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93 Carla was in her twenties when I met her. She had graduated from a bilingual high school in San Salvador, and currently worked at a call center. I contacted her through a mutual friend, someone who was also her coworker, and we arranged an interview. On an August afternoon in 2006, Carla and I sat at a café in Multiplaza, a shopping mall, talking about her job, about what working at a customer service center for a software company involved. Unlike many others who talked with customers and answered questions on the phone, Carla’s job required very good (even excellent) composition skills, since she answered questions in writing and via e-mail as leader of the technical support team. Carla had suggested that we meet at this mall at the end of her workday. This was a convenient midpoint in her daily commute between the call center job and home, located in one of many emerging residential developments in the new limits of San Salvador and Antiguo Cuscatlán. As is usual at this time of the day, the area near this comfortable café at the mall was lively with conversations , the sounds of meals, snacks consumed, and the clinking of coffee cups and spoonfuls of sugar. Looking around, this seemed to me like a fitting place to conduct our interview. The background noises, crowded corridors, and department stores, mostly conducive to face-to-face interactions between shoppers and cashiers, contrasted with the faceless telephone calls and e-mails Carla described as part of her daily workday ritual: troubleshooting, resolving questions , and providing information for customers. In 2004, when I began researching bilingual (English-Spanish) and monolingual Spanish call centers in San Salvador, two major North American and European companies had recently established their call center operations in-country and were becoming places of employment for a specific sector of Salvadorans—especially the young and fluent in English, like Carla. These two companies were not the first or the only call centers in San Salvador. Laura and 4 Exporting Voices Aspirations and Fluency in the Call Center 94 SALVADORAN IMAGINARIES Elizabeth, former neighbors in San Salvador, worked at a Spanish-language call center for a company that had started operating in El Salvador in 1998 and established its call center by 1999. The Spanish-language call center of this multinational corporation was an early operation; a few years later it would continue to be one important component of an ambitious investment promotion project that marketed Salvadoran Spanish as “neutral” in pronunciation and speech patterns. This marketing of “neutral Spanish” and bilingual workers carries interesting, critical implications of flexibility—in the sense that workers are expected to have schedule availability, and also in the sense of high labor turnover and even disposability of the worker in this sector— along with notions of national image-building. When I approached Laura and Elizabeth in 2004 with a basic question, asking for their thoughts about these new bilingual call centers, they replied that Gabriela, a third neighbor, was going to work in the human resources office of one of the newly established centers. I had the opportunity to interview all of them in 2005 and to follow up with Gabriela in late 2006. They were important contacts when I began my research, and were instrumental in putting me in touch with other interviewees as the project progressed. By 2009, call centers were a significant industry in El Salvador, a country of approximately 6 million people with an economically active population of 2.8 million. Analysts of this industry note that “despite the size of the country , and the small percentage of the economically active population working in the outsourcing business, the economic spillover of the outsourcing industry was calculated around $75.8 million [in 2009] making it an important job and income-generating business for local people.”1 The call centers emerge in this imaginary of postwar labor as strategically located worksites for mobile capital and local qualified employees. San Salvador becomes a city where complex transnational connections converge, collide, and mesh into common understandings of Salvadoran society. The tangible presence of this transnational worksite in the everyday life of a small yet significant group of mostly young and urban Salvadoran employees raises questions related to social class, mobility, and aspirations. How does this group of Salvadorans enter call center work? What are the expectations attached to this job? What views and opinions do call center agents...

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