Specters of Belonging

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrián Félix
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Mexican Migrant ◽  
Transnational Citizenship

In the context of research on the “thickening” of borders, Specters of Belonging raises the related question: How does transnational citizenship thicken across the political life cycle of Mexican migrants? In addressing this question, this book resembles what any good migration corrido (ballad) does—narrate the thickening of transnational citizenship from beginning, middle, to end. Specifically, Specters of Belonging traces Mexican migrant transnationalism across the migrant political life cycle, beginning with the “political baptism” (i.e., naturalization in the United States) and ending with repatriation to México after death. In doing so, the book illustrates how Mexican migrants enunciate, enact, and embody transnational citizenship in constant dialectical contestation with the state and institutions of citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-México border. Drawing on political ethnographies of citizenship classrooms, the first chapter examines how Mexican migrants enunciate transnational citizenship as they navigate the naturalization process in the United States and grapple with the contradictions of U.S. citizenship and its script of singular political loyalty. The middle chapter deploys transnational ethnography to analyze how Mexican migrants enact transnational citizenship within the clientelistic orbit of the Mexican state, focusing on a group of returned migrant politicians and transnational activists. Last, the final chapter turns to how Mexican migrants embody transnational citizenship by tracing the cross-border practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their communities of origin in rural México.

Enunciations of Transnational Citizenship

2018 ◽  
pp. 19-55
Author(s):  
Adrián Félix
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Discrimination ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Political Ethnography ◽  
Transnational Citizenship ◽  
The Moment

Chapter 2 examines how Mexican migrants enunciate transnational citizenship as they navigate the naturalization process in the United States. This chapter treats naturalization—the so-called political baptism of migrants—as the first stage of the migrant political life cycle insofar as this is the moment where migrants contest state scripts of singular loyalty. Drawing on a political ethnography of the naturalization process and the citizenship classroom, this chapter captures Mexican migrants’ mythologies of citizenship as they collectively expose the central contradictions of U.S. citizenship and constitutionalism. The bureaucratic arbitrariness and institutional discrimination that Mexican migrants perceive throughout the naturalization process infuse their mythologies of citizenship and inform their alternative enunciations of transnational political membership and belonging. When naturalization is sought in response to an antimigrant context, the so-called political baptism of Mexican migrants may in effect mark the political birth of transnational citizens.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Adrián Félix
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Face ◽  
Transnational Citizenship

The opening chapter of Specters of Belonging introduces the theoretical framework informing the ethnography presented throughout the book—namely, the thickening of transnational citizenship and diasporic dialects across the arch of the migrant political life cycle. Just as the US and Mexican states have thickened their borders, escalating the racialized policing of migrants, so too have migrants thickened their transnational claims of political belonging. These specters of belonging are best captured by the concept of diasporic dialectics—the process by which migrants are in constant political struggle with the state and its institutions of citizenship on both sides of the border. Mexican migrants enunciate, enact, and embody these diasporic dialectics in the face of imperial citizenship in the United States and clientelistic citizenship in Mexico, facing the ever-present danger of domestication. Thus, the introduction raises the political potentialities and pitfalls of diasporic dialectics as migrants negotiate transnationalism in life and death.

Embodiments of Transnational Citizenship

2018 ◽  
pp. 101-135
Author(s):  
Adrián Félix
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
Rural Mexico ◽  
Migrant Family ◽  
Transnational Citizenship

Chapter 4 turns to how Mexican migrants embody transnational citizenship by tracing the cross-border practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their communities of origin in rural México. Far from being a strictly private transnational practice, migrants’ desire for a posthumous return and burial in their homelands is collectively expressed in the memories, music, and everyday exchanges of the Mexican diaspora. Drawing on a transnational ethnography of migrant mourning between Los Angeles, California, and Zacatecas, México, this chapter documents how the Mexican state has institutionalized this practice at the transnational, national, state, and municipal levels of governance. Next, the chapter discusses the role of migrant family and social networks in these repatriations. As an intimate ethnography, the chapter also critically reflects on my accompaniment of Mexican migrants as they navigate transnationalism in life and death.

