Nations Unbound

Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States

Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, Christina Szanton Blanc

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135307035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Nations Unbound is a pioneering study of an increasing trend in migration-transnationalism. Immigrants are no longer rooted in one location. By building transnational social networks, economic alliances and political ideologies, they are able to cross the geographic and cultural boundaries of both their countries of origin and of settlement. Through ethnographic studies of immigrant populations, the authors demonstrate that transnationalism is something other than expanded nationalism. By placing immigrants in a limbo between settler and visitor, transnationalism challenges the concepts of citizenship and of nationhood itself.

Chapter ONE
Transnational Projects: A New Perspective¹

The Presidential Palace in Haiti, for decades under the Duvalier regime a location rumored to be the site of terrible tortures and beatings, was eagerly entered in January 1991 by over one hundred visitors from the Haitian diaspora. While many were U.S. citizens, most had been born in Haiti. Some had fled Haiti into exile and struggled to rebuild their lives, while others had grown up abroad and obtained educations, professional careers, and social standing in the United States and Canada. Both men and women, they were a prosperous group, well incorporated into their new societies. But their visit to Haiti was more than a sentimental journey. Their special invitation to the palace to witness and celebrate the inauguration of Father Aristide, Haitians’ new and freely elected President, marked them as active participants in efforts to rebuild the Haitian nation-state. This became clear when the newly inaugurated President greeted them as members of Dizyèm Depatman-an, “the 10th Department,” although the territory of the country of Haiti is divided into nine administrative districts, each called “Depatman.” In this pronouncement, which had no legal substance, Aristide was directly articulating what many Haitians had long maintained. No matter where they settle, or what passport they carry, people of Haitian ancestry remain an integral part of Haiti.

* * *

Approximately 200 well-dressed Grenadian immigrants, mostly from urban areas in Grenada and presently employed in white collar jobs in New York, gathered in 1984 in a Grenadian-owned catering hall in Brooklyn to hear the Grenadian Minister of Agriculture and Development. The Minister shared with Grenada’s “constituency in New York” his plans for agricultural development in Grenada and encouraged the immigrants to become part of this effort. Addressing the immigrants as nationals of Grenada, even though many were U.S. citizens, the Minister asked the audience to encourage their relatives at home to become engaged in agricultural production, and to convince them that this generally demeaned activity was worthwhile and important. Further, treating the immigrants as national leaders and as people who could wield influence at home and even help develop an entire industry, the Minister implored the immigrants to assist in developing an exotic fruit industry for export. But in asking the immigrants to “do what they could” to introduce Grenadian agricultural goods to the U.S. market, including lobbying U.S. government agencies to obtain approval to import the fruits, the Minister was also addressing the immigrants as ethnics in the United States.

Several of the immigrants in the audience were in a position to provide some assistance with these tasks. Some of the immigrants had recently formed a Caribbean-American Chamber of Commerce, both to assist Caribbean immigrants in establishing businesses in the United States and to market West Indian goods. And some, including the organizers of this meeting, had been in the United States a minimum of ten years and were as involved in the local politics of New York City as they were in the political life of Grenada. Grenada’s ambassador to the United Nations, for example, had been a leader in the New York West Indian community for over forty years and had spearheaded support groups to elect mayors of New York City.

* * *

In one of the offices of a company in New Jersey in 1988, an employee at a desk is helping a customer close the box of goods she is shipping “home” to her family in the Philippines and complete the listing of items it contains. A regular flow of such boxes leaves every day from seven to eight major Filipino shipping companies. Anything—appliances, electronic equipment and the like—can be sent or carried back as long as these goods fit the weight, size and other prescriptions defining a balikbayan box; they can be admitted into the Philippines almost tax free.

President Marcos had first used the term “balikbayan” (Home-comers) during a major national speech in which he encouraged Filipino migrants overseas to visit their home country and announced new regulations to facilitate their return. Mrs. Aquino extended the balikbayan regulations and stated her concern for the numerous silent “heroes and heroines of the Philippines” working overseas. The Filipino returnees could purchase up to $1,000 in duty-free gifts upon entering the Philippines. The Filipino transnational social field, built on family networks and sustained through economic exchanges and gift-giving, has thus been further structured and officially sanctioned by the Philippine state.

* * *

Faced with the long-term and probably permanent settlement abroad of substantial sectors of their populations, the political leaderships of Grenada, St. Vincent, the Philippines, and Haiti, are engaged in a new form of nation-state building. Sometimes through specific public policies, as in the case of the balikbayan regulations, but often through the use of symbols, language, and political rituals, migrants and political leaders in the country of origin are engaged in constructing an ideology that envisions migrants as loyal citizens of their ancestral nation-state. This ideology recognizes and encourages the continuing and multiple ties that immigrants maintain with their society of origin. Ignored in this construction, however, is the ongoing incorporation of these immigrants into the society and polity of the country in which they have settled. Yet the significance of transmigrants to their country of origin in many ways rests on the extent of their incorporation into the national economy and political processes of their country of settlement.

Neither the representations nor the practices of these immigrants in relationship to their “home” nation-states are encompassed within the analytical paradigms that predominate in migration studies, focusing as they do on immigrant incorporation within the country of settlement. The time has come for all of us—social scientists and immigrants—to rethink our conceptions of the migration process, immigrant incorporation, and identity.

I.
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The word “immigrant” evokes images of permanent rupture, of the abandonment of old patterns of life and the painful learning of a new culture and often a new language (Handlin 1973). The popular image of immigrant is one of people who have come to stay, having uprooted themselves from their old society in order to make for themselves a new home and adopt a new country to which they will pledge allegiance. Migrants, on the other hand, are conceived of as transients who have come only to work; their stay is temporary and eventually they will return home or move on. Yet it has become increasingly obvious that our present conceptions of “immigrant” and “migrant,” anchored in the circumstances of earlier historic moments, no longer suffice. Today, immigrants develop networks, activities, patterns of living, and ideologies that span their home and the host society.

At first glance the problem seems to be a straightforward one of revamping our vocabulary to come to terms with this new kind of migrant flow. Consequently, increasing numbers of social scientists have begun calling the emergent migration process in which people live lives stretched across national borders “transnational” (Georges 1990; Kearney 1991a; Sutton 1992a), but the term is often used loosely and without specificity. Frequently the phenomenon of transnationalism is thought to be the outcome of transformations in the technology of communication and transportation, a product of accessible air travel and telecommunications (Wakeman 1988). Language is, however, part and parcel of the manner in which we understand and experience the world; the need to change or extend our language is driven by broader political and economic transformations (Asad 1986).

To come to terms adequately with the experience and consciousness of this new immigrant population, we believe that new conceptualizations and a new analytical framework are in order. The development of a transnational analytical framework is the task of this book.

A.
Transnationalism “Discovered”

Before writing the book, each of us had been separately grappling with the problem of how to understand the migrations we were seeing and experiencing all around us. Linda Basch had been working with several Caribbean colleagues in a comparative study of the patterns of organization and self-identification adopted by residents of Grenada and St. Vincent who had migrated to Trinidad or to the United States. As an initial step in their research agenda, they sought to identify immigrants in both New York and Trinidad who had relatives on these two small eastern Caribbean islands and to trace the interconnections sustained between those who stayed at home and those who settled abroad. However, the research team soon discovered that the lives of their “subjects” did not fit into the expected research categories of “immigrants” and those “remaining behind.” Their experiences and lives were not sharply segmented between host and home societies.

Rather, the migrants in the study sample moved so frequently and were seemingly so at home in either New York or Trinidad as well as their societies of origin, that it at times became difficult to identify where they “belonged.” This same complexity characterized the lives and subjectivities of several members of the research team whose households, activities, and identities stretched across national borders and included both Trinidad and St. Vincent. For a long time these researchers, most of whom were themselves transmigrants, as well as many persons in the study sample, lived lives at variance with the language both immigrants and social scientists were using to describe the migrant experience.

In grappling with the contradictions of their research, Basch, not herself a migrant but influenced by immigrant experiences of rupture and adaptation still alive in her family history, and Rosina Wiltshire, Winston Wiltshire, and Joyce Toney, three West Indian scholars who were her co-researchers and who themselves were transmigrants, recognized that the dichotomized social science categories used to analyze migration experiences could not explain the simultaneous involvements of Vincentian and Grenadian migrants in the social and political life of more than one nationstate. Rather than fragmented social and political experiences, these activities, spread across state boundaries, seemed to constitute a single field of social relations. These researchers began to use the terms “transnationalism” and “transnational social field” to describe this interconnected social experience. Moreover, they found that transnationalism characterized the migrations to both Trinidad and New York, although their intensities and emphases varied.

At about this time, Nina Glick Schiller sat with Josh DeWind, with whom she had designed a research project to study Haitian immigrant identity. They both stared at a blackboard on which Josh had arranged two columns, one labeled “ethnic” for persons who were oriented towards the incorporation of Haitian immigrants into the United States, and the other “national” for individuals in New York who sought to galvanize Haitian immigrants into political activities designed to obtain political change in Haiti. Some Haitian leaders they readily saw as “U.S. ethnics,” while others could be identified as “Haitian nationalists.” But many leaders ended up in both columns. Schiller and DeWind, both born in the United States, carried with them into their ethnographic encounters family stories of the uprooting and resettlement of immigrant ancestors. When they began to work as a research team with several Haitian scholars who had immigrated to the United States, these colleagues, although they themselves were migrants, brought much similar baggage. Mary Lucie Brutus, Carolle Charles, Georges Fouron, and Antoine Thomas, using the reading of immigrant history that predominated in the United States, also tended to see an antinomy between identification with political struggles in Haiti or settlement in the United States (Fouron 1983, 1984).

However, it was only when Glick Schiller began to compare her field observations with Basch’s conceptualization of transnationalism that it became clear to both her and her colleagues, Haitian and non-Haitian alike, that the two poles they were examining were not opposite orientations but part of a single social experience. They were witnessing an emergent Haitian transnationalism. Neither the categories of social science that they had brought to the study, nor the categories that had meaning for the Haitian migrants, were adequate to articulate the nature of daily life for a large section of the Haitian immigrant population throughout the United States.

Meanwhile, Cristina Szanton Blanc was having transnationalism thrust upon her. She had spent a number of years conducting research in the rural Philippines among people who two decades ago had, for the most part, not even been to Manila. She had not set out to study Filipino migration perse, but found that increasing numbers of the people she had known in small Filipino towns were showing up at her doorstep in the United States in the early 1980s. These old friends and acquaintances had first obtained an education in the Philippines and then migrated to the United States where they worked as health professionals and white-collar workers, bought houses, and established themselves. Now they were working to build houses or to supplement the material resources of their family households in the Philippines. At the same time a growing number of Filipino organizations made presentations on Philippine national issues in public forums she organized at Columbia University. Drawing comparisons between Cristina’s Filipino example and Linda’s and Nina’s Caribbean cases enabled us to more fully develop the concept of transnationalism. Cristina could readily identify with the juggling of life, identities, and social worlds that was the daily practice of transmigrants. Born in Italy and settled in the United States, with networks and activities located in both countries, she discovered that she herself was a transnational migrant.

Clearly the concept of “transnationalism” is an “idea whose time has come.” Our “discovery” of transnationalism happened as several other scholars were independently beginning to move in the same direction (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988; Gupta 1992; Kearney 1991a; Rouse 1991, 1992). Even before the term transnational became popular, students of migration had observed the circulation of populations between home and host societies. For example, Elsa Chaney talked about “people with feet in two societies” (1979:209). Others, such as Jorge Dandler and Carmen Medeiros, who observed the same processes of migration while analyzing Bolivian highland migration to Argentina, became preoccupied with how to distinguish methodologically between “temporary” and “permanent” migrants because of the constant back and forth movements that characterized the lives of the Bolivian migrants (Dandler and Medeiros 1988).

B.
Definitions

We define “transnationalism” as the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders. Immigrants who develop and maintain multiple relationships—familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political—that span borders we call “transmigrants.” An essential element of transnationalism is the multiplicity of involvements that transmigrants’ sustain in both home and host societies. We are still groping for a language to describe these social locations. Transmigrants use the term “home” for their society of origin, even when they clearly have also made a home in their country of settlement. The migration literature describes the country of settlement as the “host,” but such a term, though compact and convenient, carries the often unwarranted connotations that the immigrant is both “welcome” and a “visitor.” Transmigrants take actions, make decisions, and develop subjectivities and identities embedded in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more nation-states.

Our definition of transnationalism allows us to analyze the “lived” and fluid experiences of individuals who act in ways that challenge our previous conflation of geographic space and social identity. This definition also will enable us to see the ways transmigrants are transformed by their transnational practices and how these practices affect the nation-nation-states of the transmigrants’ origin and settlement.

While we speak a great deal in this book about transnationalism as processes and of the construction of identities that reflect transnational experience, individuals, communities, or states rarely identify themselves as transnational. It is only in contemporary fiction (see Anzaldua 1987; Ghosh 1988; Marshall 1991; Rushdie 1988) that this state of “in-betweenness,” has been fully voiced. Living in a world in which discourses about identity continue to be framed in terms of loyalty to nations and nation-states, most transmigrants have neither fully conceptualized nor articulated a form of transnational identity. Nations-states, as “hegemonic representations of…spatial identity,” continue to be primary in “an increasingly postmodern world” (Gupta 1992:75).

Although the current period of capitalism is marked by new diasporas, identities of migrant populations continue to be rooted in nation-states. As part of this “reinscription of space” (Gupta 1992:63), both the political leaderships of sending nations and immigrants from these nations are coming to perceive these states as “deterritorialized.” In contrast to the past, when nation-states were defined in terms of a people sharing a common culture within a bounded territory, this new conception of nation-state includes as citizens those who live physically dispersed within the boundaries of many other states, but who remain socially, politically, culturally, and of ten economically part of the nationstate of their ancestors. In the case of the Haitian “Tenth Department,” the Grenadian “constituency” in New York, and the Filipino balikbayan, transnational ties are taken as evidence that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Transnational Projects: A New Perspective
• Chapter Two Theoretical Premises
• Chapter Three The Making of West Indian Transmigrant Populations: Examples from St. Vincent and Grenada
• Chapter Four Hegemony, Transnational Practices, and the Multiple Identities of Vincentian and Grenadian Transmigrants
• Chapter Five The Establishment of Haitian Transnational Social Fields
• Chapter Six Not What We Had in Mind: Hegemonic Agendas, Haitian Transnational Practices, and Emergent Identities
• Chapter Seven Different Settings, Same Outcome: Transnationalism as a Global Process
• Chapter Eight There’s No Place Like Home
• References
• Index