Negotiating the Boundaries of Belonging: The Mexican Artisanal Object as Emblem of Membership in the Foreign Community in Chapala

The community of foreign retirees in the Lake Chapala area in Mexico, the largest U.S. retirement community outside the United States, represents a unique type of migration, distinct from the more
common labor-driven migration in many respects. Attracted by the draws of greater purchasing power and the region’s good weather, American migrants arriving to Chapala enter into a position of relative economic affluence and benefit from the support offered by the established social network of foreigners and the community’s many volunteer associations and clubs. While the significance of national boundary-crossing appears minimal in this superficially easy transition from U.S. mainland to American enclave, as in all cases of migration, the crossing of national borders implicates a complex constellation of social and cultural borders that have to be negotiated and redefined.
This foreign community includes a heterogeneous mix of socio-economic backgrounds –some coming to Mexico because their retirement fund wasn’t enough to live on in the United States, others
deciding to move out of choice rather than necessity– requiring the reconfiguration of cultural norms and social relations both within the migrant community and with Mexican society. While certain features of the American lifestyle the migrants led in the United States are maintained, there are notable adoptions of Mexican cultural artifacts and customs that suggest the redrawing of the symbolic boundaries that define cultural and social difference. One of the most striking and suggestive indications of the complex process of redrawing cultural and social boundaries is found in the widespread consumption of Mexican folk art among American migrants.
The taste for Mexican folk art is significant not only because it indicates a radical change in the cultural affinity Americans had with Mexicans prior to arrival but, taking our lead from Bourdieu (1979)
and his comprehensive study on taste in 1970s French society, taste is tied to a host of dispositions, actions and judgements that constitute a lifestyle and defines the social world and symbolic order that endows these objects and actions with meaning. Tightly bound to both cultural and economic capital, taste both reflects and defines social divisions. As such, American migrants’ taste for Mexican folk art, a Mexican cultural product par excellence, offers a unique vantage point from which to trace the subterranean processes of symbolic boundary-drawing that articulate and negotiate the social relations between Americans and Mexicans in Chapala. Through participant observation, interviews, and visual and filmic documentation of American migrants’ purchase, use and display of Mexican folk art, this investigation seeks to ascertain the rules that govern the emerging taste in folk art and the social field it defines. In order to connect these observations with an evaluation of this migrant community’s unique process of integration and boundary negotiation, the project adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from migration studies’ theories on assimilation and transnationalism, the sociology of taste, visual anthropology and material culture.