Just a Click Away from Home: Ecuadorian Migration, Nostalgia and New Technologies in Transnational Times

dc.contributor.advisorHarrison, Reginaen_US
dc.contributor.authorMejia Estevez, Silviaen_US
dc.contributor.departmentComparative Literatureen_US
dc.contributor.publisherDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_US
dc.contributor.publisherUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.)en_US
dc.date.accessioned2007-06-22T05:36:35Z
dc.date.available2007-06-22T05:36:35Z
dc.date.issued2007-05-14
dc.description.abstractFocusing on three different narrations of migration from Ecuador to the United States, Spain and Italy, this documentary video and its study guide explore how new technologies such as the Internet, satellite communications, email, videoconferences, and cell phones have changed the experience of displacement. The two components of this dissertation propose that, due to the encounter with new technologies intent upon shrinking space and time, nostalgia is becoming digital -a quest for continuity of time and space through the simultaneity offered by digital media. Under these new circumstances, transnational businesses profit from nostalgic markets, whereas transnational families and organizations grapple with digital technologies to foment a "globalization of solidarity." As an aesthetic artefact, the project responds to the controversy within film theory regarding subjectivity and fiction storytelling procedures as defining features of documentary, a film genre traditionally marketed as objective and non-fictional. For this reason, the video is composed of what I call not three case studies but three stories of migration. The documentary starts out in Cuenca (Ecuador), where, speechless, Arturo and Mercedes see their children on the videoconferencing screen. It is their first "reunion" since the children left Ecuador and settled in New York City, eleven years ago. In another Ecuadorian city, Gloria -whose husband migrated from Quito to Madrid- promotes Internet access to rescue families torn apart by migration. Finally, we meet Carla, a journalist settled in Milan, who takes advantage of new technologies to report on the Ecuadorian community in Italy for readers far away. With a comparative and translocal approach -and theoretically based on Hall, Appadurai, Boym, Nichols and Portes among others-, this project explores multiple relationships with new technologies determined by gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, computer literacy, geographical situation, and socio-economic background. Through their differing and even contradictory discourses and practices, expressed and lived in geographical locations that coexist and overlap on the screen, the protagonists of this dissertation-documentary video show us to what extent they are inscribed in different places of enunciation that shape their experience of displacement and nostalgia in contrasting ways.en_US
dc.format.extent5604526 bytes
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/6891
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledLiterature, Comparativeen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledCinemaen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledAnthropology, Culturalen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledEcuadoren_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledmigrationen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolleddocumentaryen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledtransnationalismen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolleddigital nostalgiaen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolleddigital technologiesen_US
dc.titleJust a Click Away from Home: Ecuadorian Migration, Nostalgia and New Technologies in Transnational Timesen_US
dc.typeDissertationen_US

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