Abstract
Transnational communities transcend national borders in order to act collectively, despite geographic, economic, and political challenges. Oaxacan migrants exemplify how community organizations mobilize beyond the local scale to facilitate community-based planning in the United States and Mexico. The article brings together contributions from scholarship on collective action, governance, and citizenship to analyze community-based planning. It analyzes how Oaxacan migrants modify norms and customs about community service and indigenous governance in relation to community-based planning in both countries. The findings expand our understanding of how community-based planning is scaled up and embedded in transnational processes and relationships.
Keywords
Introduction
Planning scholars and practitioners have overlooked the process by which transnational migrants navigate, create, and use different scales to facilitate community-based planning that extends across national borders. Brown and Purcell (2005) argue that the scholarship exploring community-based planning often conflates the local scale withparticular normative goals and outcomes such as democratization, social justice, and ecological sustainability—a situation they refer to as the local trap (Purcell 2006). Transnational communities who act collectively despite geographic, economic, and political obstacles 1 challenge the tenets of community-based planning about the importance of local scale and territoriality.
More specifically, transnational processes affect our understandings of community-level action, governance, and citizenship (Irazabal 2005; Miraftab 2011) while globalization and increased multidirectional mobility further complicate current political and economic conditions. In this environment, transnational communities develop new decision-making processes and governing bodies that challenge physical distances and political and economic barriers. Scholarship on community-level collective action should move beyond examination of institutions and decision-making within territorially bound communities. Furthermore, our understanding of the intersection of governance and transnationalism should extend explanations of a declining nation-state or simple conceptions of deterritorialization (Jessop 1997). The state’s declining role in development places an increased responsibility and burden on working communities. At the same time, the intervention of nation-states in the global economy and civil society continues to have significant legal, political, and economic influence on people’s everyday conditions. While the nation-state’s role in defining citizenship meanings and practices cannot be ignored, other actors and processes, as well, shape citizenship (Holston 1998; Miraftab and Wills 2005; Roy 2011; Sandercock 1998). In short, examination of transnational migrants’ planning from below (Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 2003) expands our understanding of community-based planning.
This article analyzes community-based planning in transnational Oaxacan communities, focusing specifically on usos y costumbres, hometown benefit associations, and danzas. 2 Usos y costumbres is a form of governance based on the normative values and customs of indigenous communities. Indigenous governance systems are “evolving processes, relationships, institutions and structures by which a group of people, community or society organize themselves collectively to achieve the things that matter to them” (Smith and Hunt 2008, 9). Indigenous communities shape and negotiate forms of governance in relation to the state. Usos y costumbres developed through a complex mix of Spanish colonial imposition, the Mexican Independence movement and contemporary politics, as well as from indigenous norms. After the Mexican Revolution, the new elite used this form of governance in an effort to politically incorporate indigenous communities and foster national integration (Chassen-Lopez 2004; Caplan 2010). Today, 152 municipalities in Oaxaca choose their government through political parties, but 418 do so through usos y costumbres (Hernandez-Diaz 2007, 19).
It is important to emphasize that the two systems, usos y costumbres and the national political parties, continue to challenge and to influence each other (Hernandez-Diaz 2007; Vázquez García 2011). The indigenous governance system relies on institutionalized forms of collective action, social norms, and service: tequio, cargos, and tupilillos. Tequio most often refers to physical labor on a piece of collectively owned property such as a church, school, park, or street. In Oaxaca, a day of tequio is generally a day of collective labor, for example clearing out the streets for new construction. Cargos 3 are the individual responsibilities one fulfills for a certain period of time, starting with the responsibilities assigned to children, tupilillos. 4 On one hand, such public services often provide community funds and labor to make up for the absence of state support. On the other hand, this system has also helped raise issues related to the political and economic rights of indigenous people—and more specifically for indigenous women—at the national level in Mexico (Vázquez García 2011).
Although a substantial literature has analyzed hometown benefit associations (e.g., Alarcon 2002; Fox and Rivera-Salgado 2004; Levitt 2001; Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011; Pessar 1997; Smith 2006), most of it does not explicitly examine how associations are strategically shaped and reshaped at different scales. In the communities studied here, the hometown associations or uniones are mobile institutions that help reproduce transnational governance and other forms of collective action such as cuotas. Cuotas are the financial contributions of the community to assist in emergencies, development projects, and fiestas in both Oaxaca and Los Angeles. They are “collective economic remittances” (Goldring 2004) separate from individual and family remittances. The hometown association may collect dues for a fiesta in Los Angeles or Oaxaca, or for a specific project like building a gym, building a health care clinic, paving a street, or restoring a church. Such collective economic and “social remittances” influence organizations at the local, regional, and transnational level (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011). While the hometown benefits association coordinates collective remittances, the economic burden remains on mostly working immigrant families with economic challenges of their own.
