This presentation takes as its starting point an interpretation of the UAE (and Trucial States before it) as a borderless, transnational space. Most UAE land borders are undemarcated, disputed, or have only recently been subjected to state control. Mobility of labor, finance, expertise, and goods has profoundly shaped urban and rural spaces in what is now the UAE. Many Emiratis can trace family heritage to locations throughout the Gulf, Indian Ocean, and Arab world. Yet research suggests that in the 1990s many Emirati citizens began to claim a strong national identity, the contours and content of which are the subject of much debate, contestation, and anxiety. This anxiety is manifested in concerns about loss of heritage and historical memory, marriage to non-Emiratis, the decline of the Arabic language in daily life, and the foreign composition of the UAE’s labor force. How has a nationalist discourse emerged from the anational, borderless milieu of the Lower Gulf? For the most part, scholars have understood contemporary Emirati identity in opposition to foreign influences; this presentation seeks to understand them as mutually constitutive. This presentation argues that a strong generational difference exists in how Emiratis relate to transnational mobility, and hypothesizes that the emergence of Emirati national identity coincided with state-led projects of shaping national space and inventing an indigenous Emirati culture. This is based on a close reading and textual analysis of several memoirs and oral history collections, including Mohammed al-Fahim’s From Rags to Riches, Easa Saleh al-Gurg’s Wells of Memory, Ayash Yehyawi’s Awal Manzil, and Abdelrahman Abdullah’s Al-Imarat fi Dhakirat Ibna’iha, which will be contrasted with current ethnographic work on Emirati identity. Their publication coincided with a boom in Emirati history-writing that began in the 1990s, but their narratives end in the 1970s. This endpoint suggests a discontinuity between historical memory of a highly mobile past and Emiratis’ present identification with a national territorial space; a shift which seems to have occurred in the late 1980s and 1990s. By that time, oil wealth had financed the development of infrastructure binding together a national space, the settlement of formerly mobile populations, and the education of a generation of students in national schools. Locating this shift in the 1990s rather than the 1970s suggests a new periodization of the UAE’s history, and engages academic literature on state formation, sedentarization, and relationships between space and identity formation.