Politics Without Borders or Postmodern Nationality Mexican

10.1177/0094582X02250628ARTICLELATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES Santamaría Gómez / POLITICS WITHOUT BORDERS

Politics Without Bordersor Postmodern Nationality

Mexican Immigration to the United Statesby

Arturo Santamaría GómezTranslated by James Zackrison

Mexican immigration to the United States, the most persistent social con-stant in the history of the relationship between the two nation-states, has beenviewed from the Mexican perspective as a relationship predominantly if notalmost exclusively labor/economic-based.1 From this perspective, it is diffi-cult to recognize a more diverse and deeply rooted reality and even more dif-ficult to understand the reality within which Mexicans in the United Stateslive.

The Mexican immigrants—men, women, and children—who, for a cen-tury and a half, have passed back and forth over the border between theUnited States and Mexico are more than simply a workforce “dumped” fromthe labor market in Mexico and “sucked” into the North American labor mar-ketplace. In reality, they represent an integrated social system based on anaccumulation of experiences and understandings, the by-product of anadmittedly diverse national culture that has reproduced itself on both sides ofthe border. It has naturally and inevitably absorbed the influences of the dom-inant cultures in which people find themselves immersed, though not to thesame degree in all instances or circumstances. Job opportunities are part ofthis accumulation of experiences and understandings, but alongside of thesefactors there have always existed modes of socialization, political culture,language, traditions, customs, habits, family structures, and so forth. In otherwords, some Mexicans have moved to the United States permanently, bring-ing with them their entire national background. Mexican immigration to theUnited States has reproduced or reconstructed the Mexican nationalityalready in formation north of the Río Bravo prior to 1848.

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Arturo Santamaría Gómez teaches at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa and is a participat-ing editor of Latin American Perspectives. James Zackrison spent many years as a professor ofreligious education in Medellín and is currently world director of religious education for the Sev-enth-day Adventist Church.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 129, Vol. 30 No. 2, March 2003 274-294DOI: 10.1177/0094582X02250628© 2003 Latin American Perspectives

Mexican immigration to the United States after 1848—sometimes barelyperceptible, sometimes tumultuous—did not happen for economic reasonsalone. Other reasons were political (exile and the search for alliances), social(reunification of the family), or strictly cultural (a tradition of emigration).2

At certain times, the economic factor has been the most highly visible of thedynamics of the immigration scene, for example, in the gold rush in San Fran-cisco in 1849, the construction of railroads in the Southwest in the 1880s, andthe economic expansion following World War II from which the bracero pro-gram (1942–1964) emerged. During the period of the French invasion ofMexico and the Mexican revolution of 1910, political and social factors weremost prominent. At the end of the twentieth century, beginning with the eco-nomic crisis of the 1980s, all these factors—economic, political, social, andcultural—came together, though the economic predominated. The complexframework of factors that has always motivated Mexican immigration to theUnited States has contributed to the creation of a unique reality for millions ofpeople—bi- or transnationality.

Mexican immigration to the United States, particularly to the Southwest,has had a cultural and social niche that has sheltered it in spite of the tradi-tional contradictions with the Mexican-American population that has residedin the territories of New Mexico and Texas since the seventeenth century andCalifornia and Arizona since the eighteenth. In the second half of the nine-teenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the Mexican population inthe cities of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas was larger than thatof the Mexican cities across the border. At least until 1910, there were moreMexicans living in the Southwestern United States, born on both sides of theborder, than in the Mexican border states (see McWilliams, 1976: 63).

From 1848 onward, approximately 75,000 Mexicans (7,500 in California,ca. 60,000 in New Mexico, ca. 1,000 in Arizona, and ca. 5,000 in Texas) weretransformed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo into full U.S. citizens, atleast officially (McWilliams, 1976: 52). Independent of the fact that most ofthe treaty was not honored, this community, though small and not entirelyculturally and politically homogeneous, became, from the year of the annex-ation onward, the protecting mantle of the Mexican-born population that con-tinued moving to “the North” (El Norte).

Even in the face of the legal establishment of the new border betweenMexico and the United States, the isolation of the new southwestern NorthAmericans and the northern Mexicans in reality made the geographic divi-sion invisible. The lack of a border patrol (established only in 1924) contrib-uted to the fact that the border could be crossed without major complications.Prior to the Mexican revolution of 1910, there was no surveillance of any kindalong the Mexican-American border. Between 1911 and 1924, only four

Santamaría Gómez / POLITICS WITHOUT BORDERS 275

mounted border guards patrolled 2,000 miles of frontier (McWilliams, 1976:62). George J. Sánchez (1993: 61), in Becoming Mexican-American, states:

Indeed, the modern version of the border was created during the first threedecades of the twentieth century. It became a much more rigid line of demarca-tion as the intricate economic relationship between Mexican labor and Ameri-can capital was perpetuated through the labor recruitment agents. Here immi-gration officials, through their inspection of new arrivals and the enforcementof laws barring illegal entry, made it clear that passage across this barrier in thedesert was a momentous occasion, a break from the past. . . . Ironically, it was inthis period of transition that the term “alien” first began to be applied to theMexicans in the Southwest.

When Mexican immigration became a massive and consistent flow ofmanpower fully incorporated into the dominant and modern socioeconomicstructures of U.S. capital and the population of Mexican origin became partof the visible landscape of Southern California, the Anglo-Saxon populationand the U.S. government began to establish a marked ethnic separation of theMexican population, independent of place of origin, whether north or southof the border. Beginning with the immigration period launched by the revolu-tion of 1910, the Mexican roots of the Southwest suddenly blossomed andwere enhanced by the new flow of immigrants. The waves of immigrationspawned south of the Río Bravo reinforced the Mexican cultural presencethat had not disappeared even after six decades of the new Anglo-Saxonhegemony. For the Anglo-Saxon Americans, the fact that the population bornin the United States of Mexican origin had not abandoned many of the fea-tures of its original cultural background meant that the Mexican-Americansas well as the immigrants were “foreigners.”

