Identity Strategies and Consciousness Shifts of Sanmiguelense Mixtec Youth in Transnational and Transcultural Spaces

Border Control Double Consciousness

Because of their constant migration across real and symbolic borders and the transcultural interactions that occur on a daily basis, the youth of San Miguel Cuevas experience a type of double consciousness. As Du Bois (1990 [1903]: 125) described it, “It is a particular sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness.” Holland et al. (1998: 3–4) point out that consciousness has much to do with identity in that both combine what other people say you are and what you tell yourself you are. Consciousness is a reflection that enables us to produce coherent accounts of things and to socialize our understandings, while identity proactively connects these intimate workings with public life. These processes of consciousness and identity construction are improvised and socially and culturally shaped by forms of discourse and power.

There are often marked differences between young people who have spent most of their lives in San Miguel Cuevas and those who have spent most of their lives in Fresno County, but the interviews I conducted during 2006 and 2007 highlight that the majority identify themselves as “indigenous,” “Oaxaqueño/a,” and “Sanmiguelense” regardless of where they reside. Those who have lived in the United States longer tend to use more encompassing terms to describe themselves, such as “Mexican” and “American,” particularly when interacting with people from outside the community. Young people are also constantly attributed other identities depending upon where they are and with whom they are interacting. For example, youth in the United States are often categorized as “Hispanic,” “Latino/a,” or “illegal” by the state and the media, while unofficially they may be labeled “wetbacks,” “scraps,” “Nortaco/as,” or “Oaxaquito/as” in school or street environments. This type of classification for Mixtec migrants has been explored by Michael Kearney (2006), who argues that people are shaped by borders in both a cultural and a geopolitical sense. Borders “define the people who are divided by them and cross them” (37). Identities can be seen as categories that either sit within a border area or cross over it and often function to provide order according to hegemonic schemes. A person’s positionality, then, is often “inextricably linked to power, status, and rank” rather than to his or her actual “hereness and thereness” (Holland et al., 1998: 271).

Holland et al. (1998: 275) illustrate the way this type of constraint may be imposed and reproduced with the example of Gyanumaya, a lower-caste woman from Naudada, Nepal:

She could probably tell herself (and others) about herself as a person of a particular caste, as well as seriously monitor and edit her own behaviour to fit an image of proper caste behaviour. She was, in sum, highly susceptible to figuring herself and being positioned as a lower-caste person. . . . She lived in a web of constraints organised around caste and was probably propelled at times by purely ideological constructions; at other times by an almost purely “tactical” social reckoning of what it would cost her to refuse the caste position afforded to her in a given situation; and, probably a majority of the time, by a mixture of these two.

Fourteen-year-old Agustina, who was born in the United States and at the time I interviewed her was in middle school in Fresno and working part-time in the fields, described this kind of identity imposition as follows: “I think they look at us like different people, because they’ll be calling us ‘wetback’ and everything. . . . And I feel like people stare at us, especially us Mexicans, like we’re stupid people, or like we’re scraps, or we’re from over there, that our parents are poor, that they work in the field.” Discrimination and positionality are also experienced by young people who live in the hometown of San Miguel Cuevas. Thirteen-year-old Estela, who was born in the United States and at the time of our interview was attending school in the nearby town of Juxtlahuaca, reflected on the way other people perceived her: “I don’t feel superior or inferior to them, we’re all the same, but there are other people who feel they are superior to us, that they are better. . . . The guys from middle school are like that. Well, you could say it is because of their coloring and all that. They’re whiter-skinned.” Twelve-year-old Tania, who was born in San Miguel Cuevas and still lived there, flipped this positionality around by seeing Estela as presumida (conceited) because she was born in the United States and her parents could afford to send her to school in Juxtlahauca. It is clear that race, ethnicity, language, place of birth, and socioeconomic background can have strong bearing on the positionality of Sanmiguelense youth.

