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Transnationalism in California and Mexico at the end of empire
Abstract
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.
(Foucault 1972: 17)
The geopolitical wound called ‘the border’ cannot stop the cultural undercurrents. The ‘artistic border’ is artificial. It shouldn't be there, and it is up to us to erase it. (Gómez Peña 1986: 24)
This chapter has been stimulated by my ethnographic work on the US–Mexico border. My immediate problem in relation to this work is how to represent the social and cultural forms of an indigenous people – namely Mixtecs – who migrate in large and increasing numbers into this border area from their homeland in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. This task of ethnographic representation is made complex not only by the spatial extension of the Mixtec community into the Border Area, but by the ambiguous nature of the Border Area itself, which has become a region where the culture, society and state of the United States encounter the Third World in a zone of contested space, capital and meanings. Furthermore, the problem of ethnographic representation of this community in this border region is made yet more problematic by a corresponding decomposition of what now, in the late twentieth century, can be seen as the ‘classic’ epistemological relationship between the anthropological Self and the ethnographic Other.
... The aim is to protect the interests of the US tomato industry with markedly more restrictive policies in the spring and summer when US production is strong. The specific geography of tomato production resulted in the splitting of the tomato season into two periods with separate reference prices each: California and EU borders which performs tomato markets bears close resemblance to the role of the political border documented in the literature on the mobility of labor (Buckel and Wissel, 2009; Kearney, 1998; Mitchell, 2001). However, " geographies of marketization " materialize not solely at the political border itself, but extend deep into rural areas in Mexico and Morocco. ...
... In this case southern borders move into US fields or Spanish greenhouses. 2 This illustrates the extent to which " illegal " migration does not occur in spite of border security measures, but rather has to be understood as an integral part of the very political border regime itself, which provides the conditions of existence for transnational economic spaces (see Fernández- Rufete Gómez and Rico Becerra, 2005; Kearney, 1998; Mitchell, 2001). There is no question that border security policies are implemented to deter unwelcome elements and to prevent unauthorized border crossings. ...
... There is no question that border security policies are implemented to deter unwelcome elements and to prevent unauthorized border crossings. In addition to this, however, these measures contribute to the production of " illegalized migrants " , transforming Moroccan or Mexican citizens into a labor market segment that is easily put to use by employers and does not have the formal means to demand inclusion into northern societies (Buckel and Wissel, 2009; Euskirchen et al, 2007; Kearney, 1998). 2. When producing in Mexico or Morocco, the supply chain managers of large agrifood companies favor a tightly controlled border in order to prevent potential overflow, for instance caused by sub-standard produce. ...
Being implicated in an ambivalent play of both border crossing and drawing, global commodity chains are an ideal organizational field to analyze the fundamental paradox of global connectivity. Approaching the contingency of borders from a perspective informed by the performativity approach to markets, this paper starts from the assumption that this paradox is particularly salient in the context of commodity chains which connect the Global South with the Global North. Taking the example of one single agrocommodity, the tomato, and two border regions (Morocco – EU and Mexico – USA), we follow the links and heterogeneous associations which stretch from the border to the fields, supermarket shelves, and standardization agencies to migrant labor, quality-control apparatuses, and so forth. By reading commodity chains from their literal limits, that is, from the border and from the margins, we focus on an element of this global assemblage which is normally taken for granted and excluded from academic and public discourse.
... As Indigenous groups migrate to the United States, they continue to be exposed to ethnic discrimination, particularly from Mexican mestizo migrants (Gutierrez Najera, 2010;Kearney, 1998Kearney, , 2000Stephen, 2007). Stephen (2005) argued that Indigenous Mexicans continue to be "a racialized category within Mexican immigrant communities" (p. ...
... Since the 1990s, Kearney and other prominent scholars have documented the experiences of Indigenous Mexican migrants' (mainly from the state of Oaxaca) and their construction of transnational identities in the United States (Besserer, 2002(Besserer, , 2004Fox & Rivera-Salgado, 2004;Kearney, 1998Kearney, , 2000Nagengast & Kearney, 1990;Velasco Ortiz, 2005). ...
The purpose of this study was to provide a deeper understanding of the lived experiences and identity formation of Indigenous Mexican students in U.S. higher education. Latinx critical race theory and critical Latinx Indigeneity served as conceptual frameworks for this study, and a decolonial lens was employed to distinguish the unique educational experiences of Indigenous Mexican students from the broader Latinx student population in the United States. A testimonio research design was used to explore two research questions: (a) What is the role of higher education in the identity formation of Indigenous Mexican students? and (b) How do Indigenous Mexican college students challenge or disrupt colonial perceptions about Indigenous people on their college campus and in their communities? Twelve Indigenous Mexican (Mixtec/Ñuu Savi, Zapotec/Bene Xhon, and Nahua) college students and graduates participated in the study, which involved participation in a 90-minute oral testimonio interview. Through a constant comparative analysis of the data, multiple readings of the participants’ transcripts and testimonios, and feedback from the participants, four themes emerged: (a) defining Indigeneity in diaspora, (b) higher education as a consciousness-raising space, (c) tensions within Chicanx Studies and Chicanx-based campus organizations, and (d) the urgency for public Indigeneity on and off campus. Findings revealed how participants publicly affirmed their Indigenous identities during college, particularly when exposed to courses in Ethnic Studies, Chicanx Studies, and Anthropology. Findings also shed light on intra-Latinx discrimination and its impact on Indigenous Mexican decisions to advocate for their respective Indigenous communities both on and off campus. The study contributes to the limited body of research on Indigenous Mexican students and their experiences in U.S. schools. It also begins to interrogate the ways Indigeneity is represented within Chicanx Studies curricula and Chicanx-based campus organizations from the perspective of Indigenous Mexican college students.
