From South to North and back again: Making and blurring boundaries in conversations across borders

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in El Salvador, Mexico, and the United States, we examine migration discourse produced by migrants and nonmigrants to explore the complex dynamics of belonging that unfold as speakers reify and violate a putative divide between North and South. We argue that North and South function as semi-stable shifters that enact and interweave relationships across several politically-loaded domains, projecting relations of dominance and dependence between these spheres. The fractally recursive relations enabled by these North/South distinctions allow those involved in migration to manage the consequences of cross-border connection, producing closeness even as they assume distance.