Spivak,in other words

The publication of texts by Chicana feminists in the 1980s offered an alternative mapping of feminist literary cartographies and subject positions. This article examines the work of contemporary Chicana writer, Sandra Cisneros, whose literary text enacts a practice of Chicana feminism that engages with a transnational, transfronteriza practice of feminismo popular, which literally translates as ‘popular feminism’. This type of border feminism articulates a feminist materialist aesthetics that enables us to re-examine an emergent formation of feminism on the border, a formation characterized by specific types of movements of Mexican women across geopolitical boundaries and borders. The complex movements of this transnational Chicana feminism are announced in the story ‘Woman Hollering Creek’, which complicates the binarisms of the metropolitan opposed to the rural, the core and periphery, and militates against a reductionist opposition of First World versus Third World. I argue that armed with a transfrontera feminism, the protagonist Cleofilas and her peers can resist the power of a transnational media. This story changes the subject of dominant, patriarchal discourse and lets readers imagine how Chicana transfrontera feminism and Mexican feminismo popular can converge in other spaces and under other circumstances to produce socially nuanced global Chicana Mexicana coalitions.     

Children and Power in Mexican Transnational Families

Today, many families find that they are unable to fulfill the goal of maintaining a household by living together under the same roof. Some members migrate internationally. This article addresses the consequences of a transnational lifestyle for children who are left behind by migrant parents. Using ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with a total of 141 members of Mexican transnational families, I explore how children who are left behind react to parents’ migrations. I focus on how Mexican children manifest the competing pressures they feel surrounding parents’ migrations and consequently shape family migration patterns. The article shows that children may experience power, albeit in different ways at different ages, while simultaneously being disadvantaged as dependents and in terms of their families’ socioeconomic status.     

The Risk of Historical Artefacts in Travel: The Construction of Risk in the International Travelling Exhibition

Abstract  This article interrogates the risk of historical artefacts in travel, emphasising especially on the construction of the risk of boundary-crossing when museum exhibits travel abroad through "outbound" international travelling exhibitions. This follows the history of a controversial exhibition, the "Splendour of Imperial China"– held in 1996 that travelled from the National Palace Museum in Taipei which is renowned for its abundant and unique Chinese art collection to one of the most prominent museums on the global stage – the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Drawing upon Mary Douglas's analysis of danger/risk and classification, this paper argues that the risk within the "outbound" international travelling exhibition is less ontological than constructed. Often the controversy over the risk re-delineates the boundary between "us" and "them". This article, first of all, examines the power-laden relationship, regulated by the struggle of the global museum field, when museum experts at home and abroad co-write the risk of an exhibition's travel in the language of insurance calculation. Second, it analyses the laymen's protesting discourses against the historical artefacts' overseas travel through outbound international travelling exhibition. The protest which appropriated the "keeping-while-giving" logic of exchange, and backed up with both national sentiments and international symbolic sources, rendered the exhibition a hot potato. Finally, it interrogates how the settled outbound travelling exhibition actually renders the museum collection reclassified and revalorized according to their suitability for overseas travel.     

National conceptions,transnational solidarities: Turkey,Islam and Europe

In this article, I examine the interplay between the institutionalization of Islam in Europe and the transnationalism of Turkey's Directorate for Religious Affairs (Diyanet). Based on extensive fieldwork in Turkey, Austria, Belgium, France and Germany, I demonstrate not only the salience of the nation‐state prerogative on the part of both European states and the Turkish state but also the tension between national conceptions of Muslim identity on both sides amid transnational solidarities. I also argue that, to a certain extent, European policies of detransnationalizing the Muslim field in Europe also intersect with the Diyanet's transnational politics vis‐à‐vis Turkish/Muslim immigrants in their common resistance to the deculturalization of Muslims in Europe. While European countries try to nationalize their respective Muslim communities into their cultural and juridical framework through reterritorialization, the Diyanet has increasingly deterritorialized its activities to preserve a Muslim identity engrained in Turkishness – hence, the coexistence of both a tension and mutual accommodation between Europe and Turkey.     

