Download or read book Transnational Organization Belonging and Citizenship of Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States The Case of Oaxaque os in Los Angeles written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: Transnational migration challenges the congruency of citizenship and state territory, because migrants are able to create a sense of belonging to country of residence as well as origin simultaneously, and are capable to practice citizenship across national borders. The subject of transnational belonging and citizenship is all the more important when migration involves members of indigenous groups who are politically excluded, economically marginalized and socially discriminated in countries of origin as well as in their adopted countries. At the same time, participation in a transnational civil society through migrant organizations could offer them a serious opportunity to negotiate citizenship - that is primarily based on rights and duties, belonging, and political participation - by themselves in cooperation with partners below and above national levels. Thus, the central question of this paper is whether indigenous migrants actually organize to improve their social and political

Download or read book Transborder Lives written by Lynn Stephen and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-13 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lynn Stephen’s innovative ethnography follows indigenous Mexicans from two towns in the state of Oaxaca—the Mixtec community of San Agustín Atenango and the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle—who periodically leave their homes in Mexico for extended periods of work in California and Oregon. Demonstrating that the line separating Mexico and the United States is only one among the many borders that these migrants repeatedly cross (including national, regional, cultural, ethnic, and class borders and divisions), Stephen advocates an ethnographic framework focused on transborder, rather than transnational, lives. Yet she does not disregard the state: She assesses the impact migration has had on local systems of government in both Mexico and the United States as well as the abilities of states to police and affect transborder communities. Stephen weaves the personal histories and narratives of indigenous transborder migrants together with explorations of the larger structures that affect their lives. Taking into account U.S. immigration policies and the demands of both commercial agriculture and the service sectors, she chronicles how migrants experience and remember low-wage work in agriculture, landscaping, and childcare and how gender relations in Oaxaca and the United States are reconfigured by migration. She looks at the ways that racial and ethnic hierarchies inherited from the colonial era—hierarchies that debase Mexico’s indigenous groups—are reproduced within heterogeneous Mexican populations in the United States. Stephen provides case studies of four grass-roots organizations in which Mixtec migrants are involved, and she considers specific uses of digital technology by transborder communities. Ultimately Stephen demonstrates that transborder migrants are reshaping notions of territory and politics by developing creative models of governance, education, and economic development as well as ways of maintaining their cultures and languages across geographic distances.

Download or read book Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States written by Jonathan Fox and published by Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies University of Cali. This book was released on 2004 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The multiple pasts and futures of the Mexican nation can be seen in the faces of the tens of thousands of indigenous people who each year set out on their voyages to the north, as well as the many others who decide to settle in countless communities within the United States. To study indigenous Mexican migrants in the United States today requires a binational lens, taking into account basic changes in the way Mexican society is understood as the twenty-first century begins. This collection explores these migration processes and their social, cultural, and civic impacts in the United States and in Mexico. The studies come from diverse perspectives, but they share a concern with how sustained migration and the emergence of organizations of indigenous migrants influence social and community identity, both in the United States and in Mexico. These studies also focus on how the creation and re-creation of collective ethnic identities among indigenous migrants influences their economic, social, and political relationships in the United States. of California, Santa Cruz

Download or read book Grassroots Cosmopolitanism written by Antonieta Mercado and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explains "citizenship" as a practice and a tradition, rather than as a concept describing exclusive belonging to a political community. Immigration is commonly a condition of exclusion from citizenship in our contemporary world, as gender and slavery, have been in the past. Usually, immigrants have to comply with a subtractive model of citizenship and forgo their attachments to their homeland and mother language in order to be part of the new, dominant culture. This model is not smooth, and almost always entails hegemonic, or even violent practices of control from the state institutions either against the first, second, or even third generation. It is precisely from the point of view of immigrants that this exclusivity is challenged, and this work focuses on transnational citizenship and communication practices of indigenous Mexican immigrants in the United States as examples for the construction of a more cosmopolitan citizenship. Those practices offer a good example of how cosmopolitan engagement across nations is constructed from below, enriching instead of limiting the conception of citizenship. Using historical research, ethnography, and content analysis, I examine how transnational citizenship and communication practices among indigenous Mexicans living in California and organizing across borders, are transforming into cosmopolitan citizenship, engaging at least two nation-states along with international organizations into their daily lives. I study the case of one pan-ethnic and multi-site organization primarily composed of indigenous Mexicans from the state of Oaxaca named Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB). A content analysis of two indigenous immigrant media is also included, reflecting this cosmopolitan engagement.

