December 2008, Francisco Villa, Michoacán, Mexico
Following the invitation from the coordinator of the Center for Assistance to Migrants (Centro de Atención al Migrante) of the municipal government of Zinapecuaro I attended a special event organized by Mexican government agencies together with Mexican migrant organizations in the state of Michoacán. The meeting in the Francisco Villa village was for the distribution of computers to local schools. The computers had been donated by Mexican migrant organizations from Chicago and the federal Ministry of Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública, SEP). When we arrived, Francisco Villa, a community of 1200 people, was deserted. Almost all the inhabitants were gathered at the event’s site, overlooking the Lago de Cuitzeo. A huge tarp was stretched as a canopy above a long stage with about ten seats; another hundred chairs were set up for spectators. In addition to the residents of Francisco Villa and the surrounding communities, officials of the SEP, the state government of Michoacán, the municipal government of Zinapecuaro, and representatives and students from the schools that were to benefit were present. Rubén, the president of the migrant organization from Chicago, the Federation of Michoacano Clubs in Illinois (Federación de Clubes Michoacanos en Illinois, FEDECMI), inaugurated the event with a speech about the importance of education. He claimed that the aim of the migrant organizations was to create better educational conditions for young people that would help them procure better local job opportunities so that they would no longer be forced to migrate to the USA. His speech was followed by speeches by the representatives of the SEP, and the municipal government, thanking the migrants for their initiative. Then the 500 computers were handed over ceremoniously to the school representatives. Finally, the event concluded with a fiesta in a huge festival hall owned by Rubén Sr. the father of the migrant leader. Barbacoa, a lamb dish from Michoacán, and drinks were served to all spectators and invitees.
Such public ceremonial inaugurations of projects initiated and co-funded by migrants are increasingly taking place in rural communities in Michoacán. They are expressions of the growing influence of migrant groups on the public life of their communities of origin. In these projects, which mostly cover infrastructure and social services, migrant leaders negotiate with representatives from the three levels of the Mexican government (municipal, state, and federal). During the inaugural celebrations, the close relationship between the government representatives and migrant civil society actors is publicly displayed. Public recognition of the political involvement of Mexican migrants is relatively recent in Mexico’s political system. For a long time Mexicans living abroad had been excluded from the Mexican national system as political subjects. Still the majority of the migrants kept their position as members of the local public life through remittances that they sent for public works. Recently, these remittances became the second-largest source of national income after the income from oil exports. In 2008, Mexican migrants living in the USA contributed $25 billion to the Mexican economy (Banco de México 2009). Initially, migrant contact with the comunidad de origen was still strongly influenced by the idea of returning to their country of origin. However, the migrants’ relation to their home communities changed over the decades. Once the majority of migrants remained permanently settled in the USA, stable transnational migration patterns formed and their interest to politically participate in their community and country of origin grew. Today, organized migrant groups in Chicago, and especially their leaders, are deeply involved in Mexican politics on the municipal level and, in recent years, on the regional and federal levels as well.
June 2009, Casa Michoacán, Chicago, USA
“Me siento en México estando en otro país/I feel like I am in Mexico although I am in another country,” declared the municipal president of Cuitzeo during a meeting in Casa Michoacán, the headquarters of the FEDECMI, located in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. It may seem unusual for a Mexican government official to go abroad to meet his constituents; however, this visit to Chicago by a local politician from Michoacán is by no means exceptional. In recent years, a large number of Michoacano municipal presidents have traveled to the USA in order to visit “their” migrant constituents. They negotiate the financial support for infrastructure projects at home and they discuss local elections in their home communities. Moreover, not only municipal presidents but also Mexican governors, party politicians, and federal congressional representatives visit Chicago regularly in order to meet with the leaders of Mexican migrant groups.
The proliferation of Mexican organizations in the USA in the last 20 years indicates that migrants not only remain socially engaged with their communities of origin but also create new forms of political cross-border organization. In Chicago, the recent political organization of Mexican migrants can be observed mainly on two levels. Currently, there are local groups affiliated with the three major Mexican parties—the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), and the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN). At the same time, an increasing number of Mexicans are involved in clubes (hometown associations) of their home communities and federaciones of their home states. With more than 270 clubs, 17 federations and the umbrella organization Confederation of Mexican Federations (Confederación de Federaciones Mexicanas, CONFEMEX), Chicago has more Mexican migrant organizations than any other US city, with the exception of Los Angeles.
At first glance, the growing foundation of local groups of Mexican political parties and migrant civil society organizations in the USA as well as their close relationship to their country of origin seems to be mainly motivated by the migrants’ nostalgia and can be seen as a factor that prevents their integration into US society. Research on migration has shown that migrants maintain intense ties to their countries of origin and build idealized images of their national background (Duyvendak 2011). In this study, however, it is assumed that the increasing political organization of Mexican migrant groups in the USA is not a sign of their one-sided focus on Mexico; instead these processes go hand in hand with a transnationalization of social and political action and contribute to the emergence of new political spaces. In addition to their membership in Mexican organizations, many of the politically engaged Mexicans are simultaneously engaged in US unions and political parties as well as in national Latino and immigrant organizations. Mexican migrant organizations from Chicago played an important role in the mass mobilization against the proposed restrictive changes to US immigration law in the spring of 2006. In December 2005, the US House of Representatives had approved a bill promoted by Republican Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner (Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act/ H.R. 4437) that included the enforcement of border security between Mexico and the USA, the abolition of the Green Card program, and the criminalization of all undocumented immigrants and of those who aid them. Casa Michoacán became a central place for the organization of protest marches.
