A Tale of Two Families: The Mutual Construction of 'Anglo' and Mexican Ethnicities Along the US–Mexico Border

In the American Southwest and along the US–Mexico border, 'Anglos' and Mexicans are often viewed as the quintessential 'others'. This ethnographic study problematises the Anglo‐Mexican opposition with ethnographic data from interviews with a Mexican farmworker family and an 'Anglo' farmer family of the EI Paso Lower Valley. I argue that 'Anglo' hegemony is not based exclusively on cultural separation but often involves hybridity (including 'Mexicanisation') and patron‐client relations entailing 'benevolent' paternalism. I show how the concept of 'Anglo' is a contested identity constructed through interactions between Mexicans and Euroamericans. Through this study of border crossings in situations of asymmetrical power relations, I advocate a 'complicit' anthropology that presents competing ethnic groups in their full complexity rather than as stereotypes or caricatures of their 'others.'     

The Echo of Tlatelolco in Contemporary Mexican Protest Poetry

The shooting of a student demonstration in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City on 2 October 1968 has been the subject of many literary works, among which the Tlatelolco poetry addresses not only the event itself but also the aftermath of the massacre. Both approaches examine the relationship between the 'yo'/'nosotros' and 'ellos' constructs, focusing on the 'nosotros' construct as the result of this interaction. The following analysis of this process is based on the theory of self and Other, especially René Girard's theory of the mimetics of violence and the process of scapegoating as a basis for the relationship between the individual and society within the context of a violent conflict.     

Tightened Immigration Policies and the Self‐Employment Dynamics of Mexican Immigrants

As the U.S. government has intensified its crackdown on illegal immigration in recent years, an important question to ask is how undocumented immigrants react to the stricter enforcement of immigration laws. This paper seeks to answer whether they increasingly choose self‐employment in an effort to avoid apprehension and subsequent deportation. To guard against endogeneity bias that might stem from increased enforcement in reaction to illegal immigration, the empirical analysis makes use of the September 11 terror attacks (9/11), which inadvertently triggered stricter immigration enforcement nationwide, as a natural experiment. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach and data from the Current Population Survey between 1996 and 2006, this paper examines the changes in the self‐employment choices of male and non‐citizen Mexican immigrants (a proxy for undocumented immigrants) compared to less‐educated Whites (the control group). The findings indicate that male and non‐citizen Mexican immigrants are substantially more likely (40 percent) to enter into self‐employment than less‐educated Whites after 9/11. The analysis further suggests that this finding is not driven by the 2001 recession that coincided with the terror attacks. The increased entries are mainly observed in the group that is most likely to be in the United States illegally and in those who face strong economic incentives. In addition, increased entries are not driven by increased unemployment among Mexican immigrants after the 9/11 event, but, rather, they reflect a change in the behavior of the unemployed Mexican immigrants, perhaps due to changes in perceived risks of detection and deportation.     

Experimenting with a national sample: a Dutch survey of prejudice

The notion that beliefs and attitudes are flexible and often inconsistent has become a commonplace in social and political psychology. Beliefs and attitudes adapt to varying circumstances, issues and argumentative positions. This was the starting point for a Dutch survey on prejudice towards immigrants carried out in 1998. Measures of beliefs and attitudes were constructed in order to capture diverse aspects of prejudice. Some of these measures focused on negative evaluations of the characteristics of immigrant groups, others on the implications of prejudice, such as opinions on the rights and obligations of immigrants. In order to determine the flexibility and variability of prejudice, key aspects of the attitudes were experimentally manipulated, such as the (characteristics of the) target immigrant group, the arguments leading to these attitudes or the external support they received. The results show that prejudice is a variable set of attitudes for which a precise line between subjective bias and realistic concerns about immigrants cannot be easily drawn.     

Made in the USA? Immigrants' imported ideology and political engagement

This study explores both the extent to which immigrants' pre-migration ideological predispositions might serve as a heuristic, by which these individuals anchor and adjust their ideological predispositions in the new polity, and the extent to which imported ideology enhances the likelihood of immigrants' political engagement once in their new home. Empirical tests take advantage of two unique survey datasets of Mexican immigrants residing in the United States; one of which incorporates a survey embedded experiment. Results show that immigrants' ideological predispositions in the country of origin do anchor these individuals' ideological predispositions in the new host country in terms of intensity and directionality. Most importantly, imported ideology does heighten the prospects of immigrants' electoral participation in the United States.     

Institutionalizing precarious migratory status in Canada

This paper analyzes the institutionalized production of precarious migration status in Canada. Building on recent work on the legal production of illegality and non-dichotomous approaches to migratory status, we review Canadian immigration and refugee policy, and analyze pathways to loss of migratory status and the implications of less than full status for access to social services. In Canada, policies provide various avenues of authorized entry, but some entrants lose work and/or residence authorization and end up with variable forms of less-than-full immigration status. We argue that binary conceptions of migration status (legal/illegal) do not reflect this context, and advocate the use of ‘precarious status’ to capture variable forms of irregular status and illegality, including documented illegality. We find that elements of Canadian policy routinely generate pathways to multiple forms of precarious status, which is accompanied by precarious access to public services. Our analysis of the production of precarious status in Canada is consistent with approaches that frame citizenship and illegality as historically produced and changeable. Considering variable pathways to and forms of precarious status supports theorizing citizenship and illegality as having blurred rather than bright boundaries. Identifying differences between Canada and the US challenges binary and tripartite models of illegality, and supports conducting contextually specific and comparative work.     

(Dis)Empowering New Immigrants and Refugees Through Their Participation in Introduction Programs in Sweden,Denmark, and Norway

This article sets out to critically examine whether and how different ideas of (radical and liberal) empowerment are embedded in policy documents and texts pertaining to the introduction programs in Scandinavia. All three countries have several elements in the program that have the potential of being empowering, viewed from both a radical and liberal empowerment ideology. However, the liberal empowerment ideology is more present in the programs, to various degrees, compared to the radical empowerment ideology, which is more difficult, if not impossible, to live up to within the framework of all three programs.     

The Political Context in Everyday Social Work Practice

Social work is political-normative work (De Boer & Duyvendak, 2004). Hence, the political and policy context in which social work practices take place is crucial in understanding social work as a profession and its social task as a product of the welfare state. The political comes to the fore very explicitly when studying social work interventions with clients of immigrant backgrounds, especially due to the prioritization of the “integration” of migrants on various European political agendas. This article studies how frames on “good citizenship” determine the everyday practices of social workers using data on the Netherlands.     

Editorial voices

Jack Smith is an artist on the margins of official narratives of art of the 1960s. This essay attempts to read his works as a means of questioning the challenges posed to normative readings of the work of culture, by presenting ideas about queer performance. Smith's almost hysterical identification with Maria Montez, a 1940s film siren, is privileged in my reading. Her key film, Cobra woman, turns on the image of a wound that will not heal. In this essay, I read the wound as signaling the breaches in our attempts at full communication, and compare this state of being to the idiosyncratic form of the camp effect, which functions as a kind of hieroglyph, or broken sign. Read through Maria Montez, the ‘failures’ of Smith's practice are explored in order to invogorate the seemingly exhausted discourse on camp, as well as to pose a critique of the ways in which certain bodies are failed by dominant culture.