**2. Background**

## *2.1. Constructing Nationalism through Tourism*

Nationalism and national identity in this paper will most often be discussed in reference to either Galicia or the United States; however, Galician-Americans construct plural and multilayered identities that often fold in a strong connection to the Spanish state with a cemented notion of a unified Spanish identity. Additionally, participants also identified with America in ways that are highly multifaceted and at times tied to their identity as New Yorkers or other regional identities. Therefore, this paper takes the view that national identity is an active construction, constantly being imagined and reinvented within a collection of ever-changing layered identities. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson's (1991) notion of imagined communities, this paper presents Galician-American national identity not as a static construction but rather actively imagined through transnational practices and in conjunction with complex identity negotiations.

This research takes the approach that there are multiple ways in which Galicia is given meaning, focusing less on uncovering the origins and definition of Galician nationalism and more on the ways in which the nation is constructed or imagined by homeland visitors for purposeful aims. Tim Edensor (2002) sees the nation as performed in the banality of the everyday interconnected with the global and international. National identity in this way is not static or fixed but rather is represented, contested, consumed, and performed in multiple ways and at different moments. This paper also follows Anderson's (1991) view that the nation is an imagined community that is intentionally constructed for purposeful aims. However, it is not the accuracy of the way in which the nation is reproduce that is being explored here, but rather the various ways in which the national community is imagined.

In approaching nationalism as multifaceted both at the level of the banal and the international, it leaves room for an interpretation of how tourism is involved in the process of imagining the nation. The concept of tourism as a whole can itself be viewed as reinforcing Benedict Anderson's (1991) theory of imagined communities, as tourists are actively told how to remember, forget, and imagine the nation. Pretes (2003) builds on Anderson's notion of the census, map, and museum in the establishment of modern nations and argues that these three institutions are all still currently implemented through tourism in order to reinforce the national community and help to produce a national image. Pretes also shows how these institutions intentionally nationalize landscapes and contribute to the imagined community.

Tourism imbues sites with symbolic meaning (MacCannell 1992). These sites are presented to tourists as symbols of the nation that both reflect existing signifiers of the nation and construct new ones (Palmer 1999). Edensor (2002) presents tourism as a performance that is acted out by both the nation and the visitor. This performance of tourism can simultaneously reinforce existing national narratives, construct new competing national narratives, and provide the opportunity for tourists to challenge the performance (ibid). Tourism then performs the nation on multiple levels in a matrix connected to the other matrices of daily life. For example, Spanish tourism, even small-scale regional tourism, performs to tourists within the borders of the nation, but through the performance, this imagining will reify the nation to an international audience in an industry where tourism is also connected to the nation's economic success in the global arena. It is through the interconnected matrices that national identity in the local and everyday sphere is reproduced, which gives the nation its authority and durability in a globalizing context (Edensor 2002).

Through the act of tourism and being a tourist, the national community is reinforced and reimagined by domestic, international, and homeland tourists. Tourism markets and sells the nation both nationally and internationally, reducing national identity to elements of commercial profitability (Aronczyk 2013). This economic nationalism that is produced through tourism informs much of the growing trend of 'commercial nationalism' (Volcic and Andrejevic 2011, 2016) and 'consumer nationalism' (Castelló and Mihelj 2018) in the literature. Commercial nationalism argues that in an area of globalized neoliberal capitalism, the nation is being sold or being used to sell products while simultaneously, marketing and public relations strategies are being used by the public sector for economic and political aims (Volcic and Andrejevic 2016). In other words, tourism is a main player in commercial nationalism that "involves a simultaneous nationalization of the commercial and commercialization of the national" (Castelló and Mihelj 2018, p. 561).

Tourism acts as an example of the increased mobility and interconnectivity of the globe that eludes to the decreased relevance of the nation (Urry 2007). However, as Edensor (2002, p. 29) states, "Globalisation and national identity should not be conceived in binary terms but as two inextricably linked processes." Theories of commercial nationalism show how tourism plays a large role in making nationalism an element of increasing global capitalism. Nations exist in an international context, where the nation is imagined alongside and in reaction to other nations where "international consciousness is integral to the modern consciousness of nationalism" (Billig 1995, p. 87). In contrast to this globalized view of nationalism, theorists, such as Anthony Giddens (1985, p. 119), have described the nation as a "bordered power-container", where the nation is seen as existing within fixed geographical boundaries. However, in their article criticizing methodological nationalism, Wimmer and Schiller (2002, p. 307) argue that social scientists have incorrectly followed the assumption that the nation (its economy, politics, and society) exists only within its borders, "thus removing trans-border connections and processes from the picture". Wimmer and Glick Schiller therefore make the claim that in order to understand nationalism, we must not separate it from transnationalism.

