Conceptualizing Transborder Communities 2012

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF FIRST-PROOF, 01/28/12, NEWGEN
Chapter 19
CONCEPTUALIZING TRANSBORDER COMMUNITIES

lynn stephen
Introduction
This chapter develops the concept of transborder communities. Because most processes of migration and immigration historically involve the crossing of ethnic, racial, cultural, colonial, regional, and state borders as well as national borders, the concept of transborder is more encompassing than transnational, which as a label emphasizes national, state-controlled borders and centers the nation-state as the primary entity migrants interact with. The chapter first explores the concepts of borders, border crossing, and borderlands as a way of understanding the complexity of transborder communities. From there the discussion focuses on the concept of coloniality as a tool for understanding the ways that ethnic and racial hierarchies written into colonialism are often recycled into ideologies of nationalism that permeate discussions of contemporary migration. Racial and ethnic hierarchies that are folded into nationalist ideologies such as mestizaje in Mexico often are reproduced in new contexts. Once migrants settle into a particular region of another nation outside of their homeland, the histories and racial and ethnic hierarchies particular to that region can also affect their experiences and construction in that context. Thus, for example, the way that race is conceptualized in border states such as Arizona versus midwestern states such as Illinois is an important dimension of how Mexican immigrants are read, received, and treated in those contexts, as well as of how immigrants construct themselves in relation to others.
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After discussing the importance of historical and regional complexities for transborder communities, the chapter evaluates theories of the compression of time in terms of how to conceptualize the local in multiple places simultaneously, drawing on the concepts of bifocal vision and social fields. Finally, the chapter discusses both the power and limits of states in affecting transborder communities. Though it can be useful to decenter the role of the state in understanding multisited communities and the experiences of their members, economic, trade, immigration, antidrug, and national security policies are all arenas in which the state can weigh heavily in shaping transborder communities. A final point of discussion in the conclusions is the role of digital technologies in processes of transborder identity formation and the phenomenon of forced transnationalism through state security and deportation policies. The chapter touches on theoretical contributions and empirical observations primarily from Latin American immigration to the United States and uses this authors work on Mexican transborder communities as the primary case material to illustrate the theoretical points.
Positioning Individuals and Communities in the Transnational

For more than two decades social scientists have been documenting people moving from one country to another who were building transnational links, often calling them transnational migrants to distinguish them from immigrants (see Kearney 1998; Gonzlez 1988; Eades 1987). Transmigrants (short for transnational migrants) are defined by Nina Glick Schiller (2003, 105) as
those persons, who having migrated from one nation-state to another, live their lives across borders, participating simultaneously in social relations that embed them in more than one nation-state. Activities and identity claims in the political domain are a particular form of transmigrant activity that is best understood as long-distance nationalism (Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001). In some cases individuals maintain hometown ties but avoid a connection with any form of nation-state-building process, although states are increasingly striving to encompass such relationships. (Kearney 2000)
This often-cited definition, focused at the level of the individual, is significantly based on the framework of liberal democracy and citizenship, highlighting the relationship between the individual and the nation-state. It profiles individuals who migrate not from a community, a town, or a set of social relationships, but from one nation-state to another. Collective activities and identity claims are construed primarily as long-distance nationalism. The end of the definition suggests the possibility that in some cases migrants maintain ties with their home communities
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the immigrant experience
without any connection to nation-state building processes, but that where this is the case, the state is busy trying to reconnect with them. Glick Schillers definition is helpful for understanding the role of nation-states in relation to migration, but it needs to be supplemented to get at the breadth and depth of the connections migrants create, maintain, and reinvent in multiple locations. The national at the root of transnational has the tendency to result in the flattening of other non-national dimensions of migration experiences. Although the relationship between the individual and the nation-state continues to be important, focusing exclusively on the nation as the primary unit of engagement for migrants and as the only significant bounded entity that they are moving between can severely limit our understanding of the multilayered complexity of the migration experience, the numerous borders and boundaries that individuals cross and exist within, and the complex dynamics of shifting identity construction and reconstruction that accompanies migratory processes. A focus on the individual also leaves out the key role of social relationships and communities. In her discussion of transnationalism as a process and experience, Laura Velasco Ortiz does not abandon the importance of the nation-state, but decenters it by embedding transnationalism in the daily lives, activities, and social relationships of migrants . . . .They live a complex existence that leads them to confront and remake cultural boundaries based on differences in nationality, ethnicity, race, and gender . . . .New concepts such as networks, circuits, institutions, and migrant agents help us understand the complexities of the structuring processes of a local community that extends beyond its original territory (2005, 13). In her discussion, the nation and nationality are only one of the boundaries that migrants confront and remake. Likewise, in his description of transnational life Robert Smith acknowledges the importance of those practices and relationships linking migrants and their children with the home county. He adds, however, But, for me, transnational life is also embodied in identities and social structures that help form the life world of immigrants and their children and is constructed in relations among people, institutions, and places. Transnational life usually involves travel between the home and host destination, but it can also include the experience of stay-at-homes in close relationships with travelers (2006, 67). Here Smith mentions the home country in a reference to the nation-state, but deflects further centering of the state by using the terms people, institutions,places, and home and host destination, where home and host are not defined specifically in terms of nations. Federico Besserers pathbreaking work on transnational topographies is a literal mapping of what he calls transnational spaces, but again, he does not limit himself to national boundaries. Within processes of deterritorialization of Mixtec communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, and their reterritorialization in a wide range of locations within Mexico (outside of Oaxaca) and in the United States, he seeks to understand the different dimensions of transnational community life, such as education, citizenship, music, dance, and work, in terms of how they are mapped out between specific home communities in Oaxaca and their multiple other locations.
