Citizenship across Borders: The Political Transnationalism of El Migrante

8 The Boundaries of Citizenship

8 The Boundaries of Citizenship Transnational Power Revisited What do we claim when we claim that we understand the semiotic means by which . . . persons are defined to one another? That we know words or that we know minds? In answering this question, it is necessary . . . to notice the characteristic intellectual movement, the inward conceptual rhythm . . . namely, a continuous dialectical tacking between the most local of local detail and the most global of global structure in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view. . . . Hopping back and forth between the whole conceived through the parts that actualize it and the parts conceived through the whole that motivates them, we seek to turn them, by a sort of intellectual perpetual motion, into explications of one another. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge The stories of migrant political transnationalism we have profiled in this book offer intriguing insights into enduring debates regarding identity, belonging , and citizenship in this era of large-scale, cross-border migrations. What do the border-crossing political engagements of our ethnographic subjects have to say regarding the theoretical antinomies of immigrant incorporation and transnational connections that have dominated the migration research field in recent years? Do the transnational political practices and identities adopted by our research subjects constitute a final nail in the coffin of those earlier conceptions that envisioned citizenship and political community as tightly circumscribed within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state? Is the contemporary experience of transnational migration in the context of neoliberal globalization providing the conditions for simultaneous political engagement in multiple nation-states? Or are we in need of a more nuanced account of the limits and possibilities for a migrant politics 184 of simultaneity? What is the play of agencies in the construction and enactment of transnational citizenship across the U.S.-Mexico divide? What are the implications for democratic theory and practice of the inclusions and exclusions entailed in these new forms of migrant political transnationalism ? Finally, what is the staying power of U.S.-Mexican migrant political transnationalism? Certainly the particular form of “transnational citizenship” exercised by our ethnographic subjects is far removed from the images of “postnational ” or “global” citizenship envisioned by some international relations scholars. Nor is this form of dual engagement captured in the projected fears of long-distance nationalism and divided loyalties contained within some recent scholarship on the impact of global migration on national identity formation in the United States (Anderson 1998; Huntington 2004b). The former seeks to erase the power of nation-states as taken-for-granted containers of citizenship status and political identity, whereas the latter holds onto a vision of nation-states as the exclusive and morally most appropriate site for the attribution and formation of citizenship and political subjectivity. Our ethnographic subjects, while recognizing the continuing significance of nation-states, are far more flexible in negotiating the practices of citizenship across borders. They help to shed light on the changing nature of citizenship and political practice in what has been termed the “age of migration” (Castles and Miller 2003) and the increasingly extraterritorial extension and global reach of nation-states. We began this political ethnography of transnational citizenship by invoking George Marcus’s call for “an ethnography of complex connections” that itself becomes “the means of producing a narrative that is both micro and macro, and neither one particularly” (1989, 24). We identified four distinct contexts to be kept constantly in mind as our ethnographic subjects narrated their stories: the historical context of the particular interstate relations , the conditions affecting migrant reception and exit, and the state policies that have shaped migration and citizenship between the United States and Mexico; the political-economic context (now called neoliberal globalization), which has ushered in an historically contradictory form of North American economic integration facilitating expanded capital mobility while seeking to restrict labor mobility across the border; the sociocultural context of migrant recruitment, histories, and narratives, and the changing gender and class relations within both countries, which strongly affect the timing and geography of migratory patterns; and the prevailing institutional context that our ethnographic subjects must accommodate to or resist, as they attempt to politically construct new spaces for practicing citizenship across borders. These reciprocal contexts constitute the opportunities and constraints experienced by our ethnographic subjects, situate Boundaries of Citizenship 185 them in particular power-knowledge venues, and affect their transnational practices in the interconnected locations in...