Response Post on Migration syp

Answer ONE of the following three questions in about four sentences.

What is No Borders and how does it differ from other political movements seeking more rights and improvements for migrants and immigrants?

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What is a “labor brokerage state” and what are the implications of this strategy for the citizens of states in which this strategy is adopted?

How do experiences with migration to the US alternatively inform “antiglobalization backlash” and “alternative globalization” in communities in rural Mexico?

160

In 2004 the citizens in Partida held a meeting

Gathering all day at the
village hall, they lamented the apathy and “egotism” of their counterparts
in Los Angeles. Many argued that emigrants were abandoning the com-
mune, while those at home were “killing themselves” to sustain the pue-
blo. They questioned migrants’ “Americanized” notions of dismantling
community-service requirements or giving women the right to vote. They
decided it was time to formalize their stance. Over the next few years, they
codifi ed their communal structure and made demands of those who had
left. In the resulting statute, they proclaimed,

The community of Partida agrees to continue enjoying its lands and natural
resources in a communal manner, that being the closest to our way of life
and form of community organization . . . [including] the participation of all
community members [as well as migrants] to maintain the core institutions
of the community, including tequio [communal labor], the cargo system
[civic posts], cooperaciones [monetary contributions], the fi estas, the
assembly, the way of life, and the heritage of the community.

The hometown highlighted that emigrants were comuneros (members). If
migrants did not contribute their time and money, villagers would reclaim

5 Pathways to Hometown Change

Andrews, A. L. (2018). Undocumented politics : Place, gender, and the pathways of mexican migrants. ProQuest Ebook
Central http://ebookcentral.proquest.com
Created from fiu on 2021-03-17 12:10:03.

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p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 161

the land and houses they still had in the village, dump their belongings just
outside of town, and throw the migrants in jail should they try to return.

Partida’s statute was not just an internecine quarrel between migrants
and those “left behind.” It was also a shield against state attacks on com-
munal landholding and political participation. Starting in the 1990s the
Mexican federal and Oaxacan state government started pressing indige-
nous villages to dismantle Usos y Costumbres, open up to political parties
(which were banned under the indigenous system), and turn over com-
mon resources to individual property and corporate control. State agents
also argued that indigenous self-government should be dismantled, to
give women equal rights. In Partida, however, many people dismissed
women’s participation in politics as an external intervention. They used
their community statute to defy these outside demands, legally and sym-
bolically. By codifying their collective, male-run structure, villagers posi-
tioned themselves against the individualistic ideas of “modernization”
promoted by both migrants and the homeland government.

Residents of Retorno also faced radical changes driven by both migrants
and the Mexican state, but they responded diff erently. Instead of rejecting
political parties, they aligned themselves with the left-wing PRD. They
also collaborated with their long-distance counterparts, particularly
through the Frente Indígena Oaxaqueño Binacional (FIOB; Oaxacan
Indigenous Binational Front). With the help of these allies, villagers chal-
lenged the longtime corruption of the local- and state-level PRI. They
demanded resources, insisting that Oaxaca’s government deliver roads,
irrigation, health services, and productive projects. They also took advan-
tage of the emerging mandate for “women’s empowerment” to garner
more state support. In the process women in Retorno began to vote and
take on political posts for the fi rst time in history. Thus, they staked their
claim to resources and representation.

Why did people in Partida shore up their communal structure and
reject state intervention, while those in Retorno demanded inclusion in
local and state democracy? This chapter traces how each hometown’s
experiences of emigration shaped its approach to Mexican politics. Rather
than focus on migrants’ long-distance impacts, as many scholars have
done, I look at how those on the sending side reacted to their own or oth-
ers’ histories of migration.