Consequently, many young people are now fully aware that they are something that they did not choose to be. They are often confronted with category imposition, as in a conversation taken from the community’s online chat room between community members born in the United States who return to San Miguel Cuevas every few years: “When someone from Mexico (born and raised) tells you are not a ‘Mexican,’ how do you respond? That you are an ‘American’ because you were raised in the US not considering your place of birth, language, culture, etc.” (Yahoo Groups, 2007a: 41). Another community member responded: “Well, in my opinion I think I am more Mexican than American. . . . Even though I was born here I consider myself from Mexico. . . . When someone asks me where I am from, I say from MEXICO. . . . So even when they call me ‘gabacha,’ I am Mexican!!!” (Yahoo Groups, 2007a: 42).

These experiences in the community are therefore not based on “a cosmopolitan, placeless identity but rather begins as its opposite, a local, deeply rooted traditional identity that is lived in two countries at once, and evolves into something transnational but still local” (Smith, 2006: 11). They may be caught between “past histories that have settled in them and the present discourses and images that attract them or somehow impinge on them” (Holland et al., 1998: 4). This double consciousness is one of restriction. No matter how they try to fight imposed categorizations, the results are often out of their hands. This may lead to their becoming hyphenated beings (Mexican-American, Oaxacan-Mexican, etc.) if not on a discursive level, then on the level of consciousness. This duality is exacerbated by conflicts between autonomy and dependence, citizen and illegal, male domination and gender equality, poverty and financial security, youth and adult, etc.

Some of these young people have to deal not only with being a minority in the United States and in Mexico but also with being subaltern members in their own community, where adult males traditionally have the right to make decisions in the community’s public and private spheres. They live with limited human capital inherited from their ancestors (Ariza and Portes, 2007: 21) and limited human capital lived as individuals with what some may perceive as little status in Mexico or the United States. It is easy to see that many of them may experience what Du Bois (1990 [1903]: 7) calls “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals,” a double consciousness that is shaped by their own ideas as well as those of others. As Rosalina, a 13-year-old girl born in Fresno County, put it, “Blacks are never going to become whites, whites are never going to become Mexicans, Mexicans are never going to become blacks. It’s just a thing, you know. So we can’t really do anything about being who we are, so a lot of times I just give up. I can’t make you like me, so, whatever. If I can’t beat you, I might as well join you.”

Is it possible to overcome this type of restraint? Chela Sandoval (2000: 37) recalls Fredric Jameson’s (1984) argument that this kind of struggle was easier in modern times, when individuals could resist uneven power plays by tactically moving from one set position to another beneficial fixed vantage point within a metaphorical pyramidal or sovereign mode (Foucault, 1993: 213) of power. However, this is no longer the case, Jameson theorizes, because late capitalism has led to a diffusion of power to “a postmodern, flattened horizontal grid” (Sandoval, 2000: 73) in which the possibilities for effective resistance have dramatically decreased. Only a few decades ago, Sanmiguelenses were operating primarily within a pyramidal mode of power—largely within the indigenous hierarchies of their local community under the umbrella of the state and the nation. In this environment, the rules of the game were well established and pathways for resistance by appeal through the cargo system of governance and, failing that, the municipal, state, and national hierarchies could instead be resorted to. However, changes brought on by late capitalism—in particular, the globalization of North American agricultural supply chains and the increased global connectedness of Mixtec communities (spurred on in large part by media technologies)—have directly affected San Miguel Cuevas and its overarching systems of power. Additionally, the majority of Sanmiguelenses now migrate and may find that the hierarchies of power they encounter are often overlapping, changing, and/or hard to identify. For example, community members are constantly exposed to different power structures at home, in the workplace, or at school and in social, sporting, and cultural environments in both the United States and Mexico and are interacting with a wide diversity of people. Taking this to the theoretical extreme, it could be argued that the power structures in which Mixtec migrants operate can be likened to a flattened horizontal grid. In this changed environment, successful resistance in one situation does not necessarily predict success in another.