Thus, migrant communities are increasingly perceived as political actors—not only by Mexican parties and government officials, but also in the US public sphere. It was the high level of participation by the Mexican migrant community in the struggle for comprehensive immigration reform in recent years that first attracted the attention of a wider public in the USA to the increasing organization of Mexican migrant groups. Although Latinos have been the largest minority group in the USA since the 1980s,1 it was not until the 2006 protest that the broad network of migrant organizations (organizations of Mexican migrants as clubs and federaciones, national Latino and immigrant organizations) became visible to the public; these organizations are seen as part of an emerging “migrant civil society” in the USA in recent years (Fox 2005; Bada et al. 2006). The political organization of Mexican migrants in the USA is accorded a growing political weight for the simple fact that they potentially represent the interests of 32 million Mexican-born people in the USA (Ennis et al. 2011).2 Still the magnitude of the protest surprised the American media; more importantly, it marked a pivotal moment in American political history (Avila and Martinez 2013; Swarns 2013; Quindlen 2013).
Research Focus
In this book I show that the new visibility of Mexican migrants’ political action in Mexican municipalities as well as in US cities is an expression of the increasing cross-border political organization that is taking place in multiple arenas of interaction and communication. The methodological and theoretical approach of my study starts at the local level: analyzing the involvement of Mexican migrants living in the USA and of actors in their communities of origin in diverse arenas. Initially, Mexican migrants in Chicago participate in translocal arenas: as members of migrant organizations (clubes and federaciones) they interact with members of their communities of origin and with local government authorities in collective support projects. These translocal interactions are based on networks of social relations and lead to the formation of so-called transnational communities (Faist 2006; Velasco Ortiz 1998).
However, the migrants’ transborder involvement does not remain at the local level: starting from the political position which they establish in their communities of origin through their translocal projects, they speak up for their rights at the federal and national political levels; this is the context of their struggle for immigration reform in the USA and their demand for the right to vote in Mexican elections (absentee ballot). As a result, migrant leaders become politically active in local affiliates of the Mexican parties as well as in broader civil society and immigrant organizations in Chicago. Through their involvement in these organizations, migrant leaders combine various political arenas and enter into relationships with politicians and government officials in Mexico and the USA.3 Meanwhile, Mexican government officials and representatives of all three major political parties seek direct contact with Mexican migrant organizations in the USA; and US politicians are increasingly aware of the political practices of Mexican migrant organizations and include them in their political agenda. My study focuses on the intertwining of the different arenas in which the migrant community interacts with actors from their communities of origin, with politicians and government agencies on both sides of the border, and with other US civil society organizations. In these arenas, activities, concerns, and networks of political engagement overlap, along with political-institutional, sociopolitical, and civil society forms of organization. These arenas of political interaction and communication cannot be explored on a purely political-institutional level (by research on political parties, elections, or government institutions), but can only be understood by using ethnographic and interview-based studies to analyze political actions of social actors at the local level. The resulting insight into the multifaceted engagement of local social actors opens a new perspective on “the political” in transnational spaces. In this book I trace the emergence of transnational political spaces based on the analysis of the intertwining arenas of political interaction and communication. These arenas are clearly situated within nation-states, particularly at the local and regional levels—such as within the communities in Michoacán, within the Chicago metropolitan area, and within the state of Illinois. At the same time, they represent community, solidarity, and simultaneity between a “here” and a “there” that transcend the nation-state and its cultural boundaries.
Chicago and Michoacán as Central Places of Migrants’ Political Involvement
Chicago has been chosen as a research site because it has been a stronghold of Mexican migrant political participation in recent years. Before that, Los Angeles had been the stronghold of political activism of Mexican migrants ever since the Chicano movement of the 1960s. In a joint publication with Xóchitl Bada and Judith Boruchoff, I point out the virtually unexplored role of Chicago as a new political center of Mexican migrant organizations (Bada et al. 2013). The panorama of Chicago’s Mexican migrant organizations is broad: it ranges from civil society organizations (clubes, federaciones), chapters of Mexican political parties, to institutions of the Mexican government. The new attention to the political organization of migrants in Chicago by Mexican politicians cannot be overlooked: the communication and interaction of migrant organizations with Mexican government officials and party politicians—as mentioned earlier—has become an everyday practice in Chicago. Yet, beyond their Mexico-centered political activities, migrant organizations have increasingly addressed the US public sphere in the recent years. Ever since the first marches for comprehensive immigration reform in 2006, Chicago has become a center of Mexican migrant political activity in the USA (Flores-González and Pallares 2010).
Mexican migrant organizations can look back on a long history of social movements and political protest in Chicago. To understand the social conditions of their political activities, it is important to consider the interplay of the city’s migration history (of people from different countries) and its integration policy since the beginning of the twentieth century. In the famous book The City, the Chicago School sociologists Robert E. Park, Er...