Sarah J. Mahler

Transnational Migration: Bringing Gender In

This article aims to bring gender into an even tighter transnational migration focus by broadening and deepening our original framework of “gendered geographies of power,” linking it more directly to existing and emerging scholarship. We examine and highlight previously neglected areas such as the role of the state and the social imaginary in gendering transnational processes and experiences. We identify topics that remain under-appreciated, under-researched, and/or under-theorized. Finally, we initiate a discussion of how a gendered analysis of transnational migration can help bridge this particular research to other gendered transnational processes under study that do not privilege migration.

Transnational Relationships: The Struggle to Communicate Across Borders

In transnational contexts, and particularly in situations where people have physically migrated across international borders and may be separated by other barriers as well, communication cannot be presumed and should be problematized. To date, however, research focusing on transnational migration has emphasized the kinds of ties people maintain despite corporal separation, such as negotiating transnational households and community associations and conducting business ventures and political movements. How people accomplish these tasks across borders has been less developed in the literature, although authors do acknowledge that modern telecommunications technologies have facilitated communication, particularly in comparison to the tools available to earlier generations of migrants. In contrast, this paper focuses on the ways migrants from a very rural area of El Salvador communicate across borders, identifying the roles that gender and power play, with particular attention to the dynamics between spouses.

Constructing international relations: The role of transnational migrants and other non‐state actors

This article explores the relationship between states and transnational movements of people through the trope of diplomacy. A standard definition of diplomacy is the conduct of negotiations between nations. From the normative perspective, international migration lies within the jurisdiction of diplomacy—often precipitating diplomatic crises—but is not usually viewed as constitutive of diplomatic relations. Likewise, such migration is widely acknowledged as structured by colonial and neocolonial ties but is not often construed to structure, produce, or reproduce these ties. Lastly, diplomacy is generally seen as the domain of state agents or diplomats. What about non‐state actors such as migrants and even tourists? Can they also be agents in the construction and exercise of international relations? I will argue that transnational actors actually construct and affect the relationships between states, but that these relations have not been developed fully.

Diverse Pathways to Immigrant Political Incorporation Comparative Canadian and U.S. Perspectives

In both Canada and the United States, immigration is producing major demographic and sociocultural changes. Yet relatively little research has been devoted to the impact of immigration on each country’s political life. Even less attention has been paid to comparing the patterns of immigrant political participation in both countries. This has left underinvestigated a host of important questions about the body politic of Canada and the United States: Measured at national, urban, and community scales, do immigrants in the two countries become integrated into formal politics such as voting and running for elected office? Are they engaged in more informal political activities such as community and ethnic organizing? If so, then how do various immigrant communities mobilize politically, form agendas and alliances, express their voices, and expand their opportunities? As more countries and cities around the world become immigration destinations, there is much to be learned about creating inclusive political systems from the comparative experience of Canada and the United States illustrated in this volume.

Intimate Migrations: Gender, Family, and Illegality Among Transnational Mexicans. By Deborah A. Boehm (ed.). New York: New York University Press, 2012. 178 pages [plus 4 pages acknowledgements].

