‘Embodying the transnational: How young Mexican-American women negotiate the intersections of gender, race and class in the U.-Mexico borderlands’ Caitlin O’Neill Gutierrez BA, MSc Department of Geography University College London Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2015 1 Declaration ‘I, Caitlin O’Neill Gutierrez, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis.’ Signed: Caitlin O'Neill Gutierrez Date: 28.2015 2 Abstract This thesis investigates the processes of identity formation that young Mexican women living in the United States-Mexico borderlands engage in today. It examines how they perform multiple and transnational identities to negotiate discourses of gender, race and class across the everyday spaces they inhabit. It shows that young women leverage their parents’ Mexican heritage and migration narratives as proxies for their own Mexican identity ascription, and it grants salience to parental strategies to instil within their daughters valuable cultural and social capital via la familia.
It simultaneously contends that young women develop themselves as partially ‘-American’, a process which can function to also engender new interpretations of their Mexicanness as it is informed by their friends and peers. These performances are strongly rooted in the spatial worlds young women inhabit, most especially, the home and school spaces. Young women both conform to and contest normative expectations of them that centre on the gendered division of labour within the home, their degrees of freedom, and their educational trajectories. The thesis demonstrates that young women engage in transnational practices as a conscious strategy to make sense of the multiply conflicting identity discourses that are present in their lives.
By ascribing to and performing strategically what they perceive to be Mexican and/or more American identities, and by utilising carefully the funds of social and cultural capital available to them, young women manage to create valuable and positive lives for themselves in a socio-cultural and economic landscape that can tend otherwise to devalue and exclude them. Rooted in, and contributing to, critical feminist and race theories, this thesis draws upon fifty-five in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with young Mexican women aged 14-24 during eleven months of ethnographic research in Encinitas, North County San Diego, California in 2009-10. 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Claire Dwyer for her attentive and encouraging guidance throughout the duration of this project, and also for her continued kind-heartedness and support more generally.
I am very grateful to everyone in the Department of Geography at UCL for their administrative, logistical and intellectual support, and for making the last the last ten years (!) since I began as a fresh-faced undergrad so enjoyable and memorable. Many thanks go to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding both my Masters and this doctoral project. I am also extremely thankful to my examiners, Prof. Katie Willis and Dr.
Caroline Bressey, for their detailed reading of this thesis, their invaluable feedback and their enthusiasm for the empirical data. To the friends and colleagues who welcomed me in San Diego, thank you for making me feel so at home and for illuminating the beauty and complexity of the region for me. Special thanks go to Gaby, Beverley, Maria, Pat, Lilia, and Vanessa. I am very appreciative of Dr Christine Hunefeldt and Ruth Padrón at the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at the University of California San Diego for hosting me as a Visiting Scholar in 2009-10.
Thanks also go to Dr. Pablo Vila at Temple University in Philadelphia for receiving me as a Visiting Research Scholar in 2011. The largest and most sincere amount of gratitude heading Stateside goes to the young women who offered their time and voices to this project. Not only did you show me that young women of Mexican descent are diverse, empowered and full of aspiration, but that being Mexican outside of Mexico is something to be proud of – it is a treasured heritage to find strength in.
I could never have managed to complete this project without the seemingly bottomless pool of love and support from my nearest and dearest. To my friends, including Charlotte, Cat, Ruth, Beck, and those in Room 214, thanks for the listening ears, healthy distraction, and restorative glasses of wine. I am grateful to my extended ‘family’ - Pauline, Pier, Peter, Pete and Joan - for your care and help in raising Lauran and I. I am thankful also to have the Singer Clan in my life– Hilary, Jim, Lyndsey, Steph and Grandmas Maureen and Muriel –the cardamom tea and the recuperative trips to Chandlers Ford and Aberdeenshire have been especially appreciated.
4 To my family, I’m not sure I could ever express in writing how grateful I am for what you have given me. Lauran (yes, Best Sister Ever), Alex, Naomi and Emeli, thank you for always being there, full of beans, whether it be for cosy dinners, or some family time on the seafront at Swanage. To my mum Ann, you are the most wonderful woman I know – from connecting us as children to Mexico and giving us the richest of childhoods even when times were tough, to raising and educating us to be independent and thoughtful young women – if I grow up to be anywhere near as awesome as you I will be absolutely chuffed. Thank you for everything.
My final thanks go to my best friend and love of my life, Stuart. With you beside me, the ‘everyday’ is anything but. What a journey it’s been, and what wonderful new adventures we have to look forward to… This thesis is dedicated to my beloved grandparents, Doreen Lilian Elvines and Gerard O’Neill, and our O’Neill family home at 67 Longley Avenue. 5 Table of Contents Abstract.
4 Table of Contents. 6 Chapter One: Introduction. 13 Chapter Two: Literature Review .1 The ‘problem’ of young Mexicans who ‘fail’ to ‘assimilate’ .3 Second generation Mexicans and simultaneity .3 Identities and Intersectionality .2 Race and ethnicity .5 Project Objective and Research Questions. 61 Chapter Three: Methodology .2 Epistemological Starting Points .1 Feminist geography methodologies .2 Border theory and Chicana theory as postcolonial groundings .4 Choice of Data Collection Methods .2 Gatekeepers and Access .3 Field Sites and Participant Recruitment .4 The Methods Manifested .1 The interview process .2 Focus group formats .4 Table of Participants .1 Review of chosen methods .3 Being an Insider/Outsider .6 Analytical Tool Kit .1 On-going grounded analysis.
