Uncertain Citizenship. Megan Ryburn
in this highly unequal society and often do not reap the benefits of living in a country considered to be one of the thirty-four most “developed” in the world.104 While this is also true for many migrants from the global South living in the global North, it is arguably especially acute in a country like Chile that is so glaringly unequal.
The unique, in-depth qualitative perspective offered in this book sheds light on the everyday lived experiences of migrants in this context. In the chapters that follow, the similarities and differences between this and other migration destinations in both the global South and North are highlighted. By marrying perspectives on citizenship from feminist political theory and sociological and anthropological studies of Latin America with insights drawn from studies of migration that take a transnational, intersectional approach, the book also offers a fresh conceptual approach, as I explain in the next section.
CITIZENSHIP, MIGRATION, AND UNCERTAINTY
Within migration studies, there is a growing body of work that—mirroring the approach taken in the scholarship on citizenship in Latin America previously discussed—focuses on citizenship in practice in order to comprehend how it is actually experienced in the everyday as opposed to how it is normatively represented.105 Such analyses have sometimes struggled, however, to consider holistically the “formal” and “substantive” aspects of citizenship in a way that accounts for the interactions between them, how they are produced within and across nation-state borders, and the multiple ways in which migrants may be simultaneously included in and excluded from citizenship.
A spatial perspective on citizenship and migration has been adopted by some in attempting to make such an analysis because, as Lynn Staeheli and colleagues put it, citizenship “is inseparable from the geographies of communities and the networks and relationships that link them.”106 While they have made extremely important advances, the complexity of inclusion and exclusion is not fully recognized by the approaches taken to date because spaces of citizenship have been conceptualized as binary (as spaces of citizenship/noncitizenship) or triadic (as spaces of citizenship/noncitizenship with a third space in between).107 Where attempts have been made to overcome these binary and triadic interpretations, the focus has been on the politico-legal dimensions of citizenship, not its other substantive components.108 The multitude of simultaneous in/exclusions from different aspects of citizenship that migrants may experience transnationally is not, therefore, as wholly accounted for as it might be.
I suggest in this book that to better capture the dynamism of migrants’ citizenship, it can instead be thought of in relation to overlapping transnational spaces of citizenship. This reflects the approaches to migrant transnationalism and citizenship explained above. Transnational spaces of citizenship are produced through interactions between individual migrants and nonmigrants, in addition to processes initiated by states and their actors and sometimes interventions by international organizations such as the International Labour Organization. Groups within civil society, such as migrant organizations, also play a role in their production. These interactions are shaped by history and are both impacted by, and have an impact on, place. Thus, to think in terms of transnational spaces of citizenship is to take a profoundly geographical approach to comprehending the production of citizenship across nation-state boundaries in terms of both structural processes and agentic practices. Individuals’ relationships to these spaces are deeply influenced by their social identities.
Reflecting on the lived experiences of migrants I worked with, I found it most useful to think about transnational spaces of citizenship as representing citizenship’s legal, economic, social, and political elements, consequently reflecting both its formal and substantive components and giving due weight to each. Clearly these four spaces reference Marshall’s thinking about the civil, political, and social spheres of citizenship.109 They also build on it, however, reflecting feminist approaches to the political theory of citizenship, perspectives on the lived realities of citizenship that come from those working on and in Latin America, and the rich contributions to understandings of citizenship that have emerged from migration studies.
Primarily, the idea that these spaces are constructed through structural and agentic processes encourages thinking about citizenship not just in terms of the passive reception of rights by subjects, but also in terms of active participation, because of the emphasis on the everyday citizenship practices of migrants and other actors. Additionally, rather than thinking in terms of a linear progression of rights acquisition as Marshall did (from civil to political to social rights), this approach considers that migrants may have simultaneous, uneven access to many of these spaces of citizenship. Finally, following other feminist scholars such as Alice Kessler-Harris, Carole Pateman, and Yvonne Riaño, I expand on the definition of the social to distinguish between social and economic citizenship.110 While Marshall considered protection from poverty a social right, he did not expand further on the economic aspect of citizenship. It has been argued, however, that economic incorporation through equal access to paid employment is fundamental to women’s ability to participate as citizens, and thus the economic must be given greater weight in studies of citizenship.111 This argument can be expanded to include other disadvantaged groups, such as migrants, given the powerful impact that nationality and migratory status, as well as gender and other identities, can have on equal access to paid employment.112
The complex and dynamic ways in which migrants in this research were both excluded from and included in these distinct but interwoven spaces of transnational citizenship (legal, economic, social, and political) are best captured through the analytic of uncertainty. Uncertainty, and how it is navigated, has increasingly been used as an optic in other social science research, and it is noticeably present in some recent ethnographic studies carried out in the global South.113 While these works may have disparate foci, they coalesce around a common conceptual understanding. There is a shared sense that uncertainty conveys the insecurity, precariousness, and sometimes fear generated by economic, social, and political processes occurring in the countries under study, and that it also elucidates the ways in which these are materialized in everyday life, becoming a normalized part of its texture. Uncertainty also, however, is comprehended as allowing for—and to a degree enabling—anticipation, aspiration, planning, and action. As Austin Zeiderman and colleagues contend, we can therefore understand “uncertainty as something that is both produced and productive.”114 Its temporal mode is thus foregrounded; Elizabeth Cooper and David Patten view uncertainty as “best approached as a theory of action in the ‘subjunctive mood’.”115 The subjunctive mood, as they explain, quoting Susan Whyte, “is a doubting, hoping, provisional, cautious, and testing disposition to action.”116
Uncertainty grasped in this way manages to encompass multiple aspects of migrants’ lived experiences in relation to transnational spaces of citizenship. It is suggestive of the way in which these spaces, and migrants’ places within and outside of them, are constructed through dynamic, multiscalar processes. And it expresses a lived reality of doubt, insecurity, and ambiguity. It also, however, reflects possibilities of hope and aspiration.
CONCLUSION
The approach developed by bringing together the perspectives on citizenship, migration, and uncertainty addressed in this chapter allows comprehension of how at any one time a migrant may be positioned differently, and multiply, in each of a range of overlapping transnational social spaces of citizenship. Her different positions within these spaces are highly contingent on power relations and her social identities—both in terms of how she is perceived and how she perceives herself—and also grounded in place and historical context. Perhaps she is on the very periphery of legal citizenship in one nation-state—holding a tourist visa, for example—while in full possession of legal citizenship in another where she does not currently reside. In terms of the political, she exercises her right to extraterritorial voting and also is a grassroots activist in the country where she is living, but she cannot vote there.
With respect to social citizenship, she had better access to health care in the country she has left than in the country where she lives at present. She has left one country because she could not find waged employment there and is precariously employed in the other. Almost all of these aspects of her citizenship could shift and change depending on both her exercise of agency