Del 30 Octubre 2014 al 30 Octubre 2014
12 de noviembre - Compromiso Migrante en la ciudad natal Política de México w / Lauren Duquette - Rury y Abigail Andrews
Texto original:
“Voice and Exit: Remittances and Local Participatory Governance in Mexico” with Lauren Duquette-Rury
Contemporary debates on the relationship between migration and development focus extensively on how migrant remittances affect the economies of sending countries. Yet, remittancesalso produce political consequences in migrants’ hometowns, but have received less attention in scholarly accounts. This presentation focuses on the ways in which exit from the polity and the acquisition of remittances abroad create political opportunities for migrant groups to exercise voice in the coproduction of public services in their hometowns.
First, the presentation presents a theory to explain the conditions under which coproduction affects the quality of local democracy. Second, using three comparative case studies based on fieldwork in Mexico, the presentation process-traces central causal mechanisms over time to reveal the impact of coproduction on participation and state-society relations. Research suggests that when transnational coproduction embeds local citizens, migrants and local government officials into the process, coproduction produces more participatory governance. However, given weak local-state capacity and migrants’ constricted social bases in their hometown communities, equitable participatory governance is often challenging to achieve through transnational coproduction.
“Remaking ‘Home’: The Cross-Border Politics of Rural Mexican Transformation” with Abigail Andrews
In the contemporary global political economy, migrant labor has become increasingly central to the survival of poor communities, requiring ever more individuals, families, and villages to live spatially extended lives. In the process, the meaning of “place” in migrant hometowns is being remade. In this talk, Professor Andrews use two in-depth case studies of Mexican migrant communities to examine the relationships between migrant sending and receiving sites. She suggests that migrant transnationalism is not limited to remittances (of money or ideas) but instead entails a “deep politics,” in which people’s understandings of “home” get remade.
Mexican hometowns’ particular experiences in US cities and economic niches, she suggests, transform members’ understandings of the meaning of “development.” As members compare between hometown and destination, they begin to redefine the idea of a better life. In turn, sending communities undertake new struggles for resources, rights, and recognition, in which their understandings of life in the California shape their engagement with the Mexican state. While these cross-border politics may echo US ideas, she shows, they may also reject first-world attitudes and exclusions, pushing, instead, to protect alternative ways of life.
Professor Duquette-Rury received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2011. She has been published in Studies in Comparative International Development, Latin American Research Review and Migraciones Internacionales. She has worked as an economic analyst for the Economic Research Service at the USDA and Nathan Associates, an economic consulting firm in Washington, D.C.. Most recently, she was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the National Academies, the Tinker Foundation and the University of Chicago.
While the primary focus of her research agenda investigates the impact of migration on sending countries, she is equally interested in the other side of the migratory circuit: destination countries. She has explored this in working papers concerning immigration and its effects on political membership, citizenship and ethnic organization.
Abigail Andrews is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and a faculty member in the Urban Studies and Planning Program at the University of California, San Diego. She studies the politics of migration, development, and gender, and the interrelationships between Mexico and the United States.
Her research uses in-depth, comparative ethnography to understand cross-border Mexican migrant communities, with particular attention to gender transformations. She has also published articles on power dynamics within transnational social movements, and she is working on a book project that uses gender theory as the foundation for a critical sociology. She can be reached at alandrews@ucsd.edu.