NEGOTIATING EXTRA-TERRITORIAL CITIZENSHIP: MEXICAN MIGRATION and the TRANSNATIONAL POLITICS of COMMUNITY Monograph No. 2
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NEGOTIATING EXTRA-TERRITORIAL CITIZENSHIP: MEXICAN MIGRATION AND THE TRANSNATIONAL POLITICS OF COMMUNITY Monograph No. 2: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies University of California, San Diego. 2000. David FitzGerald TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………... 1 List of Figures and Tables ………………………….…………………………… 3 Abstract …………………………………………………………………………. 4 Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………... 5 I. Introduction ……………………………………………………………... 6 II. Theories of Transnationalism and Extra-Territorial Citizenship ……….. 11 A. Transnational Communities …………………………………. 11 B. Transnational Practices as Resistance? ……………………… 14 C. Transnationalism, Citizenship, and the Nation-State ……….. 16 D. Negotiating Extra-Territorial Citizenship …………………… 18 III. Mexican Political Transnationalism in Historical Perspective …………. 26 A. Is Political Transnationalism New? …………………………. 26 B. The Transnational Politics of Mexico and its Migrants ……... 29 C. Migrants Working with the State ….………………………… 43 D. Hometown Associations and Public Projects ……………….. 47 E. Transnational Ethnic Politics ………………………………... 52 F. Activism or Apathy? ..……………………………………….. 56 IV. Sahuayo, Michoacán and its ‘Colonies’ …..……………..………….…. 61 A. Site Selection and Methods …………………………………. 61 B. Sahuayo, Michoacán and its Migrants ………………………. 65 C. The New Transnational Media: “Sahuayo, California” ……... 74 D. A Transnational Collection Plate? …………………………... 77 E. The Colonia Sahuayense …………………………………….. 81 F. Migrants and Partisan Politics …………...………………...… 94 G. Transnational Civil Society …………………………………. 104 H. Sahuayan Migrants and the 2000 Elections …………………. 108 V. Comparative Organizational Models of Michoacano Migrants ………... 116 A. The Jiquilpan Model ………………………………………… 116 B. El Granjenal …………………………………………………. 122 2 C. Bringing the Local Back in ………………………………….. 126 VI. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………… 132 Appendix . …………………………………………………………….……..…. 138 Bibliography …………………………………...………………………………. 140 3 LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES Table 1: Migrant Financing of Sending Community Public Projects Table 2: Sahuayan Municipal Data Figure 1: Primary Research Sites in Michoacán Figure 2: Sahuayo, Michoacán and its Satellites Figure 3: Opening Page of “Sahuayo, California” Web Site Figure 4: Colonia Sahuayense Procession Figure 5: Colonia Sahuayense Leaders in Procession Figure 6: Mexican Flag in Colonia Sahuayense Procession Figure 7: Colonia Sahuayense Banner Figure 8: Migrant – Sponsored Ambulance in Procession Figure 9: Poster on Ambulance Figure 10: Cover of Fund-Raising Ball Program Featuring Miss Jiquilpan Figure 11: Advertisement on Wall of El Granjenal Bullring Figure 12: PAN Campaign Rally 4 ABSTRACT The dominant nation-state model of citizenship, in which political identity and membership are congruent with state territory, is increasingly unable to resolve the contradictions created by global mass migration. While scholars have studied this problem from the perspective of immigrant-receiving countries, they have paid little attention to citizenship models that would explain how migrants relate to their sending countries. This work draws on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork in Michoacán, Mexico, and Southern California to propose a process-based model of extra-territorial citizenship in which transnational migrants claim citizenship in their places of origin, even when they are physically absent. Legal rights of citizenship, such as voting from abroad, and a kind of moral citizenship in communities of origin share similar theoretical underpinnings. Both forms of citizenship are negotiated with non-migrants who selectively accept or reject the principles of extra-territorial citizenship. 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This monograph is based on a master’s thesis in Latin American Studies at the University of California, San Diego. I am deeply grateful to Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, for his advice and encouragement. I also thank Yen Espiritu and James Holston for their suggestions on earlier drafts of this work. Funding for field research was generously provided by the Tinker Foundation. I also thank José Eduardo Zárate Hernández, director of the Center for Anthropological Studies at the Colegio de Michoacán in Zamora. Gail Mummert, Alvaro Ochoa Serrano, Gustavo López Castro, Luis Ramírez Sevilla, Marco Antonio Calderón Mólgora, and Isabel Morales offered advice on site selection and comments on an earlier presentation of the research findings. Finally, I thank Valeria Godines, my research partner and wife. She supported me in every way during my two years in La Jolla and during our work together in Michoacán and Santa Ana. 6 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION “Sahuayans living in the North should come here. This is their house. They should be heard. They should be taken into account!” - Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) politician in Sahuayo, Michoacán “They were born in Mexico, but they don’t like anything here. They are no longer Sahuayans…. They no longer accept Mexico, and Mexico doesn’t accept them.” - Businessman in Sahuayo “They can’t take our right to vote just because we are here. We are as Mexican as they are.” - Sahuayan businessman in Los Angeles Over the last decade, scholars who study migration have increasingly used a transnational lens to describe the flow of people across borders. Previous studies of migration that began with immigrants clambering onto the docks at Ellis Island, or over the wall at San Ysidro, and ended with assimilation into the great American ‘melting pot’ are clearly truncated understandings of a much more complex process. The contemporary migration literature is more likely to pay attention to the ways that migrants maintain ties to both their countries of origin and destination. The effects of migration on source countries are also a growing field of study. Still, the literature on transnational migration has yet to analyze many aspects of migrants’ relationships with their places of origin. The very concept of transnationalism also remains controversial among some social scientists who reject its novelty or usefulness as an analytical tool. This work aims to contribute to the debates about transnationalism and the political relationships between migrants and their countries and communities of origin. It offers an analytical model to describe the negotiation of ‘extra-territorial citizenship’ that 7 is applicable to a range of forms of citizenship from the moral to the legal. The model may be used to understand transnational migrant politics on a comparative level, as well as in the case of a single transnational community. It provides a link between the micro and macro level of transnational politics that is not always clearly explicated in the literature on Mexican migration. I apply this model to specific cases using ethnographic evidence conducted in high emigration areas of the west-central Mexican state of Michoacán and migrant destination communities in Southern California. Seventy-five semi-structured interviews were conducted from June 1999 to July 2000 with sending community elites in Michoacán and migrants on both sides of the border currently or formerly involved in transnational organizing. The selection of the primary site of the ethnography, Sahuayo, is in itself significant because Sahuayo is an urban sending site in contradistinction to the overwhelming emphasis in the Mexican migration literature on rural or small town sending sites. The transnational political connections between Sahuayo and its U.S. satellites are not formalized in a central institution. Most studies of transnational politics have focused on highly organized migrant associations, thus failing to capture the experiences of less formal and less visible collective migrant practices. This work also makes comparative reference to other Michoacano transnational communities to suggest the tremendous variety of organizational differences that can be understood using the same model. Chapter 2 critically discusses basic analytical concepts related to the formation of transnational communities and transnational political participation. I then discuss how transnational migration challenges standard notions of citizenship in the nation-state for both source and destination countries. I propose a model of extra-territorial citizenship to 8 explain one element of the citizenship paradigm that has been undertheorized – how migrants continue to claim citizenship in their country and community of origin even when they are physically absent. The model suggests the cultural and economic bases of the legitimization of extra-territorial citizenship. A competing model of citizenship invoked by some non-migrant elites in Mexico fundamentally rejects or only selectively accepts extra-territorial citizenship. The question of political transnationalism’s novelty is raised in Chapter 3. I sketch evidence of high levels of political transnationalism by some European migrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before turning to the Mexican case. The dramatic evidence of the involvement of Mexican exiles and laborers in the United States in Mexican politics during the early 20th century should temper suggestions that political Mexican transnationalism is a new phenomenon. I then describe developments that are more recent in Mexican political transnationalism. My main purpose is not to systematically compare two historical periods, but rather to contextualize the contemporary relationship between Mexican migrants