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Ethnic and Racial Studies

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Transnational lifestyles as a new form of cosmopolitan social identification? Latin American women in German urban spaces
Sandra Gruner-Domic

First published on: 06 January 2011

To cite this Article Gruner-Domic, Sandra(2011) 'Transnational lifestyles as a new form of cosmopolitan social

identification? Latin American women in German urban spaces', Ethnic and Racial Studies,, First published on: 06 January 2011 (iFirst) To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.533782 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.533782

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Ethnic and Racial Studies 2011 pp. 1 19, iFirst Article

Transnational lifestyles as a new form of cosmopolitan social identication? Latin American women in German urban spaces
Sandra Gruner-Domic
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(First submission October 2009; First published January 2011)

Abstract Joining a religious sect, the sex industry or the art field can open transnational opportunities for women to participate actively in different social and cultural domains. This article is based on a qualitative study of migration, gender and identity among Latin American women in Berlin. Drawing from a transnational practices perspective, I refer to lifestyles that serve to develop cosmopolitan skills and competencies such women develop by relying on multiple identifications. These competencies facilitate their ability to find recognition as well as express a sense of belonging that extends beyond the ethnic categorizations deployed within hegemonic discourses. The women presented here identified themselves within lifestyles that helped them to develop cosmopolitan sociabilities as alternative representations of themselves. Looking at forms of cosmopolitan identification, this paper focuses on individual agency as these women contested, resisted or empowered themselves against racialized and ethnicized global hierarchies of power.

Keywords: Migration; women; lifestyles; transnationalism; cosmopolitanism; Latin American.

Migrants are attracted to cities for a range of material as well as cultural reasons: the enhancement of personal cultural capital, the opportunities for consumption, the variety of lifestyles and the availability of networks and places that provide access to advanced communication and travel. As Michael P. Smith (2005, p. 236) points out, those who have chosen to move to cities for cultural reasons are
# 2011 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 online DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.533782

2 Sandra Gruner-Domic

thought to be cosmopolitan. At the same time, studies of global phenomena such as cultural encounters and long-distance migration emphasize the way nation-states construct immigrants as foreigners or strangers (Glick Schiller and Fouron 1999, 2001). Within the German context, many discourses perpetuate images of immigrant women as poor or oppressed others. In this article I assess this assumption as well as the overly positive appreciation of cosmopolitanism that equates travel with the global elite. Further, the article looks at strategies of disempowered female immigrants and assesses their cosmopolitan skills and sociability. I approach cosmopolitan sociability as the competence of some actors to create social relations of inclusiveness.
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Methodological framework This article is based on a re-examination of the material of a large research project and extensive fieldwork conducted in 1996 8 and 2002 by the author through intensive participant observation. I investigated biographical accounts and identities of Latin American women in a context of cultural cross-border relations and the polemics of German culture (Gruner-Domic 2004). I focus on the lived experiences of three women whose involvement in transnational activities highlights identification with a particular lifestyle that engaged them with others who were different from them. The accounts were part of a sample of twenty-nine interviews conducted by the author with women between 25 and 45 years old of different backgrounds and educations who shared the experience of migration and crossing culture borders as well as ascriptions of being racially, culturally and socially different from the dominant population. All women developed a Latin American identity and sought to belong to Berlin. The three women described here emphasized that their specific lifestyles resulted from their participation in transnational activities that were essential to their ability to earn an income or pursue a career. Their involvement in these activities originated in their struggles to accommodate and resist gender, racial and social identities (Weitz 2009). At times these women behaved in pragmatic ways in order to gain access socially or to empower themselves in response to their unequal global positioning. Their subaltern position resulted in complex interactions among unequal actors when they try to reclaim a different status. All three women preferred to talk about their life experiences in terms of lifestyles, rather than describing themselves with national, ethnic or pan-ethnic labels. They regarded themselves primarily as people who share much more than relations of kinship and nationality with other people. I describe the experiences and

