Imagining Latinidad: Digital Diasporas and Public Engagement Among Latin American Migrants PDF
Preview Imagining Latinidad: Digital Diasporas and Public Engagement Among Latin American Migrants
Imagining Latinidad Critical Latin America Series Editors David Carey Jr., Loyola University Maryland Renata Keller, University of Nevada, Reno Editorial Board Sergio Aguayo, El Colegio de México and Harvard University Tanya Harmer, London School of Economics Steve Palmer, University of Windsor Bianca Premo, Florida International University Matthew Restall, Penn State University Julia Rodriguez, University of New Hampshire John Soluri, Carnegie Mellon University volume 3 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/crlt Cover illustration: by DKosig via iStockphoto.com. Textures courtesy of NASA: https://visibleearth.nasa.gov /images/55167/earths-city-lights, https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/73934/topography. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022043974 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2589-5478 isbn 978-90-04-51965-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-51967-1 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by David S. Dalton and David Ramírez Plascencia. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents List of Figures and Tables vii 1 Introduction: Imagining Latinidad in Digital Diasporas 1 David S. Dalton and David Ramírez Plascencia Part 1 Civic and Political Engagement 2 Pleito y Piedad: Continuity in Religious Conflict and Identity in Rural Morelos and its Diaspora 25 Jason H. Dormady 3 Oaxacalifornia and the Shaping of Virtual Spaces for Collective Action 42 Anna Marta Marini 4 Exploiting Liminal Legality: Inclusive Citizenship Models in the Online Discourse of United We Dream 59 David S. Dalton 5 Digitizing Transit and Borders: Social Media Use during Forced Migration through Mexico to The United States 80 Nancy Rios-Contreras 6 Latin Americans in London: Digital Diasporas and Social Activism 100 Jessica Retis and Patria Román-Velázquez 7 Digital Diasporas and Civic Engagement: The Case of Venezuelan Migrants in Mexico 119 David Ramírez Plascencia vi Contents Part 2 Digital Media and the Construction of Diasporic Communities 8 Solidarity and Mobility of Information among Brazilian Au Pairs in Online Forums 137 Amanda Arrais 9 YouTube Channels of Mexicans Living in Japan: Virtual Communities and Bi-Cultural Imagery Construction 154 Yunuen Ysela Mandujano-Salazar 10 Radio Haitiano en Tijuana: An Alternative and Aesthetic Communication Device on the Border 171 Diana Denisse Merchant Ley and Karla Castillo Villapudua 11 Latinidad Ambulante: Collaborative Community Formation Week by Week 191 Carmen Gabriela Febles 12 Public Engagement and the Performance of Identity on Instagram of Heritage Speakers of Spanish Studying in Spain 207 Covadonga Lamar Prieto and Álvaro González Alba 13 Scientific Diasporas: Knowledge Production, Know-How Transfer and the Role of Virtual Platforms The Case of Colombian Association of Researchers in Switzerland, ACIS 225 María del Pilar Ramírez Gröbli 14 Latin American Diasporas amid a Pandemic, Hyperconnected and Polarized Context 243 David Ramírez Plascencia and David S. Dalton Index 257 Figures and Tables Figures 10.1 Categories for data collection 179 12.1 Origin of participants and caregivers 209 12.2 Instagram corpus: participants and account contents 212 12.3 Instagram corpus: participants and post contents 213 12.4 Themes and codes 214 Tables 7.1 Venezuelan diasporic communities in Mexico constructed on Facebook 125 8.1 Brazilian au pairs groups on Facebook 144 9.1 C ritical case sample of YouTube Channels of Mexicans in Japan (analysis per- formed from March to June 2020) 158 10.1 Analysis units on Facebook 175 10.2 Units of analysis / Journalistic notes on YouTube 177 Chapter 1 Introduction: Imagining Latinidad in Digital Diasporas David S. Dalton and David Ramírez Plascencia 1 Introduction. Digital Diasporas and Latinidad In September 2010, Glenn Beck—at the time a popular personality on Fox News’s opinion programing—stood in front of the camera and derided U.S. universities as “re-education camps” on par with what one would find in coun- tries like Iran and North Korea (qtd. in Goldstein, 2010). Such allegations would normally prove relatively unremarkable; the political Right in the country had long expressed suspicion of professors and the tenure system. What sepa- rated this tirade from countless others was the object of Beck’s fury: Ricardo Domínguez, a