Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This paper examines the monetization of migrant return activities in contemporary Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The presence and dramatic return visits in recent years of low-wage workers from the diaspora have created numerous social contradictions and personal inconsistencies in the spatial typologies of the city. While they may not be able to purchase private properties in fortified enclaves such as where foreign expats and their high-wage overseas peers live, the low-wage overseas population can be seen in consumptive transactions at high-end cafes, bars, and restaurants within fortified spaces. This precariat diasporic group is thus visible in different hubs of the city for which they sometimes intersect with other global aspirants. I establish that low-wage immigrants are increasingly turning to the homeland as one response to their postcolonial predicaments of racial and economic exclusion as well as a response to their precarity in the West. These overseas relatives are returning to a homeland now free from the postcolonial power dynamics and racialized exclusions they confront in the United States, yet they bring these dynamics with them and exercise them at the family level through monetary circulation. This paper utilizes more than one hundred in depth interviews and seven years of ethnographic data to analyze the pleasures, contradictions, and tensions in the consumptionscape of the city from the vantage of the overseas working class.