Specters of Belonging: The Political Life Cycle of Mexican Migrants (Studies in Subaltern Latina/o Politics) - Softcover

Félix, Adrián

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0190879378 ISBN 13: 9780190879372

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2018

Synopsis

As the United States hardens its border with Mexico, how do migrants make transnational claims of citizenship in both nation-states? By enacting citizenship in both countries, Mexican migrants are challenging the meaning of membership and belonging from the margins of both citizenship regimes. With their incessant border-shattering political practices, Mexican migrants have become the embodiment of transnational citizenship on both sides of the divide.

Drawing on his experiences leading citizenship classes for Mexican migrants and working with cross-border activists, Adrián Félix examines the political lives (and deaths) of Mexican migrants in Specters of Belonging. Tracing transnationalism across the different stages of the migrant political life cycle - beginning with the so-called political baptism of naturalization and ending with the practice by which migrant bodies are repatriated to Mexico for burial after death - Félix reveals the varied ways in which Mexican transnational subjects practice citizenship in the United States as well as Mexico. As such, Félix unearths how Mexican migrants' specters of belonging perennially haunt the political projects of nationalism, citizenship, and democracy on both sides of the border.

About this title

Review:

Specters of Belonging shows how Mexican migrants create cross-border collective identities, in response to their exclusion from civic and political life in both the US and Mexico. Deeply grounded in historical and cultural context, Adrián Félixâs vivid and compelling political ethnography deploys the lens of political life cycles to analyze how migrants come to exercise political voice and collective action in both societies, as their search for belonging drives the construction of civic binationality. (Jonathan Fox, School of International Service, American University)

The political engagement of international migrants remains a key social issue, and in this beautifully crafted study, political scientist Adrián Félix sheds new light on the transnational political life of Mexican immigrants. In a uniquely poetic voice, Félix presents riveting ethnographic portraits with imaginative critical analysis, and reminding us that change is constant, introduces a new conceptual arsenal that will advance our understanding of political transformations over the life course. Imaginative and insightful, this book will be of interest to all concerned with migrant politics in these troubling times of hardened borders and exclusions. (Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California Gardens)

With this luminous study, Adrián Félix puts the flesh back on the bones of that dehumanizing fiction, the economic migrant. In lyrical, deeply researched ethnographic and political analysis, Félix captures the ardent efforts of Mexican migrants to remake the repressive structures of border governance and unitary citizenship. Waging what he calls a diasporic dialectics, transborder communities have devised forms of collective power that mitigate the harms of racial and class hostilities, criminalization and social expulsion. The author's attentiveness to the shifting patterns of civic engagement over the migrant's political life course makes this account of Mexican migrant transnationality a vital intervention into the theoretical impasse reached by current immigration debates. (Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Yale University)

About the Author:

Adrián Félix is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California Riverside.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0190879378
• ISBN 13: 9780190879372
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200