Enactments of Transnational Citizenship

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-100
Author(s):  
Adrián Félix
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Transnational Citizenship ◽  
And Control ◽  
The U.S

Chapter 3 deploys transnational ethnography to capture the enactments of transnational citizenship of returned migrant politicians and activists within the clientelistic orbit of the Mexican state. Under conditions of political cartelization, whereby Mexican political parties are congealing into a ruling bloc, Mexican migrants can be a critical cross-border constituency that can potentially challenge the hegemonic party system in México. However, in an autocratic system, these cross-border activists must avoid the ever-present danger of domestication. Indeed, Mexican migrants’ enactments of transnational citizenship can only come to fruition if they can resist the corruption, co-optation, coercion, and control of clientelistic party politics in México. While this chapter identifies the political pitfalls and contradictions of transnational citizenship, it also shows how the diasporic dialectics of Mexican migrants can further deepen democratic citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-México border.

What is Happening in the United States? How Social Classes Influence the Political Life of the Country and its Health and Quality of Life

2021 ◽  
pp. 002073142199484
Author(s):  
Vicente Navarro
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
United States ◽  
Access To Health Care ◽  
Universal Access ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Race And Gender

This article analyses the political changes that have been occurring in the United States (including the elections for the presidency of the country) and their consequences for the health and quality of life of the population. A major thesis of this article is that there is a need to analyse, besides race and gender, other categories of power - such as social class - in order to understand what happens in the country. While the class structure of the United States is similar to that of major Western European countries, the political context is very different. The U.S. political context has resulted in the very limited power of its working class, which explains the scarcity of labor, political and social rights in the country, such as universal access to health care.

The Mexican Revolution in Chicago

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Flores
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
Wide Range

This book examines the political, labor, and assimilation history of Mexican immigrants in metropolitan Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning in the mid-1920s and extending into the years of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Cold War, Mexican immigrants engaged in a wide-range of political activism, and their political beliefs were shaped by the Mexican Revolution. Mexican immigrant political activists included men and women, middle-class businessmen and professionals, and blue-collar laborers from urban and rural backgrounds. Over time, Mexican immigrants formed distinct conservative, liberal, and radical transnational societies that competed with each other to mold the identities and influence the political beliefs of the broader Mexican, Mexican American, and Latino populations of Chicago and Northwest Indiana. Initially, Mexican conservatives, liberals, and radicals all defined themselves as patriots loyal to the Mexican state, but over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, profound political events in Mexico and in the United States led the conservatives to become the most critical of the Mexican state and the most amenable to U.S. naturalization. While the liberals and radicals tended to decline U.S. citizenship, conservative Mexican Catholics become U.S. citizens in great numbers, and they did so because they sought to protect themselves from both the anticlerical policies of Mexican government and from the deportation policies of the United States government.

Marriage and Mestizaje, Chinese and Mexican: Constitutional Interpretation and Resistance in Sonora, 1921–1935

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kif Augustine-Adams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Chinese Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
United States Mexico ◽  
Chinese Travelers

On a hopeful September day in 1912, Gim Pon, a twenty-five year old Chinese man from Canton, boarded the steamship Siberia in Hong Kong harbor to sail west across the Pacific. The Siberia docked briefly in San Francisco, but Gim Pon's destination, and that of seven fellow Chinese travelers, was not California but the northern Mexican state of Sonora. In the early twentieth century, thousands of men like Gim Pon immigrated to Mexico, boosting the Chinese population there from slightly over 1,000 in 1895 to more than 24,000 in the mid-1920s. Sonora, which hugs Arizona at the United States/Mexico border, was a popular destination, and hosted the largest Chinese population of any Mexican state through the 1920s. Once in Sonora, Gim Pon adapted to life in Mexico: he changed his name to Francisco Gim, learned Spanish, and became naturalized as a Mexican citizen on February 27, 1920. Most importantly, he formed a family with Julia Delgado.

