American value: Migrants, money and modernity in El Salvador and the United States

The dissertation is an historical ethnography of El Salvador and its relations with the US during the 20th century. It examines the lives of several generations of people as they have actively participated in the restructuring of value formation as El Salvador has shifted from a country organized around producing and exporting primary agricultural products to one increasingly oriented toward the circulation of US dollars remitted by over 20 percent of the population that lives and works in several major US cities. The research focuses on a town called Intipuca and its relations with Washington, DC and explores how popular representations of the town contribute to debates about the future of El Salvador and its relations with the US. The dissertation argues that Intipuca and DC may be understood as a subaltern form of "global city" and countryside and that this new social form should be understood as part of a longer 20th century history of the restructuring of value throughout the American hemisphere. The dissertation develops a mode of analysis that avoids strong distinctions between economics and culture, the material and the symbolic in order to examine the ways that specific subjectivities, social groups and shared orientations have been "produced" in relation to the production, consumption and exchange of three commodities throughout the century: coffee (1930s--1940s); cotton (1950s--1970s); and "services" (1980s--present) and their related patterns of money circulation.