Roads to Citizenship: Mexican Migrants in the United States

Abstract

This chapter explores Mexican migrants’ practices of citizenship, and the ways in which migrants engage in battles over the meanings and limits of citizenship within a transnational and translocal setting.1 It addresses these issues by bringing together three elements at the heart of migrants’ experience of citizenship: law, belonging, and the formal political arena.2 The articulation of experiences of transnational migration provides a framework for understanding how a culture of citizenship is shaped. “Culture of citizenship” refers to the social practices and understandings of membership in a given community— at either the national or local level—in the arenas in which citizenship is negotiated and constituted. In this sense, belonging, law, and politics are inextricably related to one another.