Danzas and fiestas are significant examples of the role of culture in identity formation and active citizenship at the transnational scale (Cruz-Manjarrez 2008). Indigenous identity, which overlaps with dimensions of class and gender, has been used to politically organize and demand autonomy (Stephen 1991; Vázquez García 2011). Culture is significant “both as a dimension and object of governance, and as an explanatory variable for differences in the operation and the effectiveness of governance” (Smith and Hunt 2008, 12). It helps transfer “social remittances,” or ideas and behaviors that travel from both the home and the host country (Levitt 2001; Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011). Despite those contributions, the cultural aspect of transnationalism is often overshadowed by the economic effects of transnational development (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011). Our research focuses on three danzas: La Danza de los Negritos, danced in reverence of the patron saint; another dance imitating community leaders and actors; and a dance imitating waiters. The last two are danzas chuscas, which are parodic dances (Cruz-Manjarrez 2008). 5 Each danza demonstrates how de-territorialized cultural practices contribute at different scales to collective action, governance, and citizenship.
The article’s examination of community-based planning in transnational migrant communities challenges the literature’s basic assumptions about territoriality and scale by analyzing the experiences of Oaxacan migrants in Southern California and how they partake in community-based planning on both sides of the border. Transnationalism is found to be a strategy enacted by Oaxacan migrant communities to continue and extend forms of collective action for community service, cultural celebrations and indigenous governance. Theircommunity-based planning creates new organizational channels for decision making and resource distribution, and a process for determining who may participate. Those organizational forms develop a type of “transnational simultaneity” whose cross-border engagement goes beyond “long distance nationalism” (Tsuda 2012, 633). Without ignoring the significant role of the state, this article’s analysis extends beyond territorially based conceptualizations by considering transnational collective action, de-territorialized governance, and new forms of citizenship in community-based planning.
Analytical Framework
The article brings together contributions from the scholarly literature on collective action, governance, and citizenship to analyze how transnational migrants engage in community-based planning in Southern California and Oaxaca. The analytical framework emphasizes the spatial and political dimensions of each of those constructs.
Collective Action and the Politics of Scale
Insights from collective action scholarship are useful when analyzing community-based planning, particularly regarding the significance of geographic boundaries, group size and characteristics, member selection, and rules of conduct and sanctions (Agrawal 2001; Mason and Beard 2008; Ostrom 1990). In addition, Ostrom (2000) emphasizes the importance of cultural symbols and rituals in determining group membership. That is where individuals signal one another and through the design of institutions reinforce norms of reciprocity and organization (Crawford and Ostrom 1995). Ostrom goes on to argue that social norms have “staying power” that over time fosters a desire for cooperative behavior, especially if the parties maintain communication (Ostrom 2000, 147). The use of cultural symbols, rituals, and social norms to facilitate collective action is particularly relevant in migrant communities as they negotiate cooperative behavior, membership and governance across differing cultural contexts.
Analyzing collective action as part of a “multi-level” process requires consideration of how mobility affects our understanding of boundaries and scale (Gold 1997). Smith and Guarnizo (2009, 620) describe mobility in this context as “embedded in historically changing opportunities and constraints operating in the context of economic globalization and mediated by the institutional practices of nation-states and highly variable local contexts of reception.” For transnational migrant communities, mobility is deployed as a strategy to make connections among economies, locations, and identities (Simone 2011, 390). Studies of transnational communities demonstrate how social, cultural, and economic links across locations enable people to surmount the impediments traditionally presented by great distances and international borders (Gold 1997; Pessar 1997; Sarmiento 2002). Mobility is in part a strategy used by communities in search of “making ends meet” (Sarmiento 2002). While community boundaries may shift, a sense of place remains steady in the minds of families and friends divided between countries and faced with economic hardships on both sides of the border.
When transnational communities organize collectively to carry out an activity (e.g., a festival, sports event, planning project), the organizational scale is not fixed; rather, it is socially constructed and dynamic. The characteristics of each scale, for example, its functions and its relationships to other scales, are neither innate nor permanent (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Purcell 2003; Smith 1992). Rather, the relationship between scales is “strategic, discursive, and symbolic” (Brenner 2001, 20). Born and Purcell (2006) argue that scale is an element in political strategy. For example, it is usually assumed that local control over space supports direct democracy; however, that depends on whom the control empowers (Dasgupta and Beard 2007; Purcell 2003). Scales in and of themselves have no deterministic values but are political strategies to achieve a particular agenda.
