Les Boliviens aux États-Unis : tensions identitaires d'un groupe peu visible et hétérogène

Abstract

The United States is a secondary destination within the multipolar Bolivian migratory field. Hardly ever mentioned in the scientific production related to the South American presence in North America, this migration is mostly invisible. What are its characteristics, compared with the diversity of the Bolivian migratory field, on one hand, and with the Latin American presence in the United States, on the other ? What are the impacts of its invisibility, as well as its social heterogeneity, on the processes of identity-making that migration produces ? This article reveals the diversity of Bolivian profiles, statistically relatively skilled, and the specificities of their concentrated presence in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. It analyzes how processes of identity-making are redefined through international migration, between an invisibility diluted within a dominant latinity, the claims to a form of bolivianity, and regional as well as social identifications in tension, in spaces where popular cosmopolitanisms are slowly getting built. It draws from a statistical analysis as well as a qualitative fieldwork carried out in the Atlantic metropolis with Bolivian migrants with diverse trajectories and ways of incorporation in the United States.

Keywords

• United States
• migratory field
• identity-making
• Latinos
• Bolivians