Andrews, A. L. (2018). Undocumented politics : Place, gender, and the pathways of mexican migrants. ProQuest Ebook
Central http://ebookcentral.proquest.com
Created from fiu on 2021-03-17 12:10:03.
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162 c h a p t e r 5

h o w h o m e t o w n s f a c e m i g r a n t g l o b a l i z a t i o n

For those in Mexico, emigration was a political spark plug: a catalyst for
change. In the 1990s and the fi rst decade of the 2000s, people of Partida
and Retorno faced both “illegality” in the United States and vast political
shifts on the Mexican side. For one, Mexico began to democratize. Though
the PRI had ruled the country for seventy years, opposition parties includ-
ing the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD; Party of the
Democratic Revolution) and the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN; National
Action Party) began to challenge its clientelistic control. Along with advo-
cacy organizations of various stripes, these parties put pressure on the PRI
and exposed its corruption. During this period, Mexico also privatized
state resources and rolled back welfare support. The federal government
then reformed the constitution to enable the sale of communal lands.
Finally, Mexico decentralized, shifting responsibility for “development” to
the municipal level.

Though indigenous villages were historically isolated from Mexican
politics, democratization and decentralization made them battlegrounds
for political control. In 1995 Oaxaca’s PRI legalized the long-standing
indigenous system of Usos y Costumbres, granting 418 of the state’s 570
municipalities the right to self-govern.1 Nevertheless, the state also began
pressuring indigenous people to dismantle their traditions of public serv-
ice and independent self-government. In the late 1990s, for instance, the
state began paying stipends for cargos, undermining the tradition of
unpaid public service. At the same time, the PRI also created new funds
for sanitation, reforestation, agriculture, education, household infrastruc-
ture, and training in entrepreneurship, in hopes of holding the rural vote.2
To get such funds villagers needed the signature of the municipal presi-
dent. Thus, village authorities came to control both new salaries and state
development funds. If migrants and their allies took over a village, they
would gain access to these funds and put wind in the sails of the PRD
opposition. Despite the ostensible political independence of indigenous
pueblos, many faced clashes over local control. Municipal governments
were now a strategic arena in which to challenge the PRI.

In the 1980s Mexico also started integrating women into state-led
development.3 By the 1990s women’s empowerment was a central axis in

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 163

rural state programs. In particular, the Oportunidades program, started
in 1998 under the name Progresa, granted cash transfers to women across
Mexico, on the condition that they participate in health workshops and
send their children to school.4 Since indigenous villages often excluded
women, “women’s rights” also gave the state an excuse to dismantle indig-
enous control. Together these changes laid the terrain on which home-
towns remade their Mexican citizenship, in dialogue with the criminaliza-
tion of their counterparts in the United States.

But how did migration play into these shifts? Traditionally, scholars
argued that migration was a political “safety valve,” allowing people who
might otherwise protest to leave the homeland instead. Emigration thus
freed the sending state from accountability to migrant-sending villages,
consigning them to political irrelevance.5 Indeed, some scholars show that
migrant-sending villages tend to see less political participation than non-
migrant towns.6 Others argue that as people leave and get exposed to indi-
vidualism and class stratifi cation, cohesive communities disintegrate.7 In
such formulations communal governance fi gures as an inadequate and
antiquated form of resistance, eroded by capitalist globalization.8

Increasingly, social scientists have grown interested in how migrants’
remittances and “voice after exit” might have the opposite eff ect, fueling
hometown growth or democratization.9 These scholars argue that
migrants send back not only remittances and cultural habits (“social
remittances”) but also “political remittances”: attitudes and alliances that
can either help democratize their hometowns or exacerbate instability.10
Yet it remains unclear why migrant involvement encourages democracy,
development, and gender equity in some hometowns, while making oth-
ers less secure.11 Many scholars conclude that emigration helps sending
communities if migrants (1) make money in the United States, (2) are
exposed to “egalitarian” U.S. norms, and (3) remit the “right” productive
investments, democratic ideals, and social practices (like gender equity).12
Such frameworks imply that economic development, democratic partici-
pation, and women’s empowerment “trickle down” from Global North to
Global South. They also make such prospects appear to rely on migrants’
economic and cultural integration, depoliticizing the interplay between
sending and receiving sides. In turn, more recent studies have highlighted
the mediating eff ect of homeland contexts, revealing that successful

164 c h a p t e r 5

cooperation between migrants and hometowns also hinges on sending
state programs, homeland democracy, and interstate relationships.13 Still,
studies of migration and development remain largely divorced from the
realities of U.S. exclusion.

