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7 The Second Face of Transnational Citizenship Migrant Activists Recross the Border In previous chapters we have examined the Mexican face of transnational citizenship by detailing the ethnographic findings of a series of separate, yet interrelated, extended case studies that have slowly begun to reveal the complex emergence of Mexican migrants as cross-border political subjects and transnational citizens. In this chapter we turn to the second face of transnational citizenship—migrant politics in the “receiving” context. It is useful to begin this shift to political spaces on the U.S. side of the border by recalling Arjun Appadurai’s conception of “post-nationalism” as a trope intended to capture the waning power of “receiving” states such as the United States to incorporate transnational migrants into loyalty to their host society. Appadurai sees migrant communities in the United States as “doubly loyal to their nations of origin and thus ambivalent about their loyalties to America” (1996, 172, emphasis added). How accurate is this representation of reality in the case of Mexican migrants? In our research on Mexican migrant political transnationalism, we have found a far more complex dialectic of identity politics at play in the hearts and minds of our ethnographic subjects. When the migrants we have interviewed express ambivalence, it is not an ambivalence about their loyalty to the United States but a kind of double ambivalence about their experiences on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. Far from being “doubly loyal to their nation of origin,” the politically engaged migrants in our studies express a strongly felt allegiance to both Mexico and the United States. Yet, at times the migrants are doubly ambivalent about each nation, and about the modes of political participation on both sides of the border. The very situatedness of our transnational subjects tends to provoke mixed feelings, depending on the circumstances at hand—for instance, 167 when the migrants become actively involved in state and local political campaigns in the United States and express satisfaction with the economic opportunities afforded by their adopted country, while decrying the continuing cultural and political significance of racial and ethnic discrimination in the United States. Alternatively, when participating in diaspora politics in Mexico, our interview subjects have become embedded in economic and community development “partnerships” with Mexican state and local government officials, while continuing to decry an overall political culture they see as dominated by a corrupt political class. “Loyalty,” in short, is never unalloyed and always contingent. It is expressed or withheld by acting subjects, depending on historically specific circumstances. A key aspect of each of our extended case studies has been a phenomenological quest to discern the different ways Mexican migrants understand, experience, and try to act on their feelings and beliefs about “dual loyalty,” being “here and there,” and becoming, or not becoming, “transnational citizens.” Consider, for example, our study of Andrés Bermúdez, which involved extended ethnographic interviews with the Tomato King over a three-year period. These open-ended conversations revealed considerable ambivalence concerning his hopes, fears, and dreams, far more so than the public persona we observed on the campaign trail. Between the two elections , when Bermúdez had returned to Winters, California, to continue running his businesses, and before the electoral rules had been changed, he discussed at length what might happen if he were to give up his political persona and focus on getting migrants to stop sending remittances back to Mexico and channel their resources instead into improving Mexican American neighborhoods and educational opportunities in California. In all of our interviews, Bermúdez regularly distinguished between “Andr és Bermúdez’s” personal views and the constructed mythological narrative of “the Tomato King.” After serving a year in office in Jerez, Bermúdez had begun to express this contradictory sense of selfhood publicly. To symbolize his call for political openness and transparency in Jerez, in delivering the public address on the anniversary of his inauguration, Bermúdez appeared in a white dress suit instead of his usual black cowboy hat and ranchero outfit. The thrust of his message was that, after his term was up, he might well return to California and work toward helping his native community without having to deal directly with local party politics and a political culture he has consistently represented as corrupt and lacking in transparency (Rodríguez 2005). This has been a recurrent theme in all of our conversations with Bermúdez, who has often made...

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