Sociospatial relations of change

Ellen-J. Pader

pp. 73-103

in: Irwin Altman, Arza Churchman (eds), Women and the environment, Berlin, Springer, 1994

Abstract

When people relocate to a new environment, they invariably must reconceptualize their daily activities; routes from home to schools, shops, work, friends, and family change. Neighbors are more likely to be strangers. The size and layout of rooms in the new home are not identical to those in the old. The greater the conceptual and physical distances between the old and new locales and the more traumatic the move, the greater the need to reconceptualize one's world becomes, simply to survive. And, perhaps, the harder this transformation is. The distance between a rural Mexican village and an urban Southern California city is immense. Yet, many villagers manage the transition, entwining strands of the familiar with strands of previously unimagined new ways, while letting go of anticipated, but unfulfilled, imaginings of how life would be in the United States.