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His interest is not in the role of the nation-state in this mapping, but in the experiences and images of those he interviews as they have lived and archived their transnational experiences. His mapping comes from the topographies of those who he interviewed, built on a desire to understand the denotation of places marked off in the mental geography of those we interviewed . . . it remains clear that this special representation is not a description of a reality as seen in a natural state, but is an interpretation that comes through ethnographic dialogue (2004, 22; my translation). By connecting and mapping the different spaces in which transnational economics, culture, politics, and labor are experienced and lived, Besserer helps us to visualize the many different borders that migrants are crossing.
Borders, Border Crossing, and Borderlands

People who migrate have multiple dimensions to their identity, including region, ethnicity, class, race, gender, and sexuality. Referring only to their nation of origin or nationality or to the specific nation(s) they come to reside in as a result of migration misses understanding how they experience immigration on different levels and also how their identities are reconstituted along multiple dimensions. The concepts of borders, border crossing, and borderlands may be more fruitful analytical terrain for understanding migrant communities than a focus that centers only on the national and transnational. The crossing of many borders and the carrying of these borders within ones experience allow us to see migration in terms of family relationships; social, economic, and cultural relationships; communities; and networks beyond the legal relations that individuals have with nation-states. Though migrants may be moving across borders, another way to conceptualize borders is in terms of the geographic and metaphorical spaces that they represent. Such spaces are often known as borderlands. Borderland scholarship particularly of the U.S.-Mexico borderlandshas produced some of the most insightful cultural, political, and economic analyses of this integrated region. One of the most important writers who has had widespread influence on the way the concept of borderlands is understood is Chicana lesbian feminist poet and intellectual Gloria Anzaldua (1999). Her concept of borderlands includes the geographical space around the U.S.-Mexico border, but she also conceptualizes Borderlands as a metaphorical space that accompanies subjects to any location. Borderlands also refer to how people cope with social inequalities based on racial, gender, class, and/or sexual differences, as well as with spiritual transformation and psychic processes of exclusion and identificationof feeling in between cultures, languages, or places. And borderlands are spaces where the marginalized voice their identities
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and resistance. All of these social, political, spiritual, and emotional transitional transcend geopolitical space (Segura and Zavella 2007, 4). Whereas earlier borderlands scholarship often focused on the geographically circumscribed border region of the U.S.-Mexico border, more recent scholarship has merged with many of the concerns of scholars of transnationalism. For example, a recent volume edited by Denise Segura and Pat Zavella (2007), Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, uses an expanded version of the concept of borderlands to consider all of the United States and Mexico as potential parts of the borderlands. This is not unlike Nicolas De Genovas suggestion that cities with significant populations of immigrants from Latin America should be considered as a part of Latin America. He suggests the specific concept of Mexican Chicago in relation to the large number of Mexican immigrants there (De Genova 1998, 8990, 2005). Offered as a corrective to perspectives that see Latin America as outside the United States and assimilation as the logical and desirable outcome of migration, De Genova suggests that rather than an outpost or extension of Mexico, therefore, the Mexican-ness of Mexican Chicago signifies a permanent disruption of the space of the U.S. nation-state and embodies the possibility of something truly new, a radically different social formation (2005, 190). Segura and Zavella (2007) include case studies that are in Mexico, in the United States, and often in multiple sites in both countries to paint a picture of the tremendous diversity found in migrant womens lives. The result is a sense of the complex topographies that cross-cut womens lives, communities, and regional relations across a variety of boundaries. Conceptualizing the idea of borderlands to represent connected spaces (geographic, political, social, cultural, and economic) that encompass multiple locations both on the literal border and in particular nationstates does not eliminate, but decenters, the nation-state as the primary actor in immigration along with the individual.