This chapter shows how people in the homeland adapt their political
strategies in relation to their perceptions of migration, including negative
images of the United States. As Mexico evolved, it suggests, Partida and
Retorno each forged new forms of citizenship on the sending side. Yet they
did so quite diff erently. Each community’s political pathway—including
its historical power dynamics, the mode of control its migrants faced in
California, and the character of its migrants’ transnationalism—provoked
distinct reactions in Mexico.

For people in Partida both migration and state interventions threat-
ened communal autonomy. Those in the hometown responded with what
I refer to as antiglobalization backlash.14 Most people remaining in the
village had never been to the United States. They denounced emigrants
for being selfi sh and abandoning the common good. They dug in their
heels to protect collective governance and insist that migrants help out.
They also rejected eff orts at modernization by the Mexican state. Instead,
they remade indigenous “tradition” as a political tool. Framing land priva-
tization, corporate intervention, and party politics as threats to equity,
they shored up their long-standing autonomy. Collectively, they blocked
state “development” programs and refused to convert traditional cargos
into paid public posts.

For people in Retorno, however, outreach by migrants and Mexican
political parties presented an opportunity to transcend the village’s long
history of exclusion, fueling a fi ght for alternative globalization. Due to
family separation and historical patterns of circulation, many people in
Retorno had been migrants themselves or had family members in
California. They shared migrants’ disillusionment with the United States.
Under the mantle of the FIOB, therefore, they sought a greater voice in
Retorno and the state of Oaxaca. Locally, they continued their ongoing
fi ght against the village and state-level PRI. They dismantled traditions
that had forced indigenous people to do unpaid labor and blocked them
from local leadership. They won migrants and women political rights.
Inspired by migrants, they also joined other hometowns and the PRD to

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 165

pressure the state for support. Thus, they used their indigenous identity to
build solidarity with other villages. By exercising political voice, they
claimed new rights to belong on the Mexican side.

Women’s empowerment weighed critically on both pueblos’ politics,
representing the peril or promise of outside ties. In Partida antiglobaliza-
tion backlash was also patriarchal: men spurned women’s rights as a form
of outside meddling. They argued that Western notions of gender equality
clashed with indigenous traditions of complementarity (in which women
and men played reciprocal, mutually supportive roles).15 Ultimately, how-
ever, Partida relied on migrant women’s support, so it had to make accom-
modations. In Retorno, meanwhile, women became important leaders in
the battle for democratization. Due to family separation, women were the
majority in the village, so organizers realized they needed women to stage
successful marches—as well as to garner resources targeted at women’s
empowerment. Thus, the people of Retorno embraced what I call gen-
dered jujitsu (a martial art where a small adversary uses an opponent’s
force to set the opponent off balance), using state funds to expand their
own movement.

The contrast reveals that just as transnationalism is political, home-
town politics are transnational. Not only do migrants impact their villages
from afar, but the people in migrant hometowns also react to migration,
reconstructing the meanings of indigeneity, gender, and Mexican citizen-
ship. Ethnicity is central to this process, but it plays out in diff erent ways.
Usos y Costumbres, for instance, is not a stable indigenous tradition but
instead a dynamic political tool that changes depending on hometowns’
goals. For Partida, indigeneity represented autonomy; for Retorno, ethnic
connection. In Retorno, democracy also required abandoning the old, cor-
rupted version of Usos y Costumbres altogether. Thus, politics were proc-
essual, altering long-standing structures as villagers navigated both U.S.
exclusion and evolving homeland dynamics.

r e s i s t i n g g l o b a l i z a t i o n i n p a r t i d a

The fi rst time I visited Partida, landslides tore at the mountains of Oaxaca’s
Sierra Norte, spilling over the road and stripping the skin off the dense

166 c h a p t e r 5

forest slopes. By the time I tumbled out in front of Partida’s bright-
blue town hall, public loudspeakers were calling the comuneros out to
slosh mud and rocks off the street (see fi gure 5). Men emerged one by
one from their homes to do tequio, a duty they still traded for membership
in the village and access to its communal land. When I met with the
village leaders, they were also suspicious of me. Though migrants
from Partida had been going to California for decades, they stiff ened when
I mentioned the United States. They asked whether, like those who had
left, I would push them to change their values. Migration had incited
Partida to defend its communal ways. Villagers used their long-standing
participatory structure to restrict the meddling of migrants, political par-
ties, corporations, and even wayward graduate students from the United
States.