Transnational lifestyles 3

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reflections of these subjects so as to illustrate some of the range of modes that mobile people draw upon for identifications. Latin American migrants make up approximately 1per cent of the total immigrant population in Germany. Because of their small numbers they are often described as a single homogeneous group in German discourses, despite their diverse origins and nations. The panethnic ascription of these migrants and their resistance to being identified with the Third World became part of the context out of which the migrant women described in this article constructed their cosmopolitan identities. In general they represented a different type of migratory pattern than larger groupings such as Turkish or Italian migrants who came to work in German industries in the 1950s and 1960s. Latin Americans initially migrated as exiles, students or spouses. Since the 1980s this flow has become increasingly feminine.1 The Latin American women migrants in Berlin with whom I worked did not reject a pan-ethnic2 Latina identity but they also did not allow themselves to be circumscribed by it. Settling in Berlin they experienced not only the ascription of a single identity, but also a range of other experiences of inter-ethnic cohabitation that shaped their acceptance of pan-ethnicity. These included their contacts with other women from Latin America and their access to global Spanish language media that popularize references to a common belonging. Such experiences influenced their processes of identification with other geographic locations, allowing their emerging pan-ethnic identity to traverse a transnational terrain (Roth 2009).3 However, instead of observing Latinas conforming only to such ethnically delimited identifications, I also noted that their experience of this commonality provided these women with social competencies and abilities that extended their sociability beyond their ethnically and pan-ethnically based forms of difference.

The urban context of migrant identities and sociabilities The cosmopolitan sociabilities and identities described here must be approached through an analysis of social relations within a specific urban setting and the transnational and global practices of mobile people. However, as Glick Schiller and Caglar (2009, 2010) have noted, with the exception of the global cities literature much of the literature on migration and locality divides into two tendencies. Aside from the global cities scholarship, the literature on locality rarely takes into consideration the transnational connections of actors, including migrants, while the literature on migration rarely examines the changing institutional structures and cultural representations of specific cities.

4 Sandra Gruner-Domic

Urban ethnographers of neighbourhood have too often conflated the terms society, culture and place so that communities were viewed as unitary isolates. Focusing on geographically and culturally bounded social relations, they examined primary social relations within the confines of a subculture or community (Amit 2002). From this perspective newcomers to cities became discrete communities that stood outside a homogeneous national society and required integration (Glick Schiller, Caglar and Guldbrandsen 2006). In order to address the challenge of dealing with cultural diversity and difference in a specific city, researchers have paid increasing attention to the sentiments and attachments that build a collective identity (Amit 2002). Yet, while diversity has been seen as a threat to social cohesion in some instances, including in poor multiethnic neighbourhoods, in city centres and in campaigns that brand and market cities, it is sometimes characterized as desirable and cosmopolitan (Binnie et al. 2006). To understand the ways in which migrant women construct their lives and engage with others it is necessary to consider the historical context in which discourses and notions about belonging, identity and cosmopolitanism are embedded. It is also important to develop an analytical framework that looks beyond the ethnic lens (Glick Schiller, Caglar and Guldbrandsen 2006) as well as concepts of community and neighbourhood. Keeping this in mind, I first refer to the urban context in which the women with whom I worked have focused their desire for belonging. While their primary residence is Berlin, they live in a transnational social field. Next, I describe how they incorporate a concept of lifestyle in order to explain how their transnational activities provide them with an understanding of community that fits with their skills and outlook, enabling them to make sense of their lives and belonging. Finally, looking at these positioned subjects within the inner tensions generated by their multilayered identities, I depict the moments of cosmopolitan sociability. The Berlin context German migration politics towards guest workers a population perceived as different and temporary changed direction at the end of the 1970s. At this time, the entry of new immigrants was halted but family reunification was allowed. These changes necessitated the acknowledgement that those who were perceived as foreigners were part of the society. In the immigration debates in Germany one question became central: was the national society to be understood as a constitutional republic or a nation-state united by a national culture? This discussion interrogated the national self-conception, one of the

