Abstract
One of the key areas of discussion in Gaspar Rivera-Salgado’s paper and in Michael Kearney’s scholarship is the need to rework concepts of citizenship in the context of transborder migration, political participation, and identity formation. Here I want to explore and unfold some of the ideas about citizenship that Rivera-Salgado proposes and do some thinking about the application of different concepts of citizenship for anthropologists who do research with indigenous transborder communities. This discussion is guided by Michael Kearney’s demonstration of how to be a transborder anthropologist and a binational citizen at multiple levels.
One of the key challenges in rethinking concepts about citizenship in the context of transnational/transborder indigenous communities is incorporating indigenous epistemologies of citizenship into broader notions of political participation. I see this as part of the project of decolonizing the definitions of citizenship developed during the Enlightenment, which focus primarily on the relationship between the individual citizen and the state (Quijano, 2007). Additionally, it is a conversation about the organization of political participation through transnational and/or nonnational strategies.
Indigenous peoples in Mexico and elsewhere have developed models for citizenship that have a much longer history behind them than those birthed by the modernity project and a different set of assumptions. Many of these models, as discussed by Rivera-Salgado in this paper and elsewhere (Rivera-Salgado and Escala Rabadán, 2004), have become part of the transnational context. For example, in the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle, in the state of Oaxaca, where I have been working since the mid-1980s, citizenship consists of a set of rights and responsibilities that guides the governance of the community in its many locations in Mexico and the United States (Stephen, 2005). These responsibilities include (1) participation in the local system of civil offices, including more than 250 positions (cargos) ranging from mayor, judge, and police officer to school and irrigation committee member; (2) participation in the mayordomías that sponsor the celebrations of the feast days of saints venerated in the local Catholic Church; (3) participation in tequio (communal labor); and (4) payment of specific amounts of money for community projects or celebrations. Citizenship rights include access to communal land for farming or house construction, access to community forests, water, sand, minerals, plants, and wild game, burial in the community cemetery, and the expression of opinions and voting in community assemblies. Citizenship is commonly understood as constituted by these responsibilities (most of them collective) and rights.
While some women in Teotitlán have gained access to the full range of citizenship rights and responsibilities through their participation in weaving cooperatives and other groups recognized as part of the community governance system, others have not. The degree of inclusion of women in local models of citizenship in Oaxaca’s indigenous communities varies greatly. In transborder and transnational communities, organizations, and spaces, however, the participation of women may have more room to develop. The case of the Mepha’a (Tlapaneco) leader Inés Fernández, who was raped in 2002 by Mexican soldiers in the state of Guerrero, is a recent example of the way indigenous women have used transnational spaces to access rights that they are denied in their own countries. When she received no response from any Mexican institution of justice, Inés Fernández took her case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and in 2010 she received a response acknowledging the responsibility of the Mexican state for violation of her personal integrity, judicial guarantees, and the right to protection (Hernández Castillo, 2012). On March 6, 2012, Secretary of the Interior Alejandro Poiré apologized to her in the name of the federal government (see Petrich, 2012a; 2012b). Other parts of the settlement included the construction of a community center for the rights of Mepha’a men and women and a boarding school for indigenous children, which had yet to be realized at the time of this writing (early 2013).
The possibilities for women’s achieving rights in transnational indigenous organizations may also be improving. The Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB), described by Rivera-Salgado, has made a concerted effort to make leadership roles more accessible to youth and women. A collaborative research project on this topic revealed tensions concerning the way women and men in the organization perceived the different leadership styles of men and women and different expectations and treatment of men and women in the organization (see Romero-Hernández et al., 2013). The 2011 elections of the FIOB’s leadership in California resulted in a majority of posts’ being held by women. Of six newly elected binational leaders, two are women. Indigenous models of transborder citizenship, as pointed out long ago by Michael Kearney and Carole Nagengast (Kearney 1991; 1995a; 1995b; Nagengast and Kearney, 1990) and further researched by scholars such as Gaspar Rivera-Salgado and Jonathan Fox (Fox and Rivera-Salgado, 2004), highlight some of the unique characteristics of the operation of multiple senses of citizenship in transnational political spaces.