... An important way through which the anthropological literature on borders has sought to make the border-object understandable was extending and multiplying the scales of ethnographic inquiry to the extent that borders are generally seen to stand for much more than particular 'locations'. As much as predicating new visions of political economic encompassment (Chalfin 2007(Chalfin , 2008, are cases in point), this has meant focusing on hybridity and de-territorialization (see, for illustration, Rosaldo 1988, Alvarez 1995or Kearney 1998. Unfortunately, the accounts of the latter kind have largely been developed outside notions of temporality. ...
... Border ethnographies have taken different analytical and empirical angles. They sometimes focused on the people living at borders (Cole and Wolf 1973;Berdahl 1999;Sahlins 1991Sahlins , 1998Douglass 1998;Driessen 1992;Cohen 1972;Ballinger 2003;Green 2005); others concentrated on people moving across borders more or less voluntarily (Kearney 1998;Behar 2003;Ballinger 2003;Green 2005;Konstantinov 1996), while still others show how borders can be conceived of as more or less powerful presences of the state (Sahlins 1998;Cole and Wolf 1973;Heyman 1995;Chalfin 2006). Either through strong, authoritative power (e.g. ...
Drawing on the weak presence of problematizations of the spatial and temporal in some ethnographies of borders, this article advocates more attention to the border-space and ways in which it can be more effectively temporalized. It argues that it is not sufficient to recognize ‘space’ as an implicit characteristic of borders and advances an argument for seeing the border-space as ‘becoming’, in contrast to a largely agreed understanding of that space as ‘dwelling’. Using this distinction between two kinds of space with different possibilities of temporalization and politicization, the argument goes on with two theoretico-methodological scenarios for the border-space: the actor-network theory and Max Gluckman’s situational and processual analysis. It is argued that while the first imagines network and fluid spaces, coexistent with the regional ones, the latter offers a spatiotemporal genealogy of practices through events. Overall, the article opens a debate about seeing the border-space as ‘becoming’ by addressing a series of questions. Is the border-‘becoming’ a fully spatiotemporal politics in which the state is not necessarily a central actor? Is this mode of ontologization played in great part by events set at different scales useful to the anthropology of borders?
... A lo largo de las dos últimas décadas, el estudio de las identidades y sus fronteras (étnicas, culturales, nacionales, raciales, de género, sexuales, entre otras) se ha convertido en un importante foco de investigación en diversas disciplinas de las ciencias sociales, los estudios culturales y las humanidades 1 . Investigadores e investigadoras han buscado respuestas a la paradoja según la cual, por un lado, las fronteras que separan a las naciones, los grupos étnicos, las regiones, etc., son cada vez más porosas debido, en parte, a profundos cambios en la forma en que la política económica del modelo de estado-nación se configura (Kearney, 1998). Al mismo tiempo, y en sentido contrario, estos mismos fenómenos han contribuido a la creciente reafirmación de las identidades culturales, étnicas, regionales, de género, etc. De esta forma, no son pocos los autores que sugieren que el campo de lucha de diversos movimientos sociales se ha desplazado de la arena de la producción -por ejemplo, luchas sindicales o por la propiedad de la tierra-a la del reconocimiento de identidades -el movimiento LGTBI o la revitalización de movimientos étnicos diversos, por ejemplo (Gupta y Ferguson, 1992). ...
El memorial de los XII viajeros del suroeste» en El Paso, Texas: la construcción de una identidad regional en una ciudad de frontera de los EE.UU. RESUMEN Este artículo examina la narrativa sobre una particular identidad cultural regional que propone el Memorial de los XII viajeros del suroeste en la ciudad de El Paso, Texas, en los Estados Unidos. Según la propia decla-ración del memorial, este es un proyecto regional en marcha formado por «[…] 12 monumentos heroicos en bronce que celebran las contribuciones multiculturales de hombres y mujeres al desarrollo del suroeste». El argu-mento de este texto es triple. Primero, sostiene que el proyecto de los XII viajeros puede ser considerado como un collage que incorpora referencias históricas y culturales diferentes dentro de una única gran narrativa. Al hacer ello, segundo, el memorial difumina escalas espaciales y construye una historia regional con la ciudad de El Paso en su centro. Finalmente, el artículo sugiere que la construcción de esta identidad regional heroica y multicultural debe ser entendida en relación con una creciente actividad turística, así como en relación con las expectativas que los visitantes tienen acerca de un área de frontera sureña en los Estados Unidos. El texto se basa en la revisión crítica del material producido por la Fundación de los XII Viajeros y el examen de los personajes y las estatuas de Fray García y Juan de Oñate, los dos únicos viajeros aprobados de la lista propuesta. Palabras clave: memorial, identidad cultural, historia regional, desarrollo urbano, turismo, El Paso, Texas, EE.UU. * Agradezco a Nicholas Houser por su generosidad para acceder a material sobre el proyecto, a Robert Rundstrom de la Universidad de Oklahoma, Norman, EE. UU. por sus agudos comentarios al manuscrito inicial y a los evaluadores anónimos por sus sugerencias para mejorar el texto.
