No option but to go: Poetic rationalization and the discursive production of Mexican migrant identity

This article intervenes into identity research in migration studies, showing that a semiotic–pragmatic approach makes the study of identity more ethnographically precise. Because the efficacy of linguistic signs depends on their social recognizablity, semiotic studies of identity necessarily ground processes of identification in their particular cultural milieus. I focus on locally salient theories of personhood and agency, which undergird identity in my research site (Uriangato, Mexico). In particular, I analyze how these theories are expressed through images of personhood, or social personae, produced in one woman’s articulation of a discourse genre I call “poetic rationalization,” considering the way this process is gendered. The central claim is that enduring attachments to social personae is a central way people construct migrant identities.