Una Gabacha Sinvergüenza(A Shameless White-Trash Woman): Moral Mobility and Interdiscursivity in a Mexican Migrant Community

Abstract

This article explores a process that typifies social worlds during late-capitalist globalization: people's lives regularly involve the negotiation of conflicting visions of ethico-moral life. Such negotiations require people to reckon with complex social differentiation, wherein the boundaries between “good” and “bad” are overlapping, contradictory, and ever shifting. In the face of such complexity, we need ways to understand the assemblages that emerge as actors construct ethico-moral people and collectivities inside acts of reckoning. A crucial activity highlighted in assembly is reflexivity: the ability to step outside of and critically evaluate unfolding events and one's place(s) in them. Existing scholarship spotlights the importance of conscious moments of reflection. In this article, I highlight a different source of reflexivity: the implicit forms of positioning and critique entailed in language practices. My central claim is that the production of ethico-moral assemblages relies fundamentally on a form of linguistic reflexivity called interdiscursivity, through which actors lay claim to and can be read as possessing multiple, overlapping, and potentially contradictory forms of ethico-moral personhood. I show that the construction of “proper Mexicanness” unfurls in relationship with imagined foils of immoral US personhood, producing hierarchical distinctions that are raced, classed, and gendered. [migration, morality, ethics, interdiscursivity, assemblages]