Transnational communities “jump scales” to widen their control over social and political space through scaling up or scaling down, or what some authors refer to as de- or re-scaling (Glassman 2001; Mitchell 1998; Swyngedouw 1997). For example, local groups scale up their efforts by linking to national or international organizations. According to Escobar (2001, 161) the “politics of scale from below” have the potential to evolve into a transnational social movement (Glassman 2001; Tarrow 1994). It is important to distinguish between the agency of those who are reproducing transnational communities and the role of the state or of corporations (Goldring 2002). Jumping scales transforms the political geography of collective action and creates new, highly contentious “power-geometries” (Massey 1994). In other words, while an individual or household may decide to move, they have little or no power over the broader processes that may have precipitated that decision.
De-territorialized Governance
The restructuring of the global economy creates new forms of urban governance focused on attracting corporate investments (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Purcell 2003). As transnational corporations respond, they are challenged by community-based organizations that represent public interests. Community-based planning occurs through organizations that operate on behalf of a community, and through public officials and community leaders who can broker relationships and organize local social action (Chaskin and Abunimah 1999). It is one vehicle by which disenfranchised residents engage in urban governance (Chaskin and Abunimah 1999).
Issues of governance are further complicated where high multidirectional mobility is embedded in transnational communities. For people as well as capital, globalization has created the dual need to be both stationary and mobile. One result is re-territorialized and de-territorialized forms of governance (Brenner 2004; Brenner et al. 2003). Transnational communities develop new processes for decision making and governing bodies that link distant places. New multiscale processes for decision making and management necessitate distinctive democratic procedures: for example, transnational decision making has to include and remain accountable to the interests of actors in both countries along with distinct relations to each state.
A unique set of state and nonstate actors engage in de-territorialized governance, actors navigating transnational political spaces and repositioning themselves in a new “political-economic setting of global mobility” (Smith and Guarnizo 2009, 620). At the transnational scale, associations, nongovernmental organizations, social movements and networks of cultural production create new forms of membership, civic organization, and participation. An example is the hometown associations that support migrants from the same village 6 and organize both collectively and transnationally for social and mutual-aid purposes (Alarcon 2002; Caglar 2006; Fox and Rivera-Salgado 2004; Levitt 2001; Theodore and Martin 2007). In some ways, these organizations also represent the migrant’s loss of faith in the state’s ability to meet its economic and political needs (Levitt 2001). Despite their physical separation from their village, through participation in hometown associations migrants regulate transnational relations of trust to ensure cooperation and transparency across the border (Beard and Sarmiento 2010). Participation in the host country affects participation in the home country, and vice versa (Tsuda 2012). For example, the hometown associations can also reproduce preexisting power asymmetries across countries (Guarnizo, Portes, and Haller 2003).
Citizenship and Identity
Community-based planning and transnational processes challenge state-centric and some place-based understandings of citizenship (Appadurai 1996; Holston 1999; Levitt 2001; Miraftab 2009; Miraftab and Wills 2005; Sandercock 1998; Smith and Guarnizo 2009). Community-based practices engender strategies for legitimizing membership at different scales (Coutin 2000; Ngai 2004); for example, distinct groups maintain their allegiances instead of embracing the larger national identity (Taylor 1994; Young 1990). Such practices, built on distinctive traditions and histories, contradict the statist version of citizenship (Scott 1998). Using “place” as the basic site of citizenship confines power and limits alternatives for participatory forms of active citizenship (Kearns 1995; Smith and Guarnizo 2009, 616). However, migrants negotiate different identities and practices across borders around class, ethnicity, and culture, as well as in terms of political territories (Stephen 2007).
As an alternative to the statist version of citizenship, the Rights to the City framework prefers the concept of “inhabitance” (Purcell 2003). That concept is based on the power to decide who is an established resident, who is an acceptable new resident, who is a legitimate actor—and thus who has rights (Purcell 2003). Smith and Guarnizo (2009, 620) describe inhabitance, “an abstract status associated with urban belonging,” and political participation as both “shaped by actors situated in particular locations based on social relations of difference such as class, gender, generation, ethno-racial identities, religious affiliation, formal-legal status and so forth.” However, the emphasis on empowering local inhabitants fails to recognize the transnationality of many communities and so creates barriers to incorporating inhabitants’ rights at wider scales. A transnational perspective of citizenship and community-based planning requires a “multi-scalar” approach “sensitive to the dialectical relationships among micro, meso, and macro-structures” (Smith and Guarnizo 2009, 620). Such a perspective must also consider “human agency, and the historically situated individual and institutional actors” (Smith and Guarnizo 2009, 620).