101 Chapter Four: Processes of Identification – The value of labels .2 ‘Mexican’ by Parental Proxy .3 ‘Mexican-American’ – ‘First I’m Mexican and then I’m American’.4 ‘Chicana’ as hybridity and acceptance. 129 Chapter Five – Formations: Memories of Mexico and migration narratives .2 Memories of Mexico .3 Parental Migration and ‘Struggle’ Narratives .1 Life in Mexico / Leaving Mexico .2 ‘Struggles’ and ‘sacrifices’ in the United States. 159 Chapter Six – La familia: Ideals and reality within the Mexican home .2 Ideals of the traditional familia – myths and realities .3 Young women’s understandings of gendered roles. 191 Chapter Seven: Gendered freedoms .2 ‘Homegirls’ with ‘homebodies’ .1 Pregnancy as gendered future-fixing .3 Boys with ‘more freedom’ .4 White girls – ‘hanging out’, dating and ‘sleepovers’ .5 Dimensions of class - the parental policing/absence paradox.
217 Chapter Eight – School, Education and Identity .2 Navigating formal education: Constraints, conflicting expectations and agency .1 School as a White space .2 Language – English vs.3 Spaces of educational inequality .4 Targeted support services for Mexican student empowerment .3 Peer relationships and processes of Othering .1 Social mixing – ‘friend’ friends and American friends .2 Being viewed – Confrontations and challenging stereotypes. 259 Chapter Nine – Conclusions. 2010 Demographic Data – Encinitas, CA. In-depth Interview Schedule.
Project Information Sheet. Informed Consent Form. 321 8 Chapter One: Introduction 1.1 Introduction In early July 2014, three buses of undocumented child, youth and women migrants from Mexico and Central America arrived at a San Diego County immigration detention centre in Murrieta for ‘processing’ – transferred there by the federal authorities from ‘inundated’ Texas where the migrants had crossed the border with the help of coyotes (human smugglers). The arrival, featured on all local (and subsequently national) news outlets, sparked an anti- immigration protest – promptly organised by nativist groups via social-media – that effectively blockaded the road into the detention centre and forced the buses to re-route to alterative centres.
Immigrant rights groups counter protested, and Mexican and American families themselves then ‘inundated’ local migrant assistant charities with donations of food and clothing, and to offer themselves as temporary foster families for the new arrivals. This high-profile event struck me in a number of ways. Firstly, it demonstrated the depth of feelings and tensions around immigration in California, and in the United States more widely. It was starkly emblematic of the ‘harsh geographies’ of the U.-Mexico borderlands that young Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are growing up in (Núñez and Heyman 2007).
The mostly White crowd of local residents chanted and held up slogans such as ‘STOP illegal immigration’, ‘go home!’, ‘agents: secure our borders – NOT change diapers’, ‘what about OUR KIDS – keep OUR KIDS SAFE’, ‘protect your kids from diseases’ and ‘send them back with birth control’. In response, immigrant rights protesters held up signs such as ‘Ningún humano es ilegal’ (no human is illegal), ‘we work the jobs nobody wants’, ‘hey Obama, where’s our immigration reform?’, ‘not 1+ deportation’, ‘keep families together’, and ‘we welcome ALL children’. These captions and protester media interviews very publically exposed the complicated narratives of race, gender, class and belonging that are present in the border region. Gendered discourses of embodiment were particularly rife amongst the anti-immigration protesters – Mexican migrant women’s bodies were viewed foremost as ‘hyper-fertile baby machines’ (Gutiérrez 2008) who risked further inundating California with unwelcome Mexican children or ‘anchor babies’ (Franz 2013).
Children and young people’s bodies were framed as dangerous, violent, or carriers of disease who posed a direct threat to the conversely clean, healthy and innocent bodies of White American children. Immigrant 9 supporters tended instead to focus on notions of protection, safety, community and acceptance as parts of broader narratives of a common humanity and morality, as well as on the difficult realities of Mexican life in the U. in terms of their often second-class employment and social positionings, and the fear, for some, of deportation. Secondly, in the days immediately after the protests, the response of potential Mexican ‘foster’ families illustrated the various ways in which discourses of belonging, community, and rootedness or connection to Mexico can remain important for families many years or generations after migrating themselves.
News reports and social media suggested that much of the justification for their offering assistance to the new arrivals was rooted in recognition of, and empathy with, some kind of shared Mexican heritage or experience – personal or ancestral – of departure, migration, resettlement, exclusion and also acceptance. Looking at the scenery and people in the photos and videos of the protests, I felt like they could have been happening in any one of the coastal or semi-rural towns I conducted this research in. In fact, Murrieta, just north of Temecula (see map on page 72), is only 50 miles away from the schools in which I spoke to young Mexican women about their living in this ‘harsh geography’, and how constructions of age, gender, race and class intersected in their identity performances. I was acutely aware that they would most likely hear about the tensions unfolding just up the highway.
