Silvia Mejia was a Clara and Robert Vambery Distinguished Graduate Fellow and MITH Graduate Fellow during academic years 2004-05 and 2005-06. Working from within the Comparative Literature program with John Fuegi, and with MITH Director Martha Nell Smith, Mejia focused on three different narrations of migration from Ecuador to the United States, Spain and Italy. The resulting documentary video and its study guide explored how new technologies such as the Internet, satellite communications, email, videoconferences, and cell phones have changed the experience of displacement.
With a comparative and translocal approach, this project explores multiple relationships with new technologies determined by gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, computer literacy, geographical situation, and socio-economic background. Through their differing and even contradictory discourses and practices, expressed and lived in geographical locations that coexist and overlap on the screen, the protagonists of this dissertation-documentary video show us to what extent they are inscribed in different places of enunciation that shape their experience of displacement and nostalgia in contrasting ways.