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founding pillars of the West German society. Over the ensuing decades the question of national culture became a more fundamental challenge than the reunification with Eastern Germany in 1990 (Go ktu rk, Gramling and Kaes 2007). The necessity to reformulate German national self-conception within a global frame, took the discussions into the analysis of wealth distribution, neoliberal policies and the transnational relations deriving from migration. Soon these debates about the crucial question of whether or not Germany was a migration country produced an oscillation between tolerance and xenophobia. A multicultural model emerged to contest the nationally dominant idea of integration social and cultural of immigrants into society via socioeconomic achievement, which was believed to be viable only as long as the numbers of foreigners stayed small. Opposition to multiculturalism took the form of fears that such policies would turn the country into the supposed patchwork of multicultural America. This fuelled the public debates around perceived threats to German mainstream culture. The multicultural ideal stood in opposition to the so-called guiding culture debate (Leitkulturdebatte), which developed in the 1990s, but erupted in the early 2000s. Those who critiqued the claims for the supremacy of German culture raised questions about a conception of German-ness as a culturally based identity, especially after reunification. However, by opposing the concept of German culture to multiculturalism and positing the need for a plurality and diversity in ethno-national backgrounds, the proponents of multiculturalism reinforced an essentialist approach to both migrant and mainstream culture (Werbner 2005). This position anthropologizes ethnicity and thus establishes a particular historical construction of community (and of foreignness) as a constant (Radtke 2007, p. 474). The multiculturalism discussed in the German context did not consider a plurality or diversity of lifestyles and forms as social normality. In Berlin, multiculturalism was promoted through government projects and implemented by the citys commissioner for foreigner affairs not only to persuade people to accept diversity as a new politics of coexistence, but also as an attempt to capitalize on the cultural potential of the city. Cities such as Berlin, in an effort to develop themselves as global brands and markets, often portray themselves as multicultural and cosmopolitan. However, the terms multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism are not equivalent and have very different implications for the way in which the daily sociabilities of urban residents are understood. In turn, these understandings are taken up or contested by urban residents, migrant and non-migrant alike, in different ways. Multicultural discourses in Berlin tried to overcome ethnocentrism by embodying a vision of diversity and multi-ethnic policies

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(Werbner 2005). Multiculturalist ideologies are often reflected in a local policy used to manage and capitalize on cultural difference. Such a policy fosters practices of social and spatial differentiation while promoting cultural artistic projects that represent an essentialist picture of bounded ethnic groups. In contrast, the construction of Berlin as a cosmopolitan city has been used for a variety of political projects, but mainly to attract investment and business and to improve the citys market value in global competition (Kosnick 2009).4 This urban conceptualization of cosmopolitanism became one of the faces of Berlin in the 2000s. Far from being incompatible with the multiculturalist ideology, both the cosmopolitan city and multicultural policies exploit the Other by reinforcing the commoditization of certain cultural representations (Binnie et al. 2006; Bodaar 2006; Kosnick 2009). However, the cosmopolitanism proclaimed as part of Berlins regeneration policy is distinct from the cosmopolitan attitudes and identities fostered by transnational immigrants. Cosmopolitan practices and life styles: whose cosmopolitanism? As they deal with cultural, social, political and economic pragmatics of the Berlin context, female Latin American migrants participate in multiple forms of social interaction and identification that can be considered a form of cosmopolitan sociability. Building on the approach outlined by Nina Glick Schiller, Tsypylma Darieva and myself (this issue), I argue that these women maintained differentiated identities and social networks while manoeuvring and expanding their circle of identification and belonging. In the process of developing and maintaining their pan-ethnic Latina identities they used their lifestyles to signal their more universalistic ideas of openness and belonging. Migration may require an individual to change but does not necessarily lead to the migrant adopting a cosmopolitan position. Scholars such as Craig Calhoun (2002) have argued that openness to cultural diversity is most likely to be found among migrants and travellers in elitist positions. Other researchers have argued that cosmopolitanism is not exclusively found among elites or mobile individuals (Werbner 2008). Moreover, the experience of otherness or diversity makes people become more self-reflexive about own cultural and gender positioning. Consequently, scholars have called for a mapping of existing cosmopolitan stances, including those found within the practices of ordinary individuals (Cheah 2008) and as part of social movements (Hall 2008). Theorizing gendered differences and highlighting non-elite womens experiences and identities must be part of this broadened understanding of cosmopolitan possibilities (Youngs 2009; Stivens 2008). The transnational engagements of the Latin