... Offered as a corrective to perspectives that see Latin America as "outside the United States," and assimilation as the logical and desirable outcome of migration, De Genova suggests that "rather than an outpost or extension of Mexico, therefore, the 'Mexican'-ness of Mexican Chicago signifies a permanent disruption of the space of the US Nation-state and embodies the possibility of something truly new, a radically different social formation " (2005:190). Others have used the words "transnational" community to characterize this kind of space (Besserer 2002(Besserer , 2004Kearney , 1995aKearney , 1995bKearney , 1998Kearney , 2000Rouse 1992Rouse , 1995Levitt 2001;Glick Schiller 1995. Another characterization, particularly when referring to grassroots organizations, is "binational civil society," suggesting parts of transnational communities that participate in their national country of origin, in their country of settlement as well as creating unique third spaces that can be called "transnational" (Fox 2005a(Fox , 2005b. ...
... In this article, we use the term diasporic Indigenous students to include the lived realities of diverse Indigenous students living in the United States with familial, relational, and transnational ties to Indigenous communities and pueblos of origin in Abya Yala. 1 Drawing from the critical work of Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta (2017) on Critical Latinx Indigeneities, in this article we recognise that Indigenous Peoples in Abya Yala have unique and distinct experiences that fall outside broader pan-ethnic Latinx and mestizx 2 labels. Moreover, as they migrate and establish themselves in the United States, diasporic Indigenous Peoples continue to be racialized and exposed to the structures of colonialism and anti-Indigenous domination transplanted from Abya Yala to the United States (Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta 2017;Gutiérrez Nájera 2010;Kearney 1998Kearney , 2000Stephen 2007). ...
Diasporic Indigenous students include the lived realities of diverse Indigenous students living in the United States with familial, relational, and transnational ties to Indigenous communities and pueblos of origin in Abya Yala, also known as Latin America. In this article, we advocate for the creation of positive learning communities to best support diasporic Indigenous students in schools and beyond. Recommendations for educators include understanding the effects of anti-Indigenous discrimination within Latinx communities and reflecting on the ways schooling may unintentionally reproduce colonial or damage-centred perspectives about Indigenous Peoples. The successful cultivation of positive learning communities also requires schools to learn from and cultivate partnerships with diasporic Indigenous families and surrounding communities to uplift social-emotional learning that honours Indigenous comunalidad. We hope the information presented in this article contributes to promoting equitable learning outcomes for all students by disrupting colonial stereotypes and misinformation about Indigeneity and uplifting contemporary Indigenous saberes.
... Tanto el ppp y el enfoque de la gobernanza multinivel incorporan el estudio del Estado y de las nuevas configuraciones políticas utilizando escalas y niveles para dar cuenta del diseño y puesta en práctica de políticas (local, subregional, nacional, regional, entre otras) (Koff, 2008). Muchos estudios tienden a centrarse en las percepciones sociológicas, antropológicas y geográficas acerca de la vida, las venturas y desventuras de la población fronteriza (Martínez, 1997;Paasi, 1999;Kearney, 1998;Observatorio de Venezuela, 2018;Observatorio de Venezuela, 2019;Mouly, Idler y Garrido, 2015;Bressan, 2016). ...
Una investigación cualitativa sobre las percepciones de la seguridad democrática en la frontera de Táchira-Norte de Santander entre 2002 y 2010. Un estudio realizado luego de 10 años de haber sido puesta en práctica dicha política y destaca la necesidad de ahondar en el conocimiento y consecuencias de las comunidades y población en general
... Tanto el ppp y el enfoque de la gobernanza multinivel incorporan el estudio del Estado y de las nuevas configuraciones políticas utilizando escalas y niveles para dar cuenta del diseño y puesta en práctica de políticas (local, subregional, nacional, regional, entre otras) (Koff, 2008). Muchos estudios tienden a centrarse en las percepciones sociológicas, antropológicas y geográficas acerca de la vida, las venturas y desventuras de la población fronteriza (Martínez, 1997;Paasi, 1999;Kearney, 1998;Observatorio de Venezuela, 2018;Observatorio de Venezuela, 2019;Mouly, Idler y Garrido, 2015;Bressan, 2016). ...
