Browsing by Author "Coulouras, Thomas C."

This thesis explores the emergence of the English-language call center industry in Mexico City. It explores the way in which the industry engages with the community of those forcibly returned from the United States. Often restricted by their lack of Spanish-speaking capability and/or enabled by their strength in the English-language, returnee employees significantly contribute to the industry as they can connect with American customers or business partners. While journalists and academics have explored this interaction between post-U.S. returnee migration and call center employment at large, this thesis asks: How do returnees use and shape call centers as places in which they can reinvent community, and how does this call center-returnee relationship impact Mexico City and the resettlement landscape of those forcibly returned at large? Through interviews with the forcibly returned community in Mexico City and their peers, I claim that call centers are a vital space within the resettlement process used by returnees to enter the global market, find and support one another, and reinvent community. They build these social networks both socio emotionally and materially, which emerge as integral in their own resettlement processes. These networks inspire institutional changes within the call center industry and distinctly situate returnee call center workers within the forcibly returned community at large in Mexico City.