There are diverse interpretations of how identity develops at the transnational level. Some argue that identity arises out of networks, activities, and ideologies that take place in the home and in the host society (Sassen 2001, 2006). Immigrants settled in the receiving country still live transnational lives, and “both accommodate and resist their subordination within a global capitalist system” (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992, 12). Furthermore, individuals claiming partial and contingent rights or “flexible citizenship” (Ong 1999) can reclaim domains of social life that are often excluded from conventional conceptions of citizenship and politics (Tarrow 1994; Lawrence 2004). Forms of transnational civil society help develop identities based on cross-border affiliations, commitments and political alliances (Bonilla et al. 1998; Rivera-Salgado 1999; Smith and Guarnizo 1998). However, such organizations sometimes require the “essentialization” of identities to appeal to a broader audience and so fail to incorporate the negotiation of difference within the organization (Stephen 2001). The transnational migrant communities studied here create and redefine citizenship, basing it on active participation.
Contextualizing Oaxacan Immigration
Oaxaca’s “culture of migration” (Cohen 2004, 5) dates back to the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Oaxacan workers searched for employment in the sugarcane fields of Veracruz. Their search extended to Mexico City and Sinaloa, and into the United States through the Bracero Program of 1942 to 1964 (Fox and Rivera-Salgado 2004). Up until the 1980s, indigenous migrants worked primarily in the agricultural sector or moved to large urban centers. During this period, the rate of immigration from Oaxaca into the United States was relatively low. Since then, international trade policies such as NAFTA helped to weaken the agricultural economy of many indigenous communities and led to higher rates of migration.
In 2010, Oaxaca was one of ten Mexican states with the highest immigration rates to the United States (CONAPO 2010). In a relatively short time, Oaxaca went from a state with a low rate of migration intensity in 2000 to one of high intensity in 2010 (CONAPO 2010). Because of the increased risk and cost of re-crossing the border without documents, most indigenous migrants now decide to settle in the United States. 7 The emergence of migratory networks over the past three decades has in part allowed migrants to stay in the United States. According to Fox and Rivera-Salgado (2004), an estimated fifty to sixty thousand Zapotecs from Oaxaca have settled mainly in central Los Angeles neighborhoods: Koreatown, Pico Union, and South Central.
Oaxacan migration is embedded in sociocultural and economic patterns that are both strained and invigorated by the decision to migrate (Cohen 2004, 29). Both in the United States and in Mexico, indigenous Oaxaqueños find themselves excluded both as migrants and as indigenous people. Indigenous populations from Oaxaca are most often integrated into the urban service sector, farm labor, and some of the most difficult and lowest paid jobs in the United States. Moreover, the United States federal government excludes many migrants from full citizenship rights, and resists efforts to pass immigration policies that would regularize the status of the millions of undocumented workers. In recent years, high rates of permanent and temporary migration have strained the ability to maintain effective governance in Oaxaca and have imposed great hardships on migrants who must return to fulfill their civic obligations and retain their standing in the community (Kearney and Besserer 2004, 452-53). Most recently, the slowing U.S. job market and the increase in border enforcement and deportations have contributed to a decline in net migration from Mexico to close to zero (Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera 2012). What remains to be examined is the effect these cumulative impacts, particularly with regard to deportations, will have on migration rates to and from Oaxaca.
Methods and Data
The article focuses on findings from a qualitative study of transnational communities in Oaxaca and California that originated from two different villages in Mexico. The original sending villages have small populations of between 350 and 2100 residents and common sociodemographic and geographic characteristics (INEGI 2010). The communities are appropriate for examining the relationship between transnational processes and community-based planning, for three reasons. First, these migrant communities have active relationships with their sending villages, including participation in governance and planning, sending household- and community-level remittances, and ongoing cultural exchanges. Second, these communities organize through hometown associations in the United States that are not separate (see the Miraloma case in Levitt 2001) but rather extensions of the local governance system in Oaxaca. Third, collective action in these communities has encountered similar challenges: population loss, difficulty in transmitting language and culture, and economic political and social hardships (Cohen 1999, 2004; Cohen, Rios, and Byars 2009; Gibler 2009).
The authors gathered data through in-depth and semi-structured interviews as well as direct observation. Interview respondents included community activists and leaders, community volunteers, and a small number of those community members whose participation is considered minimal. 8 Every effort was made to contact respondents who were not active, but it is almost impossible to locate estranged community members because they are “blacklisted,” and, as one community member explained, they do not want to be found. Respondents were men and women ranging in age from 28 to their late sixties; the majority were born in Oaxaca and resided in Southern California. The in-depth interviews asked respondents about their residential and work histories, social networks, participation in organizations, and remittance behaviour. The authors recorded and transcribed the interviews, and if conducted in Spanish the interviews were translated to English. In addition to the in-depth interviews, the authors conducted numerous informal, unstructured interviews with community members at various events. The authors observed festivals, fiestas, meetings, sports tournaments, dances, and people’s homes. Observations included forms of cultural production such as rehearsals and performances of music and dance groups, cultural and religious celebrations and food preparation.