Download or read book The Reconquest of Paradise written by Sascha Krannich and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2017 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book analyzes the phenomenon of how indigenous migrants, who escaped social discrimination and economic exclusion in Mexico, are building a well institutionalized, transnational migrant community in the United States. During this process of self-empowerment, indigenous migrant leaders use transnational networks on different levels to negotiate indigenous membership, identity, and opportunities of political participation. Over the last few decades, they were able to improve living conditions of members in the migrant community as well as indigenous home communities in Mexico. Dissertation. (Series: Studies in Migration and Minorities / Studien zu Migration und Minderheiten, Vol. 32) [Subject: Migrant Studies, Politics, Sociology]

Download or read book Specters of Belonging written by Adrián Félix and published by Studies in Subaltern Latina/O. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Children of Solaga written by Daina Sanchez and published by . This book was released on 2024-12-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Daina Sanchez examines how Indigenous Oaxacan youth form racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homeland. Assumptions that Indigenous peoples have disappeared altogether, or that Indigenous identities are fixed, persist in the popular imagination. This is far from the truth. Sanchez demonstrates how Indigenous immigrants continually remake their identities and ties to their homelands while navigating racial and social institutions in the U.S. and Latin America, and, in doing so, transform notions of Indigeneity and push the boundaries of Latinidad. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork between Los Angeles, California and San Andrés Solaga, a Zapotec town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, The Children of Solaga centers Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world, and adds a much-needed transnational dimension to the study of Indigenous immigrant adaptation and assimilation. Sanchez, herself a diasporic Solagueña, argues that the lived experiences of Indigenous immigrants offer a unique vantage point from which to see how migration across settler-borders transforms processes of self-making among displaced Indigenous people. Rather than accept attempts by both Mexico and the U.S. to erase their Indigenous identity or give in to anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant prejudice, Oaxacan immigrants and their children defiantly celebrate their Indigenous identity through practices of el goce comunal ("communal joy") in their new homes.

Download or read book Migration from the Mexican Mixteca written by Wayne A. Cornelius and published by Ctr Comparative Immigration Studies University of California; Lynn. This book was released on 2009 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume provides a vivid portrait of a transnational migrant community anchored in both the remote Mixteca region of Oaxaca and the San Diego metropolitan area. Drawing on surveys and interviews with migrants and potential migrants conducted by a binational research team in 2007-2008, the contributors show how the Oaxaca-based and the California-based natives of the town of San Miguel Tlacotepec have built parallel communities separated by an increasingly fortified international border. Their findings shed important new light on a range of vital issues in US immigration policy, including the efficacy and impact of border enforcement, how undocumented status affects health and education outcomes, and how modern telecommunications are shaping transborder migrant networks." -- Book cover.

Download or read book Intimate Migrations written by Deborah A. Boehm and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-04-23 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her research with transnational Mexicans, Deborah A. Boehm has often asked individuals: if there were no barriers to your movement between Mexico and the United States, where would you choose to live? Almost always, they desire the freedom to “come and go.” Yet the barriers preventing such movement are many. Because of the United States’ rigid immigration policies, Mexican immigrants often find themselves living long distances from family members and unable to easily cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Transnational Mexicans experience what Boehm calls “intimate migrations,” flows that both shape and are structured by gendered and familial actions and interactions, but are always defined by the presence of the U.S. state. Intimate Migrations is based on over a decade of ethnographic research, focusing on Mexican immigrants with ties to a small, rural community in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí and several states in the U.S. West. By showing how intimate relations direct migration, and by looking at kin and gender relationships through the lens of illegality, Boehm sheds new light on the study of gender and kinship, as well as understandings of the state and transnational migration.

