THE CELLPHONE AS A TRANSNATIONAL SOURCE OF IDENTITY FOR VENEZUELAN AND GUATEMALAN MIGRANTS IN SOUTH FLORIDA By MATTHEW LEVIN A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2018 © 2018 Matthew Levin To the immigrant organizations and communities in South Florida that make this part of the world unique and a wonderful place to live. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Foremost, I want to thank my chair Dr. Nicholas Vargas for all the attention, expertise and support I received during this two-year process. His enthusiasm for the thesis and the themes involved buoyed me whenever I felt daunted by the enormity of the project and how it would all come together. I appreciate him always making time to speak about the thesis even when there really was not any available and for answering my rambling questions about approaching the thesis and the accompanying literature. I would like to thank all my committee members for their patience during the course of this project, forgiving me for dropping in without notice and their trust that I would deliver a thesis that they found worthy of a Master’s thesis. I want to express my gratitude to Mindy McAdams for contemplating the communication and mass media aspects of the thesis and always finding relevant journal articles on this cutting-edge subject. I would like to thank Dr. Philip Williams for his tranquil presence and encouragement when I approached him with concepts and issues that appeared massive and unwieldy to me. I also want to acknowledge Dr. Amy Jo Coffey who from the start helped me figure out the best ways to approach all the challenges of grad school and also Dr. Rebecca Hanson who took the time to show me how to code in Atlas.TI and clarified my countless questions about Venezuela as it related to this project. I would like to thank my colleague Chelsey Hendry-Simmons for joining me on overnight marathon writing sessions in the lab and pushing me to keep going. I could not have completed this without you and the rest of our magnificent cohort. I am indebted to Andres David Lopez and Joceyln Skolnik of the El Sol Neighborhood Resource Center in Jupiter. Their interest in the project made this work 4 possible. Appreciation also goes to Jose Lopez and Jesus Duran for letting me help teach English courses at El Sol and conduct my research with students. Finally, I must thank the Guatemalan-Maya Center in Lake Worth and Tim Gamwell, who gave me the opportunity to know another migrant population and to work with the community there. I must acknowledge Jon Glass, a professor at Syracuse and Gator alum who reassured me that grad school was the right choice. I want to recognize Dr. Ketan Mathavan, my great friend and someone who had to endure several years of grad school before I even started and who helped me with my own experience from the moment I began filling out the application. I also would like to thank all my friends who supported me even as I disappeared for two years, including Erinn Connor, Vanessa Garnica, Matt Gelb, Ashley Harrell, Jandi Keum, Jackie Vitale, Steven Washuta and Andrew Zangre. They visited me in Gainesville and gave me a respite from work or invited me to their place for a much-needed sabbatical. A special thanks to Jackie Vitale and Micah Hartman for allowing me to stay at their humble home during my fieldwork. I also would like to thank Katherine Escalante Rivas, whose amor y cariño made surviving this thesis possible. I am grateful too for all the time she took to assist me with a gringo with all the challenges of conducting a thesis project in Spanish. At last, I must thank my parents for their love and confidence in me during these past two years, I appreciate them taking an avid interest in the thesis despite their unfamiliarity with the topic and for forgiving me for all the time I spent submerged in this project. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................ 8 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 9 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 10 2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND METHODOLOGY ..................................................... 14 What is Incorporation? ............................................................................................ 16 Anti-Immigration Law and Incorporation in the U.S. ................................................ 19 What is Transnationalism? ...................................................................................... 20 Guatemalan Immigration History in the U.S. ........................................................... 24 The Roots of Guatemalan Immigration ................................................................... 25 Creating Community ............................................................................................... 28 Remittances ............................................................................................................ 30 Communication ....................................................................................................... 31 Venezuelan Immigration History to the U.S. ........................................................... 32 The Roots of Venezuelan Immigration .................................................................... 33 Venezuelans and Immigrant Media ........................................................................ 34 Research Questions ............................................................................................... 36 Methodology ........................................................................................................... 37 3 FINDINGS: INCORPORATION .............................................................................. 43 The Power of the Past ............................................................................................ 43 Cost Issues ....................................................................................................... 44 Legal Status ..................................................................................................... 48 Experience Issues ............................................................................................ 49 Can You Hear Me Now? ......................................................................................... 53 Getting Hired .................................................................................................... 53 Getting Social ................................................................................................... 54 Managing Marginalization ....................................................................................... 58 Entertainment and Loneliness .......................................................................... 62 A Sense of Security and Safety Nets ............................................................... 66 Money............................................................................................................... 67 On the Periphery .............................................................................................. 68 Chapter Summary ................................................................................................... 69 6 4 FINDINGS: TRANSNATIONALISM ........................................................................ 72 The Distance between Them .................................................................................. 73 The Latest Evolution of Phoning Home ............................................................ 74 ‘Cheap Calls: the Social Glue’ .......................................................................... 76 Monetary Remittances and Care Packages ..................................................... 80 For Your Information ............................................................................................... 83 Transnational News: Guatemalan Migrants ...................................................... 84 Transnational News: Venezuelans ................................................................... 85 The World of Instagram .................................................................................... 90 Fake News ....................................................................................................... 91 Knowledge / Information Remittance ................................................................ 93 Information Overload and Harassment ............................................................. 95 No Exit .............................................................................................................. 97 Chapter Summary ................................................................................................... 99 5 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 102 Limitations of the Study......................................................................................... 108 Implications for Future Research .......................................................................... 109 APPENDIX A COPY OF THE SURVEY INSTRUMENT ............................................................