Immigrant citizenship: neoliberalism, immobility and the vernacular meanings of citizenship

Abstract

This article argues that all conceptualisations of citizenship are vernacular. Drawing on ethnographic data from two related studies among Mexican immigrants in New York City, the author examines the lived meanings of citizenship and the centrality of (im)mobility in immigrant claims for the rights of citizenship. Citizenship is a contested notion in contemporary immigrant-receiving states. As the United States again debates immigration reform proposals, citizenship is cast as the ultimate prize, a privilege to be bestowed only on the most ‘worthy’. Immigrant rights groups advocate for the granting of citizenship and likewise elevate its value and importance in their discourse. Yet, its shifting meanings and manipulation mean that it is not a guarantee of inclusion or rights. The notion of citizenship can simultaneously critique and reinforce neoliberal notions of the relationship between citizen and subject.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• immigration
• rights vernacular
• Mexican
• undocumented

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the editors of this special issue, Ulla Berg and Robyn Rodríguez, for their close reading and fine-toothed suggestions on this piece as well as the invitation to the initial conference that launched this project. The author is grateful as well to the associate editor of the journal, and three anonymous reviewers. While the feedback of all of these generous souls was necessary for achieving any of the article’s merits, they are not responsible for any of its remaining faults.

Notes

1. 1. La Antorcha Guadalupana, a binational torch run in which a flame is carried overland by runners from the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, began in 2002, organised by New York based immigrant organisation Asociación Tepeyac de New York. Parish-based Guadalupan Committees participated as runners, ‘messengers of a people divided by the border’, as their uniforms proclaimed; encouraged family and friends in Mexico to run there; and collaborated in fund-raising, public relations and other aspects of the massive event. For a detailed discussion of this event, see Gálvez (2009).

2. 2. This is not to underestimate the power of radical critiques in some sectors of the immigrant rights movement, including those of activists facing deportation (or who have already been deported) including Elvira Arellano who condemn the complicity of US and Mexican trade and labour policy for producing, sustaining and profiting from the deportable immigrant population in the United States.

3. 3. Gutmann’s statement was made in reference to migrants from Mexico’s rural areas to Mexico City, but the quote is also applicable for those who emigrate abroad.

4. 4. Of course at the same time that some new sending states were experiencing migration for the first time, others were seeing unprecedented restrictions on their mobility as generations-long chains of migrants from Zacatecas and Guanajuato, for example, were increasingly prevented from engaging in circular and seasonal migration by a militarised border regime.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alyshia Gálvez

ALYSHIA GÁLVEZ is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York.