The fact that the current border between the United States and Mexico hadonce been Mexican territory established a fundamental feature of the migra-tion from south to north of the frontier—the ethnic/national base that natu-rally accompanied this flow of humanity. The labor market could not in itselfbring about such massive and continuous immigration. Family and extended-family relationships, social organizations, political communities, language,religion, and cultural identity (food, music, dress, celebrations, traditions,customs, literature, and so forth) were natural conduits for migration fromsouth to north of the separated nation that the legal division could notfragment.

Although not all of the populace living in California, Arizona, Texas, andabove all New Mexico prior to 1848 identified with Mexican nationality, themere fact of sharing language, religion, customs, traditions, and racial char-acteristics with the immigrants from the south built a cultural and racial bond,

276 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

especially at the beginning of the twentieth century with the establishment ofAnglo-Saxon domination.

The Mexican population born in California, Arizona, Texas, and NewMexico before 1848 and those who arrived later began living a dual,bicultural, ambivalent binational reality. Binationality was a reality for bothgroups even though it was not legally recognized by either the United Statesor Mexico. Spanish was the predominant language of the Mexican communi-ties in the North American southwest from the time of the annexation until atleast the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1921. The newspapers producedby the people in the Mexican communities themselves were in Spanish,Catholicism was the predominant religion, the mutual-benefit societies,clubs, and labor unions organized by Mexican workers were given Spanishnames, often those of Mexican heroes, the most celebrated patriotic festivalswere September 15 and May 5, and the primary political interests were thoserelating to Mexico. The conclusion is unavoidable, therefore, that in spite ofhaving been born or having immigrated to the United States, the predominantnationality of these groups was Mexican.

POLITICS WITHOUT BORDERS

The end of the Mexican Revolution and the beginning of the regime thatarose from it were historical landmarks for Mexico and for the Mexican pop-ulation of the United States, including those born north of the border. From1848 onward, armed conflict had itself caused extensive immigration ofMexicans to the north across the Río Bravo. It had also awakened the mostextensive and ardent political participation by Mexican-Americans andimmigrants in the southwestern United States (Sánchez, 1993).

Between 1848 and 1921, it was only during the Juárez and Porfirian peri-ods that the Mexican government involved itself deeply in issues involving itsconationals in the United States as it did during the revolutionary period ofthe new regime. The imminence of the Napoleonic invasion of Mexico andthe organization of the anti-French resistance had driven Benito Juárez toseek support from Washington and the Mexican population of the Southwest.By the twentieth century, after the Mexican Revolution and nearly 75 yearsafter the annexation of what had been northern Mexico, the role of the newstate emerging south of the Río Bravo and the new political culture arisingfrom it changed its relationship with its compatriots of the “other Mexico.”

The Mexican government, now led by the politically revolutionary factionand focused on building a new legitimacy, clearly perceived that its objec-tives for the organization of Mexican civil society should extend beyond the


northern border. The revolutionaries in power had not forgotten that Mexi-cans from the United States had played an essential role in the acquisition ofmilitary backing, propaganda, the gathering of financial resources, politicallobbying in Washington, and the recruitment of men and women for theMagonistas, Reyistas, Villistas, and Maderistas (Gómez Quiñonez, 1983:421). Simultaneous with the Mexican Revolution a strong nationalism withpopulist tendencies had emerged that pushed the new government to act inunprecedented ways even beyond its borders. For the first time in history, theMexican people in the United States, in concert with the Mexican govern-ment through its consulates, organized the official celebration of September15 that the government used to portray itself symbolically as the only legiti-mate representative of the nation.

Nevertheless, this context, apropos of these celebrations of independence,gave birth to a gradual ideological and political—and to a certain extent cul-tural—estrangement of the Mexican-American elite from the Mexican state.A fundamental reason was that by 1921, in contrast to the situation in theJuárist and even the Porfirist period, during which Mexican-American lead-ers had been born under the Mexican flag, the majority had been born andeducated in the United States.

In Los Angeles, California, the Hispanic-American Society, made up ofpeople from the California community itself, had traditionally celebratedindependence holidays, but beginning in 1921 the Mexican consulates begandebating the question of “Mexican patriotism.” Sánchez (1993: 109)describes this debate as marking a true parting of the ways between the Mexi-can-Americans and the Mexican immigrants:

This tension revealed the increased presence of Mexican consulate officials inthe cultural life of Mexican immigrants in the United States. . . . By the onset ofthe Depression, it became obvious that the interests of the Mexican govern-ment were not always identical to that of large segments of the immigrant andnative-born Mexican population.

By the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, between the gov-ernments of Plutarco Elías Calles and Lázaro Cárdenas, when the new regimewas consolidating itself through the formation of the “official” party (PartidoNacional Revolucionario–Partido Revolucionario Mexicano), the Mexicanstate attempted to organize labor unions in the north similar to those south ofthe border. In contrast, however, to what was happening in Mexico, where theCardenistas formed an alliance with the Communist party, the Mexican rep-resentatives in California were in confrontation with the Communist party inthe organization of Mexican workers. According to González (1994: 189),


The evidence indicates that the consulates, within their spheres of influence,sought participation in the political affairs of the United States through provid-ing a prominent bulwark against working class radicalism. . . . In the final anal-ysis, the Mexican consul played a major role in California’s labor struggles ofthe 1930s through fomenting the spread of conservative labor unions andengaging in union busting, especially against unions led by the Communistparty but also against those of the noncommunist leftists.