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American immigrant women whose experiences I trace were situated at the intersection of different systems of disadvantage. I ask whether they used cosmopolitan forms of relations to defy their disadvantaged gendered positions. The women described below invoked lifestyles to express their commitment towards their ethnic as well as more universal or pluralistic identifications simultaneously. As Smith (2005) has noted, ordinary people should always be treated as socially and spatially situated subjects as family members, participants in religious or local networks, occupants of classed, gendered and racialized bodies, located in particular nationalist projects, state formations or bordercrossing projects. Individuals engagements in translocal networks forge connections that increasingly sustain new modes of being-in-the world (Smith 2005). The art scene lifestyle Verena5 joined the transnational art field after living for five years in Germany. Remembering her first visit to Germany, she described her fascination with the citys cultural diversity and cosmopolitan lifestyle. It was an interest in this lifestyle that motivated her to move to Berlin where she initially worked as an au pair for an Argentinean-German couple before she studied art history. Interested in learning the language quickly, she preferred developing relations with Germans or fluent German speakers, rather than migrants from Latin America. She argued that if you are living in another place it is not sensible to stay within your ethnic community. For that you could stay at home. Her interest in art emerged as part of her relations with new friends; in this way she met her future German husband. After finishing her studies, she volunteered on a committee to select arts for exhibitions, using her ethnic background to establish herself as an expert in Argentinean art. Working for the Berlin-based House of World Cultures,6 she curated art projects with female Argentinean artists and later developed art projects that reflected individual experiences of people living together in a global world. Verena combined her prior knowledge as a business administrator in the import business with her new interest in art. She became a member of different commissions for visual arts and organized projects bringing art and artists from Argentina, then Latin America, and later from China and Turkey to Europe. Using her connections to state institutions and galleries, she expanded her network to establish new relations with artists from Eastern Europe and Asia. I have a very clear job in this context [art]. Im in the middle, the contact person, who arranges everything. As the artist cannot make

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all [exhibitions] by himself and the institutions sometimes dont know what to show, which project to present. . .well, I have something to say in this realm. . . . Its as if my work is also my private life, both are moving in the same rhythm, very active, intensive, with a lot of people, different people, lots of appointments and the same I am doing here reruns in Argentina, I move in the same circles . . . Verena experienced the validation of her background through her participation in the art scene. This validation converged with her desire to maintain contact with people of different origins, learn new languages and engage with those who felt something in common. Although she established herself in a privileged position that validated her origins in a middle-income household, she did this in the context of experiencing a racial ethnocentric hierarchization of her subaltern position in Germany (Quijano 2003; Bonilla-Silva 2000). She built her position and protected herself from discrimination by living within the context of a transnational art scene. Outside that world, she confronted her racialized difference. And wherever I am staying I feel great because my surroundings are always in the same context! And that doesnt bother me, I dont feel strange. I feel different when Im in another context. . . . I also feel strange sometimes here [in Berlin], when I leave my house, when Im around certain people. . .there are such people, with them I have nothing to do, who ignore me and I ignore them, because we dont have the same things in common, the same interests. And in my case it doesnt depend where I am.7 Lifestyle involves a social practice, a self-chosen way of being that is shared with other people who ascribe to it and recognize each other by professing similar fashions, style, consumption, ways of living or philosophies of life. Verena emphasized her lifestyle in order to legitimize her identification with other people with whom she shares a non-ethnic commonality. She organized expositions in Turkey and Greece by engaging with people with whom she shared professional interests and/or a bohemian lifestyle, enabling her imagination to roam within other global locales. When others made her feel like a foreign female by denying the possibility of a common sociability, she contested the exclusion by proclaiming herself to be the agent of her own choice of lifestyle and milieu. She chose the art scene as her sphere of social action because in that setting a gendered reading of her Latin American origin was celebrated as enrichment but not as a source of differentiation. At the same time, she was recognized as a capable woman within a shared field of knowledge. She had become

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an expert and this recognition was also validated by the German and Chinese contacts within her networks. However, by claiming a lifestyle and identity not confined to national boundaries or the parameters of an ascribed ethnic community in Berlin, Verena created another exclusionary identity. Yet Verenas claims to a cosmopolitan position bolstered by an elite ethos, which emphasizes the exclusiveness of the art scene, can be read as an attempt to counter her experiences of being excluded as a racialized foreign woman. She staked her cosmopolitan claim from her position at the intersection of multiple forms of difference. As the only daughter of a lower-middle-income family, Verena was not expected to migrate. Her family projected their hopes for economic and professional success in the next generation onto her brothers rather than her. When she stressed arts elite status and claimed a place within that world she was countering the lack of recognition from her family and the stigmatization of her racialized body in Berlin. In response to these differentiations, she claimed to live on a translocal scale (Smith 2005), alluding to the cosmopolitan feelings she shared with art scene people all over the world. To dismiss Verenas translocal identification and her network of transborder sociability as a form of rootless elite cosmopolitanism would be to deny the subordinate positioning that elicits her cosmopolitan claims. Her desire to belong everywhere (or nowhere as Falzon (2009) argues) arises from the Berlin context, which inscribes her body as Latina as well as from her Argentinean background of gender hierarchy. New cosmopolitan arguments emphasize a post-universalistic logic beyond ethnocentric perspectives. Rather than universalism, this openness to the world expresses the encounter of the local with the global (Delanty 2006). By situating herself in a cosmopolitan scene, Verena validated her sense of being in the world on a global scale in relationship to her daily experiences on a local level. The art projects, some sponsored by the city, gave Verena access to a job with status gained from the opportunities of the specific locality of Berlin and its embrace of multiculturalism. However, her openness and interest towards others led her to expand her connections to Chinese avant-garde and Bulgarian artists. She organized expositions where hybridity or dialogue between artists different backgrounds played an essential role. In an exposition she curated, artists were described as flaneurs (passers-by) embodying diverse backgrounds in their performances. Interactions within the art scene were a way for Verena to expand her social circle worldwide to include those who share common interests. For Verena, this was not only about the consumption of symbols that pertain to a lifestyle, but also the pursuit of a