## *2.2. Transnationalism, Tourism, and Nationalism*

In a lecture given by Benedict Anderson in 1992, he argues that global capitalism is creating a new form of nationalism, that of 'long-distance nationalism'. This nationalism is defined by generations of immigrants who instead of being "turned into Frenchmen, Australians, Germans, and Americans" are continuing a sense of nationhood and political involvement in their ethnic countries of origin (Anderson 1992, p. 12). Long-distance nationalism is seen as a consequence of transnational social networks (Fouron and Nina 2002). Transnationalism allows for the conceptualization of experiences of migrants who sustain transnational networks; have a sense of national belonging to the ethnic homeland regardless of citizenship, home, or country of birth; and that make choices and actions related to these feelings of transnational belonging or long-distance nationalism (ibid.).

American ideology has been largely centered on the notion of America as a 'melting pot', where immigrants blend together to create a "new American type" (Glazer and Moynihan 1996, p. 135). It was believed that immigrants would, in time, break all ties to their homeland, where descendants would eventually become fully incorporated into the new host society (Fouron and Nina 2002; Levitt and Waters 2002). However, the melting pot theory of assimilation fell short. While immigrants have assimilated in some respects, they have also maintained distinct cultural and national identities. Glazer and Moynihan (1996) describe how it was not so much the distinctiveness of the immigrants and their values that prevented them from melting and assimilating into America, but the character of American society that did not view each immigrant group equally. While the civic nationalism of America allows for all the subsequent generations of immigrants to legally become Americans, when one would ask you what you are, American was not the predicted response (Glazer and Moynihan 1996).

While the idea of "straight line assimilation", where the success of new immigrants is considered to be dependent on assimilating to the new society, is still a familiar concept within academia and policy discourse, more and more this traditional form of immigrant assimilation is being replaced by the idea that immigrants maintain certain ties to their homeland (Levitt and Waters 2002). Theories of integration and 'segmented assimilation' allow for explanations of the diverse ways in which migrants incorporate themselves politically, economically, socially, and culturally into the new host nation (Brubaker 2001; Portes and Zhou 1993). Following the point made by Vertovec (2009) that maintaining a cultural or national identification with the homeland does not exclude any successful integration in the host country, this research utilizes the perspective of transnationalism to explain the ways

in which Galician-Americans construct a Galician identity alongside incorporation into the host nation. Levitt and Waters (2002, p. 12) have stated "transnational practices and assimilation are not diametrically opposed to one another". As Robert Courtney Smith (2006) found in his research on Mexican migrants in New York, immigrants themselves engage with assimilation concepts, seeing many of their transnational activities as contrary to the pull of Americanization. In the case studied here, Galician-Americans reflect the inference not to see assimilation as something that happens or does not, but rather something that immigrants actively engage or reject in multiple aspects of their life. Instead of viewing assimilation as the alternative to transnationalism, this research focuses on how identity is maintained and what role the migrants' American lives play in the way they engage with transnational life and construct a Galician identity.

Transnationalism argues that migrants, along with their children, "retain economic, social, and political ties to their homelands, live in transnational communities that simultaneously span two or more nation-states, and develop multiple and diffuse transnational identifications" (Tsuda 2009, p. 8). While there are examples of people moving and living across borders throughout history, it has only been recently that the scale of inter-nationalism has allowed individuals a greater ability to construct transnational lives (Portes et al. 1999). Fouron and Nina (2002, p. 171) use the term transnational migrant to describe migrants "who live their lives across borders". Migrants will listen to music and keep updated on the news from the homeland, and they will continue to eat traditional foods and maintain traditional cultural practices; many migrants will even become involved in political organizations and send money home in support of a cause. However, migrants make active choices that choose transnationalism.

