Mestizaje and clothing: Interpreting Mexican-US transnational social space

The focus of the chapter is on the early determinant of movement (1910s-1940s) between western-central Mexico and the US, seen not through the standard lens of labour migration but as producing a new, transnational, social space. In this social space, migrants could work with and negotiate greater self-consciousness as mestizos and Mexicans. The determinants and implications of movement are traced through clothing, in relation to when, why and how men and women in small town Mexico adopted 'modern' styles of dress. Migration to the US opened up possibilities of dressing to cross social as well as national borders. With migration, the spread of innovations of modernity (cinema, sewing machines) also allowed people to visualise themselves as moving with the times.