The spatial politics of the past unbound: transnational networks and the making of political identities

In this article I consider the relations between historical and contemporary forms of transnational political networks. I contest accounts that counterpose a networked present against a more settled and bounded past, arguing that this contrast rests on a problematic temporalization of difference in the construction of political identities. I consider how this temporalization produces particular accounts of relations between space, politics and identity. Drawing on the insurgent imaginative geography of resistance in C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins, I argue for a focus on the dynamic geographies of connection formed through transnational networks. I develop this position through a discussion of the relations of the London Corresponding Society, formed in London in 1792, to transnational routes of political activists, organizational forms and ideas. This account highlights the multiple political identities crafted through transnational political networks. I conclude by outlining elements of a ‘usable past’ for contemporary counter‐global struggles.     

Confronting Gender Discrimination in the Mexican Workplace

Abstract

This article focuses on the issue of gender discrimination in Mexico, in light of NAFTA since passed in 1993. A model of transnational contention from social movement theories is modified and used to analyze the integration of actions by Mexican, US and Canadian women's and labor group's actions, as they fight for Mexican pregnant workers' rights. Data from interviews with labor leaders, female legislators, political parties and feminist NGOs in Mexico and tri-national government documents are processed in a typology of transnational contention, revealing a high degree of integrated transnational and domestic efforts-which I argue is the basis for a growing women's labor movement in the region.     

The Matter of Space: Bodily Performances and the Emergence of Boundary Objects During Multidisciplinary Design Meetings

Prior research has identified the importance of embodied action in establishing representational infrastructure during disruptions in interdisciplinary work. This study expands on such research by examining meetings of interdisciplinary museum design teams—including educators, designers, researchers, and museum professionals. In these meetings, the museum space (exhibition room) emerges as a boundary object as it is presented through diverse material artifacts including floor-plans and mock-ups. The authors’ analyses identify and describe bodily and discursive practices of place-making and place-imagining that the participants perform as they attempt to maintain continuity across these shifting material forms and occasions.     

Gender and Transnational Gossip

Transnational social networks powerfully shape Mexican migration and enable families to stretch internationally. In an atmosphere of such high dependence on social networks, it would be rare for families not to be affected by the opinions of others. This article analyzes this often-overlooked aspect of social networks, gossip. I analyze gossip stories prevalent for one type of migrant family, those in which parents and children live apart. Drawing on over 150 ethnographic interviews and observation with members of Mexican transnational families and their neighbors in multiple sites, I describe both parents’ and children’s experiences with transnational gossip. I show that in a transnational context, gossip is a highly gendered activity with different consequences for men and women. Although targeting both women and men, transnational gossip reinforces the expectations that mothers be family caregivers and fathers be family providers even when physical separation makes these activities difficult to accomplish.

TERROR AND THE COLONIAL IMAGINATION AT WORK IN THE TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATE SPACES OF JAKARTA,INDONESIA

This article examines the role of the imagination in the construction of meaningful places out of economically defined and organized spaces. It seeks to understand the processes through which a colonial imagery is deployed in the negotiation of a complex and continually transforming transnational corporate order. This article is based on research conducted while working as a cross-cultural trainer within a transnational corporate office space in Jakarta, Indonesia. I discuss cross-cultural training as a space within which a colonial discourse based on terror and uncertainty persists, producing an ambivalent understanding of foreign overseas labor. I argue that a colonial approach to the social relations that take place within trans-national spaces persists for both Western-born and Indonesian members of the transnational capitalist class and is central to their perspective on capitalist expansion.     

From Restored Past to Unsettled Present: New Challenges for Jewish Museums in East Central Europe

This article examines the institutional development of Jewish museums in Prague, Budapest, and Bratislava from 1989 to the present, with special reference to their role as agents of cultural memory. I consider how these museums contribute to the formation of Jewish identities in post-communist societies, which are themselves struggling to form collective identities. After analyzing the institutional structures and exhibition concepts of these museums in relation to shifts in the politics of representation, I propose a core area on which each museum could base its future development.     

The transnational politics of the Tomato King: meaning and impact

Abstract In this article we deploy transnational ethnography to explore the transnational electoral politics by which Andrés Bermúdez, a successful tomato grower and labour contractor from Winters, California, who came to be called ‘the Tomato King’, was elected mayor of the municipality of Jerez in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. We seek to explain the meaning of his transnational electoral victory and its impact on the role of ‘the migrant’ as a new social actor in Mexican political development. We thus situate the Bermudista phenomenon in the context of the literature on migrant transnational politics. We hope to move the literature on migrant political transnationalism forward by advancing an agency‐oriented perspective that incorporates both the politics of representation of ‘el migrante’ in transnational electoral campaigns and the emerging dynamics of transnational coalition politics. Our approach underlines the need to carefully historicize the relationship between transnationalism and citizenship ‐ namely, to map the contingency and agency underlying the changing practices of states, migrants, and transnational institutional networks vis‐à‐vis questions of transnational citizenship. This is best done by paying close attention to the actual social and political practices whereby human agents pursue historically specific political projects that extend the practices of citizenship across borders.     

