Jose Moya, “Cousins and Strangers.” by K.

Jose Moya’s impressive and meticulous analysis of Spanish immigrants to Buenos Aires offers some interesting insights not only into the subject matter but also into the importance of including both macro- and micro-level factors in a study of migration, and of utilizing both quantitative and qualitative sources to paint a more detailed picture of those factors. In particular, I appreciated Moya’s insight about the discovery of patterns in what might be construed as “limitless variety”, preferring to see this as the “intellectual challenge of finite diversity” (393). I think this is an important point, because at times historical diversity does seem to present the “epistemological quagmire” that Moya refuses to fall into, and his insistence that detailed and rigorous analysis can make some sense of that diversity offers a way out of that quagmire.
On the other hand, I was a bit less impressed by the way Moya juxtaposed quantitative and qualitative sources. While I generally agree that using both types of sources can only help create a richer and more nuanced picture of the past, I think that Moya over-emphasizes the dangers in using qualitative sources. For example, in his account of the differences between the perceptions of Basques and Andalusions, Moya argues that the views of these groups presented in the popular press suggest that Basques were seen more favourably as hard workers, a view which contradicts their actual employment situations (232-3). I think the “gross discrepancy” between Moya’s findings on employment and the qualitative evidence result more from a rather uninspired reading of the qualitative sources than from some inherently deceptive trait within those sources. More specifically, some of the evidence Moya cites of the auspicious view of Basques actually coincides with the type of jobs they tended to take. That is, Basques many have taken more low-paid menial jobs, but this does not actually contradict the way they were valorized as “muscular and gigantic pioneers, of erect torsos and Herculean brazos who welcome the hard and stimulating endeavours of our grasslands” (q.f. 233). I don’t want to overstate the point, but I think the disagreement Moya finds between the two types of sources is perhaps not as great as he imagines. Moreover, this disagreement may in fact result from the eight-category hierarchy of employment he creates to analyze upward mobility, without interrogating the different values that may have been placed on different types of employment, regardless of whether or not they were “menial” or “professional.” I suspect that some kind of analysis of gendered notions of work, of the valorization of “masculine” physical labour would have been useful here.
Overall, I think the issue outlined above speaks to a larger problem with Moya’s partial resistance to cultural history. While espousing a commitment to “sociocultural history” as an “inquiry into people’s real lived experiences” (405), I think the separation of the “cultural-cognitive dimensions” from the rest of the analysis creates an artificial separation in how people actually experience the world (332). I have difficulty seeing how “perceptions, attitudes, and reputations” can be divorced from the more material side of experience.

Review of the readings on Migration: Canclini, Freeman and Stephen -by C.

Indeed the readings this week covered a wide rage of issues around the topic of migration. In the books we have read we are dealing with concepts such as hybridity, transborder, transnational. What do these concepts mean to us? How do we use them? When thinking of each individual experience, either women in Barbados, Oxacans in Mexico or the U.S, or just us experiencing life in a Latin America, these terms can be mobilized and applied to each case-study we have read. My question then is how do they overlap and interact.
Transborder Lives by Lynn Stephen brings a new dimension to the concept of migration. She argues for a new way to understand people’s experiences when mobilized.  She goes beyond the idea of crossing nations – moving from country to country, or even from city to city within a state – and proposes a new definition to describe migration that expands on the previous concept of transnationalization. Her new concept, transborder, expresses that the borders crossed when migrating are not just state or national borders, but are racial, ethnic, class and cultural. Based on this idea, she explores the experience of people in the Mexican communities of San Agustin and Teotitlan. Stephen calls these places “transborder communities”. The moving back and forth  to the U.S or other parts of Mexico has redefined these people’s ideas about politics, culture, gender roles. By living in other places outside of their community they incorporate new notions of racial, class hierarchies into their self-identities. Migration has not just improved their economies, but has changed them, their ideas, knowledge and behaviors. How does the concept of hybridity fits within these people’s lives? They are definitely fusing the “traditional” with the “modern”. They are circulating within separate cultural structures, assimilating them, and translating them into new ones. Does the term “hybrid” carries negative connotations and does it really represent a new identity?
Similarly, when thinking of Carla Freeman’s High Tech And High Heels, we can understand the lives of Barbadian women working in the industry of informatics as transborder lives. In this book, Freeman studies how transnationalization is experienced and shaped by social factors, and how women identities are shaped by their participation in a transnationalized labor. Every day these women go back and forth between the borders that separate and conform their life experience: inside and outside of work. As Stephen explains, migration is not required to be part of a transnational, and I will go further, transborder social field. Transmigrants participate in the culture, political and social life of more than one place. They are exposed to the expectations, social norms, cultural values of more than one social, economical or political system. Indeed Barbadian women working in the industry of informatics move in between a set of foreign cultural, ethical and moral values dictated by the multinational industry they work for (expectations of discipline, respectability, appearance) and those of their own Barbadian culture. They have juxtaposed notions of “traditional” and “modern”. Then, we could conclude that these women are creating a new  hybrid cultural existence, living a transboder life.

Multiplicities, porosities, and time/space (dis)placements. Comments on migration and transnational by R.

The need for thinking national boundaries, its formations and porosities is what attracts Garcia Canclini in his book Hybrid Cultures (2002). What constitutes the processes that transform cultural artifacts into other forms in contexts that were not meant to them? How can we understand the multitemporal heterogeneity of modern culture in the history of modernization in Latin America? But how people experience this “hybrid history” and how they enter and leave modernity/tradition or to put in Garcia Canclini’s terms, how people navigate this hybridity?
I think one important task, both political and academic, as Rosato (in the Foreword of the second edition) suggests, is to interrogate who “determines the designation modern as opposed to traditional” (2002: xvi). Here, the definition of borders seems to be at the very core of Canclini’s stake. What is “modern” or “traditional”? And how one thing, an artifact or tale, cease to be traditional to become modern? So perhaps the distinction is less about the content of what is supposedly to be represented but by the power to name one such a thing as “modern”?

The second read I made was Moya’s (1998) Cousins and Strangers. In this book Moya wants to understand immigration experience in general focusing on the Argentina’s case of Spanish immigration in a key moment of the formation of the Argentina Nation-State. Moya highlights persistent and identifiable immigration patterns through comparison with other immigrants groups all over the world using empirical and theoretical insights problematizing the Spanish immigration in the context of the historical formation of the modern Argentina. He uses a micro and macro-social as well as a dialectical approach to think on the macrostructural and microsocial networks producing immigration and diverse forms of adaptation. Moya uses qualitative and quantitative data to support his arguments in ways that sometimes overpass my capacity of understanding. Every argument made by other authors he found statistics or other sort of data to demolish it. His managing of sources is overwhelming.
Moya portrays the Spanish-Argentina migration as a complex process beyond the simple “push-pull” explanations. He emphasize that not poverty or lack of opportunities was the cause of immigration but the effects of early industrialization, modernization and social change. He demonstrates that in the poorest areas of Spain immigration was a low factor. Immigration was caused more by modernization, movement and flux (capital, goods, services, technologies, ideas, and peoples) than by other factors. The Spanish-Argentina’s case, one of the biggest migration movement of the history, was more a conjunction of macro and structural forces (demographic expansion, liberalism, commercialization of agriculture, industrialization, and advance in transportation) and micro-social networking that had historical roots to the colony times but that “explode” on these 80 years that Moya analyze.

So how to think on the multiplicities, porosities, and time/space (dis)placements that people constantly experience? I think Canclini’s and Moya’s ideas are useful to re-des-center our attitudes and understanding of what is to live in this pre/post/modern world with multiple temporalities, spatialities, regims of knowledge, forms of power, and types of experiences. It is important to rethink Latin America with its own heterogenic eyes, and to compare the multiple patterns of time/space (dis)placements from the macro macro structures to the micro micro social skins, and the contact that skins-people create in these movements and flux.

Garcia Canclini and Stephen, week on migration and transnational, comments by T.

“La afirmación de lo regional o nacional no tiene sentido ni eficacia como condena general de lo exógeno: debe concebirse ahora como la capacidad de interactuar con las múltiples ofertas simbólicas internacionales desde posiciones propias” (García Canclini, p. 332). This project of affirming the opportunities of cultural postmodernity while not relinquishing artistic and political autonomy to the economic power of its transnational distributional networks is one fraught with difficulties, as García Canclini readily admits. These difficulties are especially pronounced for those who, by living what Stephen calls ‘transborder lives,’ give up the regional and national positions from which they could mount a positive engagement with the ‘exogenous.’ In how far are migrants able to compensate for this loss of rootedness through their participation in transnational ‘social fields’ and ‘meshworks’?
Stephen’s book demonstrates how difficult it is for Mexicans to deal with experiences of discrimination and exploitation from a position of marginality relative to a political system which they must navigate but which doesn’t recognize their participation. The problem is that although they are able to assert their cultural and social identity through their involvement in social fields and meshworks that link them to their home-communities, a similar assertion of their political identity is made impossible by the intimate relationship that any notion of political community must have to a given territory. Because politics links people together and regulates their interactions as physical beings who inhabit a shared space, it cannot easily be divorced from notions of territoriality, and the only adequate solution for migrant workers in the United States to deal with their political marginality, as many of the testimonies collected by Stephen testify, is to gain recognition and acceptance by the political body governing the territory to which they migrate, that is, to acquire a Green Card. In this regard, Stephen’s concept of a ‘cultural citizenship’ seems to me more like a hopeful fiction than a useful way of thinking about actual migrant experiences.

Migration and Transnationalism – Comments by O.

A question raised after reviewing this week’s readings is whether there has been a real advancement in our contemporary understanding of migration flows around the world since the publication of Michael Kearney’s (1995) piece, “Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism”, and of George Marcus’ (1995) article, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography”. While both cited authors drove the emergence of a theoretically sophisticated, methodologically innovative, and ethnographically rich body of literature since then, this week’s readings would suggest that since the mid-1990s and until today, there has not been significant contribution to the field of migration studies (both present and past) from a theoretical standpoint.

