The Transnational Geographies of Immigrant Politics: Insights from a Comparative Study of Migrant Grassroots Organizing

Abstract

Greater global interconnectedness produces a transformation in the ways in which groups constitute and interpret the boundaries of community formation and political practice. This article considers the ways in which a group engages (or not) with the possibilities for transnational identity formation and border-crossing politics granted by the changing structures of the global order. A comparative analysis identifies similarities and differences in the patterns of community formation and political engagement of Salvadoran migrants settled across different urban centers of North America. Variations in the territorial orientation and scales of immigrant political practice are explained by the national and city-level contexts of immigrant reception, the institutional opportunity structure in which migrant groups are embedded, and the nature of relations between migrants and their migrant and nonmigrant institutional interlocutors in places of settlement and their country of origin.

NOTES

Notes

¹ I thank Luin Goldring, Barry Wellman, Peggy Levitt, and Cecilia Menjivar for their feedback on earlier versions of this article and the four external reviewers of TSQ for their incisive and critical input.

² The LARG was formed by the author of this article, Luin Goldring (York University) and Judith Bernhard (Ryerson University). For more information on the LARG, go to http://www.yorku.ca/cohesion/LARG/html/largindex2.htm

³ For a detailed discussion of Salvadoran organizing in Los Angeles and Washington see Patricia Landolt (2000), “The Causes and Consequences of Transnational Migration: Salvadorans in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.,” 345 pages in Sociology, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, especially chapters 4 and 5.

⁴ The discussion of Toronto is partially based on Landolt (2007).