Transitional socioeconomic and political environments of public relations in Mexico

This qualitative research on the socioeconomic and political environments of public relations in Mexico documents how national context influences the practice of the profession. The evolution of public relations in Mexico has accelerated since the establishment of the North America Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada. This advancement is attributed to the practices of transnational corporations and the democratization process that motivates openness, greater professionalism and the expansion of public relations across diverse organizations.     

Gendering (Trans)National Advocacy

Whether lauded or deplored, transnational organizing among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) generally, and women's NGOs specifically, is recognized as an active player in debates about international economic policy. In this article, I turn attention toward one consequence of women's transnational NGO organizing that has been under-analyzed: the impact that transnational activism has on domestic political organizations and opportunities. The recent increase in activism on gender and policies of free trade in the USA is the product of women's transnational political organizingover the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the case of NAFTA, theoretical insights about the ways that gendered categories undergird the economy were made visible by and through the transnational advocacy in which feminists engaged.And, this article indicates, these transnational advocacy efforts have helped to shift the domestic political terrain of women's organizing in the United States. I argue that as women's rights advocates in the United States were confronted with the realization that the nexus between gender and trade policy was important to many women's rights and feminist activists around the world, they began to question why the gendered implication of trade policy did not hold a comparable place in the US feminist arena. Thus, changes in the domestic political landscape of non-governmentalactivismmay be one of the longest lasting (and most overlooked) consequences of transnational political engagement.     

Transnational Twist: Pecuniary Remittances and the Socioeconomic Integration of Authorized and Unauthorized Mexican Immigrants in Los Angeles County1

Annual U.S.‐Mexico pecuniary remittances are estimated to have more than doubled recently to at least $10 billion ‐ augmenting interest among policymakers, financial institutions, and transnational migrant communities concerning how relatively poor expatriate Mexicans sustain such large transfers and the impact on immigrant integration in the United States. We employ the 2001 Los Angeles County Mexican Immigrant Residency Status Survey (LAC‐MIRSS) to investigate how individual characteristics and social capital traditionally associated with integration, neighborhood context, and various investments in the United States influenced remitting in 2000. Remitting is estimated to have been inversely related to conventional integration metrics and influenced by community context in both sending and receiving areas. Contrary to straight‐line assimilation theories and more consistent with a transnational or nonlinear perspective, however, remittances are also estimated to have been positively related to immigrant homeownership in Los Angeles County and negatively associated with having had public health insurance such as Medicaid.     

The Sonoran Desert’s Domestic Bracero Programme: Institutional Actors and the Creation of Labour Migration Streams

This paper traces the journeys of male migrants to Empalme, Sonora, Mexico to uncover the development of the often overlooked domestic bracero programme that operated in conjunction with its well‐known international equivalent. Drawing on interviews and observations with ex‐braceros who met at a park near the Mexico‐US border, I examine their experiences and participation in Mexico’s domestic bracero program, an unintended and unexplored consequence of its international counterpart. The study shows how regulation and control were constantly reinvented at every step of the selection process by state actors and their affiliates in Mexico. The paper reveals how the oversupply of labour and modernization of agriculture in Sonora resulted in the development of a migration industry where local municipal leaders, coyotes, the state, and Mexican agribusiness capitalized from men’s displacement. The migration industry during the bracero selection process controlled who gained access to the United States labour market by capturing migrant labour en route to the United States in the process fueling a thriving cotton industry in the otherwise stagnant Sonoran Desert economy. The study concludes by taking the lessons from the historic domestic bracero programme to show one instance in which internal and international labour markets were closely interwoven. In the end, I call for more research that examines the relationship between markets on both sides of the border that uncovers how networks are not only structured by personal ties but also by state and market relations.     

Transnational ties and ethnic identities in the parental homeland: second-generation Indian Americans in India

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ‘return’ migration of high-skilled, second-generation Indian-Americans from the United States to India. Based on interviews with fifty-six respondents, it asks: What transnational ties do second-generation Indian Americans maintain with India prior to return? Upon return, what are their ‘reverse’ transnational linkages to the United States? How do these linkages shape their ethnic identities, if at all? Findings suggest that respondents’ transnational ties to India prior to return reinforce their identities as Indian Americans. Once in India, they maintain affective and civic ties to the United States, the country where they were born or raised. Further, American-inflected social ideas and norms shape returnees’ interactions with domestic workers in India. As they grapple with the disparities between Western and Indian norms on the treatment of domestic help, respondents privilege ‘American’ identities. These findings highlight the transnational ties and identity construction and negotiation of second-generation returnees.     

Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire

Abstract Peoples that span national borders are ambiguous in that they in some ways partake of both nations and in other ways partake of neither. This paper analyzes how the boundary - the power to impose difference - of the United States and Mexico is being eroded by transnational developments causing the structure of the nation-states to become problematic. To the degree that anthropology is an official discipline predicated on the distinction between Self and the alien Other which it presumes to represent, the deterioration of the borders and boundaries of the nation-state have serious implications for its epistemology and legitimacy and its power of representation of transnational communities and of difference in general. Furthermore, as national distinctions decline ethnicity emerges as a consciousness of difference.     

Globalization and Social Movements: Comparing Women's Movements responses to NAFTA in Mexico,the USA and Canada

The article examines the responses of women's movements in Canada, the United States and Mexico to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) from a comparative perspective. It argues that while some women's groups have raised important critiques of trade agreements from a feminist perspective, they have largely failed to make the gendered dimension of regionalization visible in public debate on NAFTA and have had virtually no impact on public policy. The nature of the women's movements in the three countries limited the possibilities of greater contestation of the form of economic liberalization at both the national and transnational levels. Drawing upon the literature on social movements, the article suggests that the ability of women's movements to respond to NAFTA was conditioned by: (1) the shifting universe of political discourse in each country - whether it permits the identification of macroeconomic policy as a gender issue - which is conditioned in part by the diverse forms of engagement with liberalism as a political philosophy in each country, and (2) the organizational structure of women's movements in each country, their relationships with their respective states, and their role within broader coalitions.     

Global activism and new media: A study of transnational NGOs’ online public relations

This study examines how transnational nongovernmental organizations make use of new media tools in their public relation activities and what factors influence their online public relations. A survey of communication representatives at 75 transnational NGOs based in the United States found that promoting the organization's image and fund-raising were the two most important functions of new media for the NGOs. Organizational capacity and main objective of the organization were significant predictors of NGOs’ new media use in their public relations. However, organizational efficiency and revenue did not significantly predict NGOs’ use of new media.     

Caring by Silence: How (Un)documented Brazilian Migrants Enact Silence as a Care Practice for Aging Parents

ABSTRACT

While existing work on transnational aging and care has largely focused on the substance of transnational communication and what is being said, this article examines what is being ‘silenced’ during transnational exchange. I argue that to better understand aging and intergenerational caregiving we need to pay careful attention to what is not being said during transnational contacts, suggesting that silence and ‘communication voids’ are often formulated and enacted as a care practice. Drawing on ethnographic research with Brazilian migrants in the United States whose aging parents live in Brazil, I illustrate how migrants curate their lives abroad and sieve their lived experiences as an act of care for their aging parents back home. In so doing, I reveal the significance of faith as a coping strategy in the process of silencing and concealing emotions and as a means to fight loneliness, cope with adversity, and protect family exchanges.     

‘Equally at home on Beacon Hill and Hill 16’? Transnational identities among Irish‐born return migrants from the United States

In this article, I examine the transnational identities that return migrants create upon resettlement in their country of origin. Specifically, I draw on interviews with Republic of Ireland‐born return migrants from the United States between the years 1996 and 2006. The analysis shows that return migrants – like other migrant groups – maintain and establish translocal identities and practices that straddle ‘here’ (Ireland) and ‘there’ (United States) upon return. However, the article goes further, asking why returnees develop such border‐spanning social fields. Some recent scholarship suggests that some migrants develop transnational identities as an adaptive response to a hostile receiving society. The analysis here shows a similar process at play for certain return migrants in the post‐return environment. Doubtless, for some returnees, a transnational identity is a natural outgrowth of having spent several years in the United States. Yet for others, one can better explain this transnational identity as a coping strategy to buffer resettlement anxieties and disappointments.     

Economic Well‐Being in Salvadoran Transnational Families: How Gender Affects Remittance Practices

This article examines how migrant parents' gender affects transnational families' economic well‐being. Drawing on 130 in‐depth interviews with Salvadoran immigrants in the United States and adolescent and young adult children of migrants in El Salvador, I demonstrate that the gender of migrant parents centrally affects how well their families are faring. Gender structurally differentiates immigrant parents' experiences through labor market opportunities in the United States. Simultaneously, gendered social expectations inform immigrants' approaches to parental responsibilities and remitting behaviors. Remittances—the monies parents send—directly shape children's economic well‐being in El Salvador. I find that even though immigrant mothers are structurally more disadvantaged than immigrant fathers, mother‐away families are often thriving economically because of mothers' extreme sacrifices.     

Transnational migration: taking stock and future directions

Increasing numbers of sending states are systematically offering social and political membership to migrants residing outside their territories. The proliferation of these dual memberships contradicts conventional notions about immigrant incorporation, their impact on sending countries, and the relationship between migration and development in both contexts. But how do ordinary individuals actually live their lives across borders? Is assimilation incompatible with transnational membership? How does economic and social development change when it takes place across borders? This article takes stock of what is known about everyday transnational practices and the institutional actors that facilitate or impede them and outlines questions for future research. In it, I define what I mean by transnational practices and describe the institutions that create and are created by these activities. I discuss the ways in which they distribute migrants’ resources and energies across borders, based primarily on studies of migration to the United States.     

