Subfield

International Migration, Nationalism and Ethnicity, Political Sociology, Ethnographic and Comparative-Historical Methodology, Sociology of Latin America

Research Interests

DISSERTATION:

"A Nation of Emigrants? Statecraft, Church-Building, and Nationalism in Mexican Migrant Source Communities"

ABSTRACT:

In the aggressive image of nation-state formation that infuses political sociology, populations lie prone while the state surveils, penetrates, cages, contains, disciplines, embraces, coerces, and extracts resources from them. But what do states do when a large part of the population gets up and walks away? Controlling immigration and managing immigrants have constituted recognized features of the state and nation-building projects of countries of immigration like the United States, but social scientists have generally ignored the implications of mass emigration for state and nation-building in countries of emigrant origin. Such a lack of attention obscures the ways in which international movement presents both challenges of governmentality and opportunities for building the infrastructural capacity of source country institutions.

This dissertation compares the way that different levels and agencies of the Mexican state and Catholic Church have attempted to manage mass emigration and its effects over the last century in the historical heartland of Mexican emigration. Drawing on archival, interview, survey, and ethnographic evidence, I argue that the central government consistently tried to control the volume, duration, skills, and geographic origin of emigrants from 1900 to the early 1970s. The failure of emigration control and the current abandonment of serious emigration restrictions are explained by a combination of external constraints, imposed by a highly asymmetrical interdependence with the United States, and internal constraints, imposed by actors within the balkanized Mexican state who recurrently undermined federal emigration policy through contradictory local practices. I argue that the emigration policies of the Catholic Church and state closely mirror each other, reflecting the unrecognized nationalist face of the transnational Catholic Church and a common set of problems for national institutions trying to identify, monitor, discipline, and extract financial resources from mobile members through vehicles like hometown associations formed by domestic and international migrants. As a consequence of early emigration policy failures, both the Mexican state and Catholic Church have shifted the emphases of their policies from controlling emigration to managing emigrants already on the move. In sum, this study of the Mexican case opens new vistas into a political sociology of emigration.

Notes

Field Research Coordinator, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, UCSD Sept. 2005 – June 2007; (concurrently) Guest Scholar, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, UCSD

MA Sociology, UCLA (2002);

MA Latin American Studies, UCSD (2000)

Publications

“Inside the Sending State: The Politics of Mexican Emigration Control.” International Migration Review, forthcoming Summer 2006.
(Winner ASA Political Sociology Section Best Student Paper Award and Labor and Labor Movements Section Best Student Paper Award, 2005)

“Towards a Theoretical Ethnography of Migration.” Qualitative Sociology, forthcoming 2006.

“Rethinking Emigrant Citizenship,” (Article-length Comment on Barry), NYU Law Review, forthcoming Dec. 2005.

“Nationality and Migration in Modern Mexico.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31(1):171-191. 2005.
(Winner ASA International Migration Section Graduate Student Paper Award, 2003)

“Transnationalism in Question” (Roger Waldinger, first author). American Journal of Sociology 109(5):1177-95. 2004.

“Beyond ‘Transnationalism’: Mexican Hometown Politics at an American Labor Union,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27(2): 228-47.2004.
(winner ASA International Migration Section Graduate Student Paper Award, 2002)

“‘For 118 Million Mexicans’: Emigrants and Chicanos in Mexican Politics” in Dilemmas of Political Change in Mexico, edited by Kevin Middlebrook. University of London. 2004.

“Negotiating Citizenship: The Role of Migrant-Sponsored Public Projects in Mexican Transnational Politics,” Special Issue on Research on Refugees and Immigrants, Journal of Social Work Research and Evaluation, 2(2): 251-65. 2001.

Negotiating Extra-Territorial Citizenship: Mexican Migration and the Transnational Politics of Community. Monograph Series, no. 2. La Jolla: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San Diego. 2000.

• http://rienner.com/viewbook.cfm?BOOKID=1524&search=fitzgerald



• Chapter 4 reprinted as “Negotiating Extra-Territorial Citizenship” in Borders and Border Politics in the Globalizing World, edited by Paul Ganster and David Lorey. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources. 2004.



• Reviewed in International Migration Review (Robert Smith, 2002, 36:2 603-04)

Grants and Awards

•ASA Political Sociology Section Best Student Paper Award, 2005
•ASA Labor and Labor Movements Section's Best Student Paper Award, 2005
•UC Fletcher Jones Dissertation Year Award, 2004
•UCLA Global Fellows Program, Associate Fellow, 2004
•UCLA Latin American Center Small Grant, 2004
•ASA International Migration Section Graduate Student Paper Award, 2003
•SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship, 2003
•Fulbright IIE Scholarship, 2003
•UC MEXUS Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, 2003
•UC Institute for Labor and Employment Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, 2003
•ASA International Migration Section Graduate Student Paper Award, 2002
•UCLA Summer Research Mentorship, 2002
•Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Latin American Sociology, 2001-2004
•UC Institute for Labor and Employment En-Route Pre-Dissertation Fellowship, 2001
•UCLA Department of Sociology Fellowship, 2000
•UC San Diego Rae K. Hepps Fellowship, 1999
•Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant, 1999
•U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, 1998

Advisors

Dissertation Committee: Roger Waldinger (chair), Rogers Brubaker, Wayne Cornelius, David Lopez, Andreas Wimmer

Conference Presentations

REFEREED CONFERENCE PAPERS:

“Transnationalist or Nationalist? Mexican Catholic Emigration Policies, 1920-2004.” Annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, Aug. 13-16, 2005

“State Definitions of Nation: The Politics of Mexican Nationality and International Migration.” XXV Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Las Vegas, Oct. 7-9, 2004

“Mexican Emigration and the Politics of Labor.” Annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, Aug. 14-17, 2004

“Mexican Emigration Control, 1900 - 2004.” UCLA Summer Institute on International Migration, June 21-26, 2004

“State Responses to Labor Emigration: A View from Arandas, Jalisco, Mexico.” Institute for Labor and Employment Graduate Student Research Conference, Point Reyes, CA, February 20-21, 2004.

“Nationality and Migration in Modern Mexico.” First Colloquium on International Migration and Development, Zacatecas, Mexico, Oct. 23-25, 2003

“Mexican Migration and the Politics of Nationality Law.” Annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Atlanta, 2003

“Methodological Issues in Ethnographies of Migration.” Graduate Student Contemporary Qualitative Research Conference, UCLA, April 25, 2003

“Clientelism and Democracy: Two Faces of Migrant Hometown Ties.” XXIV Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Dallas, March 27-29, 2003

“Rethinking the ‘Local’ and ‘Transnational’: Cross-Border Politics and Hometown Networks in a Latino Immigrant Union.” Annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, 2002

“Locating the National and Local in ‘Transnationalism’.” UCLA Second Annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration, May 28, 2002

“Cross-border Politics and Hometown Networks in a Mexican Immigrant Union.” Second Colloquium on International Migration: Mexico- California, University of California, Berkeley, March 28-30, 2002

“Migration, Nationality, and Nationhood in Mexico.” UCLA Comparativists’ Day, Feb. 1, 2002

“Rethinking the ‘Local’ and ‘Transnational.’” Institute for Labor and Employment Graduate Student Research Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz, Jan. 18-19, 2002

“Negotiating Extra-Territorial Citizenship: Mexican Migration and the Transborder Politics of Community.” XXIII Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Washington, DC, 2001

“Towards a Grassroots Transnational Politics?” 20th Annual ILASSA Conference on Latin America, University of Texas at Austin, 2000