The most remarkable revelation of González’s historical study is that theMexican state attempted to reproduce its political culture and corporatestructures in the Mexican communities in the United States. It is clear, how-ever, that nationalism was a larger consideration than the political ideology ofthe new government; Mexico’s agreement with the Communists did not holdtrue north of the border among the American-born.

In spite of the fact that in the United States, in contrast to Mexico, the con-sulates challenged the leftist organizations attempting to organize workersfrom south of the border, the consulates of the revolutionary government (50in 1930) involved themselves in the immigrant and Mexican-American com-munities more than at any other time in Mexican history. But just as the revo-lution reached a climax south of the Río Bravo during the Cárdenas adminis-tration (1934–1940) and then began to decline, the transnational Mexicansociety in the United States reached its zenith and began to decline during thesame period. This was not only because of the influence of the assorted ideol-ogies and political ideas that developed within the revolutionary regime itselfafter the departure of Lázaro Cárdenas but also because of an even strongerinfluence, the internal dynamics of North American society itself. The greatcrisis of 1929 and its repercussions for immigration in fact brought to an endthe political, social, and cultural involvement of the Mexican state during itsvarious periods (Juárist, Porfirist, revolutionary) and forms (liberal-oligar-chic, revolutionary-corporate) among the Mexican-Americans and Mexicanimmigrants in the United States.

What Chicano and North American historians have called “the GreatRepatriation” marked a profound historical cutoff point in relations betweenthe Mexican government, Mexican-Americans, and Mexican immigrants. Inreality, it generated the withdrawal of the Mexican government’s promulga-tion of any Mexican transnationalism in the United States. The response ofthe Mexican government to this repatriation was to pull back into its own ter-ritory. In 1936, the Cárdenas government instituted a program of coloniza-tion of underpopulated areas with expelled Mexicans. The majority of thereturnees, however, went back to their states of origin and later reemigrated tothe United States (Castillo and Ríos Bustamente, 1989: 235).


The expulsion of the Mexican immigrants showed that as far as NorthAmerica was concerned, the United States was an ethno-national unit.According to Sánchez (1993: 250), “When the local officials encouraged allChicanos to return to Mexico or fired Mexican Americans from jobs withimpunity, repatriation made clear that Mexican ethnicity, rather than citizen-ship status, defined the Chicano experience in Los Angeles.”

In reality, it was not only the U.S. government that looked upon the Mexi-can-Americans and Mexican immigrants as being a single ethnic group. TheMexican government did the same. The family, cultural, labor, educational,and social realities shared by most of the Mexicans born in the United Statesand the immigrants arriving from south of the Río Bravo created that ambiva-lence. However, it was precisely the repatriation of the 1930s that ended thecross-border involvement of the Mexican government with the Mexican-Americans and the immigrant Mexicans. From that point on, the governmentborn of the revolution stopped involving itself in labor unions and politicallife and reduced its cultural presence in the Mexican communities of theUnited States. It was not until the beginning of the 1970s that it reestablishedrelationships, though necessarily in different forms, with the “other Mexico.”After five generations in the United States, the historical circumstances ofMexican-Americans were very different.

THE NEW ENCOUNTER OF MEXICO AND AZTLÁN

It was in the context of the Chicano movement that individuals of Mexicandescent born in the United States became the preeminent and most constantdefenders of the Mexican immigrant communities, in fact replacing the con-sulates. Faced with the literal withdrawal or mere facade of the Mexican gov-ernment’s involvement in the defense and/or organization of the immigrants,the Chicanos became the most unyielding and imaginative re-creators andpromoters of Mexican nationality in the United States. In this new social rela-tionship, then-president Luis Echeverría saw in the Chicanos the bulwark andleadership for Mexicans north of the border and political allies in the difficultrelationships with the U.S. government and North American society.

Chicano organizations such as the Partido de la Raza Unida (United RazaParty—PRU) and the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (AutonomousCenter for Social Action—CASA) were engaged in a “pan-Mexican dia-logue,” in the words of the Chicano historian Juan Gómez Quiñonez, thatspoke to the aspirations of the most radically nationalistic sectors of the Chi-cano movement. For them, Mexico and Aztlán were two territories of theGreat Homeland divided geopolitically by the United States in 1848. José


Angel Gutiérrez, leader of the PRU, said in 1975 (quoted in Santamaría,1994: 60):

Chicanos should not turn toward Wall Street or Washington to find their des-tiny. Our destiny is the south with people like ourselves. . . . We are a familywithout borders, we are a family without orphans. I’ll remind you in case youhave forgotten that we are not children of the Immaculate Conception or of theStatue of Liberty. We are the children of Mexicans.

In the newspaper Sin Fronteras, the propaganda instrument of CASA,Antonio Rodríguez, one of the younger leaders, wrote (quoted in Santamaría,1994: 61): “The position of CASA-HGT is that Mexicans in the UnitedStates, born north or south of the border forced upon us, are part of the sameMexican nationality. We are against the position that those born in the UnitedStates form part of another nationality, the so-called Chicano nationality.”The same edition of Sin Fronteras reaffirmed “the position that the Mexicanpopulation residing in the United States is part of the same nationality as the65,000,000 Mexicans who reside south of the United States–Mexican bor-der.” Even though these ideological postures, similar to those of other smallerand more radical Chicano organizations such as the National LiberationMovement had no major political impact in the Mexican communities in theUnited States, they did demonstrate a pan-Mexican ideological vision thathad remained alive since 1848 in some intellectual and social sectors north ofthe Río Bravo.