Findings
Building on our analytical framework, we present the findings in three parts. The first part explains how collective action occurs transnationally, focusing on service to one’s community as well as on danzas and fiestas. The second part delineates the processes of de-territorialized governance and considers the role of scale. The third part links community-based planning in transnational communities to new forms of citizenship.
Transnational Collective Action
Collective action occurs at the neighborhood, village, regional, and national scale through transnational social and economic networks reproduced by cultural practices and norms. Service is linked to the cultural norm of one’s duty to the community and patron saint; in many cases, a member’s first experience with service occurred in the United States. For instance, one of the officers of the hometown association explained that she had never fulfilled a cargo while in her village because she had been very young when she left. In the United States, the hometown association decided that her first cargo was to be treasurer. In Oaxaca, recent migrants who return from Los Angeles—even temporarily—can be assigned a cargo that can require them to extend their stay. For example, one migrant who had returned to the village because of a death in the family was assigned a cargo. After a year of fulfilling his duty, he decided not to return to Los Angeles. In another example, the community in Oaxaca assigned a cargo to a young man living in the United States, who then had to return to Oaxaca to fulfill the responsibility. Federal immigration policies limit an individual’s ability to return to Oaxaca to fulfill his or her duties. When returning is not possible, whether for economic or legal reasons, some community members pay an individual in Oaxaca to fulfill their cargo. Deportation is another reality faced by migrants; if they end up back in Oaxaca, the assembly can quickly assign them responsibilities.
Although cargos are typically individual responsibilities, there are examples of the community coming together to help individuals fulfill leadership positions in the United States. In one example, a woman who worked as a housekeeper and was nominated as treasurer of her hometown association in Los Angeles told the association that she did not know how to read and write. Despite this, she worked as the treasurer for an entire year, collecting monetary contributions with the help of the other hometown association members, and was able to fulfill her cargo. That the governance system in Los Angeles enabled a woman to take a leadership position despite her lack of skills illustrates the overriding significance given to service as compared to skills, formal education and gender.
All the members of the community living in the United States whom we interviewed complied with the cargo system. However, there was no evidence of tequios or tupilillos performed in the United States. One respondent said that the reason individuals do not have tequios in the United States is that “the organization doesn’t have [collectively owned] property to be able to work on, what is called tequio or a day of physical labor.” The practice of collectively sustaining a common resource or public good is not applicable in the United States. Nor are tupilillos practiced in the United States. We found no evidence that the cargo system extends to second-generation children. One man spoke of his daughter who both “likes” and “dislikes” the village ways, and how his other daughter “well, isn’t attracted by it.” Our research found that after second-generation children have voluntarily participated in community-based efforts, the community does not demand an ongoing commitment.
To keep records of collective action, each village tracks its membership using a list that is sent back and forth between Los Angeles and Oaxaca. Good standing on this list ensures access to emergency aid and the right to cultural and political participation at the transnational level. Consistent cooperation in the collective system eases one’s retrieval of documents or official paperwork from Oaxaca. If an individual in the United States fails to participate, his or her name is placed on a “black list.” Having one’s name on the black list risks being ostracized from the community both in the United States and in Mexico, losing access to private property in Oaxaca, or even in extreme cases being imprisoned if one returns to his or her village. In most cases, however, sanctions cause such everyday problems as the inability to get documents like birth and marriage certificates.
Other powerful examples of collective action are the fiestas and danzas at the neighborhood and village scales, locally and transnationally. Fiestas facilitate (1) community members’ “making presence,” (2) fundraising, and (3) organizing other forms of collective action. “Making presence” means publicly displaying one’s continued commitment to the community. According to our interviews, examples include providing a monetary contribution for the fiesta, preparing food and drinks, and performing in the band or a danza and paying fees (e.g., entrance fees, buying raffle tickets, and paying cuotas) that fund community-based planning efforts. Each community member is expected to attend and support these celebrations. Because the second generation typically does not have cargos, these occasions are important opportunities to display one’s commitment to the community and the patron saint of the village.
Transnational collective action in the form of danzas occurs at fiestas. For example, in 2008, the community in Los Angeles organized to send their dancers to perform in Oaxaca as a representation of the community in Los Angeles. Eight men in Los Angeles trained for over a year to perform La Danza de los Negritos. They committed to being the first group from the United States to perform this danza for their village. One of the men had been born in Oaxaca, but the others had all been born in the United States. The entire community took on the responsibility of producing this danza, for example, ensuring that they had the funds to travel to Oaxaca and to make their costumes. Each costume requires months of intricate beading, sequins, and embroidery work. The entire community in Los Angeles participated by collecting cuotas to offset the cost of the travel. Teachers and older dancers trained the dancers. Families invested their own funds in costumes, lent space, and provided food for rehearsals. After their return, the dancers performed for the community in Los Angeles as a way of thanking them for their support and celebrating the welcome the dancers had received in Oaxaca.
