Citizenship across borders: the political transnationalism of El migrante

259 Pages·2008·1.564 MB·English

by  Bakker, Matt;Smith, Michael P

Citizenship
across Borders
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The Political Transnationalism
of El Migrante
Michael Peter SmithandMatt Bakker
Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2008 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review,
this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher. For
information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House,
512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2008 by Cornell University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2008
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Michael P.
Citizenship across borders : the political
transnationalism of el migrante / Michael Peter Smith and
Matt Bakker.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-4608-5 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-08014-7390-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Transnationalism—Political aspects—United States. 2.
Transnationalism—Political aspects—Mexico. 3. Immigrants—
United States—Political activity. 4. Mexican Americans—Politics
and government. 5. Citizenship—United States. 6. Citizen-
ship—Mexico. 7. United States—Emigration and immigration—
Political aspects. 8. Mexico—Emigration and immigration—
Political aspects. I. Bakker, Matt, 1971– II. Title.
JV6477.S65 2008
323.6'3—dc22 2007028872
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responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent
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Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Acronyms xi
Part 1
Setting the Stage
1 The Politics of Transnational Citizenship 3
2 Reconstructing the Migrant in Mexican State-Policy
Discourse 27
Part 2
The Politics of Transnational Community Development
3 The Regional State and the Politics of Translocality:
The Napa–El Timbinal Connection 45
4 The Social Construction of “Migrant-Led
Productive Investment” 79
Part 3
El Migrante as Transnational Citizen
5 Transnational Electoral Politics: The Multiple Coronations
of the “Tomato King” 109
6 Institutionalizing New Spaces for Migrant Political Agency:
Votar y Ser Votadoin Mexico 131
v
vi Contents
Part 4
The Two Faces of Transnational Citizenship
7 The Second Face of Transnational Citizenship:
Migrant Activists Recross the Border 167
8 The Boundaries of Citizenship: Transnational Power Revisited 184
Appendix Transnational Ethnography: Methods, Fieldwork,
and Subjects 215
References 227
Index 243
Acknowledgments
This book has been seven years in the making. It would not have been pos-
sible without the willingness of our interview subjects to tell us their stories
of transnational political engagement. We especially wish to thank the
main protagonists of our five case studies, migrant political activists Ángel
Calderón, Andrés Bermúdez Viramontes, Guadalupe Gómez, Efraín
Jiménez, Martha Jiménez, and Manuel de la Cruz. We also wish to thank
the jerezano activist Raymundo Carrillo and each of the other migrants,
Mexican government officials, and other interview subjects who shared
their time and perspectives with us.
Over the course of this project we have amassed many debts to friends
and colleagues, both near and far. At times these intellectual networks
seemed to stretch as far as those of the transnational migrants we studied.
Closest to home, and doubtless our most compelling debt is owed to our
colleague Fred Block, of the sociology department at the University of
California, Davis, who provided generous critical comments and support
throughout the longue duréeof our project. Luis Guarnizo and Ming-cheng
Lo, also members of the intellectual community at Davis, provided very
helpful comments on selected parts of the book. Louis DeSipio, a political
scientist at the University of California, Irvine, provided us with insightful
comments and suggestions in two rounds of reviews of our manuscript.
Greta Gilbertson of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at
Fordham University also provided a helpful review of the manuscript.
As the manuscript was being developed, portions of it were previewed in
various venues, professional conferences, and journals. These earlier efforts
benefited from the incisive comments of colleagues from Britain, Mexico,
Canada, Hong Kong, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and the United States.
vii
viii Acknowledgments
Steven Vertovec invited Michael Smith to spend a portion of his sabbatical
in 2005 as a Visiting Scholar at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society
at the University of Oxford, providing the opportunity to write and present
research that was a precursor to parts of this book. While there, Smith re-
ceived helpful commentary from many migration researchers. He especially
benefited from his many thought-provoking exchanges on transnational
politics in the receiving context with Davide Peró, now at the University of
Nottingham.
That same year Alan Smart of the University of Calgary invited Smith to
be the featured speaker at an interlocutor session of the Society for Urban,
National, Transnational/Global Anthropology at a conference in Santa Fe
where the theoretical reflections on contextualizing dual identities and loy-
alties deployed in this book were first explored. Useful critical commen-
taries on these ideas were offered by anthropologists Gordon Mathews of
the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Nina Glick Schiller of the University
of New Hampshire and the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology,
and Robert Rotenberg of DePaul University.
Matt Bakker received similarly helpful comments on portions of this
manuscript from numerous transnational scholars at the Segundo Colo-
quio Internacional sobre Migración y Desarrollo held in Morelos, Mexico,
in 2006. Especially useful were the comments of Luin Goldring of York
University, Miguel Moctezuma of the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas,
Eva Østergaard-Nielsen of the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, and
Ninna Nyberg Sørensen, who is now at the Programa Regional de Dina-
marca para Centroamérica in Guatemala. Our analysis of the transnational
politics of the Tomato King benefited from the anonymous journal reviews
done for Global Networks and Migraciones Internacionales, for which we
would like to thank Alisdair Rogers at Oxford and Rafael Alarcón of the
Colegio de la Frontera Norte.
At critical junctures over the years, this book has benefited from the re-
search support provided by a number of indispensable research associates
and colleagues. Postgraduate researcher Gustavo Galindo provided valu-
able field research assistance during the Guanajuato stage of the research.
This portion of the research also benefited from a collaborative ethno-
graphic interview conducted by Remedios Gómez Arnau from the Centro
de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte at the Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México. Our research in Zacatecas benefited from the critical
assessments offered over the years by Zacatecan development scholars Raúl
Delgado Wise, Rodolfo García Zamora, and Miguel Moctezuma Longoria.
In the final stages of our book, we have been grateful to Leticia Jáuregui
Casanueva, a community development graduate student at the University
of California, Davis, for her extensive and invaluable editorial and research
Acknowledgments ix
assistance. Peggy Hauselt timely prepared the four maps included in the
text. Our thanks are also extended to Peter Wissoker, our editor at Cornell
University Press, for his support and editorial management of this project
and to Susan Specter and Karen Hwa at the Press for all the work they have
done to help bring this book into being. Katy Meigs improved the final
manuscript through her excellent copyediting.
We would like to thank UC MEXUS (University of California Institute for
Mexico and the United States) for the generous financial support they pro-
vided for field research conducted in California and Guanajuato (2000–2002)
and California and Zacatecas (2004–5). Although most of this book is
newly published, some chapters have drawn on portions of our previously
published work that have been substantially revised for this book. We are
grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to use selected materi-
als from our research that appeared in the following journals: Matt Bakker
and Michael Peter Smith, “El Rey del Tomate: Migrant Political Transna-
tionalism and Democratization in Mexico,” Migraciones Internacionales 4
(2003): 59–83; Michael Peter Smith, “Transnationalism, the State, and the
Extraterritorial Citizen,” Politics and Society 31, no. 4 (December 2003):
467–502; “The Social Construction of Transnational Citizenship,” Journal
of International Law andPolicy(Spring 2003): 105–25; “Transnationalism and
Citizenship,” in Approaching Transnationalisms, ed. Brenda Yeoh, Michael
W. Charney, and T. C. Kiong (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2003): 15–38;
“Power in Place/Places of Power: Contextualizing Transnational Research,”
City and Society 17, no. 1 (2005): 5–34; “From Context to Text and Back
Again: The Uses of Transnational Urbanism,” City and Society 17, no. 1
(2005): 81–92; “The Two Faces of Transnational Citizenship,” Ethnic and
Racial Studies (forthcoming); and Michael Peter Smith and Matt Bakker,
“The Transnational Politics of the Tomato King: Meaning and Impact,”
Global Networks5, no. 2 (2005): 129–47.
In closing, Matt Bakker would like to express his sincere gratitude to all
the members of his family. Their enduring support even through the rocki-
est of times have made his intellectual formation possible. Above all, he
thanks María Luisa, Braulio, and Caramelo, presentes en la ausencia, whose
love and energy see no borders.
Michael Smith dedicates this book, with love, to his wife Pat. She has
given him the time to write and the courage to endure. Her artistic vision
and photographer’s eye have contributed greatly to our field research. For
all of this, and for so much more, he is eternally grateful.

