Transnational and Diasporic Citizenship Across the Americas

4000 Humanities Gateway, UC Irvine | January 17, 2013 | 3:00-4:30 PM
State interests in emigrant populations have become more salient in Latin America in the past decade and many Latin American governments have formulated new policies to include their migrant populations abroad in national polities. These policies have come to replace older models of residential citizenship with more flexible options for membership and belonging although not necessarily less exclusionary. Yet the ability of people to act as citizens in certain transnational spaces is mediated by inequalities along the axes of gender, race, nationality, and class, both in source and destination countries as well as transnationally. In this talk we draw on examples from case studies from Mexico, El Salvador, Peru, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the United States to discuss the particularities of migrant-state relationships in various settings while also pointing to new general trends in emigrant citizenship.