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social status that would not be ascribed to her by other city residents if she encountered them in her neighbourhood.

The jet-set lifestyle There are many theories related to lifestyle and consumption that investigate the relationship between consumer habits and social differentiation (Tomlinson 2003).8 A tension in oppositional views is rooted in lifestyle niches, spheres where people share commonalities that may or may not be in accordance with class social structures. I use the term lifestyle not to blur class relations but to indicate an additional status dimension of global racial hierarchies alongside nationality and race. Eva, the second woman I highlight in this article, used lifestyle choices to contest such status positioning and as a vehicle to create and expand social relations beyond national or ethnic discourses. As Diana Negra observes (2009, p. 125), especially for the United States, postfeminism lifestyle choices operate within the rationale of the new economies, which women learn to combine with a consumerist emphasis on luxury, expensiveness and a fixation on the habits of the wealthy. Contemporary mass media, especially those directed at women, have reinforced the imperative to emulate the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Eva, a sex worker who aspires to live a jet-set lifestyle, follows this emulation imperative in order to counterbalance the class and racial exclusion she experiences in many places. Eva grew up in a small town in the Dominican Republic, where tourism is a major source of income for the residents, and sex tourism is one of the few avenues for young uneducated women. As Denise Brennan (2004) has noted, in the Dominican Republic sex tourism changed the circumstances of small towns, turning them into transnational places in a global context. At the age of 14, Eva became a single mother. Looking for opportunities to restart her life financially or to get married, she started dating boys, national and foreign, at discotheques in exchange for a meal and to bring money home. At 15, a female acquaintance brought her to Berlin to work for a procurer. Unwilling to continue, she returned to the Dominican Republic after two months. In tourist places such as Evas town, foreign male tourists are an important source of access to the rest of the world. Eva sought to establish such a relationship two years later, when she met a Spaniard and went to Spain for a year as his lover. Eva grasped the opportunity few Dominican women have (Brennan 2004) to leave the country and return with the funds necessary to obtain establish a relatively stable household.

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At that time [the second time she returned to Santo Domingo at 18 years old] I had already the fantasy to fly, to be like people flying everywhere and all that, the daydream of young people to own everything, to walk around with nice shoes and clothes and people staring at you and going down the street on a motorcycle, a Honda or Yamaha. I had it all and I had a good life, I bought a house, with the money I got from the Spaniard, who gave me the three million pesetas I told you . . . I never been too long with a man, I didnt like it, I was always really crazy. I liked them one, two weeks and thats it, and I bought a house, a motorcycle, and I travelled a lot, every third month I was on an airplane. Driven by what she described as the lifestyle she had chosen as a teenager, sex work9 became a means to maintain a standard of living and to help her family financially. Eva had experienced a childhood of poverty in the Dominican Republic. With her connection to Spain and the money she made working in a bar or as the concubine of two Spanish men she could afford what she considered fashionable for the jet-set including travelling10. After a short time in the Dominican Republic, she re-established her contacts with a procurer and acquaintances in Berlin in order to return to Germany. But she returned under different conditions, working on her own and expanding relations not only to Dominicans, Columbians, Cubans and Central Americans, friends and sex workers, but also to Germans. Her German friends, a property manager who helped her whenever she was looking for a flat to rent, and a bar owner, who introduced her to a resident Spaniard whom she later married, were people she had known for longer than ten years. As a non-status resident she married the Spaniard in order to gain legal permanent residence in Germany. Although it was a marriage of convenience she maintained a friendship with the man, even when she no longer depended on his residence status. She perceived her relations to Europeans as important in that they gave her the chance to enjoy their standard of living and lifestyle, benefits gained through her identification with and relationships to these wealthy people. Evas family relations were arranged through mutual help, mostly between females. Leaving her first child under the care of her mother, she was able to live a life that allowed her to travel, remain for long periods in various places and establish a transnational motherhood (Hondagneou-Sotelo and Avila 1999). Her experience of travel and living in different countries offered her new opportunities to relate to people from different backgrounds. Evas perspective on the world and the cosmopolitan reading she gave to her lifestyle can be seen in the way she differentiated herself from the rest of her family. After Eva established herself in Berlin, she

