Salvadoran Imaginaries: Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption

Acknowledgements

ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is about connections in a rapidly changing society, and about the meanings of a community that aspires to be culturally and economically borderless . Even across significant distances, the contradictory comfort and anxiety developed around these connections characterizes the many facets of contemporary El Salvador. The transnational is, in turn, constitutive of national imaginaries. There are many individuals in El Salvador and the United States whose encouragement and generosity helped me appreciate these connections and realize this project. First, I have many people to thank in El Salvador, especially the journalists, call center employees, and other interviewees whose insights and experiences are so important to this book. Although in most cases I cannot mention them by their real names or identify them directly with their workplaces, these individuals should know that their assistance and kindness is deeply appreciated, and that I learned a great deal from our conversations. Thank you for allowing me access to your places of work. I began this project while at the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. I thank Charles L. Briggs for his support and generous advice. I am grateful to Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Daniel Hallin, Jane Rhodes, Denise Silva, and Elana Zilberg, for their thoughtfulness and guidance. I thank Faye Caronan, Tere Ceseña, Monika Gosin, Julie Hua, Ashley Lucas, and Gina Opinaldo for their friendship. In many, sometimes indirect, ways they have contributed something to this book. I thank Jackie Griffin for staying in touch and for her sound advice. I am certain that this would be a very different book without the influence and encouragement of many wonderful colleagues at the University of California , Santa Cruz. For sharing valuable ideas and carefully reading and discussing various parts of this book, I am deeply grateful to Rosa-Linda Fregoso, Norma Klahn, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Marcia Ochoa, Cat Ramírez, Felicity A. Schaeffer, and Pat Zavella. I thank Marcia and Felicity for their memorable welcome to Santa Cruz, and for our many ongoing conversations. I thank Jonathan Fox for sharing countless interesting articles and other information about migrants in Mexico. I thank many colleagues and friends whose kindness, good humor, and x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS exemplary scholarship always inspire me: Mark Anderson, Gabriela Arredondo, Neda Atanasoski, Cindy Cruz, Guillermo Delgado, Sylvanna Falcón, Adrián Félix, Dana Frank, Shannon Gleeson, Herman Gray, Beth Haas, Sri Kurniawan, Gina Langhout, Flora Lu, Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal, Eduardo Mosqueda, Héctor Perla, Juan Poblete, Jennifer Poole, and Megan Thomas. I thank all the members of the Popular Cultures and the Bodies, Borders, and Violence Research Clusters at UCSC for our enthusiastic, productive meetings. I thank Alessandra Álvares, Jill Esterás, Annette Marines, Dana Rohlf, and Marianna Santana for their support. I thank Wanda Alarcón, Gloria Chacón, Tania Cruz Salazar, and Sarah B. Horton for their friendship and for many interesting conversations that helped me think through some of the ideas discussed in this book. A very special thank you to Susan Bibler Coutin, Robin DeLugan, Cecilia Menjívar, Ellen Moodie, Ana Patricia Rodríguez, and Elana Zilberg for their generous advice and their inspiring scholarship on El Salvador. I have greatly benefited from insightful comments and questions at several professional meetings and other events. In particular, I thank Noel B. Salazar, Mimi Sheller, and Alan Smart for their comments on my work on call centers as part of a panel at the American Anthropological Association meeting (2009). I also thank the Center for Cultural Studies and the Chicano/Latino Research Center (both at UCSC) for the opportunities to present early versions of chapter 4. I thank Ray Cummings for his perceptive comments on an early draft of the manuscript. I thank Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez for his interest in this book project, and Lisa Boyajian, Marilyn Campbell, and especially Leslie Mitchner at Rutgers University Press for their expert, reassuring guidance throughout this process. I thank Gary Von Euer for copyediting and helping me refine the manuscript. I appreciate the anonymous reviewer’s close engagement with my manuscript and the suggestions that helped me strengthen it. Several institutes and research units supported my fieldwork in El Salvador and the completion of this project. While I was at the University of California, San Diego, grants from the Institute for International, Comparative and Area Studies (IICAS) and California Cultures in Comparative Perspective (CCCP) supported my research trips to El...