Return migrants from the United States to Mexico
Constructing alternative notions of citizenship through acts of (linguistic) citizenship
This article examines Mexican return migrants belonging to the 1.5 generation of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Our analysis disaggregates the notions that these return migrants have regarding “being Mexican” and speaking Spanish after spending most of their lives in the U.S. Building on critical citizenship theories (
Isin 2008,
2009), specifically on the concepts of status, habitus, and acts, we analyze how these return migrants experience and build notions of citizenship in Mexico while they develop additional linguistic repertoires in Spanish and acquire basic knowledge of Mexican culture. Our findings suggest that return migrants go through various simultaneous learning processes to acquire Mexican habitus in Mexico even though they acquire formal citizenship. This learning process we argue occurs amidst multiple social, linguistic, and cultural tensions that trigger important acts of (linguistic) citizenship through which returnees found their own definition of what it means to be “Mexican”.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.1.5 Generation: Temporary integration, illegality, and acts of political belonging
- 3.Disaggregating citizenship: Status, habitus & acts of citizenship
- 4.Methods
- 5.Acquiring Mexican habitus
- 6.Acts of (linguistic) citizenship
- 7.Conclusions
- Notes
-
References
References (36)
References
Abrego, Leisy. 2011. “Legal Consciousness of Undocumented Latinos: Fear and Stigma as Barriers to Claims-Making for First-and 1.5 Generation Immigrants.” Law and Society Review 45(2): 337–370. 

Abrego, Leisy. 2014. “Latino Immigrants’ Diverse Experiences of Illegality.” In Constructing Immigrant ‘Illegality’: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses, ed. by Cecilia Menjivar and Daniel Kanstroom, 139–160. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Abrego, Leisy and Roberto Gonzáles. 2010. “Blocked paths. Uncertain Futures. The Post-Secondary Education and Labor Market Prospects of Undocumented Latino youth.” Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 15 (1–2): 144–57. 

Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, California: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Books.
Beltrán, Cristina. 2009. “Going Public: Hannah Arendt, Immigrant Action and the Space of Appearance.” Political Theory. 37(5): 595–622. 

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980. Le sens pratique. Collection Le Sens Commun. Paris, France: Les Éditions de Minuit.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “Chapter 1 : The forms of capital”. In Richardson, J. (Ed.), The Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, pp. 241–258. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Department of Homeland Security. 2003–2018. Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Aliens Returned by Region and Country of Nationality: Fiscal Years 2003 to 2018. Retrieved online [URL], consulted July 2020.
Despagne, Colette. 2018. “Language Is What Makes Everything Easier”: The Awareness of Semiotic Resources of Mexican Transnational Students in Mexican Schools, International Multilingual Research Journal, 1–15. 

Fairclough, Norman; Mulderrig, Jane and Wodak, Ruth. 2011. “Chapter 17: Critical Discourse Analysis”. In Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. SAGE Publications Ltd. 

Fortier, Anne-Marie. 2013. “What’s the Big Deal? Naturalization and the Politics of Desire.” Citizenship Studies, 17 (6–7): 697–711. 

García, Ofelia and Lin, Angel. 2017. “Extending Understandings of Bilingual and Multilingual Education”. Encyclopedia of Language and Education (3rd ed.), edited by García Ofelia, Lin Angel and May Stephen, Bilingual and Multilingual Education, 1–20. Springer, Cham. 

Gonzáles, Roberto. 2011. “Learning to Be Illegal.” American Sociological Review. 76 (4), 602–619. 

Gonzáles, Roberto. 2016. Lives in Limbo. Undocumented and Coming of Age in America. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Gonzales, Roberto and Nando Sigona (eds). 2017. Within and Beyond Citizenship: Borders, Membership and Belonging. New York: Routledge. 

Isin, Engin. F. 2008. “Theorizing Acts of Citizenship”, ed. by Engin F. Isin, and Greg M. Nielsen in Acts of Citizenship, 15–43. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Isin, Engin F. 2009. “Citizenship in flux: The figure of the activist citizen.” Subjectivity, 291: 367–388. 

Jacobo, Mónica, Despagne, Colette. 2022. “Jóvenes migrantes de retorno: construyendo nociones alternativas de ciudadanía en México”. Estudios Sociológicos, 1191: 1–26. 