Both the more radical organizations of the Chicano movement that gener-ally moved in confrontational rather than institutional political circles and theHispanics and/or Mexican-Americans who worked within an institutionalframework considered exercising their rights as citizens, including in the firstplace political activity, part of the natural course of things in the UnitedStates. Therefore, the Chicano groups above all feel that their relation withMexico must be one of solidarity or alliance but not intervention in internalmatters. With the exception of some very small Chicano groups such as theParty of the United Poor of America, which during the 1970s backed Mexi-can guerrillas with arms, money, and public relations exposure (Santamaría,1994: 65), the descendants of Mexicans in the United States have not beendirectly involved in political activities south of the Río Bravo since the revo-lution of 1910. Nevertheless, the opinion of some groups of Mexican immi-grants in the United States began to take a different shape from that of theChicanos and Hispanics at the beginning of the 1980s, when they publiclyclaimed for the first time their right to vote in Mexican elections from NorthAmerican soil (Santamaría, 1994: 158).


DUAL NATIONALITY OR DUAL CITIZENSHIP?

Without being widely or massively discussed among Mexican immigrantsin the United States, the demand for expatriate voting rights in Mexican elec-tions has been demonstrated to be a latent desire of the more politically activesectors. In the symbolic voting of Mexicans north of the border on July 6,1988, and August 21, 1994, more than 10,000 Mexican citizens cast theirvotes in various cities in California, Texas, and Illinois (Santamaría, 1994:173–179). The first paragraph of a mimeographed document of the MexicanFront in Chicago, Illinois, signed by Rogelio Reyes in March 1994 (RossPineda, 1994: 1), reads:

The struggle for the right to vote is a legitimate struggle for Mexicans in theUnited States and should be considered as a necessary part of the democratictransformation in general in Mexico. Various groups of activists in variousstates of the United States are united around the idea that to hold citizenshipelections north of the border would be the best campaign that we could conductat this particular time in favor of voting rights foor Mexicans outside of Mex-ico.

As early as in 1929, the program of the California delegation to the con-vention of the National Anti-Reelection Party in Mexico City included ademand that the government of Emilio Portes Gil concede all rights and obli-gations of citizens to Mexicans living in the United States (Santamaría, 1994:341–342). Nevertheless, neither on this occasion nor during the 1970s and1980s, when the Mexican left wing presented the same issue in the MexicanRepublic, was there any constitutional change in response to the demand. Upuntil December 1996, the matter of giving the vote to Mexican expatriatesdivided Mexican political parties, and these political differences directlyinvolved Mexican activists in the United States and Mexican-American polit-ical leaders. As a result of the political reform agreed upon that year, thesedifferences were resolved.

In contrast to the request for the vote by those living abroad, the matter ofdual nationality for Mexicans in the United States was practically unknownin Mexico until the Mexican government itself broached the subject in thechapter “Precedence of the National Development Plan” (Soberanía del PlanNacional de Desarrollo) in May 1995 (Díaz de Cossío, 1995: 3): “The Mexi-can nation is broader than the territory within its borders. Therefore, anessential element of the program “Mexican Nation” plan will be to promoteconstitutional and legal reforms so that the Mexicans may preserve theirnationality, independent of the citizenship or resident status they may haveadopted.” The first line of this declaration could easily have been signed by


even the most radical nationalist or supranationalist elements of the Chicanomovement. In fact, the motto of many of them was precisely “Patria SinFronteras” (Homeland Without Borders). By the same token, at the end of thetwentieth century and even in the remote past, “sin fronteras” appeared in allkinds of publications and in the community and cultural centers of the variousChicano groups. Roger Díaz de Cossío, director of the Program for MexicanCommunities Abroad, in his presentation to a colloquium organized by theInstitute of Investigations of the Chamber of Deputies regarding dual nation-ality, categorized the statement in the National Development Plan as an“important announcement” and added (1995: 3):

The Mexican nation, the Mexican cultural community, is made up of all thoseof Mexican descent in the world, some of whom live in our country, sovereignand independent Mexico, and some in other countries of the world. Of this lat-ter group, the vast majority is concentrated in the United States and representsabout 20 percent of the total. In round numbers, the Mexican nation is made up,in 1995, of 90 million people who live in Mexico and another 20 million wholive in the United States.

Here, however, Díaz de Cossío does not make a distinction between theapproximately 5 million who have retained their Mexican nationality and cit-izenship and the other 15 million who were born in the United States or havebecome U.S. citizens.

These definitions by the Mexican government presented in the NationalDevelopment Plan and by Díaz de Cossío, a kind of ambassador to the Mexi-can communities in the United States, have never become the subjects ofanalyses by specialists in relations with the United States, political leaders, ornews analysts. Careful consideration in the contemporary context of Mexico/United States relationships makes them appear very audacious. ConservativeU.S. politicians and ideologues would consider the Gran Patria Mexicanaovertly interventionist, just as they classified the actions of the Mexican con-sul in Los Angeles, José Angel Pescador, when in May 1995 he criticized theactions of the Los Angeles police toward Mexican and Central Americanimmigrants. Nevertheless, this definition of the Mexican nation as includingall Mexican-Americans does not seem to have any objective beyond forti-fying the commercial and cultural links between Mexico and Mexican-Americans and Hispanics in general and reinforcing the electoral presence ofMexican-American politicians.

