Borderland attachments: citizenship and belonging along the U.S.–Mexico border

Abstract

This article reveals how economic resources and legal status (vis-à-vis the U.S.) shape national attachments and citizenship practices in the context of the U.S.–Mexico border. Through the comparison of middle- and working-class Mexicans, this article highlights how middle-class Mexicans with tourist visas to travel to the U.S. develop what I call transborder citizenship, while deported working-class migrants – legally banned from returning to the U.S. – engage in what I call transnational citizenship. For middle-class Mexicans, transborder citizenship is exhibited through their frequent cross-border experiences and cross-border citizenship practices; however, they remain rooted locally in Mexico. In contrast, for working-class return migrants, transnational citizenship is defined by their restricted mobility even while they retain personal, social, and economic ties with the U.S. Ultimately, return migrants feel dislocated and uprooted in Mexico. The article uses data from observations and in-depth interviews with Mexican nationals living in the border town of Mexicali, Mexico, conducted from June 2009 to August 2010.

Keywords:

• U.S.–Mexico border
• citizenship
• return migrants
• legal status
• mobility
• class
• visas

Notes

1. Debordering is the reduced ‘military and economic relevance of borders, especially for advanced industrialized states. Market expansion and access, not territorial conquest and acquisition, is now the game across much of the globe’ (Andreas 2000, 2).

2. Rebordering, the flip side of debordering, is the process by which ‘many borders are being reasserted and remade through ambitious and innovative state efforts to regulate the transnational movement of people’ (Andreas 2000, 2).

3. Defined as ‘immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation’ (Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Szanton-Blanc 1994, 48).

4. Since 1993, with the onset of the militarization of the U.S.–Mexico border, the U.S. government has deported more than 26 million migrants (DHS 2013).

5. In the U.S., poor-/working-class Mexicans are unauthorized, while middle-/upper-class Mexicans have tourist or business visas; in Mexico, middle-/upper-class Mexicans are able to obtain visas to cross the border unfettered, while poor-/working-class Mexicans are inadmissible to enter the U.S.

6. Yet, they are Global South Cosmopolitans in that, unlike Global North Cosmopolitans, who ‘see the globe as a second home and believe that this involves both certain rights and certain obligations’ (Zolberg 2000, 518), these cosmopolitans from the Global South I interviewed express the cosmopolitan view of mobility, without expressing the expectations of having certain rights or obligations.

7. The difference between deportation (official label: ‘Removal’) and voluntary departure is that a deportation or removal has legal consequences, as ‘an alien who is removed has administrative or criminal consequences placed on subsequent reentry’ (DHS 2011). A ‘voluntary departure’, on the other hand, signifies ‘the departure of an alien from the United States without an order of removal. The departure may or may not have been preceded by a hearing before an immigration judge’ (Golash-Boza 2012, 5).

8. Jose uses the vernacular term of ‘global citizen’ to describe his identity and mobility. Yet, Isin and Turner (2007) argue that ‘global citizenship’ requires global institutions (14); therefore, it is more accurate to point that Jose is actually referring to his cosmopolitanism as a practice of his mobile citizenship(15).

9. Malinchista is a term that typically refers to people who prefer foreign things – people, products, culture, etc. It tends to be a derogatory term that implies the person prefers things not Mexican. The term comes from La Malinche, or Malintzin, a native woman who acted as an interpreter for Hernan Cortez during the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

10. At the time of the interview, a dollar was about $12 pesos.

11. For more details on the legal bans, see the following reports by American Immigration Lawyers Association (Virtue, Davis, and Stump 2002) and Immigration Policy Center (2011).

12. For example, a high school education in the U.S. is considered basic. In Mexico, after ninth grade students are tracked into a university or technical education. After ninth grade, students in Mexico can study to become teachers or nurses – technical professions.