Foundation Grant, the University of Cambridge Travel Fund, and Clare Hall College Research Fund. On site I am indebted for institutional and academic support to the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and especially to Professor Christie Kiefer and Professor Philippe Bourgois. I wish to thank them as well as Dr. Margarita Loinaz for comments on a draft of this article and the two anonymous readers. However, needless to say, the responsibility for the ideas expressed here is totally mine.