Díaz de Cossío proposed to the colloquium on dual nationality that inorder to accomplish the true integration into the nation of Mexicans in theUnited States it would be necessary to modify the Mexican Constitution,Article 37, Section 1, where it says that Mexican nationality is lost when a



person voluntarily adopts a different nationality. The proposal of Díaz deCossío, various Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolu-tionary party—PRI) deputies, and the National Development Plan itself wasthat Mexicans who became citizens of the United States could retain theirMexican nationality, with full rights to own property but no political rights—that is, no Mexican citizenship per se: “This way, the 5 million Mexicannationals who live in the United States could decide with less difficultywhether to choose United States citizenship or not, without concerns for theirproperties or those of their family members in Mexico” (Díaz de Cossío,1995: 3).

The Partido de la Revolucionario Democrático (Democratic Revolution-ary party—PRD) is the Mexican political party most insistent on allowingvoting abroad as a right included in dual citizenship. The PRD deputyCuauhtémoc Sandoval (1995: 5) upheld this position at the colloquium:

For the past fifteen years co-nationality groups holding legal residence in theUnited States have requested that the Mexican government activate the legalmodifications necessary for dual nationality. . . . Therefore, the proposal of thePRD is all-inclusive, since these rights cannot be mutilated or segregated: dualnationality and dual citizenship.

Through negotiations, both these ideas were eventually accepted. The twolaws are not complementary. The PRI version is directed toward Mexicanswho have chosen U.S. citizenship, while the PRD is intended to includeundocumented aliens and U.S. citizens. The main reason for the sudden shiftin the PRI and the Partido de Acción Nacional (National Action party—PAN)that led to the adoption of legislation on the nonrenunciability of Mexicannationality was based on the anti-immigrant policies that surfaced in 1993 inCalifornia governor Pete Wilson’s Proposal 187. According to RafaelAlarcón and Jesús Martínez (1995): “Proposition 187 shook the Mexicansliving in California and the deputies in Los Pinos [Mexico’s presidential resi-dence]. There is no other way to explain the rapidity with which the Mexicancongress initiated the discussion on the possibility of ‘dual nationality’ or‘irrenunciable citizenship.’ ”

The proposal for dual nationality by the PDR and the PRD (whichincludes political rights) reflects distinct historical and judicial views andpolitical interests. It is not the work of ideologues, social researchers, or poli-ticians but simply the result of cultural and political traditions and the imme-diate experiences of Mexican immigrants in the United States. The demandfor the right to vote abroad arose among militant Perredistas in the UnitedStates. It is a natural continuation of the long-standing Mexican political

culture north of the Río Bravo in which events taking place in the immigrants’country of origin have been of greater political interest than what is happen-ing in the United States.

It is paradoxical that, of all the Mexican communities, it is the one with themost recent migrations, Oaxaca, that has given rise to one of the organiza-tions that most clearly understands its transstate and transnational character.The Frente Indígena Oaxaqueña Binacional (Oaxacan Indigenous BinationalFront—FIOB), founded in September 1994, has most clearly and consis-tently demonstrated this transnationalism in its social and political activismin the United States. Rufino Dominguez Santos, vice coordinator of the FIOB(quoted by Martínez, 1998: 5), wrote to the Los Angeles newspaper LaOpinión as follows:

The indigenous population of Oaxaca has for many years practiced dual citi-zenship without complications or fear of confronting any real problem. Manyreturn every year to govern our people in elected offices and continue to coop-erate in the tequio [collective community work], and this gives us the right tocall ourselves citizens where we were born, where we live, and where all ourdead return to us.

Differing from the FIOB and the PRD, with their clearly political objec-tives, the Mexican clubs in the United States, formed with a few exceptionsduring the past four decades of the twentieth century, broke with the traditionshaped north of the Río Bravo between 1848 and 1937 that made them theprincipal vehicles of political relations with government, revolutionarymovements, and Mexican political parties. Carlos González Gutiérrez (1995:61), former consul for community relations in Los Angeles, summarizes themore visible features of these clubs in recent years: “The activities of theclubs and federations . . . represent the interests and articulate the demands oftheir union members before those who remain in their communities of ori-gin—municipal authorities, state and federal Mexican governments, and, to alesser degree, the civil society and the local authorities in the cities wherethey live.” Even though these clubs did not carry on consistent or openly par-tisan political activities in relevant political situations such as the presidentialelections of 1988 and 1994 or the negotiations of the free-trade treaty, numer-ous clubs (in Los Angeles, San Jose, and Chicago, at least) openly backed thePRI and the Mexican government with newspaper ads, letters to the editor,and various types of meetings. The Mexican political system has inevitablyreproduced in the Mexican clubs in the United States the same mechanismsof corporate relationships established with social organizations south of theborder. Through the consulates and state and municipal governments, they


politicked for the PRI in many activities. Financial and material resourcesflow from the Mexican clubs in the United States to their towns and villagesof origin.

The new situation created by California’s Proposition 187 motivated thou-sands of Mexicans as never before in history to seek U.S. citizenship in orderto vote in U.S. elections. This need for legal residency in the United States didnot, however, eliminate their desire to participate in Mexican elections aswell, as was best expressed by the PRD militants in Los Angeles during a tourfrom California to Mexico City in April 1995 and on various other occasions(Santamaría, 1995).

The supranational declaration published by the Mexican government inthe National Development Plan appeared to return to the strong nationalisticpolitics and ideological definitions maintained during the 1920s and 1930s,but in contrast to the situation in the past, when the revolutionary govern-ments understood how a political ideology and a current pressing need couldbecome involved in the life of the Mexican immigrants in the United States,in 1995 the government of Ernesto Zedillo in effect was reacting defensivelyto the chauvinistic and conservative anti-immigration political establishmentin the United States openly led by the Republican party. Given that it had noprecedent, at least in the past 50 years, this sudden policy shift can be viewedas a response to the pressure produced by the social and economic restructur-ing of the United States toward the end of the century.