In this ethnography, anthropologist Deborah A. Boehm examines broad and important issues of how undocumented Mexicans manage to conduct their transnational lives in the face of sustained harassment by the U.S. government. Boehm begins her research in Albuquerque and then follows the migratory networks she detects to the small village or rancho San Marcos in the Mexican state of San Luis Potos ı. Boehm utilizes the richness of her ethnographic data to illustrate how living undocumented lives overshadowed by the hypervigilant and even tyrannical state inflects the very social glue that holds people together – the intimate bonds of family. This intimate side of migration is the book’s central focus: the day-to-day adjustments and negotiations between kin – spouses, parents and children, and other relatives of “extended” families – made all the more difficult owing to both the pressures of long-distance relationships and the stresses from a state and society that do not want them or care about their struggles. Boehm’s theoretical contribution is “to understand the nexus of intimate and state spheres,” and she sees her book as bridging scholarship “on gender, family, and migration with scholarship focused on the construction of (il)legality” (p. 13). In so doing, she joins, yet also expands upon, the work of such scholars as Nicholas De Genova, Susan Coutin, Mae Ngai, and Sarah Willen. Turning popular accusations that “illegal” immigrants alone are responsible for their situations and fates, these scholars collectively implicate states – particularly the U.S. government and, to a lesser extent, other countries and their states within – for structuring political and sociocultural statuses around (il)legality and belonging. Toward this end, Boehm weaves social and spatial concepts frequently discussed in anthropology and geography – such as home – into her writing, problematizing the connotation that home is a simple, unified place of belonging. Rather, for the Mexicans she studies, belonging is not simple; people talk about feeling that they don’t belong fully to one side or the other. “We are from both sides,” they insist, not fully from one side or the other. This is classic borderlands subjectivity, and Boehm links her subjects’ experiences nicely to this literature, aiding the book to speak to a diverse disciplinary audience. Moreover, the prose is exceedingly readable, full of first-hand stories and wonderfully “illustrative” quotes that truly capture her subjects’ perspectives and dilemmas. For example, in examining how gender is inflected by the fact that men migrate and women and children largely stay put, she quotes one woman as saying, “Without my husband, I do it all” (p. 81). The finding that with men largely absent, women occupy their past roles, and gain greater authority and autonomy is not new, but the quotations nail the point so perfectly that the findings seem new. Similarly, her discussion of how men both gain masculine status by migrating and feel emasculated while in the U.S., leading to hypermasculine performances abroad as well as when they return, is not completely new, yet Boehm pursues and captures such detail and ethnographic nuance that the material resonates more powerfully with me. While I find this book strongest in its detailed examinations of spousal dynamics and gendered lives, the last section of the book addresses how children, and not just their parents and other kin,

49.00 Cloth.

issues in Cuba, proponing a list of variables (largely historical) that should be considered in research. However, the model, like many of the other chapters, stands in isolation from a large body of existing research (both on and off the island) on racial inequalities and theories for conceptualizing race and racial dynamics themselves. Without such grounding the model appears superficial. Other chapters suffer from a similar lack of context, referencing, and research. He offers many statements and ideas that are both sensible and unobjectionable, but they are hardly new or particularly insightful in and of themselves (e.g. the need to include the study of racial issues at all levels of education). The impact of this book and these ideas gains significance in the context of the long silence on racial inequality on the island. Furthermore, as a black Cuban himself, the book can also be read as evidence of his own racial awakening in a country that has long espoused a color-blind approach to social equality. The gravest flaw in these essays is not the ideas presented but the fact that other Cuban scholars have been voicing such views since the early 1990s, though he gives only cursory attention to earlier research. In conclusion, for scholars with knowledge of the literature on historical and contemporary studies of race relations on the island, the book offers vital evidence that this topic is now open for discussion within powerful political circles in Cuba, and that Cuban academics no longer have to treat the topic as taboo. That, in and of itself, makes the book valuable. However, with the sketchy treatment of history, selective proclamations on race relations in Cuba today, and the lack of full references to research on race (by scholars on and off the island), the book presents a very partial picture and, thus, is ill-suited for those with little or no background knowledge of race relations in Cuba. For the well-versed scholar or student the book, as one of the few sources in English, gives an excellent overview of racial debates from the perspective of a black Cuban scholar, well-integrated into and supportive of the revolutionary political system.

American value: migrants, money, and meaning in El Salvador and the United States

Radcliffe, Sarah A. and Sallie Westwood, eds. ’Viva’: Women and Popular Protest in Latin America. London: Routledge, 1993. xiii + 270 pp. including collected notes, collected references, and index.

Contested terrain: Social change

49.95 cloth,

Gender Matters: Ethnographers Bring Gender from the Periphery toward the Core of Migration Studies

16.95 paper. Lyons Johnson, Patricia, ed. Balancing Acts: Women and the Process of Social Change. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. x +177 pp.

American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins

28.95 paper. Higgins, Michael James and Tanya Leigh Coen. Oigamel Oig‐ame! Struggle and Social Change in a Nicaraguan Urban Community. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. xiv + 184 pp. including collected bibliography.