scholarly journals Understanding of Mexican Migration to the United States: Rifts and Challenges

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rana Basam Khan ◽  
◽  
Muhammad Nawaz Bhatti ◽  
Ghulam Mustafa ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
El Paso ◽  
Rio Grande ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Social Defense ◽  
Basic Segment ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
The U.S

It has been decades since legislative issues have thought about social, defense, and compassionate issues of migration which has become a touchstone in U.S strategy discussion. Mexican migration to the U.S started in 1848. It has proceeded to the present with no critical interference, something that makes this work movement very particular as a basic segment of the American work advertise. Generally started with enormous development, driven by starvation, political problems, open doors in the U.S; that point eased back, tightened, or unexpectedly finished, from 1850 to 1882, similar to the case of the Chinese. The details show that Mexico is a key source of settlers in U.S and has long been a major source of enemy contact with refugees, but so many have been focusing on Mexico and not the other countries which have also become major sources of illegal immigrants. The United States and Mexico are bordered with California, San Diego, and Baja California, Tijuana, and the Pacific Ocean. The boundary stretches eastward to El Paso, Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, Texas, on the Rio Grande. From that point the border continues south-east along the Rio Grande River until the end of it in the Gulf of Mexico. Border stretching of over 1945 miles is insufficiently regulated. Only old solid markers, rusty safety clasp and spoiled dry fence posts can be found in many parts of the place, and the river Grande that over the centuries has continuously changed its course separating both nations. U.S endeavors to control passages and exit adequately have been focused principally along the most profoundly dealt transit courses driving to north. U.S. powerlessness to control all the Mexican boundary has proven that any Mexican involved in operating in the U.S seldom discovers that the frontier is an unlikely trap Through the span of the most recent 170 years, Mexican migrants have to a great extent worked in horticulture, farming, mining, and railroad development.

The Tradeoff of Temporariness: Economic and Social Impacts of H-2A Status on Mexican Migrant Men

2022 ◽  
pp. 019791832110660
Author(s):  
Shelby O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
The United States ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Formal Economy ◽  
Discernible Effect ◽  
Mexican Migrant ◽  
Economic And Social Impacts

As the H-2A visa program expands to become a core component of contemporary Mexican migration to the United States, questions emerge about the tradeoffs migrants face between temporary and undocumented statuses. This article employs propensity score matching of participants in the Mexican Migration Project—an extensive binational survey of Mexican migrants and their families—to compare economic and social outcomes of H-2A visa recipients vis-à-vis undocumented migrants. Findings indicate that although H-2A visas offer benefits like a lower cost of living while abroad, they do not produce a discernible effect on wages relative to wages earned by undocumented migrants. While H-2A migrants are more likely to work in the formal economy, they are also less likely to build social capital or language proficiency in the United States than undocumented migrants, indicating a degree of social isolation that can be exploited by employers. This comparison contributes to a growing literature on the proliferation of temporary migratory statuses and the marginality experienced by migrants within these statuses.

Contesting the “Bad Hombres” Narrative: U.S. and Mexican Media Diplomacy and Presidential Strategic Narratives about Immigrants

Diplomatica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Vanessa Bravo ◽  
María De Moya
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Transnational Media ◽  
Strategic Narratives ◽  
National Media ◽  
Mexican Migrant

Abstract During the candidacy and following the election of U.S. president Donald Trump, there was an emphasis on framing the Mexican immigrant as a criminal and on building a wall between the United States and Mexico. This narrative revived the debate on the treatment of immigrants and immigration in cross-national media. Within this context, this study analyzes the construction of the image of the Mexican migrant to the United States by both (former) President Enrique Peña Nieto and President Donald Trump during the first 100 days of the latter’s presidency, through news stories published in two U.S newspapers and two Mexican newspapers. Findings show that news stories describe Mexican migrants in contrasting ways, ranging from criminals (in the U.S. framing) to good migrants (in the Mexican efforts), and both frames are picked up by the transnational media, hindering long-standing public diplomacy efforts in both countries.

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