El presente artículo evalúa los cambios en la percepción sobre la política de seguridad democrática de Colombia (PSD) y su efecto en la seguridad de la frontera de Táchira y Norte de Santander (TNS) durante el período 2002- 2010. Siguiendo la revisión teórica desde las disciplinas que confluyen en el análisis de la seguridad de las poblaciones fronterizas, su interrelación con el entorno local, nacional e internacional se realizó una investigación de tipo cualitativo con entrevistas a informantes para conocer sus percepciones y contrastarlas a la luz de la teoría y los constructos emergentes de la información cualitativa. Los resultados muestran la emergencia de tres categorías principales: Ambivalencia sobre la capacidad del Estado, oscilaciones en la credibilidad del Estado y pérdida de la calidad de vida. Dichas categorías se subdividen en dimensiones como fortalecimiento y debilidad del Estado, violencia, éxodo poblacional, desempleo, falta de acompañamiento con políticas de desarrollo, pérdida de libertades y seguridad pública y resiliencia, entre otras. En su conjunto evidencian que la PSD fortaleció relativamente la capacidad del Estado aunque aún necesita rescatar y construir institucionalidad y cambió percepciones sobre las dinámicas de seguridad fronteriza y de la vida en la frontera de TNS. Una evaluación más apropiada requiere mayor investigación a más largo plazo con el fin de evitar los matices y pasiones propios del momento; por lo tanto, es necesario continuar profundizando y evaluando tendencias sobre la PSD en las fronteras de Colombia.
... Transmigrants are able to control their movements into and through the borders, contest bound aries, and control their identity. 31 In contrast, deportees in Tijuana are confined to one side of the border. Their movements are constrained by the physicality of the border and by punitive migratory policies. ...
... Over the last two decades, the work of Kearney and other prominent scholars brought attention to Mexican Indigenous migrants' process of re-negotiation and construction of transnational identities within U.S. society, particularly for Ñuu Savi migrants from Oaxaca (Besserer, 2002(Besserer, , 2004Fox & Rivera-Salgado, 2004;Kearney, 1998Kearney, , 2000Nagengast & Kearney, 1990;Velasco Ortiz, 2005). Through various political, social, and cultural practices, Indigenous migrants have constructed transnational identities or "social forms and identities that escape from cultural and political hegemony of their nation-state [Mexico]" (Kearney, 2000, p. 174). ...
The historical discrimination of Indigenous groups within Mexican society remains relevant to the experiences of Mexican Indigenous youth in the U.S. Similar to their immigrant peers, Mexican Indigenous students face cultural discontinuities between home and school that affect their negotiation of identity. Still, Mexican Indigenous students also develop their ethnic identities against the backdrop of an existing dominant Mexican mestizo identity. This ethnographic study examines educational experiences of four Ñuu Savi (Mixtec) college graduates and sheds light on colonial structures that continue to marginalize and stigmatize Mexican Indigenous students. Participants attribute their reaffirmation of Indigenous identity partly to college experiences.
... The Context: Tijuana Through observations from 1985to 1988, Kearney (1998 described the Zapata Canyon which was then the most heavily trafficked corridor of undocu mented crossing on the Mexico-US border. This profound fissure that runs along the northem edge of Tijuana was the stage where the Border Patrol attempted to interdict undocumented crossers every afternoon. ...
The chapter characterizes Tijuana, Mexico, as a deportation city partly due to the large numbers of Mexican migrants deported to the city by the U.S. government. Adjacent to Southern California, Tijuana has long been a major destination for Mexican migrants headed north to the United States. The chapter uses data from the Encuesta de Migración en la Frontera Norte de Mexico (Survey on Migration on the Northern Border of Mexico), as well as data from ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and meetings with deported migrants, including deported U.S. war veterans and other deported migrants who have become members of a Christian church in Tijuana. Using these data sources, the chapter gives a demographic profile of the deportees in Tijuana. From a gender perspective, the chapter analyzes institutional and family conditions that facilitate the settlement of deportees in the city, or that lead to difficulties that drive deported migrants into situations of precariousness or exclusion. The analysis also focuses on the different strategies that deported parents undertake to cope with their forced return to Mexico and their separation from family remaining in the United States, as well as strategies to re-establish family relations along the divisive border.
... Diferentemente do sucedido com a circulação de bens, o trânsito de pessoas através da fronteira por motivos de saúde, de visita a familiares e em festas, era objeto de alguma transigência policial. Mas a permeabilidade relativa das fronteiras supostamente impermeáveis é uma constante antropológica registada à escala mundial -por exemplo, veja-se, no caso luso-espanhol,Brito (1996) e Uriarte (1994; no caso franco-espanhol,Sahlins (1989;; no caso hispano-marroquino,Driessen (1992;; sobre o muro de Berlim,Borneman (1992;; sobre a fronteira entre o México e os Estados Unidos da América,Alvarez (1995) eKearney (1998); sobre a fronteira entre a Malásia e a Tailândia,Carsten (1998); sobre as fronteiras do Zimbabué com Moçambique, África do Sul, Zâmbia e Botswana,Cheater (1998); sobre a fronteira entre a Turquia e a Síria,Stokes (1998); sobre a fronteira entre a Turquia e a Geórgia,Hann e Béller-Hann (1998); sobre a fronteira entre a Hungria e a Sérvia, bem como sobre a fronteira entre o Uruguai e o Brasil,Gay (1995); sobre a fronteira greco-turca, o filme de Theo Angelopoulos, O Passo Suspenso daCegonha (1991). ...