Migrants can be seen as engaging in transnational or national life through their actions and choices. Individuals will 'choose the nation' in daily activities of their life (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). From which products to buy to what church to attend, nationhood exists in the daily and institutionalized decisions that people make. Migrants will consciously, or even unconsciously, choose the nation when they make decisions to send their children to Spanish schools or not to teach their children Spanish, when they insist on speaking Galician at home or decide not to teach their children Galician, and when migrants gain American citizenship or pass their Spanish citizenship along to their children. Choosing the nation occurs when individuals make small choices, such as cooking traditional dishes, or large institutionalized choices, such as voting, education, or country of citizenship. Choices that choose Galicia happen alongside choices that choose Spain and choose America. Each time a national choice is made, it has the possibility to shape a network of national and transnational social relations (ibid.). For example, by choosing to send their children to a Spanish speaking school, an individual may meet other Spanish parents, and by sending their children to the Galician club to learn the traditional dace (*muñeira*/*muiñeira*), they may meet other Galician parents and their children are likely to make friends in these transnational communities. Therefore, the active choices that migrants and their children make in the banality of everyday life 'choose' a national community, creating different "transnational social fields" and reproducing more national choices (Fouron and Nina 2002).

Transnationalism, therefore, is beyond identity and it is more than simply continuing a connection to the ethnic homeland. Transnationalism is something that is done; it is an active engaged process (Vertovec 2009), and one that affects not only the transnational communities but also affects both the home and host countries. In fact, all nations, not just ones traditionally seen as migrant-receiving nations, are now experiencing an increased "proliferation of subnational and transnational identities" (Cohen 1997, p. 175). In this research, transnationalism is explored as a way of constructing a long-distance national identity, focusing on the transnational activity of repeat homeland visits. While much of the discussion around transnationalism is concerned with how these migrants construct transnational lives in their host society, this research focuses on the construction of identity in the sending nation. Maintaining a physical contact with the homeland through repeat homeland visits is a phenomenon that happens less with migrants that immigrate longer distances, such as Europeans who migrate to the US; therefore, homeland visits, as a recurrent part of transnational life, have been studied

more often between migrants within Europe (Wessendorf [2013] 2016). In studying second-generation Italians living in Switzerland, (Wessendorf [2013] 2016) describes reoccurring visits to the homeland as "concrete transnational involvement" and this level of involvement in the home country was seen as the foundation to maintaining an active transnational life. Smith's (2006) book *Mexican New York* also emphasizes the importance of homeland visits in maintaining a Mexican identity for the migrants. For Smith, the local community in both the home and host countries is essential to the construction of a transnational life, but he also emphasizes the importance of these transnational communities towards the imagined community constructed in the homeland region.

The migrants and their family studied in this research sit between the literature on return migration and diaspora tourism (also called roots tourism (Basu 2007), homesick tourism (Sabine 2015), genealogical tourism (Santos and Yan 2010), and many others). Return migration refers to a permanent return to a homeland from which the individual originated while diaspora tourism often focuses on the once-in-a-lifetime visit, a phenomenon where tourists attempt to connect their roots that have been, until the visit, fairly distant (King and Christou 2011). King and Christou argue for more study into these multiple short-term visits as part of transnational life. However, these forms of more long-term or rare visits still, as Storm, Eric (2019, p. 111) argues, "generally reinforced the regional and national identity of both returnees and hosts". Previous studies have discussed the outcomes of return visits through a diverse range of encounters from disillusionment to self-discovery; cases where the visit reinforced the ethno-national identity of migrants and their children or caused migrants to rea ffirm a strengthened identity with the host county. First-generation migrants can often create a static vision of the homeland, imposing a stagnant cultural memory on the following generations (Harper 2005). These static images of the homeland can be inaccurate or become inaccurate over time, making homeland visits unable to measure up to the expectations of the "romantic fantasies of the 'old country'" (Cohen 1997, p. 185). Kim's (2009) research on Korean-American homeland tourists found that Korean-Americans often felt racially foreign in the US; however, after being excluded from the strict definitions of Korean cultural belonging in their homeland visit, they began to redefine their Korean identity. Korea, as a place, began to be defined less in terms of cultural belonging and more through ancestral and racial roots, reinforcing whiteness as a defining characteristic of claims to American identity. Additionally, there are also instances where these positive visits strengthen ethnic and national identity towards the homeland (Tsuda 2009). The role of homeland tourism on the construction or maintenance of a long-distance national identity is not straightforward and dependent on context (King and Christou 2011). However, what remains consistent through the literature on homeland visits is the contrast between mobility and place that individuals negotiate.

The increased mobility of society that has made tourism more accessible and reimagined the nation as consumable, economic, and global has also allowed for a transnational social sphere. However, the idea of homeland tourism is connected to a very static concept of "homecoming, homing, the need to 'belong', the search for 'roots'—all are evocations of the need for grounding, or 'placing'" (King and Christou 2011, p. 461). Duval's (2004) study of repeat visits by Caribbean migrants describes the visit as both a transnational practice and a pathway to permanent return. Ley and Kobayashi (2005), however, found that the frequent mobility of Hong Kong Chinese in Canada made long-term resettlements but with a continual movement back and forth throughout the life course, where Hong Kong and Canada made up one 'life world'. This tension between the fluidity of the transnational and fixed sense of belonging plays out in this research, where the visit connects participants to a fixed place.

