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149 Iam at the Comalapa Airport in El Salvador. After checking in, I reach the area where travelers and their relatives assemble before the travelers say good-bye and proceed to airport security. The lobby is a farewell mini-mall for the already nostalgic traveler who, boarding pass in hand, prepares to leave El Salvador. A kiosk sells gum, cell phone accessories, and La Prensa Gráfica among other periodicals . Another sells traditional, artisanal Salvadoran candies, and another one sells coffee beans by the pound, and coffee liquor. The Pollo Campero restaurant is nearby, its tables occupied by people eating breakfast and ordering boxes of chicken to take on their flight. The smell of chicken will later waft through the airplane cabins. The window of a crafts store—one of the bigger shops in the waiting area— displays colones, the former Salvadoran currency. Now the colones, colorful bills with pictures of Salvadoran monuments and historical figures, are for sale as souvenirs. Eight bills are pasted to a varnished wood board, in all the denominations that used to circulate: one, two, five, ten, twenty-five, fifty, one hundred, and two hundred colones. I add them. Based on the present currency conversion rate (one dollar equals eight colones and seventy-five cents), the bills would exchange for about forty-five dollars. But it is more difficult to calculate the actual value of this trophy of consumer nostalgia, a plaque to the triumph of global finance. Salvadoran money has become a commodity, a bizarre souvenir that can be purchased with a global currency. In a few decades, who will remember purchasing goods with these strange, varnished bills? Moments later I pass the security check, an obligatory ritual in every airport . Once in the departure area I walk to the gate, passing the duty-free stores full of brand-name cosmetics, digital cameras, luggage, and other necessary luxuries for the cosmopolitan traveler. In the lounge, most people sit quietly, holding their passports and boarding passes, looking out through the glass panels Conclusion Renewing Narratives of Connection and Distance 150 SALVADORAN IMAGINARIES at the airplanes on the runway or at the palm trees moving only slightly against what soon will be another hot morning on the Salvadoran littoral. A few travelers softly ask each other, where are you going, what is your final destination? It seems to me that now the question is asked more cautiously—we are all flying to Houston, but who knows what the end of so many connecting flights might be. A Narrative of Becoming Global My intention in this final section is to further open the discussion of the primary argument that has been a thread throughout this book: that Salvadoran transnational imaginaries and narratives that seem to “make sense” are produced, circulated, consumed, and mediated in everyday life by the interaction and constant contestation between people and institutions. I have explored how media images of migration, transnational business practices, spaces of consumption, and literature constitute ways of “making sense” and inhabiting contemporary Salvadoran society, and how these sites represent instances of the production and commercialization of connection, location, and distance. I have argued that these sites coexist and form part of an imaginary of postwar El Salvador—where texts, voices, and other practices intersect and produce transnational subjects. The mall, the newspaper, and the call center bring together consumers, journalists , readers of newspapers, migrants, foreign investment promoters, bilingual call center employees and their customers, and other “ordinary” Salvadorans who inhabit the Salvadoran transnational imaginary. Competing forms of citizenship and participation emerge and constitute each other on the pages of “Departamento 15,” the interview rooms at the call centers, the “streets” of the shopping malls, and “La Lumbre,” the bar portrayed in El asco. These are spaces of paradoxical freedom and interpellation; people participate in and occupy these spaces, but differentially and within certain discourses . Influential sectors, media and government institutions among them, can construct a narrative of El Salvador’s place in globalizing processes, as a strategically located, even naturalized, location for flexible labor. Salvadorans already have “neutral” accents, perfect for the needs of foreign investors. Salvadorans already have a long history of migration; thus migrants can be conjured and marketed by investment promoters as evidence of the extent to which El Salvador is globalized, or claimed in media portrayals as exemplary citizens who care about their families and El Salvador’s economy. Changes in work culture encourage call center employees to become flexible in the global...

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