Constructing Transnational Identities without Leaving Home: Korean Immigrant Women's Cognitive Border-crossing

Literature on contemporary immigrants suggests that increasing volume of transnational practices foster identity construction across borders, thereby disjoining geographical space and social space in which identities are constructed and negotiated. While studies pay increasing attention to the linkage between transnational organizing of economic and political activities and that of identities, relatively less attention has been given to transnational identity construction of immigrant groups without high level of transnationalism. This essay documents the identity dynamics among less mobile immigrants, who, albeit their immobility, negotiate their identities transnationally by way of various identity practices to imagine themselves as members of multiple communities across national and cultural boundaries. Based on thirty in-depth interviews with first generation Korean immigrant women, the author examines mechanisms of identity organizing which simultaneously indicate a gradual adaptation to the U.S. society and resistance to assimilation.