Article
Spanish
ID: <
10.4000/remi.6221>
·
DOI: <
10.4000/remi.6221>
Abstract
This article explores the participation of the Buenos Aires Korean community in the city’s garment market. It aims at understanding the mechanisms that interact in this sector to influence the group’s social organization, taking into account the dynamics (times of crisis and of upturns) in the local-global economy. First, within this context, I offer a description of this community’s arrival and settlement in Argentina, its diasporic nature and the importance of social capital. I outline the major general aspects of the Korean community in Buenos Aires: The role played by the family, churches and associations in how community life is structured; the concentrated settlement pattern in the urban space; the community’s “successful” development in the local economic sphere. Second, I investigate the community’s form of integration in the local economy – primarily its concentration in the small and medium garment industry. I address this in three aspects: The form of inscription in the urban space; inter- and intra-ethnic social relations within the garment sector; and the possibilities and the meaning that these conducts take on for the members of this community in the local-global sphere. Finally, I present conclusions as contributions for thinking about the contemporary world based on the experience of these diasporic migrant communities in an increasingly transnational world.