The Allure of the Foreign:
Imported Goods in Post-Colonial Latin America


Building from Migration:
Imported Design and Everyday Use of Migrant Houses in Mexico
Peri Fletcher

In rural Mexico new brick and concrete houses, paid for by migrant labor in the United States, are increasingly replacing traditional abode structure. Fletcher examines how these new houses, incorporating U.S. designs and appliances, are central to changing consumption practices. They are both the locus of growing consumerism and a site for heavily charged and contested ideas about family and community. An emphasis on consumption and the new uses of space reflect and reinforce changing gender and generational relations within families, and also between families. Conflicts that arise as villagers struggle to build and maintain houses in Mexico with wages earned in the United States are in part emblematic of a larger process of transformation, as agricultural subsistence gives way to transnational labor migration as a way of life.

Author's e-mail: jetaylor@ucdavis.edu

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