Despite the transnational character of danzas, certain villages guard their dances closely. In Los Angeles, respondents described the guardianship of their danzas as celos, 9 a defensive stance. One dancer stated: “we get jealous of what we have, and don’t want to share it . . . lets say [another village] wants to dance something our village has, well our village will get all over it, why is this other village doing this? And they will actually take [the issue] to the president of the other village, hey listen, what’s going on?” La Danza de los Negritos is recognized throughout Oaxaca. However, the research revealed how the members of distinct villages in Los Angeles maintained distinctive styles and steps despite the proximity of those villages in Oaxaca. Teaching the dance and particular steps to individuals outside of the village is strongly disapproved of, to ensure that the tradition is kept within the community even among those who migrate.
De-territorialized Governance
As governance associations expand and diversify through migrant journeys, they maintain and reinterpret usos y costumbres. Oaxacan migrants stop in Oaxaca City, Tijuana, and Mexico City for reasons of employment, housing, and financial support from family and friends. Labor market participation in places like Mexico City usually means informal employment in the service sector, such as child care or cleaning houses. If individuals face hardship in their first stop in Mexico City, they often continue on to the United States. In each stop with its distinct political and economic context, migrants organize an association based on usos y costumbres that connects their decision-making, forms of regulation and resource allocation to village governance.
Each of the villages has organized assemblies in both Mexico and the United States to decide on potential projects, delegate responsibilities and discuss community emergencies. Community-based planning proposals originate, however, in the assemblies in Oaxaca, which link back to the municipality of each Oaxacan community. Members in Tijuana, Mexico City, and Los Angeles vote during their assemblies to decide whether and how they will participate. In Los Angeles, over 100 people can gather, mostly through word of mouth, for a village’s assembly. The gatherings take place in informal settings like someone’s house, garage, or backyard. Support from the community living in Los Angeles often involves assigning cargos that include fundraisers and cuotas. Only members in good standing with the community can attend, discuss, and vote on a proposal and the individual contributions required.
For example, in 2008, the board president from one village took a year off from his regular employment to fulfill his cargo as board president. He traveled to Oaxaca City, Tijuana, Mexico City, and Los Angeles to visit an assembly in each city and ask for support to build a gym in his village. The president explained the need for the gym, the plan, the cost—all the components of an informed planning decision. Residents back in the village demonstrated their support for the project by starting a tequio to clear the future construction site. The community in Los Angeles voted to support the project. Now, in 2012, the completed gym is used as a basketball court, a location for municipal offices, and a place for the weekly regional market.
The de-scaling of decision making is a community strategy in neighborhood-to-neighborhood projects between Oaxaca and Los Angeles. In the case studies, villages were subdivided into distinct neighborhoods. Sometimes neighborhoods do not want or need the collaboration of the entire community. Although neighborhoods are the smallest units in the village, they can connect with transnational networks without engaging the large village governance structure. For example, a neighborhood in Oaxaca can organize its separate fiesta in Los Angeles without having to go through the larger village assembly. While the other neighborhoods in the village may attend the fiesta, they do not participate in the decision making, organizing, or fundraising. Nonetheless, significant solidarity exists at the regional scale. Villages in the geographic region of Villa Alta supported events in Los Angeles by participating in musical performances and dances, buying food and drinks, and paying an entrance fee. For a patron saint celebration in Los Angeles, a community president lent his privately owned apartment complexes for another community’s celebration.
None of the communities studied ran state-sponsored 501c-3s or nonprofit organizations in the United States. One community had opted to incorporate as a nonprofit after deciding to participate in the Mexican government’s 3 for 1 Migrant Program, 10 which required such organizational status in the United States. When incorporation was no longer practical, they let the status lapse. At the time of the study, none of the groups were participating in the 3 for 1 Migrant Program. One respondent stated, “The government sees that the village has almost everything [it needs] and so now the government gives [just enough] so they can say afterwards ‘I helped this town’ and then they can demand compensation.” This respondent’s shrewd political analysis illustrates the community’s flexibility in navigating the shifting organizational contexts for governance. Opting in and opting out of larger nonprofit organizations and state programs were politically strategic choices made by each of the villages.
Some of the literature on transnational movements from below (Escobar 2001; Glassman 2001; Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Tarrow 1994) discusses scaling up in terms of the link between community-based associations and larger nonprofits. That was not a particularly important factor or pattern in our findings. An example is the participation by one of the case study villages as vendors and dancers in a larger Oaxacan festival organized by a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles: the village participants had no role in the decision making for the festival; that was limited to the nonprofit’s board of directors. Members of both communities attended the event, but only one of the case study communities chose to participate as vendors, and thus benefited from the fundraising. The other case study community had decided not to participate because of being excluded from the decision making and of a sense that the festival’s representation of their culture was diluted.