Following their lead, many scholars have focused on the participation of those disenfranchised by a lack of formal citizenship through transnational and/or nonnational political strategies (Bosniak, 2000; Levitt, 2001; Sassen, 1999). Sassen (2006: 321) has suggested that even in capitalist democracies there is “a type of political subject that does not quite correspond to the notion of the formal political subject who is the voting and jury-serving citizen.” Her argument is that globalization has increased the distance between the state and the citizen, partly through states’ adoption of global ideas and institutions such as the rule of law and respect for private authority, reinscribing the global within the national. These changes, she argues, can take place without dislodging citizenship from “its national encasement” (320). The other paths for changes in the way citizenship is structured and understood are related to postnational citizenship, transnational identities, and “formalized innovations” such as the European passport and the increasingly institutionalized human rights regime. What makes Sassen’s argument interesting and useful here is her insistence that it is not only postnational citizenship and transnational identities that are transforming citizenship and political participation but also changes in the state as a result of globalization.
The critical assumption here is that citizenship is inevitably an incompletely specified contract between the state and the citizen and that in this incompleteness lies the possibility of accommodating new conditions and incorporating new formal and informal instrumentalities (Sassen, 2006: 321). Sassen’s theoretical insights provide a useful framework for understanding the transborder organizing that the FIOB did in 2006 through its participation in the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO)–Los Angeles. The existence of transborder Oaxacan communities in multiple locations throughout Mexico and the United States and their organization through the FIOB permitted the U.S.-based FIOB members to participate in the Oaxacan social movement of 2006 from Los Angeles. While some members of the FIOB are formal citizens of Mexico, others are not. The definition of citizenship that was operative in the organizing in 2006 was centered not solely on the contract between the state and the citizen but on the sense of citizenship that emerges from Oaxacan transborder communities. It is an instance of what Jonathan Fox (2005: 189) calls integrated transnational participation or multilayered citizenship, involving “membership in local, regional, national, and transnational polities.” This sense of citizenship is articulated through specified rights and responsibilities to the collective community, wherever it is located. The transborder communities represented in the FIOB permitted their 2006 participation in the APPO to encompass the larger territory in which the FIOB operates. Known as “Oaxacalifornia”—a term first used by Michael Kearney, as Rivera-Salgado notes—this territory includes Oaxaca, Baja California Sur, and Baja California Norte in Mexico and the state of California in the United States (Rivera-Salgado, 1998).
The Anthropologist and Transborder Citizenships
Michael Kearney, in his work with Carole Nagengast, not only provided pioneering theoretical insights into the ways that transborder citizenship was understood at multiple levels but also lived as a transborder citizen himself. If we are to take seriously the insights we gain from working with transborder indigenous migrants and immigrants, we must apply them to ourselves as anthropologists and our positioning in the structure of our projects and in relation to those we work with. Because I have been working in Oaxaca since 1983 and spend one to two months a year there, it is home for me. A large group of comadres, compadres, godchildren, old and dear friends, long-time academic colleagues and collaborators, and family places me in an extended network of wonderful people, communities, and institutions. While I do not have Mexican citizenship, I feel a profound sense of cultural and political citizenship through my life in the city and state of Oaxaca. “Cultural citizenship,” as defined by Richard Flores and Rina Benmayor (1997), is made up of everyday activities through which marginalized social groups can claim recognition, public space, and, eventually, specific rights. Renato Rosaldo (1997) points to the concept of cultural citizenship as a way of helping develop full democratic participation. I agree with Rivera-Salgado that the model of cultural citizenship has its limits when applied to the context of transnational/transborder communities. Transborder community citizenship emphasizes collective rights and responsibilities and is sustained across multiple national borders and in many sites simultaneously. “Cultural citizenship” is simply a recognition of contributions and corresponding rights and claims that may come from the presence of a group of people in a political arena where they lack national citizenship or are effectively stripped of it by discrimination. While I by no means consider myself part of a marginalized group in either the United States or Mexico, my not being a Mexican citizen significantly limits my right to political expression there. Nevertheless, I am participating as a transborder political subject and actor.
