Transnational citizenship across the Americas

Abstract

A variety of phenomena including mass migrations, diasporas, dual citizenship arrangements, neoliberal economic reforms and global social justice movements have since the 1970s produced shifting boundaries and meanings of citizenship within and beyond the Americas. This special issue builds upon, but also extends, prior discussions on transnational citizenship, by situating new practices of ‘immigrant’ and ‘emigrant’ citizenship and the policies that both facilitate and delimit them in a broader political–economic context and accounts for how new forms of neoliberal governance shape such practices. The essays included here draw from a range of disciplines and inter-disciplinary perspectives that focus on migration between the United States and countries in Latin America and the Caribbean which in recent years have been transformed into ‘emigrant states.’

Keywords:

• transnational citizenship
• migration
• emigrant states
• neoliberal globalisation
• the Americas

Notes

1. In Latin American scholarship, the Spanish term ciudadania, which translates as citizenship, encompass both the notion of political membership and belonging but also as social rights, in English usually labelled as ‘social citizenship’ or ‘substantive citizenship.’ For an overview of citizenship debates in Latin America, see Dagnino (2003) and Taylor and Wilson (2004).

2. The UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families would be one such example among many others of universal rights.

3. Zilberg (2011) notes, for example, how former US-bound Salvadoran refugees turned ‘deportee trash’ are now seen fleeing El Salvador a second time around, this time as victims of gang war violence in El Salvador, a distinct US cultural influence, one could argue, on this Central American nation.

4. The government first appointed the leaders for the Tenth Department, but grassroots community leaders who represented larger constituencies soon challenged these government appointed leaders (Laguerre 1998, pp. 162–163; see also Glick-Schiller and Fouron 2001).

5. This same tendency can be observed elsewhere in Latin America, for example, when Guatemalan and Salvadoran who fled violence in their home countries in the 1980s had much lower approval rates on their asylum applications than their Nicaraguan counterparts, because they were fleeing US backed right-winged authoritarian regimes.

6. Mexicans are the largest population of Hispanic origin living in the United States, representing a total of 33.5 million Hispanics of Mexican origin, which accounts for nearly two-thirds (64.6%) of the US Hispanic population in 2011, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (Pew Hispanic Center 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ulla Dalum Berg

ULLA DALUM BERG is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and Anthropology at Rutgers University.

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez

ROBYN MAGALIT RODRIGUEZ is Associate Professor in Asian American Studies at University of California Davis.