Article Historicizing Mobility Trajectories of High- skilled Migrants from Coastal Andhra to the United States Sanam Roohi 1 Abstract Guntur-Krishna districts in the state of Andhra Pradesh has seen intense mobility of professionals to the USA from among the ‘dominant’ castes of the region, par- ticularly the Kammas. Kammas were a rural agrarian caste who have successfully transnationalized themselves, but continue to have strong connections with their region of origin. Rather than making sense of this duality only through anthro- pological literature on transnationalism, in this account, taking a longue durée approach, I show how certain historical moments in the region created possibili- ties for the Kammas to first become urbanized, and later, cater to the demand of flexible high skilled labour in the west. Using a meso and micro level schema, the article argues that transnational migration was preceded by changes in the politi- cal economy of the region due to the region’s encounter with the colonial state. Moreover, the response of the community to these changes to achieve social and economic mobility further facilitated their rural to urban migration and, later, transnational migration. Finally, this article argues that rather than understand- ing transnational migration patterns through a statist lens, a more dissgaregated historical analysis is vital to bring out region and community inflected constitutive elements of such migration. Keywords Historical analysis, caste, Coastal Andhra, rural-urban migration, transnational migration Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics 31(1) 1–18 © 2018 SAGE Publications India Private Limited SAGE Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOI: 10.1177/0260107918770954 http://journals.sagepub.com/home/jie 1 Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, and National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India. Corresponding author: Sanam Roohi Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, and National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India. E-mails: sanam.roohi@gmail.com; sanamroohi@sjc.ac.in