A construção de um sujeito político transnacional: o ativismo migrante em Buenos Aires.

Abstract

This thesis aims to illuminate the political actions that transgress borders, as well as the transition of one of its protagonists, the immigrant, to the position of political actor. We start from two associated hypotheses: that the nation-state is constituted as a centripetal force, a centralizing and homogenizing force; and that social action can often take place as a centrifugal force, that is, a force that expands the symbolic and material limits on which it was constituted. On that wise, we will observe an immigrant as a political actor who crosses such forces and the conflict between them. For that purpose, we will engender an analysis of the formation and action of national states, among other things, as a movement of politic statization, that is, self-construction as a hegemonic space for disputes over the elaboration of the social world. Next,we will observe how social actions, from the spatialization of life, challenge the limits estab-lished by the process of statization of politics. Finally, when looking at immigrant activism in the city of Buenos Aires, we will analyze, in an empirically oriented way and with a specific focus offered to the ambiguities and contradictions of such actions, the proposals presented in the previous chapters. For the realization of this study, we resort a part of the Critical Theory set and the specialized literature on topics such as transnationalism and immigration. We also try to undertake fieldwork in order to challenge the theory based on empirically oriented obser- vations. In the end, we will see that the immigrant is an unavoidable political actor of contem- porary times, which ends up questioning the traditional notions of citizenship and political community.