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tinuum of old themes, such as colonialism, raising new questions about the processes of
transnational migration.
Inthischapter,Iamconcernedwiththerelationbetweenmigrationandwhitenessand
theinstitutionalizationofwhitemigrants'nationalidentitiesinSouthernSpain.Howare
raciallogicsofwhitenesslivedandnegotiatedinthisparticularmigratorycontext?Who
feels close to whom? Why do some nationalities live in close proximity to one another
and avoid certain groups and areas? Why are some being included in a particular com-
munity while others are excluded from the same communities because they are read as
migrants?
Here I analyze the lived experiences of white migrants when they rein-stall them-
selves in a different geopolitical context. I look also at the varying ways in which mi-
gratingnationalidentities andsocialnetworksareexpressedandcommunicated toother
white diasporic communities, and their interaction with the local dynamics of racialized
systems and “racial formations” (Winant 1994). Being a migrant is, as Seyla Benhab-
ib and Judith Resnik (2009) put it, to be in transit. Migrants migrate from one place to
another, rendering every migrant both an emigrant and an immigrant. I call this group
of women
transmigrants
, using Nina Glick Schiller's (1995, 48) concept, in that their
“daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international bor-
ders and [their] public identities are configured in relation to more than one nation-
state.” The women maintained close contact with friends and family in Sweden, read
Swedishnewspapers,ownedpropertyhere(andelsewhere).Inshort,theirlivesspanned
multiple national borders. By examining the postmigration experiences of this group of
Europeanwomen,andusinganempiricallygroundedethnography,thestudycontributes
to the literature on racism, whiteness, gender, class, and migration, which has focused
primarily on disadvantaged groups in migration.
The analysis is grounded in the interdisciplinary fields of whiteness studies and
transnational migration, aiming at broadening and deepening debates about the experi-
ences of migration and the continuous racial production that shapes our positions in a
globalarena(Ahmed2007;Bonilla-Silva2012;Frankenberg1993;HübinetteandLund-
ström 2011; Hughey 2010; Lipsitz 1995; Leonard 2008; Omi and Winant 1994; Steyn
and Conway 2010; Twine and Gallagher 2008; Ware 2010; Weiss 2005). The goal is to
provide a theoretically founded analysis of the ways in which whiteness as a product
social is embodied, lived, and experienced differently through processes of migration.
Migration, can alter migrants' ideas of self and identity.
Bydislocating whitenessandwhitenationalidentity,thisstudyisanexampleofwhat
TwineandGallagherdescribedas“thirdwavewhitenessstudies”:ananalysisthat“takes
as its starting [point] the understanding that whiteness is not now, nor has it ever been,
a static, uniform category of social identification.” Thus, as Twine and Gallagher argue,