Este livro aborda as modalidades de construção da identidade nacional em duas localidades situadas em lados opostos da fronteira luso-espanhola no rio Guadiana. O principal objetivo é contribuir para o
estudo da identidade portuguesa. Os objetos mais precisos da investigação etnográfica em que se baseia o trabalho apresentado são as festas, incluindo as taurinas, a alimentação e os estereótipos nacionais. As semelhanças e dissemelhanças de facto entre as populações em estudo também são objeto de descrição e análise, mas a atenção centra-se no ponto de vista dos habitantes, nos seus discursos.
... 15 More recent works by anthropologists return the analysis to a concern with the lived experience of migrants. 16 In addition, there is a growing understanding that migration does not merely mean a shift from one ordered environment to another, with migrants either assimilating or accommodating to a new environment, but rather creates a new type of transnational social space (Rouse 1991; also see Kearney 1998).17 ...
... In this case southern borders move into US fields. This illustrates the extent to which "illegal" migration does not occur in spite of border security measures, but rather has to be understood as an integral part of the very political border regime itself, which provides the conditions of existence for transnational economic spaces (see Kearney, 1998;Mitchell, 2001). ...
Introduction: Markets and MarketizationStudying Markets: Places and Prices, Networks and StructuresReal Markets?Geographies of MarketizationThe Discursive Borderlands of Global Capitalism: B/ordering the MarketThe Framing of MarketsConclusion
References
... From the border studies perspective, research tends to focus on the sociological, anthropological and geographic perceptions about the life, fortunes and misfortunes of border people (Kearney 1998;Martínez 1994;Paasi 1999) and has made borders multidisciplinary in its approach (Brunet-Jailly 2006). Their study has also moved from their perception as mere demarcation lines on the map to institutions (Passi 1998) and as places with particular human dynamics. ...
This paper explores the post-9/11 2001 US security measures and the impact of evolving border security policy on the lives of the residents of the California–Baja California region a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It also considers the perceptions of the border people about this policy. It shows the results of qualitative fieldwork aimed at answering questions related to the main changes brought about at the border with the new policy initiatives, the effect of the creation of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on the functioning and dynamics of the ports of entry, the most affected groups in the local community, their adaptation to the changing realities at the border and the border crossings, and the differences in border perceptions of the San Diego–Tijuana border region prior to 9/11 compared with the border today. The literature regarding terrorism, security and borders is reviewed, fieldwork results are presented and the findings are compared with those of the existing literature.
... I am interested in Guatemalan labor migrants because they have frequently been characterized as transnationals or as fostering transnational communities (Moran- Taylor Latin American countries are also repeatedly described as transnational (Gutiérrez 1999;Georges 1992;Cohen 2001a;Conway & Cohen 1998;Levitt 1997;Caglar 2006;Goldring 2001;Kearney 1998;Vertovec 2004b). In fact, so much transnational scholarship has come out of this region, any migrating population originating from here, is in a sense branded "transnational." ...
In this article, we analyse the social reproduction of post‐Soviet migrant labour. Our inquiry builds on artwork by Olga Jitlina and Anna Tereshkina and by Mahpora Kiromova dealing with the effects of migration on family relations in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. We have braided the artwork with strands of social reproduction theory to examine the transnational household as a set of relationships that enables post‐Soviet and global capitalism to draw value out of unwaged work and to reproduce the differentiated (i.e. gendered and racialised) labour force. Our focus is on the tropes of family, weddings, love, and violence. The analysis of these tropes draws attention to the intersecting effects of globalised capitalism, local structures of value, the state, and patriarchy in post‐Soviet political economy. Through them we detail the fundamental co‐constitution of production and social reproduction, but also show that practices of social reproduction can be reservoirs of resistance and potential change.
La presente investigación tiene como objetivo analizar las características de aculturación distintivas en migrantes calificados provenientes del estado de Nuevo León, México a Texas. En particular, interesa examinar la identidad en los migrantes, el vínculo transfronterizo y las redes migratorias que se han consolidado entre ambos países. La metodología corresponde a un enfoque cualitativo de alcance exploratorio, compuesto por una entrevista semi estructurada a profundidad, aplicada a 6 migrantes calificados radicando actualmente en Texas. El instrumento fue a partir de un guion de indicadores compuesto por cinco categorías de análisis; desde el perfil sociodemográfico, académico, motivaciones, cultura y migración. Particularmente para esta investigación se retomó la variable de cultura que describe el proceso de aculturación de los migrantes. Se concluye que la familiaridad, la identidad y elementos culturales como el lenguaje son fundamentales dentro de la aculturación, además particularmente en migrantes calificados el vínculo transfronterizo influye positivamente, favoreciendo relaciones laborales, familiares y de estudio.
Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech in Berlin—‘Tear down this wall!’—was the opening salvo of an epoch that celebrated borderlessness. Media and advertising from the 1980s on have been replete with images of cross-cultural encounters, accounts of unprecedented migration and travel, footloose business and placeless finance. Advertising tells us there are ‘no frontiers’. Information and communication technologies annihilate distance. According to Marshall McLuhan, media lead the way to a ‘global village’ (1964; McLuhan and Powers 1992). Globalization was the buzzword of fin-de-millennium media and scholarship. According to a commonplace description, globalization is the ‘annihilation of distance’. But distance, of course, is annihilated only by those who can afford to do so. Many others suffer the ‘tyranny of distance’. The annihilation of distance is a half-truth. That it is often cited as a definition of globalization typifies an epoch in which borderlessness is an upbeat cliché.
