Citizenship across Borders: The Political Transnationalism of El Migrante

1 The Politics of Transnational Citizenship

1 The Politics of Transnational Citizenship Perhaps the primary cultural consequence of transnational diaspora life is that it necessarily stretches the idea of national belonging by disengaging it from its presumed territorial and linguistic imperative, de-centering it in relation to any putative “core” values or marks of greater or lesser “authenticity.” Juan Flores, “The Diaspora Strikes Back: Reflections on Cultural Remittances” Discourses on the rights, entitlements, and obligations of citizenship have changed dramatically in the past two decades as a result of the increasingly transnational character of global migration flows, cultural networks, and sociopolitical practices. The once taken-for-granted correspondence between citizenship, nation, and state has been called into question as new forms of grassroots citizenship have taken on an increasingly transterritorial character. Resident noncitizens now routinely live and work in transnational cities throughout the world, while maintaining social and political networks that link them to people and places in their countries and communities of origin. At the same time, the rise of supranational institutional networks that promote the neoliberal globalization project and the spread of international agencies that promote the discourse on human rights also challenge received notions of state sovereignty and the rights associated with national citizenship. Thus, for example, some scholars (e.g., Soysal 1994; Held 1991) now depict the activities of international human rights agencies and the development of supranational authority structures such as the European Union as signs of a new international order premised on the creation of plural authority and “transnational citizenship.” What sense can we make of these developments? What do they mean for the future of the nationstate ? What prospects do they hold for the future of localities that become 3 interconnected across borders by political practices and networks that span national borders? Contextualizing Transnational Research In this book we draw extensively on five years of community-based ethnography on the practices of U.S.-Mexican transnational citizenship, while expanding the space of “community” to encompass the multiple cross-border locations in which our ethnographic subjects are orchestrating their political lives transnationally. How can we appropriately contextualize this sort of global or transnational ethnography (see Burawoy et al. 2000; M. P. Smith 2001) when the principal metatheories used to frame ethnographic narratives in terms of “structured wholes” have lost intellectual purchase ? We take as a starting point the call made by the anthropologist George Marcus to find new ways of “imagining the whole” in a period when the grand narratives of systems theorists have lost their capacity to inform our understandings of how the world works (Marcus 1989, 7–30). In an essay by that same name Marcus called for the development of an ethnography of places and their interconnections rather than a place-focused ethnography of single locales. He argues that “an ethnography of complex connections, itself, becomes the means of producing a narrative that is both micro and macro, and neither one particularly” (1989, 24). The shift from place to places, simultaneously and complexly interconnected by intended and unintended consequences, Marcus argues, requires three methodological moves: (1) the use of multilocale ethnography, (2) attention to networks of complex connections and to their simultaneous, reciprocal effects, and (3) an effort to contextualize the connections studied in terms of the sorts of “wider wholes” in which the connections and their effects are taking place. In this book we seek to gain contextual clarity by combining the qualitative richness of transnational ethnography with political-economic and institutional analysis of neoliberal globalization and state restructuring processes across the U.S.-Mexican border. In conceptualizing the “wider wholes” that might best inform our ethnographic account of U.S.-Mexican political transnationalism, we have identified four distinct types of context that must be kept in mind. Each affects the opportunities and constraints experienced by our ethnographic subjects. These four contexts reciprocally affect each other. They help to situate our ethnographic subjects and mediate their transnational practices in the multiple, interconnected places in which the actors we have interviewed are orchestrating their lives. 1. The political-economic context, now called neoliberal globalization, creates conditions necessitating, facilitating, or impeding migration 4 Chapter 1 and return migration across the two-thousand-mile-long U.S.-Mexican border. 2. The historical context germane to the study of migrant political transnationalism includes the historical development of interstate relations between the United States and Mexico, the changing contexts of reception and exit at different historical periods...