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helped her mother and siblings to migrate. None of them wanted to live in Berlin. Instead, they preferred to migrate to a relative in New York, establishing a transnational connection between three countries. Her children have been growing up sharing their lives between these three places and reinforcing family relations that support transnational practices and cosmopolitan skills for the new generation, mostly based on female transnational networks. Eva states: They [her mother, sister and brothers] like to live in America. While there they keep the same mentality and stay in the same circle of people. They learn nothing; they live in the same jungle. I call that a jungle because they stay stuck as they were in Santo Domingo all is the same the food, the culture, the music, chaotic, plebeian, sleazy people everything stays the same. Eva did not negate her ethnic identity or change her cultural costumes but her attitude developed very differently from her family members. She has attempted to emphasize her openness to others as a sign of belonging to a cosmopolitan lifestyle in which her Dominican-ness has a positive appreciation. Locality is important in this connection in that her specific context determines the way she is able to relate to others. In Berlin, her Latina or Dominican body was not reduced to the stereotyped enclave of Dominicans in New York. She explained that through her experiences of living in different places she has learned new sets of behaviour, languages and new tastes in cuisine and consumption that gave her a different perspective in comparison to her family, who preferred to stay within a narrow circle of sociability. Although her cosmopolitan perspective was stimulated through the consumerist ideologies of the wealthy in order to emulate a higherclass status, Eva also engaged with others as she identifies strongly with people she considers to be of the same origin, expanding that identity to include not only those of Dominican but also Caribbean and Latin American origin. Eva joined the transnational sex industry11 as one of the few available alternatives to poverty. She has never viewed gender as a decisive factor in her disadvantaged status. For her, belonging is tied to social status and whiteness, neither of which she felt she initially possessed. She elucidates the intersection of race and class when she describes her skin as being dark coloured in the past and whiter now that she is living a wealthy lifestyle. Her life exemplifies the agency of those who, when faced with scarce possibilities, seize transnational alternatives for themselves, making globalization work for them (Brennan 2004). In certain moments, empathy with others can be used to validate universal values of equality in terms of class and gender. Working for pragmatic reasons in the sex industry, her lifestyle

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choices validated her improved social position. Evas jet-set lifestyle includes what Bodaar (2006) calls cosmopolitan consumption, which is not only the consumption of products but also the accumulation of cultural capital and the association with being educated and sophisticated. A spiritual lifestyle? Growing up in a Catholic country in South America, Judith had to struggle with her Jewish identity and with her familys identification socially and culturally as Europeans. Her family imagined her as a woman who would live and marry according to the Jewish tradition and perhaps migrate to Israel like her brother. She opposed these social expectations, rejected marriage, renounced her job as an economist and converted to sannyasin12 a life philosophy that opposes religion as an institution, marriage and also nation states. Judith converted in the middle of the 1980s and lived for eight years in different countries in Southwest Asia. Supported by the Bhagwan organization, she moved to Germany to teach yoga and meditation in 1993. Judith appreciated the Bhagwans self-proclaimed open-mindedness to religious believers and non-believers worldwide. She participated in a community in Chile where she found people of different backgrounds with whom she could relate and establish friendships. She married a man in her community from India to help him get residency in South America. Her decision to migrate to Asia reflected her desire to engage with others participating in culturally different surroundings. She was driven by her aspiration to become a spiritual guide. Judith joined the Bhagwan spiritual movement hoping to find freedom because, although fascinated by religions, she felt constrained in her life by the tendency of Catholics and Jews to demand exclusive loyalty to a single set of beliefs. However, after a while she experienced the same demands of loyalty. When I asked whether she felt different because of following this way of living, she responded: Well, I could be different in some way because of my lifestyle, I mean, I dont eat. . .I mean in Germany there are also a lot of vegetarians so I could be one more. Im not like the typical German on the street because I dont eat or drink what they do, I have my own spiritual practice and have my people but I could have friendship with other people not from my group anytime and I want it, I will because I dont want to repeat the story of my childhood. . .well, at this moment I am going through a moment of rebellion against religion, the main religions, because of their control machinery of fear as a way of controlling people. I mean each human being should have the possibility to define himself, his

