Paper short abstract:

Migrations are phenomena that encompass the economic, social and cultural spheres, but they also involve the transfer of elements from the imaginary that are fundamental aspects of a culture, and that when a social group moves from one place to another, they find different ways of representing it

Paper long abstract:

From an ethnographic approach, this study intends an analysis between indigenous women, who at different times migrated from their places of origin to San Luis Potosí. During the interviews and the dialogue they maintained between them, compare what they left in their villages and how they've adapted to a foreign place. Despite relocation they maintain their (cultural) imaginaries and representations as shown in mechanisms to preserve the use of their traditional clothing, speak the native language and make the crafts they learned in their place of origin.

In sharing their dialogue, this paper intends to explain the main elements of each woman's culture that prevail in the imaginary and how they are reconfigured and represented. It is also analyzes how they elaborate their present in everyday life from a past protected within the collective memory of the native people. They talk about how they have managed to adapt to the new territory by forming new intercultural identities, based on the interaction with indigenous peoples of other origins as well as with non-indigenous peoples. In the interaction between these women, the important tensions that push them to strengthen their own traditions as a form of resistance also become evident.

This new approach to human geographies allows us to analyze the concept of territory in the migrant's imagination differently, which according to García (2003, 101): "Clarify certain aspects of identity permanence and collective memory that transcend the time they originated through cultural recreations, giving it a cumulative continuum…"