Borders are loci of language contact that have been understudied. Mexico and the Unites States share a border that is 1,954 miles long. Along this border we find two major languages, namely English and Spanish, and their various dialects representing two nation states and a diverse population; in addition, border economic interdependence promotes transnational flows of a diverse nature. The municipality of Tijuana, along with San Diego County, forms one of the largest cross-border conurbations with five million inhabitants. This study explores linguistic practices reflected in Tijuana’s linguistic landscape. Of the languages spoken there, English and Spanish play a principal role with Asian, other European and Amerindian languages playing a minor role that nevertheless adds to the city´s diversity. In particular, this work seeks to explore translanguaging in the linguistic landscape of Tijuana’s most renowned avenue, Avenida Revolución , and in other city areas from working-class to upscale to analyze how speakers engage in linguistic practices, and in doing so, to contribute to other works in border studies and sociolinguistics. The hard data consist of a corpus of 2,000 digital images, which were collated by relying on critical discourse analysis and on current research in translanguaging and the linguistic landscape. The guiding research questions for this study were the following: (1) What happens to linguistic practices on borders and how can these be observed through understanding the border’s linguistic landscape? (2) How are languages used in Tijuana’s landscape? and (3) How is translanguaging performed through the local linguistic landscape? The findings of the study suggest that Tijuana’s landscape shows that Tijuanans perform translanguaging in several ways: their linguistic repertoires reflect, on the one hand, contact between Baja California Spanish and other Mexican Spanish dialects on a lexical level that gives rise to lexical alternation and enrichment. On the other hand, its LL also evidences contact between English and Spanish, which gives form to lexical creativity and hybrid forms that also reflect on social practices resulting from the city’s condition and adaptation as part of the borderlands.
This article examines three Chicana/o children’s picture books and asks how such stories respond to and participate in literary expressions of nationhood. The visual and verbal texts of Pat Mora’s Tomás and the Library Lady (1997), Luis J. Rodríguez’s América Is Her Name (1998), and Amada Irma Pérez’s My Diary From Here to There (2002) all document issues of citizenship and belonging by demonstrating and encouraging the acquisition of literacy through multiliterate experiences, as their protagonists continually renegotiate their own relationship to reading and writing. As one of the nation’s most powerful cultural products, literacy contributes to the building and making of the child-citizen. The texts bring together questions of national belonging and new practices of literacy, normalizing alternative strategies for storytelling and playing a crucial role in shaping all future citizens. They also, through multiliteracy, advocate the idea of nationhood as an interdependent endeavor, creating a cultural ethos that situates Chicana/os (and, more broadly, Latina/os) inside the historical narrative of writing, and points to legacies of writing beyond the borders of the United States. These picture books thus represent a new direction for Chicana/o literature that acknowledges transnational and hemispheric migrant voices as part of US nationhood.
Recent studies suggest a major shift in the Mexico-U.S. migratory circuit: that more Mexican nationals are returning to Mexico than are migrating to the U.S. With a focus on undocumented returnees, who face unique challenges to future re-migration to the U.S. given the current border restrictions, this chapter considers why they return to Mexico from the U.S. when they do. To answer this question, the discussion in the chapter draws on data collected via 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in 10 hometowns of returnees in Jalisco and Oaxaca, Mexico, including 50 interviews with deportees and voluntary returnees. These data illuminate a multiplicity of circumstances under which undocumented migrants go back to Mexico. In particular, the circumstances that primarily drive these migrants to return fall under three broad categories: their participation in the market economy in the U.S.; their participation in a gift economy with family and community members in Mexico; and their encounters with the U.S. state’s system of immigration enforcement. These findings problematize the voluntary/involuntary binary, complicating our understanding of what it means to return to Mexico “voluntarily” or “involuntarily”, as well as what comprises “home” for Mexican migrants.
Analysis of U.S. immigration, border defense, and national security policies and their impact on individuals, families, and communities from Mexico and Central America who have migrated or fled to the United States as refugees since the mid-1980s suggests that through immigration programs such as Prevention through Deterrence, the United States has crafted a set of policies that creates “preemptive suspects”—categories of people from Central America and Mexico that may be systematically excluded as dangerous, criminal, undeserving, and less valuable than U.S. citizens.
Un análisis de las políticas de inmigración, defensa fronteriza y seguridad nacional y su impacto en individuos, familias y comunidades de México y Centroamérica que residen en los Estados Unidos como inmigrantes o refugiados desde mediados de la década de 1980 sugiere que los Estados Unidos ha creado, a través de programas migratorios como la Prevención por Disuasión, un conjunto de políticas que generan “sospechosos preventivos,” es decir, categorías de personas de América Central y México que pueden ser sistemáticamente excluidas como peligrosas, criminales, indignas y de menos valor que los ciudadanos estadunidenses.
