Mobility is one of the key axes of social inequality in the contemporary world. In Mobile Selves, Ulla D. Berg examines the conditions under which racialized Peruvians of rural and working-class origins leave the central highlands of Peru to migrate to the United States, how they fare, and what constrains their movement and their attempts to live meaningful lives across borders. Berg studies transnational labor migration not just as an economic phenomenon but also an aspirational project at the heart of the ongoing process of social becoming among people who are simultaneously centrally and peripherally situated in relation to global capitalism, metropolitan modernity, and the legacies of imperial and colonial projects. By exploring how migrants produce themselves as persons between the Peruvian Andes and the United States—through documents, money, and images and objects in circulation—this book documents and theorizes how mobility and technology reconfigure the social in a global and increasingly interconnected world.

Commentators:
Prof. Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas is the Valentin Lizana y Parrague Chair in Latin American, Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College of the City University of New York.

Suzanne Oboler is Professor of Latin American and Latina/o Studies at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She is Founding Editor of the academic journal, Latino Studies (2002-2012).

Enrique Mayer is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Yale University.

Ulla D. Berg is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Latino Studies at Rutgers University, where she also directs the Center for Latin American Studies. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in the central highlands of Peru and among migrants from this area in the United States. She is the co-editor of Transnational Citizenship Across the Americas.

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