Uncertain Citizenship. Megan Ryburn
on South-North migration prevents full understanding of the intricate global processes shaping the movement of people in today’s world. What is particularly concerning is that many migrants in the global South, like Luz María and Wilson, are subject to human rights abuses that remain largely concealed because of the lack of attention paid to the topic. By contrast, in South-North contexts—and especially regarding Latin American migration to the United States—significant strides have been taken toward uncovering such abuses in the everyday, although certainly much more remains to be done.1
Following in this vein, Uncertain Citizenship exposes the empirical reality of migrants’ lives in an underexplored South-South context. It also does broader conceptual work. I suggest that it is necessary to find new modes of thinking about the shifting and uneven ways that migrants in different parts of the world live citizenship in the everyday. To date, migrants’ citizenship has often been parsed in binary terms; they are either citizens or they are noncitizens. And if not in binary terms, then their citizenship has been characterized as falling somewhere within a triadic formation; that is to say, they can be categorized as citizens, as noncitizens, or as fitting into a third space in between. Neither of these approaches, however, quite seems to convey the cross-border entanglement of fluctuating, multiple, and simultaneous exclusions from some aspects of citizenship but inclusion in others that many migrants live. This book proposes that one way in which migrants’ citizenship can be comprehended is by considering their relationships to different transnational spaces of citizenship: legal, economic, social, and political. In what ways are migrants—simultaneously and multiply—excluded from or included in these spaces across borders? How are exclusions produced? How do migrants pursue greater inclusion?
In many cases the complex array of shifting inclusions and exclusions from citizenship experienced by the migrants with whom I worked could best be captured by viewing them through the lens of uncertainty. It is the notion of uncertainty that encapsulates the sense of past and present instability, as well as future possibility, that Luz María expressed in the long conversations we had. Uncertainty indicates the temporal and spatial mind-set triggered by migration, particularly when that migration has been compelled. It is the mind-set of being here and not-here, of constantly “going,” constantly “becoming,” of the present as a means to the future. Uncertainty also articulates the emotional timbre of migration: the jumble of fears, anxieties, and hopes that it generates. Uncertainty, however, does more than just capture something of the psychology of migration. In both Bolivia and Chile, Luz María had so often been living on a knife-edge, poised between slipping further into marginalization and reaching for greater security. This is the balancing act in which many migrants and potential migrants engage daily. Excluded from some dimensions, included in others, and in a constant state of flux, their everyday citizenship becomes characterized by uncertainty.
SITES AND METHODS FOR MAPPING UNCERTAINTY
The stories of uncertain citizenship that this book tells have been gathered over an extended time across different sites. They have their foundations in the part-time voluntary work I undertook in Santiago de Chile from 2010 to 2011 with the organization that I refer to here by a pseudonym as the Asociación para Migrantes, or simply the Asociación. This organization offers a range of free support services, such as legal advice, for vulnerable migrants, and also engages in wider advocacy campaigns for migrants’ rights. With its members I learned a great deal about the low-wage work and xenophobia that were the daily reality for many migrants in Chile. I also realized that, although there were notable exceptions, there was a scarcity of research that drew together reflections on these daily realities. There was a particular paucity of work addressing the experiences of Bolivian migrants, even though they were the third or fourth largest group of migrants in the country and had been identified as potentially the most marginalized.2
Trying to uncover something more about the lived realities of low-wage Bolivian migrants, and specifically their transnational experiences of citizenship, was my guiding motivation when I returned to carry out fieldwork in 2013 and 2014. I realized that it was necessary to take a methodological approach that was responsive and agile; it was difficult to gain access to a population who often suffered discrimination and labor exploitation in Chile, which understandably made them wary of the new and untested. Some migrants had irregular legal status as well, and naturally this too made them reluctant to speak to me. In addition, the places in which they lived and worked were often isolated and hard to get to (see chapter 2).
Multi-sited ethnography provided the flexible approach that I needed. Like “classic” ethnography, in which the researcher works in one site, multi-sited ethnography is grounded in participant observation. A concern with what people are actually doing makes participant observation a method that, as Mike Crang and Ian Cook put it, is able to effectively “engage … with ‘real world’ messiness.”3 As a consequence, participant observation is particularly appropriate for researching people’s everyday engagement with citizenship. Moreover, its emphasis on spending extended periods of time in the research context enables the building of relationships of trust, which is especially important when working with marginalized groups. Ethnography also allows, however, for the incorporation of methods other than participant observation, most commonly interviews. Interviews are particularly useful for understanding why people might engage in the practices that they do, offering an opportunity to learn more about people’s personal narratives and identities.
While both approaches use the same methods, the difference between single-sited and multi-sited ethnography is that the latter is especially concerned with acknowledging the multitudinous connections of places across space and time. First developed by anthropologist George Marcus, it is an approach “designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites.”4 This can be established by “following” people, things, or ideas, and thus it is a methodology that permits (and requires) a degree of flexibility.5 Consequently, multi-sited ethnography is well suited to studies of migration. It reflects a transnational social spaces perspective on migration because it understands space as socially constructed and not necessarily bound to the nation-state (see chapter 2). As Anna Amelina and Thomas Faist contend, multi-sited ethnography therefore allows for a more holistic understanding of the different cultures, contexts, and identities that influence migrants’ daily lives.6 It also provided me with the tools for mapping uncertainty as I pieced together what I realized was the defining logic linking together migrants’ experiences of the places I spent time in (see chapter 2).
I began my research in Chile’s capital, Santiago, before heading to Arica in the very North of the country on the border with Bolivia and Peru (see map 1 for an indication of my field sites). There are large numbers of Bolivian migrants in both Santiago and Arica. From Arica, I traveled twice to Bolivia to get a better sense of the places of origin of the migrants I was meeting in Chile and of their lived experiences of citizenship. I met some of their family members and friends in La Paz, El Alto, and Santa Cruz, and in Oruro I discovered a great deal about how claims to citizenship may be expressed through carnival dance, a practice of citizenship that Bolivians take with them across borders. In addition to participant observation in these sites and the everyday engagement with migrants that this entailed, I carried out sixty formal interviews with migrants in Chile: twenty in Arica and twenty in Santiago.
MAP 1. Fieldwork sites in Chile and Bolivia. Credit: Edward Oliver, Queen Mary University of London, 2015.
I also worked closely with the Asociación throughout this time, volunteering for about twenty hours a week in the group’s offices in Santiago, Arica, and El Alto, doing whatever I could to be useful. In Santiago I also rehearsed and performed with the Bolivian migrant dance fraternity Corazón de Tinkus (a pseudonym). Finally,