Download or read book Politics of Citizenship written by Alejandra Castañeda Gómez del Campo and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mixtec Transnational Identity written by Laura Velasco Ortiz and published by . This book was released on 2005-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Laura Velasco Ortiz investigates groups located on both sides of the border that have maintained strong links with towns and villages in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca in order to understand how this transformation came about. Through a combination of survey, ethnography, and biography, she examines the formation of ethnic identity under the conditions of international migration, giving special attention to the emergence of organizations and their leaders as collective and individual ethnic agents of change."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Departures and Returns written by Abigail Leslie Andrews and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past three decades, free-market policies have debilitated life in rural Mexico, driving migrants to seek work in the United States. Meanwhile, on the US side, Mexican migrants have faced increasing repression from US immigration control, shunting them into an economic and political "underclass" and reverberating in their sending communities across the border. On both sides, this interplay - the largest cross-border migration in the world - has sparked political struggles and transformed the relationships between women and men. Yet, the relationship between Mexico and the US varies across sending and receiving sites, taking dramatically different forms, in ways that existing research does little to explain. Based on the historical pathways of two, contrasting Mexico-US migrant communities, this dissertation examines how local-level politics shape the interplay between development, migration, and gender. I focus on two transnational, indigenous villages from Oaxaca, Mexico, which I call "Retorno" and "La Partida." While Retorno and La Partida appear comparable socioeconomically, the articulation of politics, migration, and gender - meaning both the expression of these processes and the connections between them - diverged across the two migration paths. In Retorno, the relationship between the village and its destination in North County San Diego revolved around returns: entering the United States as rural farm workers, its migrants felt they were treated "like slaves." Mostly men, they set their sights on going back to their village. By contrast, the Mexico-US interplay in La Partida reflected departures, that is, both exits and divisions. Its migrants, particularly women, left the village to escape traditions and patriarchy; concentrating in urban Los Angeles, they felt "free." In turn, these patterns sparked qualitatively distinct politics. While Retorno forged a transnational movement for resources and against exclusion, La Partida's migrants embraced the United States, provoking those who remained in their hometown to re-entrench its communal political structure. Both struggles politicized women, bringing them into civic life for the first time. But they did so in different geographic areas and through distinct relationships to life in the United States. To explain the differences, I propose the concept of a community migration pathway. I define a community migration pathway as a historical process that links particular migrant hometowns to their destinations, producing different expressions of migration, development, gender, and politics on both sides of the border. I argue that while macroeconomic processes and national political structures create constraints and opportunities, the local-level political dynamics of each hometown and destination mediate these effects, crucially shaping the consequences for communities and individuals. I use a relational, multi-sited, comparative ethnography of Retorno and La Partida to develop this theory. To explain their divergent migration patterns and gendered political struggles, I trace the historical emergence and ongoing dynamics of each hometown's relationship with a specific receiving site. In particular, I ask what political conditions led Retorno to forge a home-away relationship based on return, while La Partida built a different interplay, based on departure. I begin by examining the rise of these different migration pathways from the sending side, illustrating how the political history of each village constructs a particular pattern of movement. Then, I show how the treatment of immigrants in each US destination re-constructs each migrant community's relationships to the United States. Finally, I consider how members respond to these experiences, transforming gender relations and their communities as they fight to avoid "integration" into an undocumented underclass and defend their capacity to live dignified lives - that is, in their own words, their "freedom." This theory is distinct from other research in three core ways. First, my approach is relational. Sociological studies often divide development, gender, and migration into different subfields, as if they are independent phenomena that can "impact" each other. Often, they focus either on the receiving or on the sending end, rather than examining how the relationships between them get made. By contrast, I emphasize the articulation of these processes and places, meaning both the interrelationships (or joints) between them, and the particular expressions they take under different local circumstances. The concept of articulation is particularly important for understanding how the meanings of gender, class, and race evolve in relation to each other during the process of migration. Gendered understandings are central to any community migration pathway, and they change over time. Gender also intertwines with ethnicity, and the concept of articulation highlights how their meanings emerge in particular locales. Second, I treat migration as a dynamic process: a history that changes over time. Rather than seeing immigration as an event, I trace the histories through which it arises. Then, I look at the ways sending and receiving sides get transformed by their members, as they interact across the Mexico-US border. Third, I highlight that migration pathways take multiple forms. While the intertwining of places like Mexico and the US is structured and constrained by macroeconomic and national-level political processes, it takes shape at the local level. Therefore, even villages as apparently similar as Retorno and La Partida can diverge in dramatic ways. Their differences illustrate how on-the-ground practices mediate the structural conditions of migration, its relationship to development, and the ongoing politics that result.

Download or read book The Wall Between Us written by David Scott Fitzgerald and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Walls Between Us examines the experiences indigenous Mixteco migrants from Oaxaca living in the United States and their family members who remain in Mexico. Covering topics that range from border crossing experiences to the education of youth to mental health, the book provides a scholarly analysis of current migration from Mexico to the United States.