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life philosophy, religion or the way to be. There could be a general idea, but one shouldnt be constrained by force by anything particular or pressured or pigeonhole thinking. Judiths reflection expressed open-minded inclusiveness and a will to engage with others beyond national, ethnic or religious differences. Most of her acquaintances in Berlin were German, many were members of the Bhagwan and some were her neighbours. Her contacts included a wide range of people. For example, she taught yoga or meditation to women from Latin America with whom she organized a special yoga course. She saw her desire to socialize with people of different beliefs or cultures while at the same time needing to find people with a similar life philosophy or style as something natural:
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Because nobody likes to be questioned and changed! . . . I think if we identify in ethnic, racial terms because of the language or religion with some group it is only because that gives us some idea of security. I feel good in a group of people when we think similarly. There is no confrontation, no fear, nobody wants to change you and neither do you want to change them. There no one discredits you and you feel great, yet at the same time there is no opportunity to develop. Judith believed that Bhagwan could enable people to come together across cultures and religions because they claim to be a universal religious path without dogma or philosophy. At one stage she moved to Southwest Asia to find more diversity. She was integrated into international groups as well as with the local population but at the same time, she explained, felt threatened as a woman on Indonesian streets. Also, her experience inside Bhagwan revealed contradictions. She was critical of the few chances for women to fill key positions within the hierarchical structure of the organization and the authoritarian leadership style at the higher levels, as well as the groups construction of boundaries and loyalties. Judith was committed to engagements beyond those to whom she was related by personal ties, beliefs, kinship or more formal bonds. She sought a form of a cosmopolitan sociability: the ability to connect to other people who did not belong to her religious lifestyle or share her other identities. Interpretations of her body in different countries fostered Judiths cosmopolitan perspective. In South America or South Asia, her European body implied supremacy, while in the urban context of Berlin her racialized (Jewish/Latin American) body marked her for subordinated differentiation. These experiences led Judith to leave Bhagwan and re-embrace her Jewish identity but not Judaisms religious structures on closure. Her continuing struggle with the

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essentialized rhetorics of belonging encouraged her to maintain a critical position. She sought human commonalities that would allow people to maintain their differences but to live together. She continued to value and practise cosmopolitan sociability.

Conclusion Attracted by the diversity of a global city, these Latin American women decided to live in an urban space that claims to be tolerant and open to different lifestyles, sexual orientations and beliefs. But, in practice, Berlin struggles with that openness because discourses about diversity constantly raise question of power and hegemony. The diversity promoted in Berlin made it possible for some Latin American women to find work by relying on activities that invoked their ethnic origin or an exotic imagination. The women in these examples relied on ethnic roots and networks by converting them into opportunities to find work outside their ethnic community. Each of these women experienced situations of social exclusion and gendered inequality early on in their lives that motivated them to distance themselves from their original surrounding. Migration and involvement in transnational activities emerged as a way to find new identifications. Establishing themselves in Berlin, these women experienced forms of devalorization and exclusion that made them search for new solidarities, which would reflect and develop their cosmopolitan attitudes and integrate their multiple identifications. All three women responded to the specific challenges and possibilities of Berlin by expanding their transnational connections and developing cosmopolitan skills in order to further their business and career. I argue that, in order to find their position in the global reordering of capital and labour, these women used lifestyles strategically as a form of cosmopolitan identification. They used transnational connections as a tool to produce more cultural options or markers and create new arrangements, demonstrating their ability to translate, that is, to create communication across diverse communication styles (Vertovec 2009). These women used lifestyle as a vehicle to open alternative forms of social identification, which situated their transnational practices within the context of Berlin. They then used their reformulated practices to open spaces within which they could renegotiate rhetorics of belonging, which would otherwise exclude them from finding common forms of identifications. Their individual experiences of discrimination in Germany because of their racially and nationally subordinated position gave these women the impetus to use lifestyles that allowed them to appeal to more cosmopolitan solidarities. They

