TRANSNATIONAL YOUTH AND THE ROLE OF SOCIAL AND SOCIOCULTURAL REMITTANCES IN IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

ABSTRACT Within a framework of transnationalism, and through narrative analysis using the Labovian model, this paper offers a discussion of the role of social and sociocultural remittances in the identity construction of transnational youth pursuing tertiary education in a public university in central-north Mexico. Through the exploration of oral data from semi-structured interviews the discussion aims at providing evidence of the ties and engagement that the participants develop on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border through the exchange of goods, values, worldviews, attitudes, practices and linguistic elements, and how these impact their personal identity construction. The data presented in this paper come from a portion of qualitative corpora of a study in progress conducted by the author as a Ph.D project at Trinity College Dublin.