For love and money: second-generation Indian-Americans ‘return’ to India

This article focuses on the ‘return’ of second-generation Indian-American professionals from the US to their parental homeland, India. Based on qualitative interviews with forty-eight second-generation Indian-Americans working in the cities of New Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad, it examines the question of why they ‘return’ to India. Data suggest that better job opportunities in India motivated and enabled respondents to ‘return’. Importantly, they also ‘returned’ to develop an independent and personal relationship with the country. Their migration decisions were shaped by their transnational praxis and cultural affiliations to India and the stage in the life-course. My findings also suggest that for some second-generation immigrants, ‘return’ does not necessarily imply permanent settlement in the parental homeland or mark the end of the migration cycle.     

'India Shopping': Indian Grocery Stores and Transnational Configurations of Belonging

The cost of health services within the USA has increased in recent years, limiting access for many Americans. In response, a growing number of Americans are traveling to medical border towns in Mexico to meet their needs. However, many US patients feel uncomfortable traveling to Mexico for healthcare because they are unsure how the system works and believe that Mexico is dangerous, unregulated, unsanitary, and premodern. To reconcile these beliefs with the need for quality medical care, Mexican medical providers appropriate aspects of the US medical system to encourage patronage and alleviate the concerns of patients. This paper examines how some Mexican dentists, pharmacists and physicians in the Mexican border town of Nuevo Progreso have broadened their appeal to American patients by (a) associating their procedures with US biomedical standards, (b) building facilities that shadow US counterparts, and (c) facilitating access to the Mexican medical system.     

Temporary and transnational: gender and emotion in the lives of Mexican guest worker fathers

In this article I use the US H2A guest worker programme as a lens through which to analyse the gender subjectivities of Mexican transnational fathers. My qualitative findings highlight the ways in which the prioritization of productive over reproductive labour within the H2A programme exploits gender-based expectations within Mexican families, reproducing rigid gender divisions of family labour. Additionally, the subjectivities of guest worker fathers are influenced by cultural expectations as well as by the rurality and cyclicality of their lives. As fathers shift between the USA and Mexico, so do their gender subjectivities, symbolizing gender's fluidity. Findings complicate the oft-cited conclusion that emotional labour and sacrifice are the exclusive domain of transnational mothers.     

A rite of reverse passage: the construction of youth migration in the US asylum process

Drawing on ethnographic research at a legal aid organization, I analyse the legal brokerage of youths’ asylum applications. As youths increasingly seek asylum alone, the US has adopted policy changes allowing them more favourable access to the asylum process than adults. Despite this opening, I argue that mediating youths’ asylum claims remains challenging. First, youths have more difficulty sharing their stories than adults, and I identify three youth-specific interviewing strategies that legal intermediaries employ to elicit their accounts of forced migration. Second, I analyse how intermediaries edit these accounts to satisfy the asylum system’s expectations about childhood, as well as forced migration, constructing narratives that distance youths from criminalized adult identities and depict them as innocent child-refugees, which configures the asylum process as a victimizing and infantilizing rite of reverse passage.     

Informational returnees: deportation,digital media,and the making of a transnational cybertariat in the Mexican call center industry

In recent years, the US government has intensified the deportation of undocumented Mexican migrants, some of them with long life trajectories in the USA. With weak family networks in their communities of origin and sometimes none at all, many deportees choose to stay in cities along the US-Mexico border, joining the army of underpaid, low-skilled, and informal urban workers. Some take advantage of their transnational experience to earn a better income; within this context, the call center industry is an economic sector that profits from the language facility and sociocultural skills deported populations bring with them from their years spent living in the USA. This paper addresses the working conditions among call center workers in Mexico, with a focus in Tijuana City in the Mexican Northwest. In particular, I explore how migration, deportation, and call center labor produces what I call informational return, a process in which the convergence of culture, deportation, and digital media plays a key role in the constitution of a transnational digital worker.     

Evidence of a genetic component in the seasonal return pattern of Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar L.

We tested the null hypothesis that differences in the seasonal return patterns between stocks of Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar L., are a result of a direct response to the environment, and not under genetic control. Two stocks were used in the experiments, originating from the R. Figga and R. Imsa, respectively. In their native habitat fish from the former are known to return to the home stream as adult salmon early in the summer, while from the latter return during late summer and autumn. By rearing these stocks in the same hatchery and releasing smolts of both stocks together at three sites in southern Norway, it was demonstrated that salmon from the R. Figga stock returned earlier to coastal Norway than salmon from the R. Imsa stock, as maturing adults. Thus, we reject the hypothesis that these stocks are genetically identical in this trait. Within both stocks, multi-sea-winter fish returned earlier than one-sea-winter fish. Within stocks, there was no significant difference in time of return between salmon released as 1- and 2-year-old smolts, or between fish reared from parents ascending the R. Imsa early or late in the season.     