Colonial Borders: Racial and Ethnic Hierarchies Written into Nationalism

A multidimensional border view of migration permits us to deal with the issue of time compression in the ongoing construction, crossing, and codification of borders. A persistent challenge for migration frameworks that focus primarily on movement between contemporary nation-states is in dealing with borders that have both current and historical dimensions. The specific issue discussed here is the ways in which past colonial borders and categories linked to colonial states permeate the experiences of migrants today. Coloniality is understood as the ongoing vestiges of colonial processes of subjectification and identification that are the
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underside of modern states. Coloniality persists after the formal end of colonial political regimes through the continuing presence of colonial racial, ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies (see Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2000). Such hierarchies are often submerged in the political culture of nation-states and are ever-present as a part of nationalism. For example, after the Mexican Revolution (19101920), the promotion of mestizaje (supposed mixing of Spanish and Indian) as a nationalist ideology was pushed in tandem with policies focused on incorporating the indigenous population. Writers such as Manuel Gamio, who called for the fusion of the races (1916), and Jos Vasconceloss (1997) writings about the cosmic race reinforced the nationalist idea of Mexico as a one-race nation. This one race, the mestizo, required the erasure of the Indian. The Indian has no other door to the future but the door of modern culture, nor any other road but the road already cleared by Latin Civilization (1997, 16).). The legacy of the construction of mestizaje as the foundation of nationalism and the subsequent confinement of indigenous cultures to the past is directly observable in the visual aesthetics expressed in Mexicos national imaginaries in public museums and architecture (Alonso 2004). Borders of coloniality matter in a discussion of contemporary migration for a number of reasons. Afro-descendent and indigenous peoples are often glorified in histories of nationalism, but they continue to struggle to obtain equal rights and recognition within the framework of many nation-states, even after they have won legal recognition in constitutions. The fact that indigenous, afro-descendent, (often) women have to continue to demand equal rights is a manifestation of coloniality in many contexts. When afro-descendent and indigenous peoples immigrate as part of a national group, they often face multiple forms of discrimination in the host context. They are discriminated against because of their national identity, but may also be further discriminated against by their fellow national immigrants for their racial and/or ethnic identity. For example, some Ecuadorian immigrants in Spain may be subject to discrimination for being Ecuadorian, but are subject to additional discrimination from other Ecuadorian immigrants because of their indigenous Quichua or Afro-Ecuadorian identity. Following are two additional examples from Mexico. Within Mexico, indigenous peoples are incorporated into a colonially inherited system of merged racial/ethnic classification wherein they are ranked below mestizos (a constructed category of mixed race) and white Spaniards, who supposedly have preserved their Spanish heritage over five hundred years (see Stephen 2002, 8591). Although such categories are certainly historically and culturally constructed and not biological, they continue to operate with political and social force in many parts of Mexico as well as among Mexican-origin populations in the United States. For indigenous migrants who have come to the United States, the racial/ethnic hierarchy of Mexico continues, but it is also overlaid with U.S.based racial categories. Contemporary racial hierarchies in the United States are products of the empire building linked to ideologies of Anglo superiority such as Manifest Destiny, an expression originally coined in 1845 by the journalist John OSullivan
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to justify the U.S. annexation of Texas (Alonso 2008, 232). The expression has consistently been used to justify U.S. expansion as Anglo-Saxons have brought democracy, progress, and enlightenment to lesser peoples, including American Indians, Mexicans, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and others (see Acua 2000). As Ana Alonso points out, the discourse of Manifest Destiny conflated national origin and race (2008, 232). If Anglo-Americans were at the top of a racial/ethnic hierarchy, then Mexicans, American Indians, and Africans were at the bottom. At the time of ratification of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, when the United States acquired half of Mexican territory, U.S. racial laws only gave full political rights to free white men (people who were not indentured servants or criminals). Blacks and Indians could be indentured or enslaved in most states. People of mixed European and Indian ancestry could be barred from voting, practicing law, or becoming naturalized citizens, and in many states could not marry members of other races. This was a new racial order for those Mexicans who suddenly found themselves living in U.S. territory (see Menchaca 2001). Racial exclusion laws in many Western states and territories limited the ability of Mexican-origin residents to vote, marry interracially, and receive land grantsoften based on the fact that they looked Indian. Mexican became a catchall racial/ethnic category that was incorporated in regional racial hierarchies that included blacks, whites, Indians, and others, depending on the context. The ethic/racial formations linked to U.S. nationalism have a strong impact on Mexican immigrants, as do the ethnic/racial hierarchies produced by Mexican nationalism. And in both countries there are specific regional variations and histories of these larger ethnic/racial hierarchies. Whereas ethnic distinctions are the primary markers of difference in Mexico, particularly in terms of how much people embrace an indigenous identity built on place, language, and ethnic autonomy, once Mexican migrants cross into the United States, what was their national identity, Mexicanness, is treated as a racial identity. Scholars of Latino studies are increasingly including the racialization of cultural and ethnic categories in analyzing the varied experiences of Latinos in the United States (Fox 2006). The construction historically of all Mexicans as illegal or potential illegals also involves a process of racialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centurieswith regional specificities. As argued by De Genova and Ramos-Zayas (2003), looking at the historical circumstances leading to the production of Latino (and other) racial formations permits us to situate them within a wider social field framed by the hegemonic polarity of racialized whiteness and Blackness in the United States. Thus the Latino (or Hispanic) label tends to be always saturated with racialized differences (2003, 2). The same can be said for the Mexican label in the United States. We can use the borders of coloniality in both Mexico and the United States to understand the ways in which indigenous Mexican migrants become and continue to be a racialized category in the United States within the Mexican immigrant community and how Mexican systems of ethnic and racial classification are influenced by and overlap with the historically and regionally situated racial hierarchies in the United States.
