Flexible Technologies of Subjectivity and Mobility across the Americas

essica, a thirty-three-year-old dermatologist from Chiapas, Mexico, explains her reasons for searching for a U.S. husband in Cowboy del Amor, a recent I documentary that follows, over a period of sixteen years, the tactics used by an Anglo-American cowboy to match U.S. men with Mexican women. Jessicas middle-class background is evident as she shares how her father was killed defending his large ranch from the Zapatista guerilla fighting that began during the 1994 uprising of the landless poor in Chiapas. Her pragmatic approach to finding a U.S. husband reflects her philosophy of survival more generally: "Rather than dream, I set goals. I am a person who works toward feasible goals not dreams." Like Jessica, many women from Mexico and Colombia depict Latin men as well as the economic, social, and political situation in Mexico more broadly as curbing their desire for social and economic security and mobility. Many of these women turn not only to U.S. men but also to communication technologies to access transnational mobility and opportunities they find lacking in their local milieu. These women articulate their desire for U.S. men alongside the language of professionalism and the marketplace, as they recount the process of finding romance and/or marriage through ideals of hard work, self sacrifice, and individual struggle that afford them the opportunity to express their desire for self-improvement, to superarse, to better themselves and the lives of their families. This form of moral mobility justifies personal gain in the face of collective struggles for resource distribution, such as articulated by the Zapatistas. Through interviews with Mexican and Colombian women, I found connections among unlikely technological couplings, such as how participants used both the Internet and cosmetic surgery to find what they defined as their "true" self by flexibly altering the inner and outer meanings of their subjectivity. Women who rely on Internet dating described unraveling their inner selves