recently tenured professor at the University of California at San Diego, had used public funds to develop a controversial app called the Transborder Immigrant Tool. His project aimed to equip potential migrants in Mexico with GPS-enabled cellphones that would come with his app. This would provide maps to the water caches stored throughout the Sonoran Desert at checkpoints across the trek. Furthermore, it would share daily poems declaring solidarity with migrants in an attempt to boost their morale. Prior to Beck’s statements, Domínguez had already come under investiga- tion by California Republicans, the FBI, and the University of California at San Diego. Central to these investigations was whether or not he could legally use his public funds to assist undocumented migrants in crossing and navigating the border. That the professor was never charged in a court of law mattered lit- tle to those in the right-wing news media, which charged him with seditiously striving to “dissolve” the United States (Beck 2010).1 What stands out most from these reactions is the fact that, in any practi- cal sense, the Transborder Immigrant Tool would never have a significant effect on immigration to the United States. Domínguez had funding for some 500 cellphones, and he had no serious plans for distribution (Marosi, 2010). 1 A headline by The Blaze—which no longer has a story assigned to it—read the following: “UCSD Professors Want to Dissolve US, Give GPS Phones with Explicit Poetry to Illegals for Border Crossing.” © í | 2 Dalton and Ramírez Plascencia Nevertheless, his project spoke to the budding potential of wireless technolo- gies, GPS, and the internet more generally to assist migrants as they crossed into the United States. As he created this app and distributed cellular phones, Domínguez alluded to the potential for migrants to better navigate the hurdles associated with migration through simple, relatively inexpensive technologies. This potential has only grown in Latin America since then. Indeed, an array of factors—particularly political instability, crime, and poverty (Bergman 2018; Cruz J.M., 2016; Petras and Veltmeyer, 2011)—have led millions of people throughout the region to seek opportunity or refuge abroad. An important form of migration has occurred domestically, with people traveling from rural areas to urban areas within a single country (Rodríguez-Vignoli and Rowe, 2018).2 That said, numerous people also have chosen to leave their countries of origin in their search for a better life. Domínguez’s project aimed specifically at those people who had decided to seek a new life abroad. His poetry sought to foment solidarity chains among migrants to the United States and their allies. At the same time, its use of GPS technology spoke to technology’s ability to produce significant political repercussions on the ground by identifying opportuni- ties for mobilization (and the evasion of authorities) in physical space. In this way, the Transborder Immigrant Tool alluded to what Chela Sandoval (2000) calls a “methodology of the oppressed” through which the Latin American diaspora—both in this specific case and beyond—could coordinate against a political, legal, and cultural apparatus meant to silence it. Domínguez’s project serves as a useful launching pad for the present study, which interro- gates the nature of the digital diasporas that have emerged within and among migrant communities in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Indeed, the Transborder Immigrant Tool embodies this book’s principal thesis, which holds that social media and digital technologies have redefined the parameters of community building, thus allowing Latin American migrants throughout the world to build a shared community that advocates for its collective rights both in its host country and in its country of origin. As Domínguez’s Transborder Immigrant Tool so powerfully showed, digital platforms and social media allow migrants to maintain cultural connections even when traversing hostile terrain or navigating unwelcoming local conditions in new host countries. In the years since Domínguez’s project, migrants—both internal and external—have only further incorporated technology into their overall experience. To be sure, twenty-first-century diasporic communities face 2 There is a smaller, though sizeable, sector of the population that migrates from urban centers to rural areas. For a discussion of how this plays out in the Mexican context, see G. León-Pérez (2022).
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