Migration, ethnicism, and transnationalism versus the right to assume citizenship by one’s (multi-) presence in the world

ABSTRACT Reflecting on my experience, I present an example of a collision between theory and reality, within the context of my study of Cadaqués, a coastal village in Spain with a history of proteiform mobilities and currently home to a diverse immigrant population working in the tourism industry. This analysis is based ethnographic work in the village, including qualitative interviews with fifty residents, statistical data, press articles, and mapping. The results of my field study appeared to be out of kilter with the abundant literature on the themes I had selected and I was forced to re-center my study by establishing new models: instead of taking a migratory, ethnicist and transnationalist perspective to my study of a dominant group of Bolivian migrants, I decided to formalize a psycho-social geography. I questioned how globalization dynamics and the presence of various (mobile) inhabitants contribute to evolutions within a village community. My objective here is to demonstrate that researchers should be open to questioning their selected paradigms and to developing new analytical tools. As a result, the researcher will be able to produce more pertinent results.