Sandoval (2000: 37) challenges Jameson by arguing that regardless of this power dispersion, resistance is still possible in diverse situations because the “mutation of culture also makes accessible, to the oppressor and the oppressed alike, new forms of identity, ethics, citizenship, aesthetics, and resistance.” To some extent this is happening in San Miguel Cuevas. Yet overall practical realities are never so clear-cut. Community members from San Miguel Cuevas continually move between rigid and fluid spaces and continue to experience “a kind of double reality and double consciousness of power . . . with new and old formations at work all at once” (Sandoval, 2000: 75).

Agency

Agency can help refigure the culture/self relationship (Holland et al., 1998: 28). It constructs being performatively (Butler, 1990: 25), and through it sociocultural fields become “spaces of authoring” (Holland et al., 1998: 271–272). Many subordinate individuals, including community members from San Miguel Cuevas, have experienced “historical, subjective, and political dislocation since the forming of the colonies” and have had to create and rely on “a set of inner and outer technologies” (Sandoval, 2000: 79) to get through daily life. Youth from the community are often confronted with their subordinate position in a range of contexts. A goal for many of those to whom I spoke is to escape their history of poverty, marginality, and discrimination, while retaining their Mixtec identity and culture, but how this is done depends on the individual. A range of both conscious and unconscious life choices made by members of the transnational second generation have led to changes in their positionality.

Robert Smith (2006: 8) pinpoints gang involvement and higher education as two common but opposing paths taken by youth from Ticuani, another Mexico/United States transnational community. While there are diverse life choices made by Sanmiguelense youth, I will explore these two in particular. Although there are not many community members who are officially “jumped in” (formally initiated, usually by being beaten up) gang members, gang affiliation is prevalent among the community’s youth of school age in both the United States and Mexico. Gang activity tends to diminish with age, economic independence, or marriage. Gang affiliation affects community, work, and school participation and is very visible in teenager aesthetics on both sides of the border.

Young people from the community tend to identify to some degree either with the Northsider gang, which broadly speaking represents Mexican-American pride, or the Southsider gang, which represents Mexican pride. According to Smith (2006: 207), “the emergence of pandillerismo [gang involvement] in transnational life is not an aberration but a logical outgrowth of migration and assimilation processes in which migrants and their children are embedded.” His interviews with Ticuani community members showed that gangs formed because young members needed to defend themselves against violence coming from other ethnic groups in public arenas. This rationale is mirrored in an interview I conducted with Carmela, a teenage community member from San Miguel Cuevas who was born in the United States and raised in a trilingual household, attended school in Fresno County, and helped her family in the fields when she could:

I mean, just being at school is like being out in the city. It is where all these kids are individual people and just dogging everyone. This is how our campus is. There’s a table here, a table there, and every table is a different gang. It is mostly Mexicans that kick with us, they are down from the South, and then there is another table where all the Northsiders kick it, all the Bulldogs, and other people, you know. There are little groups that come up to you, you know, “What you banging?” It’s all about this, or all about that, and that’s when you either stand up for yourself or they are just going to be on your ass the whole time. And it got even worse when I got to middle school. So now I know I am not the type of person who is just going to let something fly.

Gangs are an almost unavoidable part of life for many school-going youth in Fresno County and, increasingly, in San Miguel Cuevas. Even if one decides not to join a gang, associations are almost immediately made between the colors one wears and the type of people with whom one socializes. By deciding to affiliate themselves with either the Northsiders or the Southsiders, Sanmiguelense young people are making a decision about who they are and what they want. This freedom of choice was expressed by Carmela as follows:

I mean, the people I hang around with that are down [with a gang], they want me to quit, to concentrate more in school. I mean, lots of times my friends have just sat with me and tried to push it in my head: “It’s not good for you.” You know, and then, like, my sister does it all the time. And then I talk to my brother about it, too. I tell him what’s going on and everything. And he goes, “Well, I’m not the indicated person to tell you what to do, but in my opinion, don’t get into this, it’s just stupid shit. It’s for a lifetime, you know.” But, I mean, they could sit down with me a whole year and just try and get it in my head, but it’s my decision, whether I want to be in it or not.