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Regional Borders within National Borders

Some of the other borders that migrants cross are rooted in the regional specificities of where they come from and where they go. For example, for indigenous Mexican migrants, it matters what the specific regional context is for them in Mexico as well as in the United States (see Fox and Rivera 2004). The experiences of Purpecha indigenous immigrants from Chern, Michoacn, who form transborder communities in Cobden, Illinois, St. Louis, and other Midwest towns in the United States, incorporate two regionally specific racial and ethnic histories (see Martnez 2001; Anderson 2004). These include constructions of the Purpecha indigenous groups in relation to other indigenous groups (such as Nahua and Mazahuas) and nonindigenous groups in Michoacn as well as the racial and ethnic hierarchies specific to the U.S. Midwest. Cobden had a population of 1,108 in 2007. Racial categories listed by the city of Cobden for 2007 include White Non-Hispanic (84.9 percent), Hispanic (12.9 percent), Other race (5.7 percent), Two or more races (1.5 percent), Black (1.4 percent), and American Indian (0.8 percent) (Cobden, Illinois, Detailed Profile 2007). According to Warren D. Anderson, contact between the Puerpecha of Michoacn and Cobden began no earlier than 1959, and by 2000 migrants from Chern were likely the single numerical majority of any specific origin among the Hispanic population (2004, 357, 369). Other significant groups included in the Hispanic population, according to Anderson, are mestizos from Guanajutao, Jalisco, Guerrero, Chiapas, Veracruz, and Central America (2004, 269). Thus the indigenous ethnic dimension of the Chern migrants identity is unique in Cobden, both among other Mexican and Central American migrants and among White, Non-Hispanics. In this situation, additional ethnic, racial, and colonial border crossings are a part of the Purpecha migration experience that is not necessarily shared by all Mexican migrants in Cobden, Illinois. A more detailed ethnographic example in another part of the United States illustrates the racial/ethnic classification system in Southern California, which interacts with that of Oaxaca, Mexicoa state that has sixteen different indigenous groups and is at least 30 percent indigenous. The Zapotec and Mixtec ethnic groups from Oaxacawhich each contain considerable linguistic and other variations number more than 500,000 each. Paco Mendoza, an eighteen-year-old Zapotec migrant worker from Teotitln del Valle, lived for two and a half years in Oxnard, California. There he spent a significant amount of time in the company of other young men and women from Teotitln del Valle. Through his participation on a basketball team and other social activities, he regularly spoke Zapotec and publicly identified as Zapotec. Because Paco is tall, many other Mexican immigrants in California doubted his claim to be from the state of Oaxaca. He was, they said, too tall to be from Oaxaca. In his narrative, Paco discusses his understanding
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of the racial-ethnic system in Oxnard and Moorpark, California. In addition to talking about different categories of migrants and his own identity, he describes his one experience of discomfort at the hands of local women whom he labels as Chicana. He recounts how these Chicanas made fun of him and his friends as they were speaking Zapotec on the street. Playing basketball and socializing with friends from Teotitln who speak Zapotec was an important experience of ethnic validation and pride for him. At the same time, speaking Zapotec in public marked him as Indian in the context of the Mexican immigrant and Chicano communities of California. The discussion took place in Teotitln del Valle, Mexico, in 2004, after he had returned from California: Paco: I learned about Latinos because I was in the U.S. and knew some Latinos. I learned that all of the Mexicanosactually all of those people who come from below the California borderare called Latinos. You can identify more as Mexicano or from such and such a part of Mexico, but there they called everyone Latinos. Did you use that word Latino to describe yourself? There? I was a Latino there, why not. All of us who are from that part below the U.S. border are Latinos. But then people always ask you, Where are you from? I might say, Mexico or Mexican. Then they say, But where precisely are you from? (De donde mero eres?) And then? What do you say then? I say I am from Oaxaca. Because there in Oxnard when you go to apply for a job, they say to you? Where are you from? From Oaxaca? They say, people from Oaxaca work. The people from Michoacn are big, but they dont work. They dont do much work. If you keep saying, I am from Oaxaca, then they will say, Well those from Oaxaca are not afraid of any work. They are not afraid. So you tell them you are from Oaxaca. In Oxnard there are a lot of people from Oaxaca and Guerrero . . . . So when you say you are from Oaxaca it was like a recommendation for a hard worker? Yeah, like that . . . . But they didnt identify me as being from Oaxaca. They didnt believe that I was from Oaxaca because I am tall. I would say to people, I am from Oaxaca. They would say, No, you cant be from Oaxaca, they are all shorter there. You are lying. You are not from Oaxaca. . . . And since I didnt have any identification I could only identify myself by saying I am from Oaxaca, from this town. Then they would say again, No, you are from Michoacn because you are large. You are lying. You just want to pass yourself off as being from Oaxaca. . . . I would insist, No. No. I am from Oaxaca. I am Oaxaqueo. So did you identify yourself as being Zapoteco from Teotitln or indigenous? Yes, I identified myself as being Zapoteco. When they didnt believe me when I said I was from Oaxaca, I would always continue by saying, I am
Lynn: Paco:
Lynn: Paco:
Lynn: Paco:
Lynn: Paco:
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Lynn: Paco: Lynn:
Paco:
Lynn: Paco: Lynn: Paco: Lynn: Paco:
from Oaxaca. I am Zapoteco from Teotitln del Valle. When you like, come and visit Teotitln. It is a town where a lot of Americans come to visit. They are artisans there. We get a lot of visitors to see the artisans. Did you feel proud when you said this? Yes, yes, yes. I always felt really proud because I am from this land and I am from the town of Teotitln. In Oregon, people also talk about people from Oaxaca as being hard workers. But some friends have told me that, for example, in the high schools, that kids from Oaxaca get made fun of. They call them Oaxaquitos, los inditos. Did this ever happen to you in California? Nothing exactly like that, but something related, I think. You see, in Oxnard when we meet others from Teotitln del Valle, we know that they are also Zapotecos. We have the Zapotec language and we speak to one another in our own language. We walk around with our friends speaking Zapotec. But one time when I was walking with some friends and speaking Zapotec, some people walking in front of us started making fun of us for speaking Zapotec. Because we were speaking Zapotec they thought that we were saying something bad about them. But no, we were just speaking our own language. They said, Hey look at that bunch of stupid Indians. They thought we were criticizing them. But we were not paying any attention to them. We were talking about our own business, where we live, our own concerns. How did it turn out? Well, it wasnt a problem for us. We didnt give it much importance. Who made this commentary? I think they were Chicanas. Did they speak Spanish? Yes. They spoke Spanish and they were Chicanas. They were some girls., some women. They always think they are very superior by being Chicana. They were speaking English and then in Spanish. That is why I thought that they were Chicanas because they could speak Spanish and English. They were not Americanos.
