El norte no se hizo para todos/The United States wasn\u27t made for everyone: Imagined lives, social difference, and discourse in migration

Abstract

Based on two years of research in Uriangato, Mexico and Chester County, Pennsylvania, this dissertation argues that commonly-occurring discourses---understood as instances of language use---about migration shape migration patterns. In particular, the dissertation details discourse production among working-class migrants and their loved ones, examining this process from the perspective of current, former, and non-migrants. The dissertation also considers how migration develops inside of and influences family life and class mobility. The dissertation demonstrates that discourses generated by migrants and their loved ones typify migration practice by portraying the types of people who do and do not---or who should and should not---migrate. From this starting point, several key claims are made. First, these discourses characterize and enact the shape and function of the forms of social difference, such as gender, that inform who migrates and how. Second, in this, these discourses offer images of personhood---or social personae---that speakers perform in articulating them, thereby modeling possible life trajectories for themselves and others. Third, these discourses thus allow speakers to imagine what life would be like if they migrated; such imagining can encourage, or discourage, migration by making it personally immediate and tangible to speakers, as they try on what life would be like if they migrated. Fourth, this process is evidenced most tangibly in the positions---or role alignments---speakers take to the social personae they articulate, accepting or rejecting personae as models for their own lives. Finally, it is the central claim of the dissertation that sustained patterns of role alignment between speakers and the personae they create---patterns that endure across events of speaking---regiment and are predictive of whether and how speakers migrate, both at the individual and aggregate level. The dissertation explores this claim from multiple speaker perspectives, considering the variety of linguistic tools---from patterns of pronominal reference to direct reported speech---that speakers use to construct personae and their alignments to them, as well as the function of these processes at the level of individual speakers and in the discourse of many speakers taken in concert