Several Oaxacan nonprofit organizations bring different ethnic groups together, but their governance structure is not usos y costumbres although it is influenced by it. Among these are a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles connected to larger nongovernmental organizations that build social movements for international indigenous rights, and a federation of organizations that represent the state of Oaxaca in the United States. While some individuals from the case study villages participated in these nonprofit organizations on the regional and transnational scales, these were individual as opposed to village decisions. Our findings were similar for faith-based participation. Village participation was limited to activities of the hometown association.
Active Citizenship and Transnational Inhabitance
Participation in assemblies, fiestas, and danzas shape, to some extent, sociopolitical, cultural, and economic rights of migrants in both Oaxaca and the United States. Transnational inhabitance is practiced at these occasions as individuals organize collective action and build on community experiences and knowledge across borders. Participants represent a diversity of transnational experiences gained through employment, immigration, and the fulfillment of varying leadership roles. Such experiences have changed the nature of community participation. For example, until recently women, despite their contributions, could not vote in their respective assemblies in Oaxaca. Women in the United States in contrast have had decision-making and leadership roles from the inception of some of their associations. Now a number of women in Oaxaca increasingly represent their families in their assembly 11 and have started to assume leadership positions.
Active community participation by second-generation members both shapes their own identities and transforms the community identity. The second-generation members sometimes have to return to the village to check on family and to secure the rights to an empty house. They thus “make presence” in the village when it becomes increasingly difficult for other members to visit because of lack of legal documentation, sickness, or prohibitive cost. Some second-generation children participate in assemblies. However, since the board conducts business in Zapotec, participation is difficult for those second-generation members who do not speak that language. In fact, because the selection of who sits on the board usually takes place in Oaxaca, the second-generation is usually not included. One respondent said, “It all takes place down there, you know. . . . That’s the thing, we’re not in the hat.”
Second-generation identity is increasingly flexible. For example, the second-generation son of one respondent had just returned from serving in Iraq and did not participate in the hometown association. Another second-generation respondent identified with the gay community in Los Angeles, and described disassociating himself at times from his Oaxacan community. “I was involved in social activism within Latino gay communities, but not with Oaxaca. . . . I would go sometimes to some parties here and there, but I was rarely seen. . . . But now I think I learned to really balance it out. . . .” Unlike the soldier, this individual was active in the hometown association, but recognized the complexity associated with being both Oaxaqueño and gay.
Danzas and fiestas provide mechanisms for the negotiation of indigenous identities at the transnational scale. In the Danza de los Negritos, a complex indigenous identity is woven through the production of the Spanish-style velvet suit and hat combined with the mirrors, masks, and embroidery of flowers and butterflies, which hark back to pre-Colombian and colonized Mexico. The dancers must find a balance between learning from the elders and adapting to new contexts. According to one dancer, “danzas also need to be adjusted.” Hand gestures, symbols, and costumes need to adapt to the various places the community inhabits. For example, one of the dancer’s suits displayed the skyline of downtown Los Angeles and the abbreviation for the city (“LA”) embroidered in sequins next to words written in Zapotec, the name of the village and the patron saint.
Like the assembly, danzas also are a means of sharing community experiences and voicing public critiques of leaders and community-based plans. In one example, dancers portrayed a group of community leaders responsible for a failed planning project in their village. Dancers represented several members of the board of directors, dressing like them and imitating their behavior: the president with the misappropriated funds falling out of his pockets; the secretary as a gossip creating divisions in the community; the architect as a drunk, dancing and swerving with beers in his tool belt. The dancer portraying the architect who had been paid to develop the project in Oaxaca danced carrying a sign that had on one side a picture of a collapsed retaining wall, referring to the project the whole community had invested in. Another dancer portrayed a researcher who had been studying in the village by running from person to person, jotting down notes and taking pictures while meddling in the community’s affairs. The community performed this danza at a fiesta in Los Angeles in front of some of the people it was portraying.
Another example, the danza of the waiters, illustrates how the community distinguishes other dimensions of citizenship: ethnicity, class, and race. Unlike the Danza de los Negritos, this danza has its creative origins in the United States. In the dance, eight male dancers wear white male and female masks, and are dressed in white shirts, black skirts or pants and black aprons filled with straws, and carry notepads to take food orders. This danza depicts the experience of indigenous Oaxaqueños in the restaurant industry, working as busboys with little opportunity to move up to positions as waiters, since the position of waiter is often limited to white men and women. This danza highlights the complexities of citizenship and identity in the United States by vividly depicting class and racial hierarchies in the workplace that prevent full incorporation into the host country.