Jacobo, Mónica, Cárdenas, Nuty. 2020. “Back on your Own: Return Migration and the Federal Government Response in Mexico”. Migraciones Internacionales, 111:1–16. 

Kosnac, Hillary, Wayne Cornelius, Tom Wong, Micah Gell-Redman, and Alex Hughes. 2015. One Step In and One Step Out: The Lived Experience of Immigrant Participants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Program. California: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies-University of California.
Lorelli, S. Nowell1, Jill M. Norris, Deborah E. White, and Nancy J. Moules. 2017. “Thematic Analysis: Striving to Meet the Trustworthiness Criteria”. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 161: 1–13.
Olvera, José J. and Carolina Muela, C. 2016. “Sin familia en México: Redes Sociales Alternativas para la Migración de Retorno de Jóvenes Mexicanos Deportados con Experiencia Carcelaria en México.” Mexican Studies, 32 (2): 302–320. 

París, María Dolores. 2010. Procesos de repatriación. Experiencias de las personas devueltas por las autoridades estadounidenses. Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Ramanathan, Vaidehi. 2013. Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship: Who Belongs? Who is guest? Who is Deported? Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 121: 162–166. 

Richard Devlin and Pothier, Dianne. 2006. “Introduction: Towards a Critical Theory of Dis-Citizenship.” In Critical Disability Theory: Essays in Philosophy, Politics, Policy and Law, ed. by Dianne Pothier and Richard Devlin, 1–24. Vancouver-Toronto, Canada: UBC Press.
Rumbaut, Rubén. 2004. “Ages, Life Stages, and Generational Cohorts: Decomposing the Immigrant First and Second Generations in the United States”. International Migration Review, 38 (3): 1160–1205. 

Stroud, Cristopher. 2001. “African Mother-tongue Programs and the Politics of Language: Linguistic Citizenship versus Linguistic Human Rights”. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 22(4): 339–355. 

Stroud, Cristopher. 2018. “Linguistic citizenship.” In The Multilingual Citizen. Towards a Politics of Language for Agency and Change, ed. by Lisa Lim, Cristopher Stroud, and Lionel Wee, 17–39. Bristol, UK: Encounters. 

Taylor, Shelley; Despagne, Colette and Faez, Farahnaz. 2018. “Critical Language Awareness”. In John I. Liontas (Ed.), TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, 1–14. 

Unzueta, Carrasco and Hinda Seif. 2014. “Disrupting the Dream: Undocumented Youth Reframe Citizenship and Deportability through Anti-deportation activism.” Latino Studies, 12(2): 279–299. 

Vincent, Andrew. 2002. Nationalism and Particularity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Valdés, Guadalupe. 2001. “Heritage Language Students: Profiles and Possibilities”, ed. by Joy Kreeft Peyton, Donald A. Ranard and Scott McGinnis in Heritage Languages in America. Preserving a National Resource 37–80. United States: CAL and Delta Systems Co.
Wee, Lionel. 2018. “Essentialism and language rights”. In L. Lim, C. Stroud & L. Wee (eds.), The multilingual citizen. Towards a politics of language for agency and change, edited by L. Lim, C. Stroud & L. Wee, 40–64. Bristol, UK: Encounters. 

Wodak, Ruth and Meyer, Michael. 2015. Chapter 1: Critical Discourse Studies: History, Agenda, Theory and Methodology. In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, Los Angeles: SAGE.
Zentella, Ana Celia. 1995. ”The “Chiquitafication” of U.S. Latinos and Their Languages, OR Why We Need an Anthropological Linguistics”. Paper presented at SALSA III at the University of Texas, Austin, Symposium about Language and Society, April 7–9, 1995. [URL]
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Masferrer, Claudia, Erin R. Hamilton & Nicole Denier
2024.
Adding Return Migration to the Equation: U.S. Immigration Policy and Migrant Families in Mexico. In
Immigration Policy and Immigrant Families [
National Symposium on Family Issues, NA],
► pp. 23 ff.

Silver, Alexis M. & Melissa A. Manzanares
2023.
Transnational ambivalence: incorporation after forced and compelled return to Mexico.
Ethnic and Racial Studies 46:12
► pp. 2612 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 november 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.