Spheres of Influence and Area Studies: The Hidalgo-Clearwater Connection

Through an analysis of two communities—one in Florida (Clearwater), and one in Hidalgo, Mexico (Ixmiquilpan)—this paper analyzes the impact of migration in both home and host communities. The migration patterns of these two communities are viewed as a systemic whole that creates responses and processes that cannot be understood in isolation from each other, nor outside of the current context of globalization and social, cultural, and economic integration. Our approach entails a non-linear means to conceptualize migration that does not assume a unidirectional (both in time and place) process but one that takes into account the varied interstices of the movement of people both in the material and socio-cultural sense. We refer to this approach as the “spheres of influence.”

CrummettMariamigracionixmiclearwater.pdf — PDF document, 27Kb