Reformulating tradition and modernity: Moroccan migrant women and the transnational division of ritual space

In this article I analyse the rituals that transnational migrants who live and work in Europe (mainly Italy) perform in Morocco during their return there for summer holidays. The transnational dimension of rituals and ceremonies reveals the diverse ways in which Moroccan families gain social recognition across transnational space. I explore how migrants construct and display their identities contextually and in opposition to multiple Others. By performing the traditional rituals associated with important turning points in their lives in Morocco, migrants seek to reintegrate themselves and maintain their membership of their community of origin. At the same time, however, these performances bring to the surface a hidden agenda: the assertion and exhibition of migrants’ differences with respect to those who have stayed behind. These rituals, which provide a perspective through which to analyse the intersection of global and local interconnections, also reveal complex and shifting interpretations of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, and the practices in which these are embedded. I conclude by suggesting that, in this process, migrants develop a creative interplay with ‘traditional practices’ by subverting, reformulating and giving new creative shape to their meaning and content.     

New insights in reproducing transnational corporate elites: the labour market intermediation of executive search in the pursuit of global talent in Singapore

In this article, I provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the reproduction of transnational corporate elites through the process of people moving between firms’ internal labour markets rather than from expatriation. Theoretically, the article advances understandings of the reproduction of transnational corporate elites by drawing on a pioneering engagement with global talent, transnational elites and labour market intermediary discourses. I generate these new theoretical insights through an original case study of how global executive search firms in Singapore create pipelines for the recruitment of transnational corporate elites between firms’ internal labour markets. The findings also highlight the vital role of Singapore's neoliberal labour market practices, as well as its foreign talent programme to ‘win the war for talent'. By situating this research on the agency of executive search in reproducing Singapore's transnational corporate elite, the article's key contribution is to decentre North American and Western perspectives on the reproduction of knowledge on transnational corporate elites.     

‘A ondi queras’: Ranchero identity construction by U.S. born Mexicans on Facebook

This study describes how transnational second‐generation Mexican bilinguals use a stigmatized variety of Mexican Spanish to communicate on Facebook and construct an identity. The stereotyped features of this variety index a ranchero identity. Historically, ranchero is an ambivalent identity for Mexican society in general. On the one hand, ranchero culture is a positive reminiscence of Mexico's agrarian past, while on the other, rancheros, along with indigenous Mexicans, are at the bottom of the hierarchy in Mexican society. A discourse‐centered, ethnographic analysis of digitally mediated conversations demonstrates how language use allows participants to reminisce about their collective past, maintain Mexican identities tied to their ancestors, fit their identities to contemporary U.S. Mexican culture, and distance themselves from the stigma associated with the ranchero background.     

“Back There We Had Nothing to Eat”: The Case of Transnational Food Insecurity

This article discusses migrant food insecurity in the United States from the perspective of Mexican and Central American migrant women. Many describe migrating because they had nothing to eat in their countries of origin. Migration is thus framed as a necessary strategy for overcoming food insecurity. I argue that these women's perspectives are unique in the migration literature because food security comprises a gendered labour from which men are frequently spared. Unfortunately, food insecurity still prevails in these women's households in the US. Assuming a “double‐duty” workday of earning wages and overseeing care within households, these women experience the added burden of ensuring food security of households “back there.” Thus, I argue that the food practices of Mexican and Central American migrant women provide a unique lens through which to understand the increased feminization of transnational migration from Latin America to other regions of the world.     

Continental transnational activism and women workers' networks within NAFTA

In this article, I present some experiences of transnational networking among women workers, women's groups, and feminist organizations at both the transcontinental and transborder level in the FTAA and NAFTA areas. These transnational efforts are analyzed as forms of resistance to the encroachments of global capital. The record of these networks is both encouraging and problematic. Encouraging because certain issues have received greater attention from both the state and multinational companies, and Mexican organizations have received strategic support to empower themselves and even, in some cases, develop a feminist workers' perspective. The record is also problematic as cooperation is not always free from conflict, or asymmetric relations, among the organizations. Asymmetries often reflect unequal access to power and financial resources. In spite of this, it seems undeniable that transnational networks among women's organizations are modeling new forms of resistance to the processes of global restructuring.     

