**5. Conclusions**

Galician-American homeland tourists studied in this paper view regular visits to Galicia as essential to constructing a Galician identity. Set alongside the di fficulty in creating a transnational social network in the US, Galician migrants use the visit to construct an identity that is at its core continually mobile and transnational. Even though the visit forms the core of establishing a Galician identity, it was not removed from the experience of American immigration and the wider society participants experienced. Participants intentionally 'choose the nation' in daily life with varying degrees of involvement at di fferent moments in the life course of the participants. Moving between actions of assimilation and transnationalism breaks down the idea that these two concepts are static or mutually exclusive. The experience of having Galician heritage in the US, a country with a large number of migrants from Latin America, was met with racial assumptions in which participants formed a strong, specifically northern, Spanish identity. Galician-Americans drew on the landscape and imagined history of Galicia to act against a social system that often categorized them as 'not white'. The visit therefore allowed both an identity with a place that had only a very small transnational public sphere in the US and one that could be geographically and culturally constructed as Celtic, northern, and 'white' as a reaction to the stratified racial system in the US.

Galicia was imagined by participants as Celtic, as the rural idyllic, as impoverished, and as a story of success and overcoming hardship. The visit for participants fits an even larger narrative of migration that their families had endured. Family narratives of migration fed into the coded characteristics

of Galicians being hard workers that make sacrifices for their families evidenced in the success of these migrants who are able to a fford return trips, financially support community development, and purchase property in Galicia. Participants ultimately viewed the visit as an obligation, something that Galician-Americans must do to be "real" Galicians. Visiting Galicia was essential to an identity of an imagined community embedded in place and defined by migration. Galician identity was described as something embodied, claimed only after having been there. However, it was seen as an identity that is highly mobile within the context of multiple flows back and forth. It is the prominence of the physical place, in needing to visit Galicia to be Galician, for these migrants that places the local at the center of transnational identity, a subject that has been largely approached through the "'invisible hand' of globalization" (Smith 2006, p. 241). This locality in contrast to the placelessness often used to describe transnationalism is important in understanding how nationalism is constructed for migrants but also how the local and transnational are both sustaining elements of these migrants' experiences of being Galician. This transnational identity is built in contrast to transnationalism's claim of subverting the local and in contrast to traditional ideas about unidirectional and permanent flows of migration.

In Galicia, a land often defined by emigration narratives constructed through transnationalism, should not be ignored from the wider conversation on nationalism. National identity, and the imagined national community, is multifaceted and imagined in numerous ways. Galicia, and additionally Spain, is continually imagined and reimagined by flows of migrants and migration, adding new perspectives to the ways in which nations and nationalism in Spain can be understood.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