Although Proposition 187 was exclusively Californian and its constitu-tionality called into question, from the very moment of its formal launchingin 1993 it had negative effects on the well-being of immigrants in Californiaand other states. The Mexican government was defenseless against the newU.S. immigration policies. Its relative weakness vis-à-vis that of the UnitedStates limited its ability to have a chapter on migration included in the NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement and to prevent the introduction of immigra-tion laws such as Proposition 187. Lacking the social and political power ofthe revolutionary state of the 1920s and 1930s and the nationalistic populistideology that gave it legitimacy and moved it forward, the Mexican state, asreformulated by the neoliberal modernizers of the 1980s and 1990s, discov-ered that allying itself with the political and entrepreneurial Mexican-Ameri-can elite in proposing the adoption of dual nationality was in reality its onlyrecourse. Thus, the defense of the interests of immigrants was left to theUnited States, since it would be U.S. citizens and not Mexican institutionsthat would attempt to resolve immigration conflicts.


THE NEW MEXICAN POLITICAL CLIMATE

The constitutional recognition for cross-border voting rights long soughtby the Mexican communities in the United States as a minimal concession totheir economic, social, and cultural contribution to the reproduction of Mexi-can national life may at last be achieved in the year 2000. The exercise of theright to vote in Mexican elections from abroad may be the primary laboratoryfor Mexican political culture because it will allow closer scrutiny of the pro-cess without the corporatist control, social coercion, and political directivescharacteristic of the party-line voting patterns of the Mexican citizenry. Itmay now be possible to see for the first time in Mexican history the struggleof the political parties to win a majority of votes extended outside of Mexi-can national territory. This vote will amount to the first constitutional con-firmation of the redefinition of Mexican sovereignty, legally confirming theexistence of Mexican nationality beyond the legal territorial limits of thenation-state.

The Mexican expatriate vote, particularly as symbolically expressed inthe United States in 1988 and 1994, has been markedly unfavorable for thePRI and definitely inclined toward the PRD. The PAN took third place onthe two occasions when the symbolic vote was taken throughout the UnitedStates, with the exception of Dallas, Texas, in 1994, where it won(Santamaría, 1997: 90).

The working hypothesis in this case is that Mexican citizens resident in theUnited States, no longer under the thumb of the political parties of the Mexi-can state, adopt a more critical and independent stance that is reflected in aninclination toward the opposition parties in symbolic voting. A variant of thishypothesis is that the Mexican citizens resident in the United States are para-digmatic constituents of a new Mexican civil society in which there are nocorporate and state authoritative controls and the mass communication mediaprovide better-balanced and more truthful information.

A cursory reading of the Spanish-language press in the United States andof the manifestos and other documents written by Mexican immigrant orga-nizations between 1988 and 1997 reveals that one of their more constant andbest-argued demands has been for the expatriate vote, not dual citizenship. Inthe new anti-immigrant context that affects important social benefits receivedby Mexican immigrants with legal residence in the United States, citizenshipis a vital legal protection. For illegal aliens, who constitute the majority of theMexican community north of the border, however, there is no possibility at allof receiving collective U.S. citizenship or any other type of collective


legalization. For them, particularly those involved in political activities,expatriate voting rights would be a springboard for political influence in theirmother country and in relationships with Mexican-American politicalgroups.

The Mexican-American elite has for nearly 20 years been the formal rep-resentative of all the communities of Mexican origin in the United States. Theright to vote while living abroad would give Mexican immigrants, whetherundocumented or not, a voice parallel to that of Mexican-Americans. TheMexican state would have two spokespersons among the communities ofMexican origin in the United States—those whose personal interests, espe-cially the political ones, are centered north of the border and those who aremore interested in life south of it. These latter are the ones who truly believethat the nation extends beyond its borders.

Mexican-Americans have natural interests that are definitely rooted in theUnited States. More than anyone, they are interested in strengthening theirpolitical positions through the hundreds of thousands of potential votes thatwould result from Mexican immigrants’ becoming naturalized citizens. Forthe vast majority of these millions of immigrants, however, their cultural,ideological, and political interests are centered in Mexico. Prior to the par-tial approval of Proposition 187 by the California electorate, immigrantMexicans had been the ones who throughout the history of the United Stateshad least sought citizenship. This identification with Mexico is clear fromthe very titles of the Spanish newspapers in the Southwestern United States,such as La Opinión in Los Angeles, that give preferential treatment to polit-ical news from south of the border. More than 65 percent of La Opinión’sreadership (close to 110,000 daily circulation) are Mexican immigrants. Hec-tor García, a Mexican citizen born in Oaxaca and living in Los Angeles(quoted by Martínez, 1998: 8), explains very simply the dilemma of dualnationality and at the same time his profound sense of attachment to his coun-try of origin:

I believe that when a person decides to become a United States citizen, it isbecause one wants to better oneself. But I don’t believe that this government[the United States] will accept dual citizenship. If one takes refuge in a country,one should renounce the other. In any case, this does not erase how one feelsabout one’s country of origin. I don’t think that people will lose their customs.Are we or aren’t we?

In the meetings and consultations organized by the consuls and otherMexican governmental functionaries in the United States to weigh the possi-bilities of promoting dual citizenship, the principal participants were gener-


ally society leaders, politicians, and intellectuals from the Mexican-Americancommunities and secondarily members of the Mexican immigrant clubsclosely allied to the PRI, who are not normally tied to Mexican political life.Throughout 1995, Mexican functionaries held interviews with the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, One-Stop Immigration, theCouncil of La Raza, and other prominent Mexican-American groups, all ofwhich have certainly played an important role in the defense and organizationof Mexican immigrants but whose political arenas and principal nationalinterests unquestionably lay in the United States.