Gang affiliation exemplifies the way well-intentioned choices of action may lead to the reinforcement of dominant ideologies, imposed identity constructs, and sovereign power relations. The Southsider and Northsider gangs function within national ideological structures. Louis Althusser (2001 [1971]: 125–126) argues that resistance of this type may be counterproductive, with individuals often being unable to escape dominant ideological structures and instead, as Frantz Fanon (1967: 18) would argue, continuing to dance within the “language of the civilizing nation.” In this case, Sanmiguelense youth involved in gangs could be said to “desire the very thing that dominates and exploits [them]” (Foucault, 1983 [1972]: xiii). Choosing gang membership as a strategy for social mobility may meet some important short-term goals regarding freedom of choice, belonging, and counterdomination, but in the long term it “is destined to repeat the same oppressive authoritarianism from which it is attempting to free itself and become trapped inside a drive for truth that can only end in producing its own brand of domination” (Sandoval, 1995: 218).

Despite the gang activity that takes place within the community, the youth of San Miguel Cuevas are brought together time and time again through their extended families and through community events in which most participate in some way and actively accommodate difference. For example, in 2007 I was invited to a wedding of two Northsiders in Fresno County. Around 200 Sanmiguelenses attended the wedding, which was complete with a traditional meal, cake, presents, band, and dancing that went on throughout the night. Well into the celebration, I noticed that the open-air dance floor was divided into sections. Toward the back were the adults, toward the front were the Southsiders, and in the middle were the Northsiders. Although many were related through kinship, there was obvious friction between the Northsiders and Southsiders, with blue and red bandanas being flashed now and then.

Higher education is an alternative and sometimes concurrent path that can also result in overcoming one’s subordinate position. This life choice is often made in both the United States and San Miguel Cuevas but tends to be more successful in the former. In San Miguel Cuevas, education seems especially valued by girls, for whom it provides what may appear to be a favorable alternative to following in their mothers’ and older sisters’ footsteps—marrying and having children early—or migrating to work in the fields of the United States. Of course this is not the only reason young women choose to study, and there are many women who choose a similar lifestyle to that of their mothers and older sisters, understanding the different type of value it holds. Young men, however, tend to have a different set of priorities. They want to continue as comuneros (active community members), temporarily migrate to the United States to work, and save enough money to build a house and have a family back in San Miguel Cuevas. Although it is commonplace for younger men to spend more time in the United States than they originally planned, higher education does not seem to figure as much in their practical plans. Many young women in San Miguel Cuevas told me that they wanted to continue their studies but were discouraged by their parents, who saw it as either too expensive and time-consuming or inappropriate in terms of what their future ought to be. As 23-year-old Oscar put it, “My dad doesn’t think about giving us more schooling, in educating my brother and sister any more—only up to primary school. He thinks that people who study don’t achieve what they want, don’t finish their studies, and sometimes invest their money only to end up with nothing.”

Education in San Miguel Cuevas is a difficult strategy to follow because education after middle school must be pursued outside the village. For example, in 2006 Luz, a 14-year-old girl living in San Miguel Cuevas, exclaimed: “I’m going to continue studying no matter what!” but within six months she was no longer in school and was pregnant. Catalina, who was 12, dreamed of going to college in Mexico City: “More than anything I want to keep studying.” Yet three years later she too was married, and after one unsuccessful border crossing she and her husband were back in San Miguel Cuevas waiting for another chance to cross the border and work in the fields of the United States. The chances of her returning to school are slim. Unfortunately, Catalina’s desire for higher education will not become a reality in the United States without reasonable English-language proficiency and the funds and documents that make it possible to migrate and study there.

