Who We Are: Migration, Gender, and New Forms of Citizenship

In the past decade the Elián González and Elvira Arellano controversies raised a set of issues that continue to be at the center of public debate and scholarship about immigration and citizenship. These issues include the citizenship status of migrant children and children born to undocumented migrants, the politics of motherhood and the nuclear family in the context of migration, and the vastly different applications of immigrant rights to citizenship based on national origin. The recent emphasis on migrant parents and their children reflects what Lauren Berlant has called the "privatization of U.S. citizenship," in which personal choices about sexuality, reproduction, and religious beliefs come to determine the legitimacy of an individual's belonging in the nation.¹

Placed at the intersection of the immigration and welfare debates, migrant mothers and their children occupy a precarious place between public and private discourse, a position that has been exacerbated by recent challenges in Congress to the right to citizenship for U.S.-born children of undocumented migrants. The relationship between motherhood and national belonging is historically contested terrain. At least since the 1965 Moynihan report, minority and single mothers have been scapegoated for social ills from rising crime rates in inner cities to the crisis in American education to the emasculation or hypermasculinization of urban youth. This thankless function is now frequently served by migrant and immigrant mothers. Migrant mothers are either shown as incapacitated, passive victims of domestic abuse and the violence of a globalizing market or judged as greedy, scheming trespassers eager to feed off social welfare through their strategically born anchor babies.

Latina/o American writers, filmmakers, and other artists have begun to offer a counterdiscourse to such persistent misrepresentations of migrants from Mexico and Central America. Documentaries such as Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary, Which Way Home?, the HBO miniseries Enrique's Journey based on Sonja Nazario's Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles in the Los Angeles Times, and feature films such as La Misma Luna and Sin Nombre have inundated the media landscape in the past five years with often melodramatic accounts of unaccompanied migrant children and adolescents who leave their homes in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua to join their mothers in the United States.²

Migrant Imaginaries, Remaking Citizenship, and Divided by Borders are three timely and much-needed publications that contribute to a scholarly counterdiscourse, and take an innovative look at Mexican migration to the United States by reading cultural expressions and social organization by migrants as acts of citizenship. While the authors work in different academic disciplines (Schmidt Camacho teaches in an American studies department, Coll is a cultural anthropologist, and Dreby is a sociologist), all three focus on the significance of material culture for the "migrant imaginary." Central to this imaginary is the privileging of transnational forms of identification as an alternative to the nation-based model of identity in the Americas; as a result of the long-standing migration patterns of laborers from Mexico to the United States, national borders do not affect these migrants' sense of self as much as their struggle for the civil and human rights of migrants.

Drawing on the migrants' own self-understandings, each author deploys terminology that implies a concept of citizenship that poses an alternative to narrowly legal and political conceptualizations. Coll privileges "cultural citizenship" over nation-based citizenship. Dreby analyzes the dynamics among transnational families from the perspective of "domestic ethnography," and Schmidt Camacho foregrounds "migrant imaginaries" in the contributions of Mexican migrants to American culture and notions of citizenry by contextualizing the experiences of Mexican migrants in the post...