Chinese migrants in New York: Explaining inequalities with transnational positions and capital conversions in transnational spaces

Abstract

This article puts forward the concept of ‘transnational positions’ as an important part of a new analytical framework to deconstruct and explain the inequalities that 22 Chinese transnational migrants – who had links to Singapore and who lived in New York – perceived they experienced when attempting to access resources in the transnational spaces they formed by living in several societies. Emphasis is on analyzing their experiences in New York and in Singapore. Transnational positions are the migrants’ subjective and retrospective accounts of their relations with people and institutions controlling access to desired resources in the different countries and places in which they lived. This new framework uses Bourdieu’s ideas of capital conversions to deconstruct and analyze the Chinese migrants’ transnational positions. The article shows that these positions express and reflect the migrants’ perceptions of their inequalities when they attempted to access resources in their transnational spaces, and that these inequalities are the intersections of cultural, social, economic, and political characteristics, with roots in different places, which the Chinese migrants saw as the opportunities and constraints with accessing resources in their transnational spaces. The relevance of this new analytical framework, and the data analysis, to explain cultural hybridity and cosmopolitanism are discussed.