Search Results

This chapter explores the effect of transnational movement on gendered kin relations, and examines how families living across an international border are both divided and united transnationally. Individuals, couples, and families living across an international border experience the contradictory processes of continuity and fragmentation. Even as the U.S.–Mexico border divides couples and families, Mexican immigrants build relationships and construct home and family in a manner that transcends nation-states. However, despite the fluid movement of transnational Mexicans between the U.S. and Mexico, the border is a barrier with a powerful and far-reaching impact on families and the geographic and symbolic locations of kin. Ultimately, for Mexican immigrants, constructing home, marriage, and family is a transnational endeavor, one that bridges—yet is always ruptured by—the U.S.–Mexico border.

This chapter focuses on categorization by the U.S. state, emphasizing how U.S. immigration policies and practices create a form of contingent citizenship—a concept that, while applicable to all transnational Mexicans, is particularly evident among the youngest of migrants, those with or without documents. The experiences of young people underscore spatial and symbolic shifts in understandings of national belonging and exclusion among individuals within undocumented immigrant families or families of mixed U.S. legal status. Indeed, through the construction of “aliens” and “citizens,” the state creates shifting or contingent citizenship for children within transnational mixed-status families. Moreover, the physical movement and geographic and symbolic locations of children reveal the instability of citizenship itself.

This chapter studies the complexities of gender and power in the context of the U.S. state. Gendered crossings illustrate how unauthorized entry and migration, as well as its perils, are shaped by one's gender in shifting circumstances. Indeed, state power and processes that categorize migrants as “illegal” play out in the gendered actions and interactions of transnational Mexicans' everyday lives. Increasingly, gender shapes and is shaped by undocumented migration against a backdrop of intensifying controls at the U.S.–Mexico border and within the United States. The chapter then discusses “gendered transgressions” of transnationality, demonstrating how the state's presence and the specter of “illegality” reconfigure desire, infidelity, and gendered violence.

This chapter discusses how migrants operate both within and outside of nation-states. Although individuals and families do act outside of state control, circumventing the state and strategically using state policies and practices as they are able, the U.S. state has far-reaching effects in transnational Mexicans' everyday lives. Indeed, the production of illegality interacts with—and often shapes—the intimate exchanges of daily life, resulting in the multiple spatial and metaphorical places migrants reside. That migrants repeatedly situate themselves in both places, divided by the border, and between two nations captures these shifting locations of intimate spaces and states of illegality. Nevertheless, immigrants exercise independence even as they are subjected to intense controls.

Using the correspondence of U.S. government officials and Mexican immigrant children, women, and men of varying legal status, this chapter examines how censorship was used to maintain the separation of bracero families across the U.S.-Mexico border. This historical consideration of how the U.S. government’s censorship and obstruction of these families’ correspondence emerged as an underestimated and, in turn, effective border enforcement measure in support of the Bracero Program’s conditions and terms illustrates this government’s selective acknowledgment of bracero families. It also proves most revealing when striving to understand the deep-seated anxiety, restlessness, and silences of the program.

This chapter examines children who migrate and those who do not. The recognition of children as principal actors, and the inclusion of young people as fundamentally central to migration, contributes to broader understanding of migrant agency—and its limitations—along lines of age, gender, and generation. This analysis of young people draws on two primary debates within anthropology and interdisciplinary migration studies. The first centers on immigrant “generation” and categorization by scholars that identifies the commonalities among first- or second-generation immigrants, and how these experiences differ according to the timing of one's migration to a new place. The second focuses on agency, considering the extent to which young people act or not, within global flows.