1st Edition

Transnational Citizenship Across the Americas

Edited By Ulla Berg, Robyn Rodriguez Copyright 2014

    Mass migrations, diasporas, dual citizenship arrangements, neoliberal economic reforms and global social justice movements have in recent decades produced shifting boundaries and meanings of citizenship within and beyond the Americas. In migrant-receiving countries, this has raised questions about extending rights to newcomers. In migrant-sending countries, it has prompted states to search for new ways to include their emigrant citizens into the nation state.

    This book situates new practices of ‘immigrant’ and ‘emigrant’ citizenship, and the policies that both facilitate and delimit them, in a broader political–economic context. It shows how the ability of people to act as transnational citizens is mediated by inequalities along the axes of gender, race, nationality and class, both in and between source and destination countries, resulting in a plethora of possible relations between states and migrants. The volume provides cross-disciplinary and theoretically engaging discussions, as well as empirically diverse case studies from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that have been transformed into ‘emigrant states’ in recent years, offering new concepts and theory for the study of transnational citizenship.

    This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

    1. Introduction: Transnational Citizenship across the Americas Ulla Dalum Berg and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez

    2. Puerto Ricans: citizens and migrants – a cautionary tale Carlos Vargas-Ramos

    3. Transnational alienage and foreignness: deportees and Foreign Service officers in Central America Connie McGuire and Susan Bibler Coutin

    4. Race, blood, disease, and citizenship: the making of the Haitian-Americans and the Haitian immigrants into ‘the others’ during the 1980s-1990s AIDS crisis Georges E. Fouron

    5. Immigrant citizenship: neoliberalism, immobility, and the vernacular meanings of citizenship Alyshia Gálvez

    6. Beyond citizenship: emergent forms of political subjectivity amongst migrants Robyn Magalit Rodriguez

    Biography

    Ulla Dalum Berg is Assistant Professor of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and Anthropology at Rutgers University, USA. Her research focuses on migration, transnationalism, media, ritual and performance in Latin America and the US. Her work has appeared in Latino Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Latin American Perspectives, and Identities.

    Robyn Magalit Rodriguez is Associate Professor in Asian American Studies at the University of California Davis, USA. She is the author of Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (2010) and co-author with Pawan Dhingra of Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2014).