For Sanmiguelenses who have grown up or lived most of their lives in the United States it is another story. Higher education is more accessible, and parents tend to have a different opinion of their children’s acquiring it. Juana, a 20-year-old woman from Fresno County, said, “My parents want the best for us. They want us to be professionals. They want us to be someone in life. They don’t want to see their kids working in the fields, suffering like they did.” Parents in the United States tend to see education as a way for their children to escape low-paying and physically exhausting work. Most members of the transnational second generation whom I spoke to in Fresno County hoped to gain a college education, and over the years some of them did. A message on the community’s online chat room from an 18-year-old female (Yahoo Groups, 2007b: 427) shows how hard many have to work to do this:

I started college as a full-time student, and on Monday I started the beautiful grapes with my parents. . . . I only went two days and on Wednesday I started to work at Poindexter Nut Company. Sooo, this new job I have, its okay, I work four days a week, ten hours shift each day, the only bad thing is that I’m a very slow driver, so I barely have time to make it home after work and rush to my classes. (ex: I work from 6am-4:30, then my class starts at 6pm-9 something, it changes everyday) then I get home and rest and wake up at 4am the next day.

Juana summed up the general feeling of those who have pursued further education as follows: “Something that’s changed my life is school. The better education I get, my eyes are more open, that I have more opportunities to do more things than just like get married and have kids and be a housewife.”

Education and gangs are only two examples of the many paths that may be taken by the community’s youth to change their positionality. Other common strategies are seeking work outside of agriculture, working long hours to earn a good wage, getting involved in external social or political circles, and starting a family. Different strategies are chosen depending upon what seems to provide a better fit at the time. Choosing gang involvement can be seen as a politics of fulfillment that “is mostly content to play occidental rationality at its own game,” while choosing education can be seen as a politics of transfiguration that “strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable” (Gilroy, 1993: 38).

Border-Crossing Consciousness

Young people moving in transnational and transcultural spaces need a high level of what Anzaldúa (1987) calls facultad, seeing deeper meaning behind surface phenomena. They shift back and forth between traditional spaces (interacting with elderly community members or participating in community events) and more contemporary ones (male/female friendships, sporting and schooling activities in the United States, or gang affiliation). Through this increased flexibility, coupled with a growing desire for achievement in different figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998), many young people have gained the social and cultural capital required to negotiate within and between spaces both inside and outside of the community. Some are finding new ways of positioning themselves in different contexts.

On the basis of this ongoing negotiation between diverse consciousnesses and identities, a second kind of double consciousness emerges as many young community members go beyond imposed classifications to analyze their situation more broadly and use multiple and flexible strategies according to the circumstances at hand. In the words of Du Bois (1990 [1903]: 14), “Each alone was over-simple and incomplete, the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one.” This type of double consciousness, which requires a “determined effort at self realization and self development despite environing opinion” (Du Bois, 1990 [1903]: 49), has been described as “intercultural positionality” (Gilroy, 1993), “differential consciousness” (Sandoval, 1995), and “Nepantla” (Anzaldúa, 1993). It helps one deal with constraints by inhabiting “inbetween spaces” (Bhabha, 1994: 190) and “the interstices between the legitimized categories of social order” (Sandoval, 1995: 210) by using creative and shifting types of agency. It may not be fully expressible, but it is achievable through concerted practices of perception and action.

An example of this more fluid type of double consciousness, in which one “resides in a state of contingency of possibility, readying for any event” (Sandoval, 2000: 180), is reflected in the answer given by 22-year-old Porfirio, who has lived in both Fresno and San Miguel Cuevas and is currently in college, when I asked if he always ticked the “Hispanic” box on U.S. government forms:

No, I always tick “Other” [laughs]. I say I’m Mexican. And they say, “Well, technically you are,” and I say, “No, technically I’m not, I’m indigenous.” Maybe I’m not 100 percent indigenous, but I am indigenous and I am not Hispanic. The Spanish are the ones who invaded my country. . . . So I always try to mark “Other,” or sometimes they have “Native American” and I mark that. I am Native and I am American. What’s wrong with that?

Porfirio went on to explain that sometimes he does tick the “Hispanic” option, but only when it is convenient:

When Cristina [Porfirio’s girlfriend] and I were thinking about buying a house, we were talking to this loan officer, and she said, “What race are you? Are you Hispanic?” and I said, “No, I am not, I am Mexican,” and she’s all, “Oh, ah, well, there is no box for that,” but she’s all, “OK, I understand that, but if you want to get this loan, we have to put you under ‘Hispanic’ because that is what the government sees as the race who needs the money.” So I was, like, “OK, fine.”