Download or read book Lost in Translation written by Cintia Marisol Huitzil and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently, the ‘changing patterns of migration’ have become a growing focus in academia specifically in regards to indigenous migration to the U.S. from nontraditional migrant sending regions south of the border. Such work has focused on migrant farm workers, transnational identities and/or transnational community networks. This case study on language barriers, ingenuity and resilience as a result of miscommunication between monolingual or limited spanish, or english speaking indigenous transnational migrants and service providers in Los Angeles County compliments previous research in its analysis of public service interactions and their resulting symbolic and physical violence. Latin American, non-native Spanish speaking, migrants residing in the U.S, number anywhere between 500,000-1,250,000. LA County is home to the largest immigrant community in the US and forty percent of county social service recipients do not identify English as their primary language. Services are currently offered in nine ‘threshold languages’ at a county wide, public service level: Vietnamese, Spanish, Armenian, Russian, Farsi, Chinese, Tagalog, Cambodian, and Korean. The Los Angeles. Department of Public Social Services (LADPSS), boasts a mission of “effective and caring service.” However, for indigenous migrants in LA county who do not speak one of these languages, (and who lack a legal status), “effective and caring service” is virtually non-existent. With the growing presence of Indigenous migrants in the US, including Mixtec, Maya and Zapotec peoples, current LADPSS language policies perpetuate and can instigate psychological, physical, and structural violence for these communities as no services are offered in their indigenous languages. Currently, there are four organizations in Los Angeles that are challenging traditional service provider practices. This study looks at the ways in which Mayavison, Clinica Monseñor Oscar Romero, the Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño and the Frente Indígena the Organizaciones Binacionales are re-defining services and service provider practices through grassroots, community education campaigns and training workshops to lessen and spread awareness about the violence perpetuated by the social exclusion of indigenous transnational migrant communities and their needs.

Download or read book Zapotec Generations Across Settler Colonial Borders Gendering Belonging and Identity written by Brenda Nicolas and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on oral histories and participant observation fieldwork with Zapotecs in Los Angeles, California and Oaxaca, Mexico, my dissertation, Zapotec Generations Across Settler Colonial Borders: Gendering Belonging and Identity, examines how the experiences of the U.S.-raised generations, and women participation in particular, are central to sustaining transnational immigrant Indigenous communities across borders. I argue that through their involvement in traditional dances, Oaxacan brassbands, and immigrant hometown association (HTA), Zapotecs in the U.S. diaspora, shape their Indigenous identities in ways that challenge their racial categorization as Latina/o and/or Hispanic. These forms of community belonging confront state notions of Indigenous "authenticity" in the U.S. and Mexico, while also contesting gender role expectations that attempt to exclude women and immigrants from community practices of belonging. By incorporating historical and comparative approaches to race and gender, I consider how the United States and Mexico, as settler colonial states, have shaped, maintained, and/or reconfigured Indigenous racialization into a national imaginary that attempts to make invisible, silence, and eliminate Indigenous peoples. I use a critical hemispheric Indigenous framework that bridges Latin American, Latina/o, and American Indian literature to draw on my theoretical framework, transborder comunalidad, an ongoing Indigenous Oaxacan conception of collective community life sustained through practices and beliefs in diaspora that challenges state violence against Indigenous peoples.

Download or read book Twice Undocumented written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The right to birth registration is a fundamental human right consecrated in Article 7 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Despite the fact that Mexico's Senate ratified the Convention in 1990, the statistics regarding the under-registration of births in the world and in Mexico are alarming. The most recent estimations of the national index of opportune birth registration in Mexico report average to high numbers, but these national statistics hide enormous variations amongst Mexican states. It is no coincidence that this problem disproportionately affects the states with large populations of indigenous peoples, such as Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca, since these are the groups already living on the margins of society. If living without birth certificates implies that Mexican children do not exist or are invisible, then migrating to the United States without a birth certificate multiplies their problems, as they are then "doubly undocumented" and deprived of many basic rights, resources, and opportunities. These migrants' situation of double vulnerability has converted them into victims of statelessness and of the indifference of the Mexican government by way of their consular offices in the United States. On the forefront of a campaign to get all Mexicans registered domestically and abroad is the non-governmental organization (NGO) Be Foundation: Derecho a la Identidad. This NGO was a driving force behind the Reform Initiative of Article 4 of the Mexican Constitution, which officially passed the Senate on March 13, 2014. The reformed Article guarantees the right of all Mexicans to a free and opportune birth registration and seeks to facilitate the process by requiring certain formatting standards for all birth certificates. Despite becoming an important negotiating force and advocacy network within Mexico, questions arise about Be Foundation's ability to bridge this national legislation with local capacities, especially with unregistered migrants living in the United States. This thesis examines the binational issue of under-registration and the "double invisibility" of Oaxacan migrants in California, by comparing the advocacy efforts of Be Foundation with that of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB), in order to understand the ways in which different social actors deal with the issue of birth registration on both sides of the border. The thesis poses the following research questions: What are the advocacy roles of these organizations in regards to the issue of doubly undocumented Migrants living in the United States? How did such a small organization manage to pull off a national constitutional reform? Has Be Foundation aligned itself with migrant organizations such as FIOB in order to create a transnational advocacy network committed to their cause, or is their network primarily national? Considering the strong transnational network that already exists within the Oaxacan migrant community, how important is the advocacy role of Be Foundation to migrant organizations that operate primarily in California, such as FIOB?

Download or read book A Citizenship of Aliens written by Maribel Hernandez Rivera and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: