Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism

Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism

Roger Rouse

1991

Journal Article

Roger Rouse

Journal Article

10.1353/dsp.1991.0011

1911-1568

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:


Roger Rouse  
Roger Rouse is assistant professor of anthropology at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently a visiting
research fellow at the University of California, Davis, Center for
Comparative Research, where he is completing a book on the topic of
his 1989 Stanford dissertation, "Mexican Migration to the USA:
Family Relations in the Development of a Transnational Migrant
Circuit."


Notes



The first version of this paper was written in early 1988 while
I was a visiting research fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican
Studies, University of California, San Diego. It draws on fieldwork
carried out between 1982 and 1984 under a doctoral fellowship from
the Inter-American Foundation. I am grateful to both organizations
for their support. Many of the ideas contained in the paper were
developed in a study group on postmodernism organized with
colleagues from the center. My principal thanks—for comments,
criticisms, and immensely pleasant company—go to the group's
members: Josefina Alcazar, Alberto Aziz, Roger Bartra, Luin
Goldring, Lidia Pico, Claudia Schatán, and Francisco Valdés. I have
also benefited from Khachig Tölölyan's sensitive reading of the
text.




1. See Lockwood and Leinberger 35. The assertion of a false
point of origin is apparently used so that the manufacturers can
participate in foreign delivery contracts. See Soja 217.


2. "Hoy, ocho años de mi partida, cuando me preguntan por mi
nacionalidad o identidad étnica, no puedo responder con una
palabra, pues mi 'identidad' ya posee repertorios múltiples: soy
mexicano pero tambien soy chicano y latinoamericano. En la frontera
me dicen 'chilango' o 'mexiquillo;' en la capital 'pocho' o
'norteno' y en España 'sudaca.' . . . Mi compañera Emilia es
angloitaliana pero habla español con acento argentine; y juntos
caminamos entre los escombros de la torre de Babel de nuestra
posmodernidad americana." Gómez-Peña (my translation).


3. See, for example, Clifford 22; and Rosaldo, Culture and
Truth 217.


4. Jameson 83. Like Jameson, I find it useful to follow Ernest
Mandel in arguing for the emergence since the Second World War of a
new phase in monopoly capitalism, but I prefer to label this phase
"transnational" rather than "late" partly to avoid the implication
of imminent transcendence and, more positively, to emphasize the
crucial role played by the constant movement of capital, labor, and
information across national borders.


5. See Davis, "Urban Renaissance"; and Lipsitz, esp. 161.


6. It is important to stress that I am concerned not with the
various meanings of this particular term but instead with the image
itself. The term serves merely as a convenient marker.


7. See Williams 65-66.


8. Williams 65-66.


9. The combination of these images is readily apparent in the
classic works on rural social organization by Robert Redfield and
Eric Wolf (The Little Community and Peasant Society and
Culture and "Types of Latin American Peasantry"), both of
whom draw heavily on Mexican materials, and can also be seen in
Immanuel Wallerstein's tendency (in The Capitalist World
Economy) to use nation-states as the constituent units of
his world system, at least in the core.


10. This approach has been used in two related but different
kinds of study. In work focusing on migration itself—especially on
migration within Mexico—changes have commonly been gauged by
comparing the forms of organization found in the points of
destination with arrangements revealed by detailed research in the
specific communities from which the migrants have come. See, for
example, Butterworth; Kemper; and Lewis. In work on communities
known to contain a significant number of migrants and descendants
of migrants—and especially in work on Mexican and Chicano
communities in the United States—it has been more common to compare
forms of organization found in these communities with arrangements
discovered...

2013-08-05 14:48:21

1991

<p>Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 1991</p>

1

Project MUSE

8-23

Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies

Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diaspora_a_journal_of_transnational_studies/v001/1.1.rouse.html

1

Project MUSE Snapshot