How the respondents understand their identity can affect their attitudes toward community-based planning. In the words of one respondent:
They [non-participants] act negatively toward their country. They no longer want to speak their dialect and only want to speak English even though they don’t speak it well. They are ashamed to speak the dialect and so don’t want to be with their paisanos because people will think that they are from a rancho—that they are indigenous—and so they part from the union.
Thus, respondents are negotiating multiple ethnic and social identities: among others, Mexican, Oaxaqueño/a, indigenous, second-generation, and undocumented as well as those related to gender and sexuality. Transnational migrants are constantly balancing the need to maintain their transnational commitments against management of the pressure to assimilate into the host society. Reproducing spaces where, in the words of one respondent, it is “safe to be Indian” helps communities sustain collective action at the transnational scale.
Conclusion
Community-based planning among transnational migrants exemplifies how ordinary people act strategically across scales in response to economic global restructuring. The community renegotiates its cultural and political borders, expands its membership, and reproduces mobile institutions and practices. A key example of such processes is the acceptance of women in leadership roles and of financial contributions to replace physical participation. Certain institutions serve as mechanisms that can work across national boundaries and in different geographic, political and cultural domains to reproduce loyalties, obligations, sanctions and behavior. All these examples show how transnational migrants strategically adapt their community-based planning processes in response to the conditions they face.
Community-based planning in the cases presented here does not expand bottom–up or top–down, but rather strengthens political and economic power by deterritorializing and reterritorializing decision making. The scaling up of decision making revolves around national and international migration networks embedded in different contexts of reception: government policy, labor market participation, housing, social capital strategies, organization of the receiving community, and political conditions (Menjivar 2000; Portes and Rumbaut 1990). New research demonstrates that the ways in which cities present themselves to immigrants and municipal strategies are also significant factors in contexts of reception (Jaworsky et al. 2012). Scaling up decision making need not mean linking to a nationally based nonprofit organization or a larger social movement. Associations can decide strategically to scale up or descale their organizing. For example, a neighborhood organizing a fiesta in Oaxaca may decide to gain economic and political power by including migrants from their neighborhood who reside in Los Angeles.
Transnational communities continually accommodate and resist their subordination within a global capitalist system, and renegotiate identities in different spaces and at different scales. Included are “safe” spaces where indigenous migrants can challenge decision makers as well as the power of the state to determine rights and citizenship. Danzas and assemblies exhibit the tangled relationships among ethnicity, class, generation, and political status that challenge state-centric definitions of citizenship. Danzas create spaces where individuals establish and renew the collective identity necessary for action. These spaces do not exist in isolation but respond to the historic and contemporary realities of the Oaxacan community in both Mexico and the United States, as illustrated in the danza of the waiters. Furthermore, transnational practices are not static, but rather resist and simultaneously adapt to conditions that often include exploitation and discrimination. Beyond binational or hyphenated identities, complex transnational practices expose the limits of typical ways of understanding a migrant’s incorporation in the host society. Participation in the transnational community guarantees collective rights that neither Mexico nor the United States has thus far provided.
On the other hand, internalized racism deters collective action, which depends on a strong communitarian identity and ideology. Moreover, despite their volunteerism and cooperation, transnational migrants engaged in community-based planning are not isolated from the pressure of the state: most egregiously, only certain individuals have the legal right to cross the border. The question of the state’s responsibility towards these communities remains unresolved. Roy warns that in an “era of liberalization, the ideology of sweat equity shifts the burden of coping from the state to the poor” (Roy 2003). The findings from our study support this contention by revealing how the burden of community and economic development rests on transnational migrants—who in many cases are the working poor. Community-based planning does not make up for the limited structure of opportunities that migrants face. Like the migrant networks, in this context community-based planning is shaped by such factors as immigration laws and labor markets, which often dictate whether immigrants have access to resources and basic rights in the United States (Menjivar 2000). That constraint manifests itself in the necessity for many migrants to substitute monetary participation for physical participation because, if undocumented, many migrants do not have the right to return to the United States after traveling to Mexico. Insights from community-based planning in this transnational context move us beyond the local trap to reveal new forms of collective action, de-territorialized governance, and citizenship based on active community participation that continuously traverses political and economic borders.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the Oaxaqueños who made us feel welcome in their community, at their events, and in their homes, and who were willing to share their stories with us. We also thankfully acknowledge the contribution of three dedicated research assistants: Rosalinda Meza, Luis Sarmiento, and Adriana Urbina.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was supported by grants from the Community Outreach Partnership Center and the Center for Research on Immigration, Population, and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine.