Conclusion

The final chapter concludes by raising the specter of transnational afterlife and the implications of the book for migration studies. By tracing the thickening of transnational citizenship across the migrant political life cycle, Specters of Belonging adds to our understanding of migrant cross-border affiliations, allegiances and attachments. In doing so, the book challenges the linear logic of neo-assimilationists, who contend that the U.S. continues to integrate migrants as it did during previous eras of mass migration, by pointing to the institutional racism that impedes the process of migrant “incorporation.” Conversely, the book also challenges the irresolute circularity of the transnational perspective, which depicts migrants as ambivalent about their sense of belonging to their country of settlement and of origin. By capturing migrants’ cross-border enunciations, enactments and embodiments of transnational citizenship, Specters of Belonging argues that Mexican migrants are tenaciously transnational, defying the border in life and death.

Epilogue

IN HIS SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL Orange County: A Personal History, Gustavo Arellano describes a surrealist dream of return migration to his ancestral village of El Cargadero, deep in the heart of north-central México. “A couple of months before finishing this book,” Arellano writes, “I experienced the most vivid dream: I won a contest in which the main prize was the ability to fly” (2008: 25). After crisscrossing disparate geographies, from South East Asia to Eastern Europe, Gustavo decided to descend on El Cargadero, arriving in the late afternoon, when “the sun bathes everything in a soft, radiant glow.” Gustavo’s dream depicts the village quite accurately, verging on the utopian before taking a surrealist turn: “El Cargadero sits on the slope of a mountain, so rays either enveloped houses or cast them in shadows.” Hovering above, Gustavo tried to eavesdrop on conversations, “but all I heard was the laughs of contentment,” he writes. Once he landed on terra firma, “Streetlights flickered on, lending a beautiful shine to the village,” and people greeted him warmly....

Enunciations of Transnational Citizenship

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.

Embodiments of 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.

Introduction

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.

Enactments of Transnational Citizenship

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.