The Making of Vulnerabilities: Indigenous Day Laborers in Mexico's Neoliberal Agriculture

This article explores the linkages between representations of race, culture, and social structure in the San Quint’n Valley, Baja California, an area of northwestern Mexico that produces tomatoes for export to the United States using an indigenous migrant labor force. I focus on a day laborers' riot that took place in 1996. The press debate that followed the event exposed the articulation between local cultural images, social relations, and global political-economic processes. I argue that the modern agro-export sector takes advantage of and reshapes colonial and postcolonial caste-based social relations that are most likely associated with "tradition." The use of indigenous day laborers in segmented labor markets typical of "flexible capitalism" is interpreted locally as a return to the past. Contract farming, an arrangement between Mexican entrepreneurs and transnational corporations, creates some confusion. Some blame Mexican caciques (ruthless landowners), whereas others blame transnational firms for the exploitation of indigenous peasants. Those who blame caciques evoke images of backward Latin American regions that need to be modernized by the revolutionary state. Those who hold global corporations responsible interpret neoliberal agriculture as a return to the nineteenth-century Porfiriato, a period of foreign capital penetration in Mexico. Paradoxically, "modernity" is associated with revolutionary social justice as the ideals and values of the Mexican Revolution are being radically reworked by the introduction of neoliberal policies.     

Voting here and there: political integration and transnational political engagement among immigrants in Europe

In this article, I examine voting patterns in origin and receiving country national elections among immigrants in Europe. The existing scholarship on transnational political engagement offers two competing interpretations of the relationship between immigrant integration and transnational engagement, which I classify as the resocialization and complementarity perspectives. The resocialization perspective assumes that transnational political engagement gradually declines as immigrants become socialized into the new receiving society. Conversely, the complementarity perspective assumes that immigrant integration increases transnational political engagement. I test these competing perspectives with survey data collected between 2004 and 2008 for 12 different immigrant groups residing in seven European cities. The analysis examines how immigrant political and civic participation in receiving countries affect their proclivities to vote in homeland elections. I also analyse the effects of receiving and origin country contexts on immigrant voting behaviour in homeland elections. While my findings support both the resocialization and complementarity perspectives, they also highlight the ways in which a set of origin‐country contexts shape immigrant propensities to engage in transnational electoral politics. I observe a degree of complementarity among immigrants with resources who are motivated and eligible to participate in both receiving and origin‐country elections.     

The Family of Man in Guatemala

Placing Edward Steichen’s 1955 photographic exhibition, The Family of Man, in Guatemala reorients the show’s Cold War geography and challenges the limits of Steichen’s humanism. Steichen’s orientation was East–West, his purpose to break down what he considered to be a nihilistic binary between the United States and the Soviet Union. A North–South axis brings with it issues of hereditary, festering colonialism and comprehensive exploitation of indigenous populations, who, in the visual realm of Life magazine, were one source of the sorts of exotic images, stamped with the seal of authenticity, which made their way into The Family of Man. It is important to see how the exhibition was displaced from the stable terms of exchange with its assumed audience through its deployment as a mobile element of the United States Information Agency’s contribution to the cultural diplomacy of the United States. After reviewing the message that Steichen constructed for the exhibition, the essay will examine the uncertain, Cold War terrain that greeted it in post-revolutionary Guatemala. The essay discusses the two impresarios who made possible the appearance of The Family of Man in the Casa de Protocolo: Edward Steichen, the originator of the exhibition, and Nelson Rockefeller, the master of the bewildering context surrounding this photographic work. I conclude with some reflections on present-day humanistic projects in Guatemala.     

Parenting From Abroad: Migration,Nonresident Father Involvement,and Children's Education in Mexico

In Mexico, a country with high emigration rates, parental migration matches divorce as a contributor to child–father separation. Yet little has been written about children's relationships with migrating parents. In this study, I use nationally representative data from the 2005 Mexican Family Life Survey to model variation in the interaction between 739 children in Mexico and their nonresident fathers. I demonstrate that, from the perspective of sending households, parental migration and parental divorce are substantively distinct experiences. Despite considerable geographic separation, Mexican children have significantly more interaction with migrating fathers than they do with fathers who have left their homes following divorce. Further, ties with migrant fathers are positively correlated with schooling outcomes, which potentially mitigates the observed education costs of family separation.