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As the United States hardens its border with Mexico, how do migrants make transnational claims of citizenship in both nation-states? By enacting citizenship in both countries, Mexican migrants are challenging the meaning of membership and belonging from the margins of both citizenship regimes. With their incessant border-shattering political practices, Mexican migrants have become the embodiment of transnational citizenship on both sides of the divide.
Drawing on his experiences leading citizenship classes for Mexican migrants and working with cross-border activists, Adrián Félix examines the political lives (and deaths) of Mexican migrants in Specters of Belonging. Tracing transnationalism across the different stages of the migrant political life cycle - beginning with the so-called political baptism of naturalization and ending with the practice by which migrant bodies are repatriated to Mexico for burial after death - Félix reveals the varied ways in which Mexican transnational subjects practice citizenship in the United States as well as Mexico. As such, Félix unearths how Mexican migrants' specters of belonging perennially haunt the political projects of nationalism, citizenship, and democracy on both sides of the border.
Sommario
- Foreword: Ghosts across Borders by Gustavo Arellano
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1: Introduction: The Political Life Cycle of Mexican Migrants
- Chapter 2: Enunciations of Transnational Citizenship: Mexican Migrants' Encounters with Naturalization
- Chapter 3: Enactments of Transnational Citizenship: Migrants' Entanglements with Mexican Party Politics
- Chapter 4: Embodiments of Transnational Citizenship: Postmortem Repatriation from the United States to México
- Chapter 5: Conclusion: Transnational Afterlife
- Epilogue: Phantom Paisanos
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Info autore
Adrián Félix is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California Riverside.
Riassunto
As the United States hardens its border with Mexico, how do migrants make transnational claims of citizenship in both nation-states? By enacting citizenship in both countries, Mexican migrants are challenging the meaning of membership and belonging from the margins of both citizenship regimes. With their incessant border-shattering political practices, Mexican migrants have become the embodiment of transnational citizenship on both sides of the divide.
Drawing on his experiences leading citizenship classes for Mexican migrants and working with cross-border activists, Adrián Félix examines the political lives (and deaths) of Mexican migrants in Specters of Belonging. Tracing transnationalism across the different stages of the migrant political life cycle - beginning with the so-called political baptism of naturalization and ending with the practice by which migrant bodies are repatriated to Mexico for burial after death - Félix reveals the varied ways in which Mexican transnational subjects practice citizenship in the United States as well as Mexico. As such, Félix unearths how Mexican migrants' specters of belonging perennially haunt the political projects of nationalism, citizenship, and democracy on both sides of the border.
Testo aggiuntivo
With this luminous study, Adrián Félix puts the flesh back on the bones of that dehumanizing fiction, the economic migrant. In lyrical, deeply researched ethnographic and political analysis, Félix captures the ardent efforts of Mexican migrants to remake the repressive structures of border governance and unitary citizenship. Waging what he calls a diasporic dialectics, transborder communities have devised forms of collective power that mitigate the harms of racial and class hostilities, criminalization and social expulsion. The author's attentiveness to the shifting patterns of civic engagement over the migrant's political life course makes this account of Mexican migrant transnationality a vital intervention into the theoretical impasse reached by current immigration debates.