Mexican immigrants north of the border seeking to obtain the right tovote from abroad have frequently argued that other nations allow their citi-zens to do so. This is certainly true. For example, whenever there are presi-dential elections in Peru, their consulates use the press, radio, and televisionto encourage Peruvians in the United States to exercise their right to vote,depositing their ballots at the consulates. It is estimated that there are morethan a half-million Peruvians in North America, and the Peruvian vote in theUnited States is far from symbolic.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE CROSS-BORDER VOTE

The political rights of the Mexican immigrants on U.S. soil depend on acollection of forces both north and south of the border. Up until 1995 theseforces placed immigrants at a disadvantage and favored the moderate Mexi-can-American political groups and the ruling party in Mexico. The politicalresults of the Mexican election on July 6, 1997, made it more likely that theMexican Vote Abroad legislation would be more favorable for immigrants.Extending and strengthening the labor union, community, cultural, educa-tional, and political struggles of Mexican immigrants north of the border,whether legal or undocumented, would create a better framework for theirachievement of cross-border citizenship. Therefore, there was no better polit-ical or legal instrument for the defense of immigrants, particularly for thosewho could not hope for U.S. citizenship, than the status of Mexican citizensliving in the United States with complete voting rights in Mexico. Their polit-ical and electoral strength would obligate the Mexican government to assumea distinctive relationship with them at every level—fiscal, immigration pol-icy, educational, cultural, commercial, and so forth. Also, the juridical andpolitical recognition of the immigrants that would return them to their posi-tion as citizens or grant them dual citizenship would open up negotiatingspace that, in turn, would give them social and political weight in U.S.society.


The granting of full citizenship rights to the cross-border Mexican wouldplay a transcendental role in the much-needed Mexican transition to democ-racy. It would imply taking into account and counting the votes of millions ofpotential Mexican citizens in the United States. In any democratic society inwhich there is true electoral competition, 3–4 million votes can determine theoutcome. This is precisely the number of possible votes available from Mexi-can citizens, documented or undocumented, across the border. The organiza-tion of Mexican elections in the United States would serve as an excellentexample of a truly democratic nation. No propaganda campaign, no intrigueby the powers-that-be could be a better one. In this scenario, the Mexican voteabroad would be a kind of guarantee of the democratization of the Mexicanelectoral system and would return to the category of Mexican citizens thosewho had been seen as mere instruments of labor.

ARE THE IMMIGRANTS THEFIRST POSTMODERN CITIZENS?

This essay has attempted to demonstrate that throughout history, Mexicanimmigrants have reproduced, clearly discovered, and reinforced their origi-nal nationality north of the border. They have re-created that nationalityunder the hegemony of the U.S. state—reconstructed their national identityin the territory of another nation-state but in a region that has Mexican roots.This exceptional history, perhaps shared with a few other groups such as theBasques and the Kurds, has since 1848 conferred on these immigrants a bina-tional and transstate character. They have been binational—particularlythose well established in the United States and those who regularly movebetween the two countries—because they assimilate, though differently andin singular ways, two national cultures and their worldview is transformed bythe interaction of the two. Simultaneously, among the immigrants there arestrata that sustain a citizenship relation with Mexico and the United States,though differently and unequally, and therefore can be classified as“transstate.” Mexican immigrants, whether U.S. citizens, legal residents, orundocumented aliens, particularly in the second or third strata of this com-munity, maintain citizenship obligations to both countries. North of the bor-der, this is done through the payment of taxes, contractual arrangements forlabor, health care, living, buying and selling, acceptance of the social andjudicial system, public education of children, and so forth. All citizens of theUnited States are subject to the normal functioning of U.S. society. At thesame time, these immigrants do not suspend their relationship with the


Mexican state. They are still Mexican citizens independent of the fact thatthey may live in the United States or move regularly between the two coun-tries. The ways in which they maintain this relationship with the Mexicanstate are varied, whether through the consulates or through governmentalinstitutions south of the Río Bravo. Nevertheless, in the contemporary envi-ronment of productive labor, financial, commercial, and, to a point, politicalglobalization, Mexican immigrants in the United States, to maintain at least asmall place in the social, cultural, and political life of both countries, requirefully binational status. This is a matter of postmodern nationality in the sensethat it supersedes the nineteenth-century concept of being a citizen of onlyone nation-state.

The Mexican national state, after the experience of nearly 150 years,should be in a position to recognize this exceptional history and offer the legalresources for its progress. In the midst of profound social and economicreconstruction in both countries bordering the Río Bravo, Mexican immigra-tion persists. The new conditions under which it takes root in the UnitedStates are ever more adverse, and for that reason the Mexican state and soci-ety should use all the resources possible to provide its conationals at least amodicum of legal and political coverage. Mexican immigration to the UnitedStates is basically undocumented and will continue to be so for a long time tocome. Leaving millions of human beings without institutional, judicial, orpolitical backing will inevitably send them in search of illegal defenses andlivelihoods, into clandestine activities and other pathways of participationand informal social and political noninstitutional activities such as their par-ticipation in the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the protest movements againstProposition 187 in 1994 and 1995 and the immigration reform of 1996 thatwas implemented in 1997.