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16 Sandra Gruner-Domic

simultaneously established commonalities and consented to ethnic diversity. City developers may promote a form of urban cosmopolitanism through promoting the commoditization of cultures and the consumption of the Other (Binnie et al. 2006). However, as Annemarie Bodaar (2006) suggests, for individuals cosmopolitan consumption is less associated with knowing or consuming the Other than achieving cultural capital by gaining competencies, being able to navigate in different cultures and being educated and sophisticated. This stance can be found in the examples of the women in this article that projected their lifestyles as cosmopolitan consumption. Identification with cosmopolitan lifestyles created more options for these women to develop their lives. Their multiple identifications were embedded in both their cultural selves and simultaneously in the openness they cultivated and utilized to create ties with others. Any form of personal identification within a lifestyle is connected to differentiated discourses or identification projects (religious, gendered, national, ethnic, class or lifestyle). Hence it is an illusion to believe that those projects are going to include everyone. But it is also incorrect to perceive peoples agency as confined within these projects and to ignore the fact that they can embrace sociability inspired by similarities with others and accept universality expressed through their particularities. Such cosmopolitan competencies and sociabilities allow for the intersection of diverse representations without ignoring that in the exercise of openness relations of power are also negotiated. Scholars such as Richard Fardon (2008) claim that recovering the European tradition of cosmopolitan openness defined against essentialized identities could privilege the former against other alternatives of conviviality and once again become an ethnocentric project. Along these lines, Breckenridge et al. (2002) have cautioned that defining and clearly delimiting cosmopolitanism would be difficult as such a stance would itself be un-cosmopolitan. Perhaps it is best to note, along with Stuart Hall (2008), that sustained cosmopolitanism is impossible until inequality is resolved. Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the women who shared their life stories and made possible this article. I would like also to thank the anonymous reviewers, and specially Nina Glick Schiller for the great comments and inspiring reections as well as Tsypylma Darieva for her remarks.

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Notes
1. For further information about migratory patterns of Latin Americans to Germany, see Julia Paz de la Torre (1990) or Sandra Gruner-Domic (2002). 2. Pan-ethnicity involves processes of ascription, accommodation and identication that creates othering moments in which diverse groups are perceived as homogeneous (Espiritu 1992) 3. Depending on the context, the women in this article referred to their nationality, as, for example, Colombian, when talking to me (I am Bolivian) to differentiate their background from mine. At other moments they prefer to talk of us as Latinas. 4. Kosnick (2009) argues that only cities that provide a vibrant climate of talent, technology and tolerance will successfully attract the creative class. Creative class is here a synonym for afuent elites and innovative talent. 5. All names are pseudonyms 6. This is a Berlin state-sponsored project to promote the understanding of cultural diversity. 7. Translated by the author. 8. Tomlinson (2003) differentiates between three major types of interpretation. The rst is Bourdieus thesis that different classes exhibit different lifestyles based on their habits, which are associated with occupation and access to capital or their intention to display a distinction from or a relationship to other social groupings. In contrast, the second position argues that, because of the increasingly broad dissemination of common styles, tastes, commodities and services the contrast between social groups and their habits is diminishing. The third position suggests that mass consumption is disappearing, allowing for more diverse lifestyles and fewer traditional groupings (cf. Hiebert 2002). 9. Sex work should be considered in its variety of services that satisfy the fantasy of sensuous reciprocity and is replacing street prostitution (Augustin 2007, pp. 60 1). 10. Ali Nobil Ahmad (2008) states that migration itself has become a commodity that can be consumed by those who can afford this status symbol based in market ideologies that cultivate demand for modern pleasures, hedonism and experiences imagined from afar. This mystication is sustained by growing control restrictions imposed by the rst world. 11. The sex industry concept follows Laura Augustins (2007) denition as a realm that includes not only prostitution but all kinds of nancial activity related to providing and selling and transactions connected to sexually linked products, services and infrastructure. Denise Brennans (2004) description of transnational sex tourism offers a broader frame for understanding sex transactions in a transnational arena. 12. Sannyasins are followers of guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, better known as the orange people from Oregon. The bhagwan originated as a worldwide life-awakening movement based on practices and methods that individuals can use to discover their own proper religious path. Rejecting established beliefs, dogma and ideology, the movement seeks to nd an essential universal religiousness by being open to all religions or none.

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SANDRA GRUNER-DOMIC is Lecturer in Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. ADDRESS: 3620 S. Vermont Avenue, Kaprielian Hall 348, Los Angeles, California 90089-2539, USA. E-mail: grunerdo@usc.edu