        Pioneering studies of migration and transnationalism in anthropology can be traced back to the works by Arjun Appadurai (1991, 1996), Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton-Blanc (1994). These authors contributed to the field by putting forward new concepts (“ethnoscapes”, “unbound nations”) to explain the new realities they were faced with—namely, the increasing visibility of immigrants from the “third-world countries” coming into the territories of “first-world anthropologists”, who were until then more used to travel to foreign “exotic” locations in the world to carry out research projects than to conduct research in their own home.

        The mid-to-late-1990s seem to be a turning point in the field of studies of migration and transnationalism. By the end of this decade, most of what we would consider as foundational works in the field had been published. See for instance the works by Appadurai (1991, 1996), Basch et al. (1994), Kearney (1995), Marcus (1995), and Ong (1999). We could even include Gloria Anzaldua’s (1987) Borderlands among the foundational works published in the area, even if it came out in the late 1980s. These authors contributed to the field in significant ways, particularly in regards to crafting a strong theoretical framework from which to understand the global and local dimensions of migration flows. It was in this decade when the authors conducted work that challenged ingrained notions of space as fixed and unchangeable, of nations as bounded in geopolitical boundaries, and of immigrants as undoubtedly assimilated to their new places of destination. 

        Yet, it seems to me that after this decade, most of the work generated in the field has consisted simply in the multiplication of ethnographic case studies, that while contributing to our understandings of specific migration histories, fail to provide any new and original theoretical insight in the field (for an exception, see Anna Tsing’s (2004) Global Frictions: An Ethnography of Global Connection). How much does the work of Lynn Stephen (2007) increase our theoretical understanding of migration and transnationalism between Mexico and the USA? How much does the work of José Moya (1997) enlighten the attraction and repulsion debate to analyze migration flows? To what extend does he draw on and depart from the polarized debates between theorists who align with Marxist approaches and thus look at economic and social structures and those who concede more weight to individual choices and personal agency to understand migration flows? While the wealth of information provided in these two books was impressive and overall interesting, I felt that the works by Moya and Stephen did not contribute in significant ways to move the theoretical debates in the field of migration and transnationalism forward. 

        Moya’s historical study examines Spaniards migration to Argentina in the mid-19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Lynn Stephen, in turn, focuses on present migration of Zapoteco and Mixteco people to the USA. These works are well grounded in historical and anthropological research, and a wealth of qualitative and quantitative data is presented. José Moya looks at local histories of migration and draws on chain-migration theory (or social networks) to understand why Spanish migrants came to Argentina from very particular locations and settled in specific neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires, thus explaining migration as the movement from a known place to a location with family or friendship contacts, and turning to both micro and macro processes to better understand migration. He also explores some of the reasons why this migration of over 4 million people has received little attention in the social sciences in contrast with other migrant groups in Argentina, and advances the idea that this could be due to a more classic Marxist interest in class and labour issues, rather than on the study of ethnicity and immigration. In consequence, Moya explores the contributions Spanish people had on Argentinean life and politics by organizing in identity and ethnicity-based political organizations upon their arrival to Argentina. Lynn Stephen, on the other hand, draws heavily on qualitative data coming from her interviews and conversations with informants that took place during the past 8 years and in different locations both in Mexico and in the U.S.A. Using these narratives to portray some aspects in the life of these indigenous migrants, Stephen advances the concept of “transborder” realities and lives as opposed to the most commonly used of “transnational” realities and experiences. While transnational speaks mainly to the simultaneous connections that migrants have across nation-states, transborder refers instead to the multiple boundaries that migrants cross and negotiate in their journeys both within and outside Mexico and the USA—namely racial, ethnic, gender boundaries, to name but a few. 

        I see a great effort in Moya’s and more particularly in Stephen’s work in avoiding dichotomies. They seek instead innovation in proposing multi-dimensional concepts that help social scientists portray reality in a more accurate fashion. Stephen’s distinction made between transborder and transnational stems from this effort to avoid binary conceptualizations. This call, however, has been made by innumerable social scientists in countless occasions, and at this point it seems to me more of a cliché than a well-conceived conceptualization, more of a formula to help academics build reputation as sophisticated scholars than an evidence-based claim in the current studies of migration and transnationalism. Therefore, while we see that they have attempted to provide different angles and perspectives to migration processes, their discussions also feel like discussions of recurrent old themes and dilemmas that either continue unsolved, or provide scholars with a niche to continue sounding theoretically sophisticated while avoiding to truly push the discussions forward. 

 

Works Cited:

Anzaldúa, Gloria

1987   Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.

 

Appadurai, Arjun

1991   Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology. In: Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, Richard  G. Fox, editor. Pp. 191-210. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Researc Press.

1996   Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 

Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton-Blanc

1994   Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. Langhome, PA: Gordon & Breach

 

Kearney, Michael

1995   The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 547-565.

 

Marcus, George E.

1995   Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95-117.

 

Moya, José C.

1997   Cousins and Strangers: Spanish immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930. Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

Ong, Aihwa

1999   Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

 

Stephen, Lynn

2007   Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

 

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt

2004   Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.