Global South cosmopolitans: the opening and closing of the USA–Mexico border for Mexican tourists

The US government has simultaneously increased efforts to close its border to unauthorized migrants, and opened the border to increasing flows of tourists from Mexico. In this paper I focus on the experiences of Mexican tourists who are able to freely cross the USA–Mexico border with US visas, given that their unique status as tourists from Mexico is an important element to consider because it organizes their daily lives, their moral understandings, and their experiences across the USA–Mexico border. I show how Global South cosmopolitans from Mexico benefit from class privilege in Mexico, but become legally vulnerable in the USA due to their racialization as Mexicans and lack of citizenship rights. This paper draws on ethnographic data and in-depth interviews collected in the border town of Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico between July 2009 and August 2010.     

Performing the Nation: Unauthorized Mexican Migration and the Politics of Language Use and the Body along the US–Mexico Border

ABSTRACT

Given the harsh environment for Mexican migrants in the US state of Arizona, migrants must think carefully about instantiating their identities in White public space through clothing, bodily movements, and language. This article explores the ways some unauthorized Mexican migrants in Arizona perform belonging to the USA by performing Chicano. Performing Chicano means passing as a US citizen, and migrants’ well-being can depend upon the recognition of those performances. Other unauthorized migrants perform the Supermexicana, to pass as Mexicans who are shopping in the USA, and need to hide the fact that they clandestinely live there. This article examines how some migrants perform a commitment to the USA in public while privately disavowing it, and how others perform a commitment to Mexico that they simply cannot have. This analysis argues that the experiences of unauthorized migrants in the USA can be productively seen through the lens of national performativity.     

Capitalism and US policy at the Mexican border

Does US policy at the Mexican border—heavily weighted toward immigration and drug law enforcement—help the capitalist system function in North America, and if so, how? And if not, what are the most likely drivers of such policies, and how do they interact with the capitalist context? Four topics are examined: inequalities of rights to border crossing into the United States from Mexico, and the role of such unequal mobility in the maintenance of various privileges in North America; a puzzle in capitalist–functionalist border policy–underinvestment in ports of entry compared to enforcement between such ports; enforcement against unauthorized migrants seen both as labor control and discriminatory politics; and border enforcement and militarization as a system of regional repression and control, addressed at the rapidly growing and important US–Mexico border region. The relationship between US border policies and the functional needs of capitalism is complex, not simple; the article rejects a perfect system view in favor of a richer view of capitalism as filled with contradictory social impulses and political outcomes, shaped in broad contexts of class relations and capital accumulation. The wider context of this essay is the question of how the territorial nation-state relates to capitalism, two fundamental features of our era. Some preliminary thoughts on that question are broached in the conclusion.     

‘It's almost like white supremacy’: interracial mixed-status couples facing racist nativism

This article expands the theoretical debate on racist nativism and the specific impact that it has on the experiences of interracial mixed-status couples in the USA. In-depth interviews suggest that the costs of racist nativist microaggressions and macroaggressions are experienced differently, depending on the social status of each member of the couple. Microaggressions target Latinos/as, while racial profiling, a macroaggression, is mainly experienced by Latino men; however, in both cases their white partners also experience rebound racism on behalf of their partners. White women partnered with Latinos experience the greatest rebound effects of racist nativism. Larger macro-policies create a precarious position for couples; this leads them to make calculated legal risks to sustain their families and ultimately constrains their freedoms.     

Molecular demonstration of SLC4A1 gene deletion in two Mexican patients with Southeast Asian ovalocytosis

We describe the finding of two Mexican patients with a specific 27-bp deletion in the solute carrier family 4 gene (SLC4A1delta27) (also known as the band 3 gene found on chromosome 17q21-q22), characteristic of Southeast Asian ovalocytosis (SAO). The patients were asymptomatic, and the initial diagnosis was made by microscopic observation of the presence of typical stomatocytic ovalocytes. The gene deletion was confirmed by PCR and DNA sequencing. Both patients were heterozygous for the deletion. One patient is from Tabasco state, in southeastern Mexico, a malaria-endemic zone. The other patient is from Mexico City, which is not a malaria-endemic area. Their families have no non-Mexican ancestors and their previous generations were born in Mexico. Both patients carry the HLA-B*3501 subtype, characteristic of Amerindians and Asian populations. Familial and HLA data led us to conclude that these two patients are the first report of SLC4A1delta27 in Amerindians. The nucleotide analysis showing a perfect match sequence between Southeast Asian and Mexican patients suggests, but does not prove, that the Mexican gene is not a de novo mutation. Instead, this gene might be the result of migration of individuals with Asian ancestry into the Mexican gene pool. We are looking for other families with the mutation to detect, by HLA analysis, the ancient ethnic origin of these patients.     