In this discussion, Paco provides ample evidence of the racial classification system that operates within Mexico, which is imported into the United States and operates in places like Oxnard, California, which has a large Mexican immigrant and Chicano/a population. Being from Oaxaca is believed to be associated with short stature and indicative of indigenous ancestry. Because Paco didnt look like he was from Oaxaca, being tall, he had to invoke different criteria of indigeneity to convince other Mexicanos that he was from Oaxaca. He then identified as Zapoteco from the particular town of Teotitln. He explains to people who dont believe he is from Oaxaca that he speaks Zapotec, an Indian language, as a way of proving he is from Oaxaca and therefore indigenous. He makes a place-based and linguistically based claim to being indigenous. For Paco this is a point of pride, not an insult.
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Pacos discussion of the term Latino focuses on what he learned is the basis for the Latino labeleveryone who is born below the Mexican border and is from Latin America. Instead of the term Latino, he deploys Mexicano, as a way of being more specific about his identity. From there, he says, when he meets other Mexicanos the process of identity labeling moves to the state and local level. Once he enters into the level of identifying himself as being from Oaxaca, the discussion reengages with the Mexican racial/ethnic hierarchy, focused on an indigenous/nonindigenous dichotomy. However, when Paco experiences a taunt from a group of young women who speak both Spanish and English in Oxnard, his discussion joins the racial/ethnic hierarchy of Mexico with a regional Southern California racial/ethnic hierarchy that includes the terms Chicano/a and Americano/a. Chicanos and Chicanas are distinguished from Mexicanos as being from the United States and speaking both Spanish and English. They are differentiated from Americanos/as by being nonwhite and being able to speak Spanish. In his narrative Paco integrates the Mexican racial/ethnic hierarchy with a U.S.-based system of labels with a Southern California specificity. The borders Paco has crossed as a migrant worker in California include colonial borders of race and ethnicity, the borders of U.S. and Mexican sovereignty, the regional borders of Oaxaca and California, and the borders of the racial/ethnic hierarchies specific to each region. Using an analytical framework of transborder migration thus makes it possible to track the compression of time and space. The two preceding examples illustrate the simultaneous compression of time and space. The compression of time is through the continuities of colonial racial and ethnic hierarchies from the colonial periods of Mexico and the United States to the present. The compression of spaces is the integration of two specific regional histories and systems of racial and ethnic classification from different geographic regions in Mexico and the United States.
Experiencing the Local in Multiple Locations: Compression of Space and Time

Another way in which compression of space can be conceptualized in relation to those in transborder communities is through how people experience the local in multiple places simultaneously. Much of the recent research on transborder communities is multisited, with investigators spending time in two, three, or even more field sites that encompass members of one town or city (see Besserer 2004; Hirsch 2003; Stephen 2007; Zilberg 2004; Zlolniski 2006). Although this technique
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allows researchers to experience the different places that transborder communities inhabit, it does not substitute for conceptualizing the daily participation of community members in more than one local place simultaneously. The best one can do, for example, is to observe a member of a transborder community attending an event in one location while talking on a cell phone with a family member who is engaged in a related activity in another location. Recently, while attending a special mass in Spanish for the Virgen de Guadalupe in Eugene, Oregon, this author observed an acquaintance from a community in Oaxaca talking on a cell phone with a family member who had also attended a mass on the same day in Oaxaca City. They shared and compared with one another the details of both masses. Another example is fifteen members of the federated public works committee from San Agustn Atenango, Oaxaca, who live in twelve different locations in the United States, traveling to Fresno, California, to discuss their plans for developing a community cemetery and holding a telephone conference call with the local authorities in their home community. The latter example illustrates the construction of a local-level, multisited transborder political community. It is part of a common practice in many communities that links local hometown authorities in the place of origin with long-distance auxiliary committees that also function as part of the governance system (see Smith 2006, 5375). Scholars have grappled analytically with how to conceptualize this simultaneous sense of the local in multiple places. Some have advocated a bifocal orientation through which migrants build social fields linking their community of origin with their community of settlement (Segura and Zavella 2007, 17). This author has argued elsewhere that women in transborder communities have developed bifocal vision, which allows them to see both near and far at the same time. Put another way, bifocal vision is a socially and experientially developed pair of glasses that transborder migrant women wear that permits them to imagine and think through the implications of daily occurrences and their subsequent actions in a multisited context (see Stephen 2009). The author discovered this model after reading Patricia Zavellas insightful discussion about peripheral vision as a way to envision how young women in the United States and Mexico keep track of norms and family expectations in simultaneous locations (2000, 2011). As stated by Castaeda and Zavella (2003, 131), whether they reside in Mexico or in the United States, migrants imagine their own situation and family lives in terms of how they compare with el otro lado (on the other side of the border). The author has found that women use this kind of vision not only to keep track of norms and family expectations in multiple places, but also with a wide range of other issues. The use of a bifocal vision approach in understanding the kind of cognitive map transborder migrants work with helps to ground the experiences of transborder individuals and communities in the local against the backdrop of globalization and deterritorialization. Scholars working outside the field of immigration/migration have also advocated for a return to the local in response to what some see as an overdetermination of the structures of globalization (Harcourt and Escobar 2004).