The Colombian anthropologist Myriam Jimeno (2005: 59) has articulated the tension inherent in the dual position of researcher and fellow citizen with those who are the subjects of inquiry. She describes the history of Colombian anthropology since the mid-1940s as follows:
In countries such as Colombia, anthropological practice is permanently faced with the uneasy choice between adopting dominant anthropological concepts and orientations, or modifying them, adapting them, rejecting them and proposing alternatives. This need to adapt the practice stems from the specific social condition of anthropologists in these countries; that is, our dual position as both researchers and fellow citizens of our subjects of study, as a result of which we are continually torn between our duty as scientists and our role as citizens.
Her point is that political neutrality is impossible when one identifies oneself as a citizen of the polity of the people one is researching. This shared interest in the political implications of research leads to a set of questions that is quite distinct from those of researchers who consider themselves “outsiders” in relation to their research projects and perceive themselves as moving into and out of “the field.” I believe that Michael Kearney conducted his research, as do I, in the spirit of shared citizenship with the people he conducted research with. Obviously, this sense of citizenship is based not on legal/national citizenship but on the shared sense of collective rights and responsibilities that comes from participating in transborder communities.
The shared experiences of anthropologists who conduct their studies among those with whom they share citizenship—not just legal but cultural and political citizenship in terms of “considering political communities and systems of rights that emerge at levels of governance above or below those of independent states or those that cut across international borders” (Bauböck, 2003: 704)—have much to offer us in terms of rethinking our methods. The lessons learned from decentering the notion of “the field” and seeing ourselves as always “in the field” can work not only for those who conduct research at home in the context of their daily lives but also for those who conduct their research elsewhere (see Stephen, 2002: 13–15; Uribe, 1997). Operating as citizens not only of individual or multiple nations and communities (in a legal and cultural sense) but also as citizens of the planet in our role as anthropologists is one way to open up our thinking. Most of us do not push hard enough in terms of the way we position ourselves in the sociopolitical proximity of our subjects in the globalized Americas.
While the boundary between the practice of anthropology as a discipline and the social action we take as citizens (cultural or otherwise) may be fuzzy (Jimeno, 2005: 63), it is important to acknowledge differences of power, positioning, and exit that can distinguish us from those with whom we conduct research. As someone who has done research in Oaxaca over the past 25 years as well as in Oregon with Oaxacans who live there, I am a transborder researcher with a visa. I can come and go when I please. Most people in Oaxaca do not have that luxury; they have to stay and try to survive or leave and struggle to survive in the United States. In contrast to most of my Oaxacan counterparts, I am working in the multisited field of a transborder ethnographer. I am never “in” or “out” of the field; my life in Oregon and my life in Oaxaca are part of one field (see Stephen, 2002: 7–15). Further, like all researchers, I am “conducting research” and not just “living life.” Thus I am at least doubly different from those I am working with, but this difference does not translate into a lack of political accountability and responsibility. In fact, this is the core of my shared political and cultural citizenship with those I work with and should form the basis for the relationships that are central to any process of research.
Important questions to guide the research process embedded in a context of shared cultural and political citizenship might include: What happens if I subject my ideas about a particular research project to a horizontal dialogue with its protagonists? What kinds of suggestions and insights will I receive? What research problems will those in the particular communities, organizations, or context I work in consider important and why? How can I create the best conditions for the people I work with to assert their knowledge, analysis, and political judgment at each stage of the process (see Hale and Stephen, 2013: 21)? The model of collaborative transnational research that Michael Kearney embodied has translated into real policy for the FIOB, requiring all researchers to consult with leaders and sign a formal contract regarding their responsibilities and obligations to the organization and the specific project that the two parties agree upon. Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Nordoeste, Oregon’s farmworker union, also does this, and many other organizations now follow this model.
In sum, both Rivera-Salgado’s analysis and Kearney’s rich legacy contain important insights about transborder and transnational citizenship and how to live it. I thank them both for the many gifts they have given us, which continue to help us learn and grow.
Footnotes
Lynn Stephen teaches anthropology at the University of Oregon and is the author of Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon (2002).