Geographical patterns and determinants of species richness in Mexico across selected families of vascular plants: implications for conservation

Mexico is considered a megadiverse country containing more than 10% of the world's biodiversity. The distribution of this species richness and endemism is different among the different Mexican states. We examined the species richness patterns of 13 families of vascular plants (including ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms) in Mexico using political divisions (states) as units of analysis. We analysed the species richness values (absolute richness, endemic richness and restrictive richness) of these plant families using stepwise multiple regression analysis, assessing their relationship with a set of 10 environmental variables (expressed as heterogeneity coefficients). A combined cluster analysis with multidimensional scaling analysis (MDS) and an analysis of similarities were also undertaken to define the spatial–geographical patterns. Additionally, we proposed a methodological strategy to determine which states of Mexico have priorities for conservation. Our results suggested that the three species richness values used were significantly predicted by environmental factors, especially by climatic heterogeneity. Notwithstanding that a linear pattern was recognized, the Mexican states were gathered in four groups, which were confirmed by the MDS and the cluster analysis: (1) the Yucatan Peninsula, (2) arid Mexico, (3) the Mexican Transition Zone and (4) the megadiverse states. We proposed that 12 Mexican states include all the environmental conditions and are candidates for developing conservation programmes: (1) Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Yucatán, (2) Baja California, Chihuahua and Sinaloa, (3) Guerrero, Jalisco and Nuevo León and (4) Chiapas, Oaxaca and Veracruz.     

Do Migrants Degrade Coastal Environments? Migration,Natural Resource Extraction and Poverty in North Sulawesi,Indonesia

Recent literature on migration and the environment has identified key mediating variables such as how migrants extract resources from the environment for their livelihoods, the rate and efficiency of extraction, and the social and economic context within which their extraction occurs. This paper investigates these variables in a new ecological setting using data from coastal fishing villages in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. We do not find as many differences between migrant and non-migrant families regarding destructive fishing behavior, technology, and investment as might have been expected from earlier theories. Instead, the context and timing of migrant assimilation seems to be more important in explaining apparent associations of migration and environmental impacts than simply migrants themselves. This finding fits well with recent literature in the field of international migration and immigrant incorporation.     

Biogeography, current knowledge and conservation of threatened vascular plants characteristic of Mexican temperate forests

The main goal of this study is to document the biogeographical patterns, current status and conservation of 24 species of vascular plants in Mexico, all of them recorded in some risk category in the Mexican official publication named ‘Norma Oficial Mexicana 059’ (NOM-059) and some of them in the IUCN red lists (the World Conservation Union) and CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species); many of these species are linked to Mexican cloud forests and other temperate vegetation types. Distribution maps of these 24 species were generated with information obtained from specialized literature, herbarium specimens, institutional databases, and field work; with this information, the patterns of richness and endemism of these species were obtained. For this, the Mexican territory was divided using a grid system based on a chart index (scale 1:50,000 system composed by grids of 15' × 20'). Also, we up to date the knowledge of these species and their populations and current habitats, and evaluate their geographic distribution in relation to the current Mexican National Parks and Reserves System and Mexican Priority Regions for Conservation. We also discuss some changes of categories in the NOM-059 and suggest the urgent incorporation of some of the species in the recent IUCN Red Data List of Threatened Species (2003). Most of the species studied require special policies for their conservation due to problems that affect their natural populations; also we consider that these taxa are underrepresented in the current Mexican System of Natural Protected Areas, especially those with restricted distributions.     

‘We eat meat every day’: ecology and economy of dietary change among Oaxacan migrants from Mexico to New Jersey

Abstract

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the USA has experienced large-scale and continuing immigration from around the world, especially Latin America and, within Latin America, from Mexico. One dimension of these transnational processes is dietary change. In this paper, we qualitatively assess the effects of migration from Oaxaca, Mexico to central New Jersey on the ecology and economy of dietary patterns. We explore multiple factors at the micro and macro levels. Data come from focus groups held among Mexican migrants in New Jersey, and in Oaxaca among people from their sending communities. Economic constraints and lack of culturally appropriate foods are larger barriers to healthy eating than lack of knowledge about appropriate diets. We end with recommendations for nutrition education and interventions.     

