Uncertain Citizenship. Megan Ryburn
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Название: Uncertain Citizenship
Автор: Megan Ryburn
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Культурология
isbn: 9780520970793
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The complex and dynamic ways in which migrants in this research were both excluded from and included in these distinct but interwoven spaces of transnational citizenship (legal, economic, social, and political) are best captured through the analytic of uncertainty. Uncertainty, and how it is navigated, has increasingly been used as an optic in other social science research, and it is noticeably present in some recent ethnographic studies carried out in the global South.113 While these works may have disparate foci, they coalesce around a common conceptual understanding. There is a shared sense that uncertainty conveys the insecurity, precariousness, and sometimes fear generated by economic, social, and political processes occurring in the countries under study, and that it also elucidates the ways in which these are materialized in everyday life, becoming a normalized part of its texture. Uncertainty also, however, is comprehended as allowing for—and to a degree enabling—anticipation, aspiration, planning, and action. As Austin Zeiderman and colleagues contend, we can therefore understand “uncertainty as something that is both produced and productive.”114 Its temporal mode is thus foregrounded; Elizabeth Cooper and David Patten view uncertainty as “best approached as a theory of action in the ‘subjunctive mood’.”115 The subjunctive mood, as they explain, quoting Susan Whyte, “is a doubting, hoping, provisional, cautious, and testing disposition to action.”116
Uncertainty grasped in this way manages to encompass multiple aspects of migrants’ lived experiences in relation to transnational spaces of citizenship. It is suggestive of the way in which these spaces, and migrants’ places within and outside of them, are constructed through dynamic, multiscalar processes. And it expresses a lived reality of doubt, insecurity, and ambiguity. It also, however, reflects possibilities of hope and aspiration.
CONCLUSION
The approach developed by bringing together the perspectives on citizenship, migration, and uncertainty addressed in this chapter allows comprehension of how at any one time a migrant may be positioned differently, and multiply, in each of a range of overlapping transnational social spaces of citizenship. Her different positions within these spaces are highly contingent on power relations and her social identities—both in terms of how she is perceived and how she perceives herself—and also grounded in place and historical context. Perhaps she is on the very periphery of legal citizenship in one nation-state—holding a tourist visa, for example—while in full possession of legal citizenship in another where she does not currently reside. In terms of the political, she exercises her right to extraterritorial voting and also is a grassroots activist in the country where she is living, but she cannot vote there.
With respect to social citizenship, she had better access to health care in the country she has left than in the country where she lives at present. She has left one country because she could not find waged employment there and is precariously employed in the other. Almost all of these aspects of her citizenship could shift and change depending on both her exercise of agency through everyday citizenship practices (such as applying for legal residency, perhaps with support from a migrant organization) and structural factors (such as changes to immigration law, perhaps precipitated by recommendations from an international body). A change in one may result in a change in another, although not necessarily.
In this way, many migrants are neither entirely citizens nor “noncitizens,” nor are they in a clearly delineated “third space” of citizenship. Rather, as the stories that unfold in the pages ahead illustrate, there is an unpredictable quality to their experiences of citizenship across multiple dimensions. In relation to each of these dimensions, and spanning them, there is a sense of ambiguity, of instability, and sometimes of fear, but also a whisper of possibility. They live uncertain citizenship.
2
Places of Uncertain Citizenship
In the room where my niece lives you can fit a double bed and a single, and nothing else. And we all squashed in there, and we lived four grown-ups and a little girl. Five people…. In the single bed, there was my husband, me, and we put a soft toy or something alongside so that if we rolled off, we’d fall on that. I mean, it’s not a bed, it’s a mattress on the floor. We were like that for March, April, May, about two months while we looked for another room. April was when my sister arrived. Then in that same room it was my niece, her husband, my husband and me, my sister, and two children. There were seven of us.
—DIANA, AGE TWENTY-EIGHT, FROM SANTA CRUZ, BOLIVIA
As the late, great Doreen Massey contended, “If space is … a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space.”1 That is to say, places do not preexist but rather are formed and reformed through social interactions and interventions by institutions.2 They are not abstract. They are made manifest through embodiment, understood and created through the physical, experiential, and emotional.3 Places are consequently comprehended in a variety of ways by different people, but they also have shared meaning.
For Diana and many others, there were certainly particular places—like the inner-city tenement housing she describes in this chapter’s opening quotation—that were tangible expressions of their collected migration stories-so-far. It is imperative to grasp a sense of these places in order to comprehend how uncertain citizenship affects migrants in their daily lives. So prior to embarking on a discussion in the rest of the book of the construction of and interactions between the “wider power geometries” of spaces of citizenship, this chapter provides a grounding in the lived reality of uncertain citizenship.
Combining migrants’ accounts with my own participant observation through an iterative process, I slowly began to map the connections among what I came to understand as “places of uncertain citizenship,” six of which I discuss here.4 All, to borrow from Rob Shields, are places on the margins—in some cases literally on the geographic periphery, such as on the border at Lago Chungará, and in other cases figuratively peripheral to the center of society, as with the migrant cités (tenement housing) located in the heart of the capital city.5 They are places that perform a clever trompe l’oeil, being at once invisibilized and yet highly visible. And thus they are places of liminality, full of “ambiguity and paradox.”6
THE BOLIVIAN-CHILEAN BORDER
AT LAGO CHUNGARÁ
The physical geography of Lago Chungará marks it as somewhere outside normal paradigms. One of the highest lakes in the world, it sits at forty-five hundred meters above sea level. The altiplano landscape that surrounds it is splendidly dramatic, covered in pampa and snowy peaks; grazed by llama, alpaca, and vicuña; and a feeding ground for flamingo. I approached the Chungará–Tambo Quemado border crossing on my first journey there for this research in a fog of dizziness after briefly passing out on the bus due to our rapid ascent from sea level in Arica. My altitude sickness on that journey contributed to the sense of almost surreality engendered by the contrast between the dark green militarization of the border guards and the impossible blueness of the sky and the beauty of the place. Chungará seemed a shimmering mirage perched in the cordillera, yet it also was a place where weighty decisions regarding the movement of people were being enforced every day.
As a nexus point on the triple frontera (triple frontier) joining Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, its present is imbued with a history of conflict and unease. It is part of a borderland that holds deep importance in the national imaginaries of these three neighbors. The boundaries of Chile, Peru, and Bolivia were drastically redrawn following the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), and the consequences have been far-reaching. The war was a product of tensions СКАЧАТЬ