This type of double consciousness provides a privileged viewpoint of the local as well as the global (Gilroy, 1993: 16–19, 29) and can be understood as “a shifting place of mobile codes and significations, which invokes that place of possibility and creativity where language and meaning itself are constituted” (Sandoval, 2000: 34). It requires its practitioners to move between meaning systems in order to overcome power impositions and to function in a range of situations (Spivak, 1990: 156). In San Miguel Cuevas it is most prevalent among members who have had extensive and frequent border-crossing experience (in both a geopolitical and a cultural sense)—those who are bi- or trilingual, have higher education, or are involved in transnational civil-society organizations such as the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations—FIOB) or in other cultural citizenship (Rosaldo, 1994) circles. This transnational consciousness crosses borders, bringing together the essentialized identities imposed on and chosen by these youth to make a whole and legitimate being. People who hold this type of consciousness are also normally very aware of the strength their own community and culture holds.

The development of this type of consciousness is not easy and at times can be lonely, painful, and threatening (Reagon, 1983: 356). Many young people from the community feel that there is no longer any concrete place where they belong. Living in the United States, many seem to rely on the nostalgia of happier moments in San Miguel Cuevas, but on their return this sense of belonging is not always a reality. Porfirio expressed the feeling of being caught between two worlds when he moved back to the hometown:

They wouldn’t accept me back. And for me it was, like, ahhh, I came home, but I couldn’t . . . although I always thought it was my home, and it is my home, and I always felt proud of being from there, but when I went back, I couldn’t . . . it wasn’t attaching back. My memories weren’t connected with my home, with the town. I was, like, this is my town, it’s different. I don’t remember it as this. People won’t accept me, and I miss home. I miss over here [the United States]. Yeah, so it was really weird. It’s, like, you are over there and you miss this place, but this is not really home, and you’re here and you miss that place, and you go back, but you miss it. . . . It’s really hard to claim home.

The role of nostalgia in these accounts can also be found in Du Bois’s (1990 [1903]: 233) work on double consciousness: “Somehow he found it hard to fit into his old surroundings again, to find his place in the world about him. He could not remember that he used to have any difficulty in the past, when life was glad and gay. Life was smooth and easy then.”

This multifocality, in the sense of becoming as well as being (Hall, 1990: 225), can be difficult, but it also allows for “a new topography of loyalty and identity” (Gilroy, 1993: 16). Some of the community’s youth acknowledge that they may not be strictly from “here” or “there” and, in doing so, do not fully commit to the restrictive and discriminatory environments of either. This is reflected in the community’s online chat room by a young woman who has postgraduate education (Yahoo Groups, 2007a: 41):

I had a very interesting conversation with a Mexican person (who lives and studies there), and I wanted to know how you guys react or respond . . . when they almost tell us that we are “gabachos” [Americans]? (OK some but not all) could it be true that we are neither from here nor from there? I only ask out of curiosity.

This type of border-crossing consciousness allows for greater self-determined activity among the community’s young people and was also expressed by Juana:

We’re the only ones who can choose our lives, what we want to do with our lives. No matter what, like, there’s many people that gives a good advice and it’s up to you whether you want to take those advice or not. For instance, I take those advice, for my own good. I think about it. I have experience working in a restaurant—I don’t want to work my whole life in a restaurant, being burned, getting cut. And working in the fields? Uh-uh, nah, I’d hate that. So that’s, that’s why probably, like, my parents did that to us, so that we can choose which way we want: fields or school.

Individual Situated Knowledge and the Creation of a Youth Standpoint

Even though the choices they make are often similar, Sanmiguelense young people’s consciousness, identity, and resulting agency have tended to develop on an individual rather than a communal basis. They have learned to create personal tactics linked to their situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988), to a large degree on the basis of the embodiment of social positionality and physical location. According to Federico Besserer Alatorre (2007: 332), also speaking of Mixtec transnational communities, “it is obvious that uncertainty is experienced when crossing borderlines, when traveling from one place to another, when located in one place or simply when living in a community that is separated by space.” In these uncertain spaces it is not always easy or common for individuals to acknowledge that they share a space of struggle or achievement. In other words, members of the transnational second generation of San Miguel Cuevas have struggled to find a single standpoint (Harding, 2004) as a platform from which to support each other, to represent themselves to others, and to grow as a community. Their transnational experience has primarily been one of uncertainty rather than of a known cognitive map (Besserer, 2007: 331). Thus they have created a diversity of stances that are frequently in opposition to one another. An entry in the San Miguel Cuevas online chat room demonstrates this opposition to an extreme. It is from a Southsider gang affiliate answering a Northsider gang affiliate who called her “Scraps” (which loosely means “Southsider/Mexican/Rubbish”). Both young women live in Fresno, and they are about the same age, but one was born in the United States and the other in Mexico (Yahoo Groups, 2007a: 146):

Scrap tu madre que cruso la frontera con el pinche demonio que eres tu!!!!! [Scrap your mother who crossed the border with the demon that you are!!!!] . . . OK better I start again in English, because the least I want is for you awanna be miss–stupid-American to not be able to read this . . . ahora que muy Nortaca [and you really are American].

This type of decentered transculturalism (Hirabayashi, 2002) is common in the community of San Miguel Cuevas. Many members choose not to interact with specific others because of their differences. Usually difference is expressed in subtle ways through personal interaction or gossip, but the online forum allows for greater risk-taking in communication. The interaction quoted above led to the formation of a second online chat room that was more Southsider-influenced, but it did not last long.

Although the community’s young people experience the world from different viewpoints, they are faced with the same problems in similar environments and often share concerns with the community’s older generations. They could yet develop a common standpoint based upon their shared transnational and transcultural experiences. Increasing numbers of young people now have a border-crossing consciousness born of their embodied life experiences as indigenous migrants, access to higher education, and interaction with other individuals and organizations. This border-crossing consciousness has also been facilitated by an increased use of the Internet, which allows immediate communication regardless of geographic location. Shared spaces that have been created in this way over the past ten years include Los Autónomos, the Facebook pages San Miguel Cuevas–Nuu Yuku, and Autónomos Young Oaxaqueños, the cultural project El pueblo de mis sueños (Melville, 2009), and the community’s web site (http://www.sanmiguelcuevas.com/) and chat room (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sanmiguelcuevas/).

Increased Sanmiguelense migration has resulted in important shifts for the community in the ways in which community members identify themselves and are categorized by others and what it means to belong to the community today. With a greater range of life choices available, the situational diversity lived by community members has increased. Some of their experiences may be negative; operating within the restrictive space of double consciousness, it is difficult to find an alternative to imposed identity categorizations that are class- or race-bound. Others are positive; approaching challenges with a border-crossing consciousness allows for greater agility and success in a range of situations. Increasing transnational choice and action offers a privileged position for community members but also strains the community’s traditional system of governance and its space of belonging. San Miguel Cuevas is changing significantly, and its political and social structures are struggling to keep up.

Thomas Kuhn (1962), writing about scientific revolutions, argued that the more established institutional members have control over the scientific apparatus. New ideas enter the scene, but they do not rock the boat enough to lead to marked change in traditional scientific paradigms. Rather, established paradigms slowly fade out, and over time newer ones take their place. Applying this idea to San Miguel Cuevas, I suggest that community members are finding different ways of being in and interacting with the world because of transnational migration, and this is changing the community. San Miguel Cuevas currently sits somewhere between the paradigms of a local and a transnational community. Shifts in standpoint are occurring through participation in cross-border cultural citizenship and growing acceptance of the transnationalization of the cargo system of governance and of community social structures. This is spurred on by transnational communication and activities such as community fundraising, event organization and participation, and other support mechanisms. Shared cross-border forums are allowing Sanmiguelense youth to take advantage of their unique position as Mixtec migrants. Changes in agency, individual consciousness, and a transnational collective vision offer these young people alternative pathways to those that were available to their parents and grandparents who have frequently been labeled by others as poor, indigenous, undocumented farmworkers.