Precarity and Belonging

Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship

Edited by Catherine S. Ramírez, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Juan Poblete, Steven C. McKay, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer

SERIES: Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States

Rutgers University Press

Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. This collection brings mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.The editors ask: What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued or revalued when labor and social precarity impact those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? This book interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, “legal”/“illegal,” and deserving/undeserving in order to explore the fluidity--that is, the dynamism and malleability--of the spectra of belonging.

This judiciously selected compilation shines by threading the critical link of insecurity through spaces of belonging, labor, and migration across time and contexts. Through the lens of precarity, the insightful, accessible, brilliant essays in this collection expose the complexity and fragility of life at the heart of our troubled times. It breaks new ground and will be read widely.'
Cecilia Menjívar, co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crises

Precarity and Belonging is a marvelous and timely collection. The essays brilliantly explore how the increasing precarization of life impacts the social and physical mobility of both citizens and noncitizens, blurring the boundaries between them and thus making possible a politics of commonality.'
Jonathan Xavier Inda, author of Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology, and Ethics

CATHERINE S. RAMÍREZ is an associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Assimilation: An Alternative History and The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory.

SYLVANNA M. FALCÓN is an associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of the award-winning book Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activism inside the United Nations and co-editor of New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights.

JUAN POBLETE is a professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Hacia una historia de la lectura y la pedagogía literaria en América Latina and La Escritura de Pedro Lemebel and editor of New Approaches to Latin American Studies and Critical Latin American and Latino Studies.

STEVEN C. McKAY is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands? The Politics of High-Tech Production in the Philippines and co-editor of New Routes for Diaspora Studies.

FELICITY AMAYA SCHAEFFER is an associate professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship across the Americas.

Introduction: Toward a Politics of Commonality: The Nexus of Mobility, Precarity, and (Non)citizenship
CATHERINE S. RAMÍRE Z, JUAN POBLETE, SYLVANNA M. FALCÓN, STEVEN C. McKAY, AND FELICITY AMAYA SCHAEFFER

Part I Mobility and Migration
1 More Equal Than Others: Managing the Boundaries of Citizenship
BRIDGET ANDERSON

2 Refractions of the Nation: The Democratic Impacts of “Chain Migration”
ADRIÁN FÉLIX

3 Racialization of Central Americans in the United States
LEISY J. ABREGO AND ALEJANDRO VILLALPANDO

4 The Waste of Globalization’s Party
ALEJANDRO GRIMSON

5 Occupation on Sacred Land: Colliding Mobilities on the Tohono O’odham Reservation
FELICITY AMAYA SCHAEFFER

6 A State-to-Come: Tibetan Refugee-Citizenship and the Nation in Exile
TSERING WANGMO DHOMPA

Part II Labor and Precarity
7 Apartheid, Migrant Labor, and Precarity in Comparative Perspective
MARCEL PARET

8 Labor Precarity, Immigration, and the Challenges of Accessing Worker Rights: Evidence from California
SHANNON GLEESON

9 Negotiating Indenture: Migrant Domestic Work and Temporary Labor Migration in Singapore
RHACEL SAL A ZAR PARREÑAS AND KRITTIYA KANTACHOTE

10 Pocketed Proletarianization: Why There Is No Labor Politics in the “World’s Factory”
BIAO XIANG

11 The Urban Exclusion of Internally Displaced Farmers in Medellín, Colombia
CLAUDIA MARIA LÓPEZ

Part III Belonging and (Non)citizenship
12 Exclusionary Inclusion: Applying for Legal Status in the United States
SUSAN BIBLER COUTIN AND VÉRONIQUE FORTIN

13 Formal and Informal Citizenships: The Spectrum of Practices and Statuses in Latin America and the United States
JUAN POBLTE

14 Denizenship 227
NICHOLAS DE GENOVA

15 Black No More: Black Denizenship and the Struggle for the Future
CATHERINE S. RAMÍREZ

16 Imperial Citizenship: Marshall Islanders and the Compact of Free Association
EMILY MITCHELL-EATON

Afterword: The Politics of Precarity and Noncitizenship under Global Capitalism
TANYA GOLASH-BOZA

Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index

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