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Other scholars have come to prefer the concept of social field as a way to think of the simultaneity of experiences in multiple spaces of the local. This concept offers a way around binary divisions that have permeated so much of social analysis, such as global/local and national/transnational. Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller capture the localness of national, transnational, and global connections:
In one sense, all are local in that near and distant connections permeate the daily lives of individuals lived within a locale. But within this locale, a person may participate in personal networks, or receive ideas and information that connect them to others in a nation-state, across the borders of a nation-state, or globally, without ever having migrated. By conceptualizing transnational social fields as transcending the boundaries of nation-states, we also note that individuals within these fields are through their everyday activities and relationships, influenced by multiple sets of laws and institutions. Their daily rhythms and activities respond not only to more than one state simultaneously but also to social institutions, such as religious groups, that exist within many states and cross their borders. (2004, 1010)
Networks and Meshworks

Anthropologists and other social scientists have debated how to conceptualize transmigrant activity, whether as networks, circuits, or interlinked networks in a concept Escobar calls meshworks. Such concepts also tend to decenter the role of the nation-state, linking communities and movements directly rather than as mediated by national political and legal structures (see Juris 2008, 2007; Escobar 2003). Unlike networks, which may be focused from one person outward, the idea of meshworks is about understanding interlinked networks and the total effect they can produce as a system. Escobar states that the characteristics of meshworks include that they are self-organizing and grow in unplanned directions, are made up of diverse elements, exist in hybridized forms with other hierarchies and meshworks, accomplish the articulation of heterogeneous elements without imposing uniformity, and are determined by the degree of connectivity that enables them to become self-sustaining (2003). The concept of meshworks allows us to envision the multiple networks that transborder communities participate in both through and around the nation-state. Transborder communities are not only connected to the multiple sites that their members occupy, but are also linked to other networks that span one or more countries and connect them to nonimmigrant communities and networks. The model of a meshworks permits us to envision, for example, how transborder migrants are simultaneously linked to hometown, religious, perhaps labor union, and sports networks, as well as many others that are not dominated by recent immigrants. The model also permits us to visualize all the borders that
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migrants cross, the complexity of the networks they live in, and how these are connected to one another.
The Role of the State: Immigration, Militarization, and Security in Transborder Communities
Michael Kearney (1998, 126) asserts that the ethnography of migration suggests that communities are constituted transnationally and thus challenge the defining power of the nation-states which they transcend . . . members of transnational communities similarly escape the power of the nation-state to inform their sense of collective identity. Cultural studies theorist Nestor Garca Canclini (1995) is also sympathetic to the ways that new kinds of transborder identity are formed, but his optimism about those processes is tempered by a warning to remember that they are intimately tied to cross-border labor recruitment practices that leave workers with no rights and little recourse to any labor protections; racism and anti-immigrant sentiment resulting in border enforcement policies that are killing people trying to enter the United States; and anti-immigrant legislative proposals that are eliminating access to basic social services for many immigrant families. Although he does not say so directly, he is invoking the importance of the state in processes of transborder community networking; identity formation; defining border spaces (e.g., through the use of force at the U.S.-Mexican border); and constructing new transborder communities, often in unintended ways (e.g., through the deportation of Salvadoran gang members, discussed later). The intense crossing and instability of traditions, bases of valorizing opening, may also bein conditions of labor competitiona source of prejudice and confrontation. Therefore, the analysis of the advantages or inconveniences of deterritorialization should not be reduced to the movements of ideas of cultural codes, as is frequently the case in the bibliography on postmodernity. Their meaning is also constructed in connection with social and economic practices, in struggles for local power, and in the competition to benefit from alliances with external powers (Garca Canclini 1995, 240241). Though acknowledging the importance of creative border hybridity represented in work such as Anzalduas and Garca-Canclinis (with his words of caution), this author also has to highlight other aspects of transborder community members experiences, which include the physical and very real danger of crossing the U.S.-Mexican border and being labeled illegal in the United States (see Urrea
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2004). In addition to the physical dangers of trying to cross the border, migrants live with the ever-present drumbeat of anti-immigrant organizing that not only permeates the border area, but is prevalent throughout the United States. Antiimmigrant sentiment, which fosters groups such as the Minutemen, is also directly linked to concrete policies such as Operation Gatekeeper and other border fortification plans that directly affect the lives of indigenous migrants. Leo Chavez looks at how anti-immigrant fear has coalesced into a single account that he calls The Latino Threat Narrative, which operates with commercial and grassroots media to create a national conversation (2008). Such anti-immigrant cultural discourses produce powerful results when harnessed to proposed local, state, or federal immigration policy and practice. This authors approach seeks to recognize both the powers and limits of countries in affecting the ways that transborder communities develop through time and work around and through the political, legal, economic, and cultural apparatuses of states. Thus, though specific state-based policies such as the Bracero program, implemented by the U.S. and Mexican governments in 1942, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), implemented by the same two countries in 1994, have significantly affected directly and indirectly where, when, and how people have migrated within Mexico and also to the United States, the power of these policies in the lives of immigrants is deflected, refracted, and refocused through the changing larger contexts wherein transborder communities develop and change. Although this chapter has consistently made an argument for using the term transborder community rather than transnational to partially decenter the position of the nation-state and national identity in how multisited migrant communities and their members experiences are conceptualized, it would be foolish to argue that the state can be written out of this discussion. Economic, trade, immigration, antidrug, and national security policies are all arenas in which the nationstate is central and can profoundly affect transborder communities. In the United States the convergence of several different wars on the U.S.