Persistent Mexican immigration to the United States, unexplainable inpurely economic terms, shows very clearly that in this stage of globalizationthe economies on the two sides of the border are very mixed and not“national” in the usual sense. In the same way that the U.S. border has neverbeen an impassable barrier for Mexican immigration, the Mexican economyand national territory have always been natural areas for the expansion ofU.S. capital and politics. During the 1990s it appeared that Mexican immi-gration could be contained by political and police patrol means. The new U.S.economic models, focused on flexible automation, have, however, created akind of dual labor market that the demands on one hand a highly qualifiedlabor force and on the other a less qualified labor pool. The global labor mar-ket has been stretching the political spaces of the national governments ofMexico and the United States. Simultaneously, the business communities


north of the border have profited from the increasing lack of control and ille-gality of the immigrants. George Lutz (1993: 37) shows how these tendenciesare seen with increasing clarity in Los Angeles:

Large cities (like the one under consideration) are illustrative examples of how,in connection with the consumption profile of the beneficiaries of moderniza-tion (financial services, business assessment, judicial services), service sectorsarise whose profit margins are so small that they can only stay afloat throughthe recruitment of immigrant labor. This explains to a great degree the labormiracles of the Republicans: car wash and parking attendants, pizza deliverers,etc. Many hold two jobs and work 70 hours a week because they only earn, ifthat, a minimum wage of about $4.00 an hour.

In this complex scenario, and in spite of the gradual increase in unemploy-ment in strategic industries such as metallurgy and automotive, there contin-ues to be a demand for low-skilled services—domestic work, part-time sales,office and restaurant cleaning, and other types—that are increasingly per-formed by immigrants, for the most part undocumented. Thus, the massiveMexican and Central American immigration will persist, and with it the needwill be ever sharper to find mechanisms for organization and social, cultural,and political defense. Faced with these mechanisms, the Mexican state willhave to respond, whether reacting in favor of its citizens or associating itself,either actively or passively, with the political and economic definitions that inthe United States seek more control and exploitation of immigrant workers.

U.S. society increasingly tends to deny immigrants the right to tacklepolitical, labor, cultural, and social conflicts, placing them on a socially infe-rior level. Nevertheless, the response of thousands of them is increasinglydefiant as they become involved in student protests (against Proposition 187and the Bradford law in 1994 and 1995 in California), strikes (throughout theUnited States in the cleaning industry, the garment industry, and agriculture),political protests in solidarity with the PRD and the Zapatistas in mobilizingagainst the immigration laws of 1996, demonstrations such as the October 12Latino marches on Washington in 1996 and 1997, and even social rebellionssuch as the one in Los Angeles in 1992. The condition of immigrants has notbeen an obstacle to their acting in two nations, between two states, as post-modern social and political subjects.


NOTES

1. Bibliographic sources on Mexican immigration from the viewpoint of economics predom-inate both in Mexico and in the United States. Among the classic Mexican sources, seeBustamante (1976, 1978), Diez Canedo (1984), and Morales (1981).

2. For example, López Castro (1986) talks about “types of immigration,” one of which is “theimmigration tradition.”

REFERENCES

Alarcón, Rafael and Jesús Martínez Saldaña1995 “Una nación de emigrantes.” La Jornada, June 20.

Bustamante, Jorge1976 Espaldas mojadas: Materia prima para la expansión del capitalismo norteamericano.Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Sociológicos 9. Mexico City: El Colegio de México.1978 “Emigración indocumentada a los Estados Unidos.” Foro Internacional, no. 71.

Castillo, Pedro G. and Antonio Ríos Bustamante1989 México en Los Angeles. Mexico City: Alianza Editorial Mexicana y Consejo Nacionalpara la Cultura y las Artes.

Díaz de Cossío, Roger1995 Trabajos del Coloquio sobre Doble Nacionalidad Mexicana. Mexico City: Instituto deInvestigaciones Legislativas.

Diez Canedo Ruiz, Juan1984 La migración indocumentada de México a los Estados Unidos. Mexico City: Fondo deCultura Económica.

Gómez Quiñonez, Juan1983 “Notes on an interpretation of the relations between the Mexican community in theUnited States and Mexico,” pp. 399–416 in Carlos Vázquez and Manuel García y Griego(eds.), Mexican-US Relations. Conflict and Convergence. Los Angeles: UCLA ChicanoStudies Research Center/UCLA Latin American Center.

González, Gilbert G.1994 Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Workers’ Villages in a Southern CaliforniaCounty, 1900–1950. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

González Gutiérrez, Carlos1995 “La organización de los inmigrantes mexicanos en Los Angeles: la lealtad de losoriundos.” Revista Mexicana de Política Exterior 46 (Spring): 59–101.

López Castro, Gustavo1986 La casa dividida: Un estudio de caso sobre la migración a Estados Unidos en unpueblo michoacano. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán.

Lutz, George1993 Extraños en el paraíso. Barcelona: Kairos.

Martínez Saldaña, Jesus1998 “¿Somos o no somos? Mexican international migration and political membership inNorth America.” MS, Political Science Department, Santa Clara University.


McWilliams, Carey1976 Al norte de México: El conflicto entre “anglos” e “hispanos.” Mexico City: SigloXXI.

Morales, Patricia1981 Indocumentados mexicanos. México City: Grijalbo.

Ross Pineda, Raúl1994 “Las elecciones ciudadanas en Chicago.” MS, Consejo Electoral Ciudadano, Chicago.

Sánchez, George J.1993 Becoming Mexican American. London: Oxford University Press.

Sandoval, Cuauhtémoc1995 Presentation to the Colloquium on Dual Nationality, Mexico City, June.

Santamaría Gómez, Arturo1994 La política entre México y Aztlán: Relaciones chicano-mexicanas del 68 a Chiapas 94.Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa and California State University.1995 “Mexicanos o Estadounidenses ¿o las dos cosas?” Diario Noroeste, May 12.1997 “El voto mexicano en el extranjero.” Arenas: Revista Sinaloense de Ciencias Sociales,no. 1 (January-March).


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Politics Without Borders or Postmodern Nationality Mexican