1) Bibliographic Data
De Genova, Nicholas (1998) “Race, Space and Reinvention of Latin America in Mexican Chicago”, Latin American Perspectives, V.25-5, Sep:87-116.

2) Question(s) addressed by the author and working arguments
The author purpose is to suggest a critical re-evaluation of the conceptual foundations of ‘Latin America’ as it has been constructed as an object of spatial knowledge for Latin American Studies in the United States. He wants to elucidate the ways in which that spatial topography of the Americas is intrinsically racialized and involves a continuous work or reracialization that is manifest in the dialectical articulations of global processes with the localities where the global takes place.
From the Critical stand-point of a Mexican Chicago (one that belongs to Latin America), the author suggest a critical theory of transnationalism from below that can reckon with US imperialism and its conceits by interrogating some of the constructions of race and space that intersects in the imagining and enforcement of the boundaries of the US nation-State . Rather than presume the fixity and integrity of the US nation-state, the author emphasizes its constitutive restlessness. He proposes the existence of a Mexican Chicago-confined within the boundaries of the US nation-state but also a site for their production. And here, by emphasizing the production of these boundaries, he wants to suggest that Chicago becomes a site for their contingency. The proper place to think Chicago is Latin America, and when he propose this he directs his intellectual efforts against the epistemological stability of the us nation-state as presupposition.
Chicago as urban space is continuously produced and reproduced through the contradictions of struggles in which Mexican migrants are centrally implicated where Mexican communities themselves can be constituted not in isolation but indeed only in the midst of social conflict. He argues that the every day life practices of migrant workers produce a living space in Chicago that conjoins it irreversibly to Mexico and render it irretrievable for the US nation state. Chicago has become a Mexican City through the entrenchment of transnationalized labour and migrant workers improvisational productions of locality. Mexican migrant workers not only go to work in capitalist production but also are embroiled in the production of difference and racialized difference within specific local configurations of capitalist hegemony as well as transnationally, across a global capitalist topography of domination.
Mexican migrants understandings of their own cultural identities (between blacks and whites) become thoroughly saturated with ideologies of racial difference. He calls this process reracialization because migrants has already been racialized in Mexico prior to their migration. The process of reracialization is transnational in its consequences and can be founded in Mexican rural villages. Mexican relatively fluid racial order may be relaborated thanks to migrant racialized encounters. The reracialization of Mexican migrants in US is no less transnational than Mexican migrant labour itself. In this light the production of a Mexican Chicago evokes not only the contingency of the space of the US nation state but also the manifestation of a laborious process whereby what is at stake is the reinvention of Latin America Itself

3) Conceptual references to transnational – transnationalism
Transnationalism exist in some working relation to imperialism. Transnationalism, as specified for the proposes of anthropological inquiry, involves the ways in which the macroeconomic and state-driven political processes that annihilate the space and destabilize national boundaries have contributed to the proliferation of sociocultural interactions of a new order and an unprecedented intensity. The interest of the author is to sharpen the critical perspective made possible by discourses of transnationalism by giving emphasis on the transnationalization of labour and the racialized class politics of globalization-to advance, as it were, a transnationalism from below.

4) Conclusions or Final Remarks
Transnational migration and the transnationalization of labour complicates our traditional understanding of space and borders. These forces shape and reshape the identities and racialize the notions of what is and what’s not US and Latino America.