Acronyms
CDPME Coalición por los Derechos Políticos de los Mexicanos en el
Exterior (Coalition for the Political Rights of Mexicans Abroad)
CHDC California Human Development Corporation
CHIRLA Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles
CIC Centro Interuniversitario del Conocimiento (Interuniversity
Knowledge Center)
CISAN Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte (Center for
North American Studies)
COESPO Consejo Estatal de Población de Guanajuato (Guanajuato State
Population Council)
DACGE Dirección de Atención a Comunidades Guanajuatenses en el
Extranjero (Program for Attending to Guanajuatense Communities
Abroad)
FCZ Frente Cívico Zacatecano (Zacatecan Civic Front)
FCZSC Federación de Clubes Zacatecanos del Sur de California (Zacatecan
Federation of Hometown Associations of Southern California)
G8 Group of Eight
HTA(s) Hometown Association(s)
IADB Inter-American Development Bank
IFE Instituto Federal Electoral (Federal Electoral Institute)
IME Instituto de Mexicanos en el Exterior (Institute of Mexicans Abroad)
IMF International Monetary Fund
INEGI Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (National
Institute of Geography, Statistics and Information)
INS Immigration and Naturalization Service
xi
xii Acronyms
MALDEF Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund
MIF Multilateral Investment Fund
NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement
NALEO National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials
OEAMs Oficinas Estatales de Atención a Migrantes (State Offices for
Attending to Migrants)
OPME Oficina Presidencial de Atención a Migrantes en el Exterior
(Presidential Office for Mexicans Living Abroad)
P4P Partnership for Prosperity
PAN Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party)
PCME El Programa para las Comunidades Mexicanas en el Exterior
(Program for Mexican Communities Abroad)
PRD Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic
Revolution)
PRI Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Revolutionary Institutional
Party)
SEDESOL Secretaría de Desarrollo Social (Secretariat of Social Development)
TRIFE Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (Federal
Electoral Tribunal)
UAZ Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas (Autonomous University
of Zacatecas)
UC MEXUS University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States
UNAM Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous
University of Mexico)