The double-edged blade of transnational citizenship: Mexican migrants’ views of the Peña Nieto administration

Abstract

Studies of political transnationalism have focused on the rapprochement and increased attention that the Mexican state has directed at the Mexican diaspora in the United States (see Iskander in Creative state: forty years of migration and development policy in Morocco and Mexico, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2010; Delano in Mexico and its diaspora in the United States: policies of emigration since 1848, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011). In the context of the slow and painful democratic transition in Mexican politics, scholars and state actors have speculated that Mexican migrants in the United States are politically up for grabs, with no clear preference for any one particular Mexican party. Following the dubious return to power of the formerly hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) from 2012 to 2018, this essay tracks Mexican migrants’ views of the Pena Nieto administration using original public opinion survey data. Focusing on two of the flashpoints of the outgoing presidential administration in Mexico—namely the energy sector reforms and the case of the disappeared students from Ayotzinapa—this essay asks, how do Mexican migrants in the United States view the political performance of the Pena Nieto administration? Drawing on unpublished survey data tracing US-based Mexican migrants’ political assessment of the recently defeated PRI administration—from its ominous political ascension to its handling of structural reforms and egregious human rights crises—this essay argues that Mexican migrants’ views of the Pena Nieto administration were transnationally tinged by blood and oil.