A Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages Its Migration

Abstract

The field of migration studies is dominated by examinations into how immigrant-receiving countries grapple with social problems ranging from border control to immigrant incorporation. David Fitzgerald challenges this tendency and offers what is, to date, one of the most comprehensive looks into the politics and administration of emigration.A Nation of Emigrants is about the consequences and opportunities that mass labor emigration poses to emigrant-sending nations and how such nations attempt to limit the negative consequences and leverage the opportunities of emigration. Focusing on Arandas, a small rural county in Jalisco, Mexico, the book tells the story of how state, civic, and religious institutions within Arandas and greater Mexico attempted to maintain ties with migrants from Arandas living in the United States. Fitzgerald uses this locale to examine the evolution of local experiences with absent community members, the national tensions between administering a territory and managing citizens, and the international dimensions of labor migration. The three primary content chapters are organized according to systems of emigration control and management. Chapter 2 examines federal efforts to manage mass labor migration to the United States. Chapter 3 focuses on how the Catholic Church adjusted to the rise of mass migration to a Protestant nation. Chapter 4 discusses how hometown associations emerged to encourage and coordinate emigrant investment in municipal projects within Mexico. Each of the chapters follows a similar historical arc by examining how institutions opposed to mass labor emigration during the early twentieth century had, by the early 1990s, actively embraced Mexican nationals living in the United States. Municipal governments, parish churches, and the federal government all balanced courting emigrant workers’ earnings with anxieties regarding the reincorporation of emigrant citizens. Each of these chapters serves as evidence for Fitzgerald’s primary intellectual objective, which is to critique theories regarding the erosion of nation-states and the rise of transnational subjects. “The Westphalian system of sovereign states is not in decline,” argues Fitzgerald. “In fact, it is so robust even when confronted by mass international migration that it has shaped a new social contract between emigrants and their home country that I call citizenship a la carte” (p. 154).Fitzgerald’s concept of “citizenship a la carte” suggests that Mexico — a nation of emigrants — has adjusted to the rise of mass emigration by extending to citizens abroad opportunities for ongoing economic, cultural, social, and even political engagement with Mexico. Citizens abroad, in other words, may leave Mexican territory but remain Mexican subjects. Yet, argues Fitzgerald, citizenship a la carte limits how governments can exercise authority over citizens outside the national territory and the ways in which emigrant citizens can pick and choose benefits of citizenship without obligations. In particular, explains Fitzgerald, states lose the option of coercive force when citizens exit the national territory, and emigrants participate from afar in Mexican politics, culture, and society but are exempt from living according to conditions that they help to create. A Nation of Emigrants raises important questions regarding the reach of national authority, the substance of citizenship, and the everyday physical realities of life in an era of mass migration.The book sharply outlines its theoretical framework and will prove useful in graduate courses on state power, transnationalism, and citizenship. Fitzgerald’s historical approach promises a provocative analysis of changes that have taken place in Arandas since economist Paul Schuster Taylor conducted interviews there for his 1933 book A Spanish-Mexican Peasant Community: Arandas in Jalisco, Mexico, but it provides merely a general tour that lacks empirical and analytical substance. For example, archival resources are not always contextualized, and Fitzgerald tends to deploy single primary sources without considering contradictions and contingencies. Further, he misses opportunities for deeper analysis. For example, Fitzgerald provides new information on the Catholic Church and its role in managing Mexican emigration, but he discusses religion, families, and migration without attention to the gendered dimensions of work, mobility, and authority, and without any significant analysis of how the rising number of female migrants might have impacted the Mexican state’s assumption of a more protectionist stance toward its citizens abroad during the 1990s. Still, with these quibbles aside, A Nation of Emigrants raises critical new questions that will lead migration scholars to more thoughtfully consider the emigration story that unfolds alongside immigration history.