During 1996 and 1997 an Australian parliamentary committee conducted an inquiry into greater autonomy for Torres Strait Islanders, but by 2000 the future of the issue seemed unclear. This thesis explores what the notion of autonomy has meant for Torres Strait and for Torres Strait Islanders in the past, and what it might mean in the future. The thesis uses material from the period before European contact to just after the end of the parliamentary inquiry. Although previous research and historical material are utilised, unique parts of the thesis include an analysis of: the formal submissions and hearings associated with the parliamentary inquiry; the Torres Strait’s location between Australia and Papua New Guinea; and the Strait’s small-island make-up. In this latter regard, comparisons are made with models and examples of autonomy found in small island states and territories in the Pacific. The findings include that we must consider two groups of Torres Strait Islanders, those in Torres Strait and those on mainland Australia. Whereas those in the Strait have been able to legitimise a case for a form of autonomy those on the mainland have not. Islanders in the Strait have achieved a degree of regional autonomy; those on the mainland are unable to make a case to be part of this regional autonomy, or to achieve a form of corporate autonomy. The status of Islanders in the Strait is influenced by several factors including the Strait’s location on the border with Papua New Guinea, the associated Treaty with that country, and the nature and the accessibility of the in-shore fishery. A major finding however is that although Islanders have achieved a degree of regional political autonomy, which may be progressed yet further, they have been unable to embrace non-Indigenous people within this. Their present aspiration for regional political autonomy therefore is limited to one that would apply only to Indigenous-specific affairs. This stands in some conflict with their aspiration for regional economic autonomy which would include their control over the entire regional fishery which they presently share with non-Islanders.
Recent scholarship has shown how aggressive policing along the US–Mexico border and in the interiors of the United States and Mexico has heightened migrants’ vulnerability to violence, death, displacement, and exploitation. Here, we explore how migrants engage in social practices to respond to state violence along an extended and militarized migrant trail. We show how migrants form part of a broader landscape of sociopolitical contestation with organizations, cartels, local communities, and state agencies, wherein they generate new forms of sociality and strategic cooperation to promote their survival and well-being. Migrants’ social practices illustrate that, far from eroding migrant agency, heightened state violence has generated new and creative social strategies to survive, and at times resist, aggressive policing measures.
This article develops the concept of "transborder" communities. It first explores the concepts of borders, border crossing, and borderlands as a way of understanding the complexity of transborder communities. From there the discussion focuses on the concept of coloniality as a tool for understanding the ways that ethnic and racial hierarchies written into colonialism are often recycled into ideologies of nationalism that permeate discussions of contemporary migration. It evaluates theories of the compression of time in terms of how to conceptualize the local in multiple places simultaneously, drawing on the concepts of bifocal vision and social fields. Finally, the article discusses both the power and limits of states in affecting transborder communities.
Δε διατίθεται περίληψη / no abstract available
Closing the BorderOpening the BorderMaking it StickReferences
Laura Velasco Ortiz and Dolores Paris Pombo dedicates the special issue of Latin American Perspectives, May 2014, to Michael Kearney for his contribution to the study of indigenous migration in Latin America. The multiethnic and multiracial component of Latin American migration is a consequence of the vitality of the continent's indigenous and Afro-American peoples. Latin American indigenous migration is reflected in the increase in size of the Indian Hispanic American population in the United States, which in 2000 was 407,073 and by 2010 had increased to 685,150. The current scenario of indigenous migration is characterized by the deterioration of the living conditions of the campesinos, workers, and low-income residents of the Latin American continent. The structural context of indigenous migration includes the destruction and appropriation of natural resources in indigenous territory. The spatial logic of mobility responds to a cultural regionalization that goes beyond regionalizations produced by nation-states' political administration.
This article offers ideas for reconceptualizing Latin America through the discipline of Anthropology. I use the concept of "The Américas" to incorporate areas that have been geographically divided into North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean and to conceptualize flows of people, capital, and culture. On the one hand, my suggestions question the container of the nation-state as our primary focal lens by considering transborder processes, identities, and institutions. On the other hand, I maintain that we still have to consider the "nation" in our discussions because of the strong historical presence of nationalism in creating categories that have powerful roles in defining how people are inserted into relations of power. My second area of emphasis is on the kinds of insights anthropologists based in Latin America and the Caribbean have offered which can help us rethink how U.S. Empire and global hegemony are part and parcel of the field within which we operate and participate in as natives and citizens.
Based on a 3-year qualitative research study that took place in a new immigrant-receiving community in North Carolina, the manuscript examines the implications of transnational cultural and sociolinguistic patterns of multilingual indigenous Latino immigrants (ILIs), and its effects on their survival in the US. Utilizing narrative analysis, it explores how Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan immigrants of indigenous backgrounds use survival strategies of the Pedagogy of the Chameleon to move across multiple identities, both to maintain their cultures and to survive as immigrants in the United States. This manuscript explores the ways ILIs use strategies and skills passed through strong social networks to move in and out of transnational social spaces. In addition, it raises questions about the ways multilingualism affects border mobility and transnationality as well as how undocumented families use multilingualism as a transnational bridge to facilitate their survival in a hostile US environment, the community, and in schools.
