From P aris to Pueblo and Back: (Re‐)Emigration and the Modernist Chronotope in Cultural Performance

In this article I examine ethnographic data collected during the rehearsals and performance of a play created by a group of S panish seniors at a social center near P aris. The play recounts a S panish immigrant's return to her pueblo from F rance after years of living abroad. Drawing on B auman's (1992, 2011) notion of “cultural performance,” I approach the play as a reflexive event that stages the most significant meanings of the community by and for whom it is created—meanings that include the modernist chronotope that dominates it. This particular chronotope—in which F rance is associated with progress and sophistication, and S pain is associated with backwardness and provincialism—serves as an organizing framework for the community as they represent and make sense of their experience of migration. On an individual level, however, the narrative of return does not necessarily manifest this particular chronotopic structure. To illustrate this divergence, I present Fina, an actor in the play and the author of an autobiographical monologue included therein. By juxtaposing these distinct articulations of the same narrative—one communal, one individual—I show how processes of identification may be linked to chronotopic variation depending on the scale at which they occur.