The democratic deficit of transnational environmental activism: a case study of e‐waste governance in India

The literature on transnational activism often associates environmental NGOs with democratic legitimacy, grassroots representation and environmental justice. Authors employ case studies to demonstrate how engaging in transnational networks increases the political agency of environmental NGOs. Yet, there is a tendency mostly to select successful cases. In this article, I investigate the political activities of the environmental NGO, Toxics Link, surrounding the recycling of electronic waste in India. Based on qualitative research, this study shows how the political incorporation of Toxics Link in transnational advocacy networks and domestic governance networks constrains their political agency. The structural exclusion of e‐waste labourers from Indian policy negotiations negates the discursive claims of legitimacy, representation and justice. These incorporation processes create a democratic deficit. I use the insights gained from this case study to provide a critical assessment of theories of transnational environmental activism.     

Framing and immigration through the trump era

For the last decade, undocumented or illegal immigration has been one of the most contested policy issues in the United States, with significant news attention on policies affecting the undocumented population, ranging from deportations to comprehensive immigration reform, the DREAM Act, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Despite these prominent and multifaceted policy debates, scholarship on media framing and public opinion remain more focused on the portrayal of immigrants rather than policies affecting them. In general, scholars find that policy frames are far more consequential to public opinion than equivalency frames (variations in how news media describe unauthorized immigrants, either as “illegal” or “undocumented”) or episodic frames (whether news articles are heavy on human‐interest stories rather than policy facts and statistics). Also, negative frames generally have stronger effects than positive frames, and these effects sometimes vary by partisanship and family migration history. Finally, the relative infrequency of powerful frames in news stories, like a life spent in the United States, provides opportunities for advocates to move public opinion on immigration policy. These findings have important implications for future battles over immigration policy in the United States, which show no signs of abating.     

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.     

After the transnational turn: Looking across borders to see the hard face of the nation-state

This paper leverages the repressive turn in U.S. migration policy to understand how a cross-border perspective can illuminate the experiences of two different, but contemporaneous second-generation populations: Those whose lives have unfurled in the United States, all the while growing up in internationalized families with ongoing homeland ties; and those whose childhoods began in the United States, but were disrupted as part of the ‘Great Expulsion’, and thus migrated to Mexico, albeit often with U.S. citizenship and almost always with cross-border ties to family members still living in the United States. As the paper demonstrates, looking across borders highlights the importance of the territorial frontier and the continuing power of the national to undermine the forces that produce cross-border connections.     

From “Shared Responsibility” to a Migration Agreement? The Limits for Cooperation in the Mexico‐United States Case (2000–2008)1

Why were the Mexican and United States governments unable to establish formal cooperation for the management of migration flows even after agreeing on the need for a “shared responsibility” approach and establishing an agenda for negotiations on a bilateral agreement in the spring of 2001? Conventional wisdom is that the terrorist attacks of September 11th were the main reason for the shift from a bilateral to a unilateral approach to the management of US‐Mexico migration flows. Although this event changed the US government’s foreign policy priorities, in order to understand the reasons why the proposal for a migration agreement failed, it is necessary to look beyond the security context that permeated the US agenda after September 11th and analyse the underlying structural, domestic and ideological factors that influenced the governments’ positions during and after the negotiations. By examining the context of power asymmetry in the US‐Mexico relationship, the domestic politics that surround the issue and public perceptions of immigration in the United States, this paper identifies the challenges implied in efforts to expand bilateral cooperation over migration issues in the NAFTA framework. The fact that both countries’ migration policies are mostly pursued unilaterally despite the acceptance of a “shared responsibility” raises key questions regarding the limits of regional integration and bilateral or multilateral cooperation for the management of migration.     

Conflicts over knowledge transfer across the border: Korean international students and the conversion of cultural capital

It is common knowledge that international students are a major conduit of international knowledge transfer and that they become transnational managerial elites and highly skilled migrants. However, few studies show how this transfer occurs. Moreover, people often assume that knowledge transfer is a smooth process. Drawing on in‐depth interviews of former and current Korean international students and non‐migrant Koreans in the United States and South Korea, my study shows that knowledge transfer can, in fact, be highly conflictual. I argue that conflicts in the country of origin between international students (the transferors) and non‐migrants (the recipients) mediate knowledge transfer. I see the conflicts as struggles over the conversion of cultural capital from the Global North into local power and wealth, which reworks Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital for transnational social fields. In so doing, I develop a framework that links knowledge transfer and transnational social reproduction.     

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.     

Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Options in Canada

This article examines the role of public opinion in Canada'sattempt to lessen its dependence on the United States and seekcloser ties with European and Asian countries. Employing nationalsurvey data collected over a three-year period, the authorsargue that widespread public support for new directions in foreignpolicy has not developed in Canada in spite of the climate ofincreasing nationalism and the shift in government policy. Attitudestoward the problem of foreign investment, domestic economicissues, trade agreements, and Canadian participation in internationalpeacekeeping forces are also reported.