Becoming Palestinian: Lina Meruane’s Transmigration Journey and Drifting Identities

Abstract

Transmigration as a human phenomenon contains and at the same time overflows the idea of travel. This crossing borders implies an unresolved fracture, a non-deliberate abandonment, a temporality. In this regard, I propose to study the phenomenon of transmigration in the context of Palestinians in Chile and thus understand transnational identities, human movement and current multidimensional migrations. The methodology used is based on the travel text Volverse Palestina (2013) by the writer Lina Meruane to understand unfinished identity processes such as that of the writer herself. The conceptual state is given by the idea of becoming, associated with the notion of return in the confines of the migration.