1
Introduction
This paper draws from a larger study about the contentious cultural politics
surrounding global cultural flows of people, money, commodities and ideas between
California and Central America. The full inter-American ethnography explores
convergences between these cultural politics: The Latinization of Los Angeles and the
Americanization of El Salvador. It threads together multiple sites and connections
between Los Angeles and El Salvador around a particular set of practices—media
representation, consumption, policing, and forced repatriation (deportation). In it I track,
what I term, the geo-politics of simultaneity of this particular inter-American
“globalscape” (Appadurai 1990) by mapping complex networks of communication and
paths of circulation, which suture these previously distinct locations of cultural
production together.
More than just the literal movement of people back and forth across geographical
borders, connections between El Salvador and Los Angeles are also material and
discursive, imaginary and spatial, affective and mimetic. Narratives leak beyond the
boundaries of nation-state. Gang youth deported from LA, walking the streets of El
Salvador, call each other “homies.” Discourses which link migration to cultural
contamination, crime, delinquency, vulgar consumerism, and unproductivity resonate
back and forth between the US and El Salvador. In El Salvador, for example, remittances
like welfare in the US are said to “make people lazy.” Crime legislation and proposals
for—Three Strikes and Tarjeta Roja—turn on like metaphors, which link the arenas of
sports and citizenship. Genres—therapeutic, revolutionary and rights discourses travel
too. In cobblestone pueblos deported or return youth and young adults struggle through
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Convention