As a life-long immigrant, the experience of migration has become a structuring element of
my social reality. Born in Brazil, I travelled on the behest of my mother, to the United Kingdom, at the age of four where I spent a consecutive 6 years. From there, I followed my mother to Geneva, Switzerland - not before spending a brief year in Paris, France – where I spent my teenage years and left, at the age of 17, to attend University (in Sociology) in the United States. Studying Sociology in San Francisco at the turn of the century provided an ideal scenario to engage with how social contexts, styles, ontologies, and Selves interact in a diverse and dynamic space. Throughout my undergraduate years, my interest veered towards ethnic interplay and interaction, identity, and migration of the “dispossessed”.
My undergraduate thesis discussed the usage of graffiti as identity markers and resources and proved to be my first ethnographic experience engaging with graffiti artists, in their contexts and situations, focusing on Mexican immigrants in the San Francisco metropolitan area. After graduating in sociology in 2004, I moved back to my hometown of Brasilia, Brazil to face the distressing notion of not belonging “neither here nor there”. My family jokingly called me “tourist” or “gringo” and my year-long engagement with the University of Brasilia demonstrated how far detached I had become of cultural “Brazilian” markers. For this reason, I did not seem to find common ground with my fellow students in the department of Social Sciences at the University of Brasilia. During this time, my friends where the “others”; the exchange students and foreigners attending the University. This embodied and situational development of my “condition” of being an “immigrant” -a privileged one, of course – drew me closer to the field of inquiry of the condition of human migration.
After entering the Master’s in Social Science program at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Mexico City, I sought to engage with how second generation Mexican Americans interact and present their “mexican-ness” on social media platforms such as Facebook. Articulating the Chicago School cannon with new considerations of social configuration of ICT social space engagement and formation, I sought to discuss the implications of self-presentation on social media platforms and the means and modes of articulating ethnic self-conceptualization of Self utilized by (some) Mexican-American Facebook users. This research also stemmed heavily from ethnographic work applied to the digital sphere. It is then, not surprisingly, that my research interest at the Doctoral level follows this line of inquiry. Understanding migrancy is also a means to approximate my experience within a comprehensible format and continue to engage with how the migrant experience shapes the forms and ways of “being” in the world.
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