This project combined methodologies from linguistic anthropology, participatory action research and interactional sociolinguistics. Data was collected from participant observation, four case studies, extensive interviews and a language and literacy survey. Multilingual conversations were recorded and analyzed with Conversation Analysis, with a focus on actions and identities as they emerge through enacted stance. The analysis was informed by concepts taken from the anthropology and sociology of transnationalism. The study shows four Maya-speaking individuals negotiating highly multilingual social worlds, where English, when it appears, is more often lingua franca than dominant code, and where participants use their various languages strategically and contingently to accomplish their various goals. These choices are constrained by their status as workers at the bottom rung of a social field characterized by undocumented status and the persistence of colonial discourses. Recommendations for research and practice based on research findings include: (i) reconsideration of second language pedagogies for such immigrant populations (ii) the use of stance in the analysis of multilingual conversations (iii) more research on undocumented status and how it contributes to the silencing of minority language populations and (iv) the use of participatory research methods in studies of undocumented and indigenous communities.
Scholars have suggested that migration from Mexico to the United States benefits women by challenging often rigid gender norms. The results of ethnographic field research in San Luis Potosí and New Mexico complicate this view. Here migration results in a complex interplay between males and females—a series of negotiations through which women exercise increased autonomy in some circumstances but also face the reassertion of male dominance and in which males reproduce patriarchal power even as they create new ways to express masculinity. This research problematizes previous understandings of the impact of migration on gender roles and underscores the need to make a gendered analysis central to theories of transnationalism and the study of (im)migration.
Globalization poses a challenge to existing social scientific methods of inquiry and units of analysis by destabilizing the embeddedness of social relations in particular communities and places. Ethnographic sites are globalized by means of various external connections across multiple spatial scales and porous and contested boundaries. Global ethnographers must begin their analysis by seeking out "placemaking projects" that seek to define new kinds of places, with new definitions of social relations and their boundaries. Existing ethnographic studies of global processes tend to cluster under one of three slices of globalization-global forces, connections, or imaginations-each defined by a different kind of place-making project. The extension of the site in time and space poses practical and conceptual problems for ethnographers, but also political ones. Nonetheless, by locating themselves firmly within the time and space of social actors "living the global," ethnographers can reveal how global processes are collectively and politically constructed, demonstrating the variety of ways in which. globalization is grounded in the local.
This essay examines cultural and literary representations of women and water along the US borders. I analyze Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995) and Kem Nunn's Tijuana Straits (2004) to examine how conflicts over water and pollution are gendered in the context of globalization. Through a close textual reading of these novels in their social, political and historical contexts, I argue that water functions as a metaphor for border environmental and justice issues and their gendered dimensions in North America. Water landscapes and the struggles over water provide the backdrop for these texts because of the unique properties of water and environmental pollution to cross boundaries. In crossing political boundaries, water symbolizes the contested politics and the geographic and cultural spaces between nations and communities that hold unequal power. Water also represents complex forms of violence as a result of large-scale economic development, the cultural changes this development ushers in and their gendered effects.
In Chimalapas, Mexico, nongovernmental actors attempted to integrate campesinos into the discourse and practices of the Western environmental movement. The political economy school of anthropology assumes that cultural identity and practice flow from historical experiences grounded in relevant national and institutional contexts. In this article, I argue that although the movement in Chimalapas drew from the well-developed symbolic toolkit of the environmental movement, it was not able to create a space for local concerns within a transnational agenda that was already fairly well established and inflexible. Political ecology was the hinge of this movement: a political-economic analysis that validated traditional agrarian concerns in Chimalapas but included an environmentalist discourse legible to international funders. In this way, environmentalists in Chimalapas attempted both to create new practices and to link old practices to new expressions of culture and identity.
In the United States, unprecedented high numbers of naturalization applicants, the adoption of restrictive immigration policies, changing demographics, and the 1996 presidential election coalesced in the mid-1990s to make naturalization simultaneously a high priority and problematic. Salvadorans who had immigrated during the 1980s and who were still struggling for the opportunity to naturalize were caught up in these dynamics. A juxtaposition of their struggles against exclusion and of naturalization ceremonies' rhetoric of inclusion elucidates complex and paradoxical connections between naturalization and transnationalism.
Border scholars have on the whole rejected the claim that the U.S.–Mexico border has been dissolved by late modern crossborder migrations of capital, people, and practices. However, in noting the escalation of militarized policing practices in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands in the midst of liberalizing trade agreements such as NAFTA, the tendency in this literature has been to reconcile hegemonic U.S. geopolitical and geoeconomic practices in the region as paired. In conversation with these approaches to U.S. statecraft in the region, I propose that border policing in the wake of September 11, 2001, surfaces the long-standing relative incoherence of U.S. geopolitical and geoeconomic practice. By investigating how nonlocally conceived policies come apart on the ground in terms of the local circumstances each produce, I describe the border as a security/economy nexus in U.S. statecraft.
In this article, I seek to complicate scholars' understanding of the “modular” form of the nation-state by examining four kinds of indigenous political space that figure in contemporary American Indian struggle in the United States: (1) “tribal” or indigenous-nation sovereignty on reservation homelands; (2) comanagement of off-reservation resources and sites shared between tribal, federal, and state governments; (3) national indigenous space in which Indian people exercise portable rights beyond reservations; and (4) hybrid political space in which Indian people exercise dual citizenship and assert rights as tribal citizens under treaty and other federal Indian law, as U.S. citizens under the Constitution, and as social or cultural citizens within a multicultural U.S. society.
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