Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States

CHAPTER ONE: Rethinking Transnationalism: Conceptual, Theoretical, and Practical Problems

Rethinking Transnationalism Conceptual, Theoretical, and Practical Problems In the introduction, I distinguished analytically between a nation’s borders and boundaries. I also pointed out that diasporas usually remain connected to their nations of origin over long periods of time. As I stress in this chapter, transnationalism can undermine the state’s legal definition of boundaries by blurring cultural borders.1 The identities of many diasporic peoples (including my own) cannot be contained within a single nation-state, nor can their practices and discourses be completely understood from a well-bounded political , territorial, or linguistic perspective. Since the 1990s transnationalism has spurred a minor academic industry among migration scholars, with an increasing number of books, dissertations , anthologies, journal issues, articles, conferences, workshops, courses, and research centers devoted to its study. Together with the closely related concept of diaspora, transnationalism has captured the imagination of social scientists and humanists. However, persistent problems plague the field of transnationalism, including the operational definition of the concept; the classification of various types; the explanation of its causes and consequences ; its alleged novelty; its relationship with assimilation; and its future beyond the first generation of immigrants. In particular, scholars have engaged in lively debates as to whether Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic are exemplars of transnationalism. This chapter delves into some of the main issues in the study of transnationalism . This exercise will set the stage for the comparative analysis of Cubans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans in the United States and Puerto Rico. Focusing on three very different diasporas from the same region (the 1 rethinking transnationalism 18 Hispanic Caribbean) and to the same countries (the United States and Puerto Rico) reveals both the underlying parallels and range of variation in contemporary transnationalism. Preexisting ties between sending and receiving countries, whether colonial, neocolonial, or postcolonial, shape the size, composition, settlement patterns, and incorporation of migrant flows. A comparative transnational perspective entails suspending the illusion that the nation-state can entirely encapsulate a citizen’s thoughts, loyalties, and actions. A Brief Intellectual Genealogy In 1916 the U.S. journalist Randolph Bourne coined the expression “transnational America” to challenge the myth of the melting pot, which justified the assimilation of immigrants into Anglo-Saxon culture. Instead, Bourne posited that newer European groups (such as Germans, Scandinavians, and Poles) in the United States retained vigorous connections to their homelands , rather than becoming unhyphenated Americans. He then argued that the United States should be more cosmopolitan in accommodating ethnic groups with origins other than Anglo-Saxon. Bourne’s essay was a passionate plea for cultural pluralism, which later writers would elaborate under the banner of multiculturalism. Unfortunately, the term transnationalism fell out of common and academic use for decades, while the assimilation model prevailed in migration studies, at least in the United States. In the 1950s economists began to write about “multinational” and later “transnational” corporations simultaneously operating in several countries, usually headquartered in industrialized North America, Western Europe, and Japan. During the 1970s scholars in the field of international relations extended the term transnationalism to nongovernmental organizations that cut across boundaries between countries (Levitt and Waters 2002: 7). By the 1980s social scientists widened the concept to groups that move across international boundaries yet remain attached to their home communities (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc 1995). When applied to migrants rather than corporations, transnationalism suggests that people may transgress borders and boundaries, inhabiting the interstitial social spaces between them; hence such migrants have been called “borderless people” (Michael Peter Smith 1994). The earliest and most influential formulation of the transnational migration paradigm was in the volume edited by Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, rethinking transnationalism 19 and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration (1992). Shortly thereafter, their coauthored work, Nations Unbound (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994), spelled out more systematically the conceptual and methodological implications of the new model. Later, other scholars expanded, refined, or criticized the transnational perspective on migration (see, among others, Cordero-Guzmán, Smith, and Grosfoguel 2001; Levitt and Nyberg-Sørensen 2004; Olwig 1997; Pessar and Mahler 2003; Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999; Portes, Haller, and Guarnizo 2002; Rouse 1995; Vertovec 2009; and Waldinger and Fitzgerald 2004). By now, transnationalism has become entrenched in migration studies , heralded as “one of the most promising potentials for social research for the twenty-first century” by its proponents (Guarnizo 1997: 287) but derided as an “intellectual fashion...