Home Visits: Transnationalism among Australian Migrants

As a perspective developed primarily in anthropology, ‘transnationalism’ has until recently been dominated by ethnographic and textual analyses. While not problematic for any particular study, the overwhelming dominance of these methodologies has created two major theoretical shortcomings; a tendency to inflate the prevalence of transnational models of living, and the attribution of an egalitarian or emancipatory character to transnationalism, generally in the absence of systematic evidence. In this article we attempt to remedy these problems by examining the frequency and determinants of one tangible indicator of transnational activity in migrants to Australia: visits home. Our results suggest three important conclusions: 1) not all migrants visit home at all, and only about 11 per cent do so on a regular basis; 2) there are major between-group differences in migrants’ capacity to visit home; and 3) the earlier concepts of assimilation and migration order are of substantial significance in understanding transnationalism.     

Declining Odds: Kinship, Women's Employment, and Political Economy in Rural Mexico

Some women in San Cosme Mazatecochco, a rural community in central Mexico, whose families have more diverse networks and a slight economic advantage, use the community's flexible kinship system to get more secure employment. But their ability to do so is limited by the larger political economy. As the Mexican economy deteriorates for working-class Mexicans and the class system becomes more closed, more women participate in the labor force and more women have marginal employment, [political economy, kinship, women, class, Mexico]     

Values under seige in Mexico: strategies for sheltering traditional values from change

The adverse economic conditions of inflation and falling oil prices over the late 1970s and 1980s in Mexico forced many middle-class married women out of the home and into the workplace in order to help the family maintain its socioeconomic standing. Although this phenomenon ran directly against the traditional Mexican cultural construction of gender and family, many Uruapan middle-class couples had no alternative and rationalized the change by concealing, reinterpreting, or not directly challenging traditional values. Sections discuss the dilemma of middle-class families, Mexican middle-class adaptation to wives' employment, strategies for existing change in values, and the open acceptance of changed values. The author's comments and conclusions are based largely upon interviews with 16 married women of the period. It is concluded that even though the middle class resists them, changes have taken place over the past 20 years in the acceptance of married women in the workplace, the sharing of domestic work, fertility control, and equality between spouses in family decision making. It remains to be seen, however, whether these women will stop working and return to their formerly exclusive roles of wives and mothers if and when economic conditions improve in Mexico.     

Export agriculture,transnational farmworkers,and labor resistance in the Mexico–US borderlands

This article discusses the system of export agriculture in northern Mexico and its impact on transnational farmworkers employed in both sides of the US–Mexico border. Since the late 1990s, a transnational industry producing fresh produce for consumer markers in the USA has taken hold in the San Quintin Valley in Baja California, transforming the economic and social fabric of this border region. This industry has generated a new labor regime predicated upon the employment of a flexible and cheap source of indigenous workers from the poorest states in southern Mexico. I examine the contours of this regime, the forms of labor resistance it has elicited, and the new types of labor migration it has generated by Mexican workers to the USA. As I show, indigenous farm laborers engage in novel forms of labor and political protests to claim for their rights. These developments, I argue, speak of the class formation of transnational farmworkers who, mobilizing local and transnationally, combine traditional labor demands with wider claims for their civil and political rights.     

Concordant Biogeographic Patterns among Multiple Taxonomic Groups in the Mexican Freshwater Biota

In this paper we analyse the degree of concordance in species richness and taxonomic distinctness (diversity) patterns among different freshwater taxonomic groups in order to test three long held patterns described in Mexican freshwater biogeography: 1. The aquatic biota of Mexico includes two distinct faunas, a rich Neotropical component in the south and a south-eastern region and a less rich Nearctic component towards central and northern latitudes of the country. 2. A hotspot of species richness and diversity has been recorded in the Usumacinta, including the Yucatan Peninsula. 3. The presence of two distinct biotas in Mexico, an eastern one distributed along the Gulf of Mexico slope, and a western one associated to the Pacific versant. We use species richness and taxonomic distinctness to explore patterns of diversity and how these patterns change between zoogeographical regions. This paper points out a clear separation between Neotropical and Nearctic drainage basins but also between eastern (Gulf of Mexico) and western (Pacific) drainage basins. Present data gives additional empirical support from freshwater biota for three long held beliefs regarding distributional patterns of the Mexican biota. The neotropical basins of Mexico are generally host to a richest and more diversified fauna, that includes more families, genera and species, compared to the less rich and less diverse fauna in the nearctic basins.