Awards

• Winner of Winner of the 2019 American Political Science Association Best Book in Latino Politics Award.

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780190879372

Table of Contents

Reviews

The book adds a new layer to critiques of citizenship...Written with passion and references to a wide range of materials, including songs, Mexican proverbs, and personal experiences, Felix's study weaves in the politics and the poetics of belonging, giving his analysis a depth and complexity that are much needed in transnational studies. -- Perspectives on Politics The life cycle is an evocative metaphor to capture the changing nature of migrant politics...By definition, life cycles conclude with death, and Felix pays attention to the choices migrants make around end-of-life rituals...Those choices are spiritual and personal, but they are also deeply political...by calling attention to migrant tenacity, he draws readers' attention to the many barriers to acting or feeling transnationally that migrants struggle against and shows how they do so at an intimate scale. -- Boom California ...Felix provides a riveting ethnographic account that grounds new conceptual frameworks and methodologies for studying not only political membership of Mexican migrants but also transnationality...The book thus serves as both poetic narrative and political analysis...Concepts such as diasporic dialectics spring organically from these ethnographic encounters and from the words and practices of his research participants...The strength of this book comes from the author's intimate understanding of shifting, multifaceted borders...the important part of the research is in fact the 'accompaniment,' the use of ethnography to break down the very borders the author is interrogating, including those across the academic/activist divide. -- Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 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, Adrian Felix's 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 Adrian Felix sheds new light on the transnational political life of Mexican immigrants. In a uniquely poetic voice, Felix 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, Adrian Felix puts the flesh back on the bones of that dehumanizing fiction, the economic migrant. In lyrical, deeply researched ethnographic and political analysis, Felix 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 I refuse to romanticize what too many academics and activists do. And that's why Specters of Belonging is so important. Felix remains remarkably clear-eyed about a subject and people in which he has an admitted vested interest...He literally sees the idea of Mexican transnationalism to the graves of jerezanos buried back in the motherland ....Felix joins a long list of zacatecanos/as in American letters.... We all, in our own way, deal with the visage of a past we can never return to but which we can't help but to keep alive. Felix takes it to the next step by capturing the efforts of our courageous, damned paisanos. -Gustavo Arellano, from the Foreword

With this luminous study, AdriA!n FA (c)lix puts the flesh back on the bones of that dehumanizing fiction, the economic migrant. In lyrical, deeply researched ethnographic and political analysis, FA (c)lix 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 * The political engagement of international migrants remains a key social issue, and in this beautifully crafted study, political scientist AdriA!n FA (c)lix sheds new light on the transnational political life of Mexican immigrants. In a uniquely poetic voice, FA (c)lix 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 * 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, AdriA!n FA (c)lixas 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 *

"""In addition to its scholarly value, this book will be useful for policy makers interested in how immigration policies can make participation in civic lives on both sides of the border easier and more robust. Félix's work is both timely and necessary."" -- Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics ""The book adds a new layer to critiques of citizenship...Written with passion and references to a wide range of materials, including songs, Mexican proverbs, and personal experiences, Félix's study weaves in the politics and the poetics of belonging, giving his analysis a depth and complexity that are much needed in transnational studies."" -- Perspectives on Politics ""The life cycle is an evocative metaphor to capture the changing nature of migrant politics...By definition, life cycles conclude with death, and Félix pays attention to the choices migrants make around end-of-life rituals...Those choices are spiritual and personal, but they are also deeply political...by calling attention to migrant tenacity, he draws readers' attention to the many barriers to acting or feeling transnationally that migrants struggle against and shows how they do so at an intimate scale."" -- Boom California ""...Félix provides a riveting ethnographic account that grounds new conceptual frameworks and methodologies for studying not only political membership of Mexican migrants but also transnationality...The book thus serves as both poetic narrative and political analysis...Concepts such as diasporic dialectics spring organically from these ethnographic encounters and from the words and practices of his research participants...The strength of this book comes from the author's intimate understanding of shifting, multifaceted borders...the important part of the research is in fact the 'accompaniment,' the use of ethnography to break down the very borders the author is interrogating, including those across the academic/activist divide."" -- Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies ""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 Félix's 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 ""I refuse to romanticize what too many academics and activists do. And that's why Specters of Belonging is so important. Félix remains remarkably clear-eyed about a subject and people in which he has an admitted vested interest...He literally sees the idea of Mexican transnationalism to the graves of jerezanos buried back in the motherland ....Félix joins a long list of zacatecanos/as in American letters.... We all, in our own way, deal with the visage of a past we can never return to but which we can't help but to keep alive. Félix takes it to the next step by capturing the efforts of our courageous, damned paisanos."" -Gustavo Arellano, from the Foreword"

The political engagement of international migrants remains a key social issue, and in this beautifully crafted study, political scientist AdriA!n FA (c)lix sheds new light on the transnational political life of Mexican immigrants. In a uniquely poetic voice, FA (c)lix 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 * 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, AdriA!n FA (c)lixas 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 *

Author Information

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

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