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| 127 7 Here–Not Here I spent an afternoon in Mexico with a friend, Liliana, as she cared for a chaotic house full of children. They ran back and forth between the living room where we were talking and a dusty courtyard filled with goats and chickens. “Come niños,” she called to the two smallest of the group. “I have someone for you to meet.” Liliana introduced me to her grandsons, Héctor and Claudio, aged two and five. “They have been here for nearly a year,” Liliana explained. “My son and daughter-in-law—they are mojados, as you know— and so it is safer for the boys to be here with me. Their parents work all the time, so really it is better this way.” Liliana went on to describe the difficulties her daughter-in-law was having, being so far from her young children. “But, the boys are U.S. citizens,” Liliana proclaimed proudly. “They are the Americans in the family . . . aren’t you, mis cariños?!” She teased her grandsons, as they ran out of the room laughing. Héctor and Claudio are, in many ways here and yet not here, U.S. citizens with a form of contingent citizenship— they are citizens of the United States living in Mexico explicitly because of the undocumented status of their parents. While chapter 6 considered migrants’ constructions of age/generation and how they intersect with family position and gender, this chapter explores how state power and (il)legality are laid over such understandings, and how categorization by the state plays out in the lives of young people.1 The experiences of young people underscore spatial and symbolic shifts in understandings of national belonging and exclusion among individuals within undocumented (im)migrant families or families of mixed U.S. legal status. Among Mexican (im)migrant families, the legal status of individual family members vis-à-vis the U.S. state has concrete implications for the well-being of both documented and undocumented children. The construction of (il)legality creates unstable, contingent national membership in particular ways among children and youth. The lived experiences of any transnational Mexican cannot be neatly slotted into immigration status as defined by the U.S. state, although the youngest members of families move in and out of different forms of citizenship in 128 | Here–Not Here specific ways. As the lived experiences of children illustrate, such categories are always subject to leakage, despite confidence in the integrity of boundaries on the part of the state and its members. Through the construction of “aliens” and “citizens,” the state creates shifting or contingent citizenship for children within transnational mixed-status families. As the historian Mae M. Ngai argues, “The line between legal and illegal status can be crossed in both directions” (Ngai 2004: 6). The physical movement and geographic and symbolic locations of children reveal the instability—including the flexibility (Ong 1999) and exclusionary aspects—of citizenship itself. The Instability of Citizenship Different layers of citizenship—including the state’s denial to recognize national membership—exist for Mexicans in the United States: undocumented residents do not hold legally ascribed membership or citizenship, permanent residents maintain a limited kind of membership, and Mexicans who have naturalized as U.S. citizens are arguably excluded from “cultural citizenship” (Flores and Benmayor 1997; Maira 2009; Rosaldo 1997; Rosaldo and Flores 1997; Stephen 2003) because of ethnic prejudice and racism. Multiple forms of citizenship are also undermined because of gender inequalities (e.g., Goldring 2001; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999). To some extent, Mexicans who are permanent residents of the United States live as partial citizens in this country because they do not have the same rights as U.S. citizens—including the right to vote—although they must fulfill some of the same responsibilities as U.S. citizens—such as registering with the Selective Service and paying taxes. Of course, Mexicans who live in the United States without documents are excluded from formal citizenship or membership: undocumented Mexican (im)migrants are denied legal U.S. citizenship as well as broader civil citizenship or cultural citizenship that guarantees basic human rights. Citizenship includes rights and responsibilities: state-ascribed citizenship both denotes membership in a collective and outlines the relationship between an individual and the state (Jacobson 1996: 7). Historically specific notions of citizenship are increasing problematized in a transnational world. As people move about the globe and across the boundaries of nation-states, narrow legal definitions...

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