-Mexican border, the construction of additional border walls, and the George W. Bush and Barak Obama administrations policies of increasing raids on worksites with undocumented employees and increasing deportations from deep inside the U.S. have made the state a common presence in transborder communities and for families through their encounters with U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) officials. Tony Payan makes a compelling case for how the 2002 reorganization of the Homeland Security Department conflated three different warson drugs, over the enforcement of immigration laws, and on terrorinto one and has placed them all on the U.S.-Mexican border: [T]hese three issues are in fact quite separate from each other. They have different origins, they have difference processes, and they require different strategies, etc . . . . Yet since September 11, the United States government has bundled them into a single mother of all battles that has turned the
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border into a front line of national security (2006, xiv). The unified war, Payan demonstrates, has incorporated the strategy, tactics, personnel, resources, rhetoric, and hardware of militarization. The effects for those who live in the borderlands, such as the forty-three border counties of Texas, which are among the poorest in the country, are infrastructure and socioeconomic deficiencies, enormous income inequality, and daily danger (2006, 138). For undocumented migrants crossing over the U.S.-Mexican border, the trip is expensive and can be fatal. Between 1995 and 2006, there were over 3,700 known migrant fatalities due to unauthorized border crossings; dehydration and hypothermia were the most common causes of death (Cornelius 2006, 3). Cornelius emphasizes the word known to indicate that the numbers are likely higher. Initial research carried out on the disappearedthose who cross the border and never appear again, dead or alivesuggests that these number are likely even higher. Every community with a migration history also has histories of the disappeared. If added up, they would likely far surpass the number of actual known deaths (see Stephen 2008). Although increased border enforcement and militarization have not stopped undocumented migrants, the latter have become increasingly dependent on coyotes (people smugglers) to get into the United States. The increased demand for their business has encouraged coyotes to dramatically raise their prices, from a median of $613 in 1993 to a median of $1,634 for migrants who crossed between 2002 and 2004 (Fuentes et al. 2006, 67). In a study on the failure of tighter border enforcement to discourage undocumented migrants, Cornelius and other researchers expanded their scope to include extensive interviews with migrants from hometowns in the states of Oaxaca and Yucatn. This study revealed that between 92 and 98 percent of those who tried to go to the United States did get through, and that their success was dependent on coyotes, which 80 percent of those surveyed used. The average cost of passage between 2005 and 2007 was $2,124, with coyotes charging $3,500 or more for passage through a legal port of entry concealed in a car or as a passenger using false or borrowed documents (Cornelius et al. 2008, 8). The conflation of national security policy with the war on drugs has also resulted in specialized deportation policies, not only for undocumented immigrants, but also for Salvadoran immigrant gang youths and young adults. They are deported to El Salvador when they are released from prison. Reverse border crossings by forced return through deportation brings the presence of the nationstate into sharp focus, because each week up to three U.S. Marshall aircrafts take handcuffed deportees to San Salvadors international airport. According to Elana Zilberg, anywhere from two to six hundred Salvadorans are forcefully repatriated in this manner each monthamong them gang youth (2007, 494). In a different form of cross-border linkage, Zilberg documents the intimate connections between the cities of Los Angeles and San Salvador through coordinated Salvadoran and U.S. government antigang and antidrug policies (2011). Through a shared history of counterinsurgency training and discourses equating antistate activism with
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illegality, the U.S. and Salvadoran governments now share models and strategies of crime control, and there is talk of creating a transnational prison system where Salvadoran immigrants convicted in the U.S. could serve their sentences in Salvadoran prisons (Zilberg 2007, 497). There are also prisons in the United States that specialize in housing Salvadoran and other deportees doing time for illegal reentry into the United States. Zilberg documents the difficulty for gang members and unaffiliated youths who leave El Salvador for the United States because they fear arrest by military and police forces for acting or appearing like gang members (2004, 2011). This two-way border crossing stems from the ongoing U.S. participation in the production of violence in El Salvador through training of Salvadoran police and military forces in zero tolerance police models, which resulted in the arrest of more than 30,000 youths in El Salvador, accused of being gang members, between July 2003 and July 2005. Fear of such detentions in El Salvador has increased undocumented migration back to the United States, where Salvadoran youths may again be jailed and ultimately deported (Zilberg 2007, 497501). The identity construction processes of these youths, deported from Los Angeles to San Salvador and living in a homeland many have never been to or dont remember, illustrates the complexity of the transborder experience and what Zilberg calls a forced transnationality. The narratives of Salvadoran youths deported from Los Angeles to San Salvador reveal a painful rupture between culture and nation, where cultural identity does not correspond to, but is rather, excluded from national citizenship (Zilberg 2004, 762). In the