As the United States hardens its border with Mexico, how do migrants make transnational claims of citizenship in both nation-states? By enacting citizenship in both countries, Mexican migrants are challenging the meaning of membership and belonging from the margins of both citizenship regimes. With their incessant border-shattering political practices, Mexican migrants have become the embodiment of transnational citizenship on both sides of the divide. Drawing on his experiences leading citizenship classes for Mexican migrants and working with cross-border activists, Adrian Felix examines the political lives (and deaths) of Mexican migrants in Specters of Belonging. Tracing transnationalism across the different stages of the migrant political life cycle - beginning with the so-called political baptism of naturalization and ending with the practice by which migrant bodies are repatriated to Mexico for burial after death - Felix reveals the varied ways in which Mexican transnational subjects practice citizenship in the United States as well as Mexico. As such, Felix unearths how Mexican migrants' specters of belonging perennially haunt the political projects of nationalism, citizenship, and democracy on both sides of the border.

About the Author
Adrian Felix is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California Riverside.

Reviews
In addition to its scholarly value, this book will be useful for policy makers interested in how immigration policies can make participation in civic lives on both sides of the border easier and more robust. Felix's work is both timely and necessary. * Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics *
The book adds a new layer to critiques of citizenship...Written with passion and references to a wide range of materials, including songs, Mexican proverbs, and personal experiences, Felix's study weaves in the politics and the poetics of belonging, giving his analysis a depth and complexity that are much needed in transnational studies. * Perspectives on Politics *
The life cycle is an evocative metaphor to capture the changing nature of migrant politics...By definition, life cycles conclude with death, and Felix pays attention to the choices migrants make around end-of-life rituals...Those choices are spiritual and personal, but they are also deeply political...by calling attention to migrant tenacity, he draws readers' attention to the many barriers to acting or feeling transnationally that migrants struggle against and shows how they do so at an intimate scale. * Boom California *
...Felix provides a riveting ethnographic account that grounds new conceptual frameworks and methodologies for studying not only political membership of Mexican migrants but also transnationality...The book thus serves as both poetic narrative and political analysis...Concepts such as diasporic dialectics spring organically from these ethnographic encounters and from the words and practices of his research participants...The strength of this book comes from the author's intimate understanding of shifting, multifaceted borders...the important part of the research is in fact the 'accompaniment,' the use of ethnography to break down the very borders the author is interrogating, including those across the academic/activist divide. * Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies *


Awards
Winner of Winner of the 2019 American Political Science Association Best Book in Latino Politics Award.



Book Information
ISBN 9780190879365
Author Adrian Felix
Format Hardback
Page Count 202
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 425g
Dimensions(mm) 160mm * 239mm * 18mm