The importance and impact of physical location and place on transnational lives is often understated by those studying transnationalism. Levitt and Waters (2002, p. 7) argued about transnationalism that the "ways in which connections to collectivities constituted across space seem to override identities grounded in fixed, bounded locations". This global mobility of transnationalism has also been referred to as solidarity without location, "rendering any strictly bound sense of community or locality obsolete" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, p. 9). Fouron and Nina (2002, p. 196) define second-generation transnational migrants as "bounded not by the territorial limits of a state but by the boundaries of social fields".

This boundless and unfixed definition of transnationalism is reflected in the earlier discussion arguing against the 'container' view of the nation, of which tourism offers an example of nationalism in a globalizing transnational world. Additionally, in order to understand these repetitive return visits by Galician-Americans, it is essential to acknowledge this increase in mobility and internationalization that was not accessible to earlier generations and defines transnationalism (King and Christou 2011). However, while these authors are not wrong to emphasize the important phenomenon of being able to maintain social, economic, and political engagemen<sup>t</sup> transnationally, it goes against the findings of this research that emphasizes the experience of visiting the place and location of the nation as essential to the construction of a transnational life.

Though the nation is not conceived as container or existing only in its borders, the construction of national identity continues to be imbedded in symbolic associations to land and place. Rather than transnationalism creating a long-distance form of national identity that is placeless, this research confirms the argumen<sup>t</sup> made by Smith (2006) that the local informs a transnational identity:

"Being a Ticuanense is not a cosmopolitan, placeless identity but rather begins as its opposite, a local, deeply rooted traditional identity that is lived in two countries at once, and evolves into something transnational but still local. Because migrants and their U.S.-born children can return regularly to Ticuani, its traditions and ability to confer authenticity make it important to many second-generation youths for whom being Mexican in New York has negative connotations of victimization and difficulty in school. In this way, assimilation and transnationalization become intimately bound." (Smith 2006, p. 11)

Just as in Smith's study, this paper argues that the visit allows for the construction of transnational identities and social networks, where the nation is embedded in ideologies of belonging to a fixed place. Within this long-distance nationalism, identities are constructed in both the home and host countries, with migrants simultaneously moving between moments of transnationalism and assimilation. These transnational identities are dependent on visiting the homeland while simultaneously impacting the homeland through their visits.

## *2.3. Galicia: Land of Migration*

The homeland tourism that Galician-Americans engage in defies our traditional notions of tourism by blurring the relationship between host/gues<sup>t</sup> and home/away. These homeland tourists in this research are not visiting Galicia for the first time, but rather they visit yearly or with a high frequency. They normally do not stay in hotels, and stay with family or own property. They do not always engage in traditional tourist activities, such as visiting marketed tourist destinations. In this way, Galician homeland tourists can be seen more as travelers, in that they do not often visit the main attractions or spend money on marketed tourist experiences. However, in this paper, I refer to Americans of Galician decent that routinely visit Galicia as homeland tourists, not visitors or travelers. While an argumen<sup>t</sup> can be made for referring to this group as travelers, I intentionally use the word tourism here to acknowledge the intentional temporary short nature of the visit and their similarity. Additionally, "Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, there is still a tendency to see tourism as a mindless frivolous activity and of travel as an avenue to grea<sup>t</sup> adventure and self improvement" (Chambers 2010, p. 5). In fact, those who define themselves as travelers define tourists as something they are not, but travelers themselves reproduce the social, economic, and environmental issues that they claim distinguishes them from tourists (Week 2012). Tourism has been described from this perspective of mass tourism that is highly commercialized and superficial, focusing on the consumption of tourist activities in contrast to engaging in an "authentic". While that form of tourism does exist, and is particularly evident in other areas of Spain, it is not the only way tourism is experienced. Tourists themselves are diverse, creating numerous ways to be a tourist and experience travel. Within the diverse and practically infinite ways in which to do tourism, MacCannell (1992) argues that the one thing tourists have in common is a search for an imagined "authentic" experience. However, this search for the authentic is ultimately superficial, steeped in the nostalgia of the rural, and reinforces the exploitative power dynamics ingrained in tourism (ibid). All of the Galician homeland visitors, regardless of whether or not they engage in traditional tourist activities, are still in search of an 'authentic', sometimes nostalgic, Galicia, actively constructing their image of the imagined community through being a tourist.

