The historical mutation of past net

The historical mutation of past networks of movement into present ones is a
profoundly important analytical task. For example, the development of transnational
US–Mexican migration and cultural flows has attracted much analytical attention
(Goldring, 1996, 2002) and has been portrayed as an epochal change from modern to
post-modern culture (Rouse, 1991). However, we prefer to understand such processes
as instead a redirection of flows that have long linked Mexican people to wider scales of
social and cultural activity(e.g. from zones of small holder agriculture to plantations,
haciendas, and mines, and later railroads, Mexican cities, and the United States). The
recent neoliberal assault on the livelihoods of millions of poor Mexicans and the
intensification of labor (and then family) migration to the US does indeed present a
dramatic set of changes, not only in economics but in imagined worlds, but this is best
understood as a rearrangement of an ever-present network of flows.