Australian exchange students’ transnational identity negotiations and Spanish language learning: Becoming ‘casi mexicana’?

Abstract

This qualitative study examines the transnational experiences, perceptions, and identity shifts of Australian exchange students before, during, and after sojourns in Mexico. Whereas the extant literature focuses on students' motivations and subsequent benefits of exchange, this longitudinal study investigates the processes of identity negotiation and perception shifts as well as the agency participants bring to both the experience and their subsequent crafting of narratives. This included one students claim to feeling 'casi Mexicana', almost Mexican, which exemplifies agentic identity negotiation, the theoretical phenomenon under investigation.

This study is timely and unique. For Australian students, Mexico is an unusual exchange destination, and their experiences are framed, at least initially, by the presence in urban Australia of a pastiche version of Mexicanidad. In the absence of a significant local Mexican expatriate population, Australian constructions of Mexico draw upon discourses of exoticised, tropicalised cultural 'otherness'. These imaginaries operate as a largely empty conceptual 'box' that serves as a holding space for sojourners' myriad desires, expectations, and interpretations. Thus, although the students engage with living, breathing Mexico, they also engage with imagined 'Mexico'. This interplay forms a potent context-transcending crucible within which to understand, at a theoretical level, the processes of identity negotiation amid contested social imaginaries. Ong's Transnationalism, poscolonialism and Bourdieu's capital provide theoretical framing lenses.

The study found that participants' pre-departure expectations included Spanish-language proficiency and to 'fit in' to new fields easily. But while some embraced the Mexico they found, thus acquiring the capital to interact successfully and to reframe their imaginings, others rejected the Mexico they encountered as insufficiently 'authentic', as framed by Australian imaginaries.

At a methodological level, this is an emic study that combined semi-structured interviews undertaken before, during, and after the students' sojourns with autoethnographic analysis of the researcher's own Mexico sojourn, as an undergraduate. The data collection and analysis was iterative, making use of participants' earlier perceptions in subsequent interviews to elicit commentary. Further, visual data elicitation techniques and social media performances were used to examine participants' identity work.