Tourism in Spain is famously popular. In fact, Spain has been referred to as a success story for tourism and nation branding. Nation brander Wally Olins (2003, p. 162) states that after the civil war and decades of "isolated, autarkic, poverty-stricken, authoritarian anachronism, hardly part of Europe at all", Spain was able to transform into a "modern, well-o ff, European democracy" after the death of Francisco Franco. The brand started as a widespread tourism campaign that promoted modernized and sunny Spain with a logo designed by the famous Catalan artist, Joan Miró. This tourism logo encapsulated the whole of Spain's new image of European modernity (Aronczyk 2013). Through this image constructed by tourism, Spain "carefully orchestrated and promoted its re-entry into the European family" (Olins 2003, p. 162). While this narrative of the birth of a modern European Spanish image and a new tourist industry is overstated and simply incorrect (Pack 2008), the reality of this representation is that it continues to overemphasize the unity of a single image of the Spanish nation resting on tired stereotypes. Over the decades, tourism in Spain has presented a very narrow image of the nation, reproducing a cliched exotic orientalism invented by outsiders while also catering to the 'sun and sea' demands of the tourist market (Storm 2017). There were and continue to be attempts at promoting regional diversity, but images, such as bullfighting, flamenco, and fiesta, still dominate within much of Spanish tourism, representing a stereotypical version of the nation for mass consumption (Storm 2017).

While Galicia has never become a mass tourist destination as many other areas of Spain, tourism has been important in Galician history, both through building an imagined nation and through building its national identity in relationship to the Spanish state. In their study of the Swedish middle class in the early 1900s, Frykman and Löfgren (1983) describe how national identity became tied to the landscape and presented as inherently political. In a similar way, Santos and Trillo-Santamaría (2017) explain how the pilgrimage tourism of the Way of Saint James (el camino de Santiago) and the representation of landscape tourism created a political stance representing the nation as submissive and as part of a unified Spanish state. Through these tourism o ffers, Galicia "served to reinforce Spain as a nation-state" and "contribute to the building of and image of Galicia based on rural and social attributes lined to femininity, such as melancholy, which may lead to the rejection of Galicia as a political subject" (Santos and Trillo-Santamaría 2017, p. 104). While Galicia's main tourist attraction has been Santiago and the pilgrimage, it is Santos and Trillo-Santamaría's second point related to the construction of landscape through tourism that is most related to the construction of an imagined landscape within the homeland tourists in this article.

Landscape in general has long been studied as a social construct that is imbued with signifiers of cultural and national meaning (Cosgrove 1984; Schama 1995). Nations are often visualized by idealized landscapes, and landscape is actively constructed as national. Edensor (2002, p. 40) argues that since the rise of modern industrialism and emergence of the modern nation happened simultaneously, nations are "clothed in this rhetoric of the rural, a rural which most frequently encapsulates the genus loci of the nation, the place from which we have sprung, where our essential national spirit resides." Therefore, landscape often serves as an origin story of the nation, the ultimate and most pure form of national description. The rural landscape of Galicia acts in a similar way as an emotive national symbol. Both nationalists and the tourism industry in Galicia have drawn on cliched and exaggerated symbols of landscape in order to convey a Galician identity distinct from that of the rest of Spain (López Silvestre and González 2007). This visualization of Galicia as rural, green forests, mountains, misty weather, and rugged coastlines were used to distinguish Galicia nationally and politically through dualisms of "north versus south, the Atlantic vs. the Mediterranean, damp vs. dry, vitality vs. despair, rural vs. urban, feminine vs. masculine, i.e., Galician vs. Castilian" ( <sup>L</sup>ópez Silvestre

and González 2007, p. 246). Heritage tourism presents landscape as a cultural construction imbued with national meaning and where nostalgia for the past is communicated in order to build a national identity for the present (Palmer 1999). In visiting Galicia and experiencing the landscape, participants are engaged in activities that reproduce and reinforce the nation. Data from 2005 shows landscape and visiting family or relatives as the top two reasons why tourists visit Galicia ( <sup>L</sup>ópez Silvestre and González 2007). Just as Galicia is known for its landscape, it is also known as a land of emigration.