narratives of belonging of transborder Salvadoran youths that focus on violence, belonging, and exclusion, Zilberg finds ways in which Los Angeless immigrant barrios have been relocated and reinscribed within the post-civil war landscape of San Salvadors barrios populares (762). Here the power of the U.S. and Salvadoran nation-states is central to the connections created between Los Angeles and San Salvador, but becomes displaced in the imaginaries of Salvadoran transborder youths as their search for belonging pulls them toward inclusiveness based on kinship, neighborhood, and the family created out of gang ties. Their transborder communities are violently forced into existence by U.S. and Salvadoran security and antigang policies, but are lived through other categories built on metaphors of kinship. The politics and strategies of homeland security, policing, and deportation as part of antigang, antiterror, and antidrug policies have become integrated with larger U.S. immigration policy to build a wall of exclusion and create blurred borderlands such as those found in U.S. and Salvadoran prisons for gang members and particular neighborhoods in Los Angeles and El Salvador. Increased use of raids on places of employment in the United States has brought the policing of the U.S.-Mexican border into all Latino immigrant communities in the United States, including those far from the border in locations such as Postville, Iowa, where in May of 2008 ICE authorities arrested nearly four hundred people and tore families apart (Hsu 2008, A01). The day following the raid, 90 percent of Hispanic children
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were not present in school because their parents had been arrested. According to the U.S. Attorneys office for the Northern District of Iowa, those detained included 290 Guatemalans, 93 Mexicans, 2 Israelis, and 4 Ukrainians (Hsu 2008, A01). The deported workers were replaced with Somali immigrants just two months after the raid. This is certainly a powerful demonstration of the capacity of the state to reconfigure transborder communities.
Conclusions and Directions for Future Research

Transborder communities have complex historical and current trajectories that require a sophisticated array of analytical tools. Much theorizing has centered on the transnational, focusing on how individuals are connected across the borders of the nation-state and engage in forms of long-distance nationalism that can be key to identity formation and the building of community. This chapter has emphasized the concepts of borders, border crossing, and borderlands as a different way of understanding how individuals and communities living in time and space compressions are able to build connections in multiple spaces at once and can construct, maintain, and rework identities that incorporate disparate forms of racial, ethnic, regional, national, gendered, and kin relations. This discussion has specifically sought to take apart the homogeneity of nationalism as projected across borders and to emphasize the importance of regional histories of colonialism and the racial, ethnic, and gendered hierarchies attached to this history. It has emphasized a disarticulated sense of border crossing, examining the multiple borders that migrants and immigrants cross, maintain, and rearticulate through their daily lives. The discussion has suggested that transborder communities should be conceptualized as linked together through networks and meshworks that connect them not only to their home communities, but also to a wide range of other social actors, institutions, and communities in their host environment. A multilayered, historically complex, and contemporarily rich picture of all the borders that migrants cross and carry with them into multiple situations and places provides a sense of the counterweights that exist to the power of nation-states to impose legal and physical borders in peoples lives, police their own boundaries at any time or place, and forcibly move and remove those who are excluded. As globalization deepens and digital technology develops ever-newer generations, one of the areas for further exploration of the construction of transborder communities is the Internet. Digital border crossing is an important dimension of many transborder communities. Beyond regular use of e-mail to communicate, many community and hometown associations use Web sites, YouTube, Facebook,
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Twitter, and blogs to share news, allow people to follow the progress of community development projects, and organize political pressure campaigns(see Stephen 2007, 274308; Smith 2006). Social networking technology is also increasingly being used by individuals, families, and transborder organizations. Important questions for future researchers include the following: What is the impact of access to digital technology and social networking tools on identity formation in transborder communities? Can virtual organizing take the place of face-to-face events, political organizing, and economic development efforts in transborder communities? In cases where transborder communities have difficulty maintaining a unified governance system as members spread over greater and greater areas in North America, can systems of virtual governance be effective? Another arena for additional research is the concept of forced transnationalism and its link to U.S. security and immigration policies. When U.S. law enforcement strategies are linked to those of Mexican, Central American, and other countries, increasingly new classes of criminal deportees are being created, who have grown up in U.S. urban areas but are being forcibly returned to their homes to serve out their prison sentences. If they are unable to return to the United States, as many intend, what kinds of communities are they seeking to belong to? Is the aftermath of U.S.- supported military campaigns of repression in places like El Salvador and Guatemala now giving way to transborder cartels, gangs, and organized criminal communities who operate with impunity across borders and in spite of the state? What are the options for young people in the United States, Mexico, and Central America who grow up in the territories of these groups? Transborder communities are simultaneously sites of hope and oppression as their members navigate both the daily realities of exclusionary state policies and practices and the openings of family, culture, political organizing, community, and opportunity offered by movement and local life in multiple locations. As digital technologies and ease of travel increase the possibilities for transborder existence, many aspects of these communities are becoming generalized around the globe and are part of all communities. Eventually the primary research question may be: What, if anything, distinguishes transborder communities from other communities?
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