Bordering Experiences: A Transnational Latin American Woman between Italy and Peru

The chapter aims to explore the transnational Spanish-speaking Latin Americans’ reflective construction of bordering by analysing the different forms of boundaries crossed by a Peruvian transgender woman who experienced backand-forth migration to and from Italy in order to reveal the way she positions herself in the social space and how she makes sense of social encounters and conflicts in her experience of deterritorialization and relocation. Theoretical underpinnings and data analysis are grounded on the reflections developed in the field of Bordering Studies (Anzaldúa, 1987; Szary & Giraut, 2015; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss & Cassidy, 2019) about how bordering has redefined contemporary notions of citizenship and belonging by involving specific discourses and practices in different multiscalar and complex ways that can’t be understood according to essentializing identities, nor just to binary categories based exclusively on class, gender, or geographical origin. For this same reason, the study will adopt an intersectional approach by analysing the agency and the resources to navigate between different and complex borders in the narrative of a transnational Latin American transgender woman. Through her discursive production regarding back-andforth displacement between the centres and peripheries of the globe, I will discuss how, in spite of an idealistic construction of emerging and cross-border linguistic and discursive communities, people are not equally mobile.