Spain overall has a significant history of emigration, known as one of the largest emigrating countries in Europe until about the 1980s (Gomez 1962; Serra 2003). Of all the autonomous regions in Spain, it is Galicia that was by far the largest emigrating province historically and most Galicians ended up migrating to the Americas (Gomez 1962; N úñez 2002). Data from 2016 showed that Galicia was the largest group of all Spanish citizens registered as living abroad, making up 21.85% of all Spaniards living internationally (Golías 2018). More recently the Galician newspaper, *La Voz de Galicia*, published a finding that Galicians are registered as living in a staggering 70% of the world's countries (Punzón 2019). They attribute this to the economic recession of recent years; however, this more contemporary flow of migrants follows a historical pattern of emigration. N úñez (2002, p. 234) explains that the historically large emigration of Galicians until around the 1950s was not the cause of extreme poverty but rather can be described as a choice that was made by migrants "within a context of limited opportunities" and potential for growth. Furthermore, as Lamela (2018) argues, in the Galician case, there has been a consistent back and forth flow of migrants for generations, something typical of not only the Galician migrant experience but a defining narrative of Galicia.

Galicia as a place of emigration is so cemented in Spanish popular knowledge that there are even common jokes about it, for example: 'What is the largest city in Galicia? Answer: Buenos Aires'. So deep is the impact of emigration that in many South American countries, the term 'Gallego' is used as a synonym for someone from Spain. In Galicia, migrants were part of the national narrative of the nation and considered a part of the imagined community of the nation ( N úñez 2002). However, there have been diverse ways in which migration has been constructed in relation to the nation. Migrants have been presented through a narrative of nostalgia and homesickness and also as a people of adventure and success (ibid.). The Galician governmen<sup>t</sup> itself imagined its nation as transnational, extending beyond its borders to the Galician communities abroad and even funding migrant return visits (ibid.). This impact and narrative of emigration is evidenced even in the Galician language: "The term 'morriña' is defined by the Galician Royal Language Academy as a 'melancholic and depressive feeling and mood, specifically or caused by a nostalgia for the homeland'" (Lamela 2018, p. 1). The impact of migrants on Galicia should not be reduced to simply an inclusion in the national narrative. Migrants were politically involved and set up associations in their home countries that sent back aid and supported causes ( N úñez 2016). They were influential in funding and creating tourist infrastructure in Galicia and additionally contributed to creating and reproducing the rural folkloric imagining of the landscape and nation (Santos and Trillo-Santamaría 2017). Galician migrants were and are impactful in the banal imagining of the nation:

"they continue to be an ever-present element of daily life. Return migrants fill Galician villages every summer, and many restaurants, shops and companies are named after the migration destinations of their owners. Moreover, migration has decisively contributed to reshaping the rural Galician landscape, since return migrants have introduced architectural styles partially transplanted from their host countries." ( N úñez 2002, p. 251)

Historically, Galician emigrants to the US have been numerically insignificant compared to other Latin American countries, such as Argentina (Moya 1998), but if examined from the local community level, there were entire Galician municipalities where the majority of the emigrants left for the US, specifically New York. Those from the Galician province of Coruña were especially predominant in the United States (Pérez 2008). In her study on migrants from Galicia to New York, Pérez (2008) determined that since the early 20th century, the sending area of Coruña, with a significant history of migrants going to New York, were from the areas of Bergondo, Oleiros, and Sada (see Figure 1). This research focuses on the municipalities of Bergondo and Sada, areas in which the majority of migrants went to the US. Looking at Figure 1, there is a clear prominence of emigration towards New York in Sada; however, in Bergondo, while New York is still the most common destination, when looking down at the parish level, certain areas presented much higher numbers of those emigrating to New York (Pérez 2008). While this sort of migration data is very di fficult to determine due to the inconsistency in records and the multiple migratory patterns of many Galicians, the data can still show both the importance of social networks in migrant destinations and also the high impact of certain destinations on geographic areas. Initially, many of these migrants were men working in maritime shipping or labor; however, they were eventually followed by women and families, creating communities of Galicians from the same municipality living in close proximity in New York neighborhoods, many in Astoria, Queens, where the migrant association Casa Galicia (Galicia House) is still functioning (ibid.). It is this community of Galician-Americans that originated from Sada and Bergondo that continue to visit Galicia regularly and are the subject of this research. This paper argues that the construction of a transnational social field and a long-distance Galician identity by these migrants is dependent on the ability to return and visit Galicia, constructing a national identity based in both place and migration.

**Figure 1.** Percentage of migrants and their primary destinations of migration in Bergondo, Oleiros, and Sada from 1917 to 1941 (source: Pérez 2008).