Figure 5. Villagers doing communal labor on the main street of Partida. Photo by the
author.

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 167

Defending the Commune

Leonel Vega and his wife, Nadia Parra, illustrated the local penchant for
self-protection. One long, cold evening I sat with the couple, eating yellow
mole over their fl owered, plastic tablecloth. Leonel had worked in Los
Angeles before coming back to Partida to marry Nadia in 2001. These
days, however, he was breaking his back to manage Partida’s water infra-
structure and its system of public labor—one of the pueblo’s more rigor-
ous civic jobs. Migrants did not appreciate this hard work, he complained.
Across from Leonel’s small cement home, his brother-in-law Bernardo
Cruz, who lived in Los Angeles, had built a gleaming, three-story house.
Migrants like Bernardo—those with papers anyway—would come back to
Partida to relax or even rent out their homes for pay. Looking across at the
empty dwelling, Leonel was angry:

I’m working so that they can have running water, so that the roads are well
maintained, and they’re profi ting from that. . . . [In the communal system]
we have obligations, and we have rights. . . . When you do tequios, you see
all the work that needs to be done. Being the person who manages the
tequios, for instance, is a huge amount of work, because you’re responsible
for the water system, and if that breaks you have to go in the middle of the
night and fi x it . . . or right now that we have to [do tequios to] plant all
these trees . . . and when you’re there [in the United States], you don’t even
know what’s going on.

As more people left, cargos from road maintenance to village secretary fell
heavily on those who remained. People who stayed in Partida, Leonel felt,
had been saddled with unfair burdens.

Just the day before Leonel and several dozen men had marched out to
the home of a migrant who failed to pay his “tax.” In the late 1980s, as
described in chapter 4, villagers decided that if emigrants wanted land or
rights in Partida, they would have to contribute a hundred dollars per year
and participate in the community’s HTA in Los Angeles. Though this man
kept his (usufruct) land in Partida, he never remitted the requisite hun-
dred dollars. The pueblo decided it was time. Machetes in hand, they
fenced off his property for return to the collective holding. Other times,
the comuneros cut off electricity, water, or sewage to the homes of

168 c h a p t e r 5

“reluctant” migrants (those who failed to contribute to the village), even if
family members still lived in the house. If migrants tried to visit without
having paid, they locked them in cells below the town hall. They explained
to the wayward, “Only the people who have worked and contributed have
rights, but you don’t contribute. You don’t help, and you [migrants] just
come to help yourselves to what’s already here.” If migrants did not sup-
port the community, the village revoked their membership.

Residents like Leonel endorsed such sanctions because they resented
their migrant counterparts. Only 35 percent of men and 3 percent of
women in Partida had ever been to the United States. I heard of just one
married couple separated across borders. So instead of feeling tied to
migrants, most people felt betrayed—including returnees like Leonel.
Parents would sob into the phone, begging their children not to leave or
accusing them, “Why did you abandon me?” Some even cursed their
migrant sons and daughters, refusing to hear their names. The resent-
ment was palpable in families like Ernesto Galindo’s. Ernesto grew up on
a three-thousand-square-foot plot, where he now lived with his wife and
seven children in a one-room adobe hut, with two large beds and an open
fi re. Just feet away his brother who lived in Los Angeles had built a three-
story home, sealed with a padlock. Every time Ernesto looked at the lock,
his eyes fi lled with rage. Though some migrants sent money to Partida
through their HTA, those at home felt they never quite did enough.

Tomás Ríos, one of Partida’s senior statesmen, explained why they felt
so mad. Once a teacher, Tomás had worked in Los Angeles in the mid-
1990s, but he returned disillusioned with the individualism and isolation
of U.S. life. Now in his midfi fties, Tomás lived with his wife and their teen-
age children and ran an embroidery shop at the top of Partida’s hill. In his
spare time Tomás played guitar at local parties and tried to document and
bring back the Zapotec language. He was skeptical of me when I fi rst
arrived, wondering why on earth I was asking so many questions. He
would look at me pensively from under his thick eyebrows, as his foot
click-clacked on a sewing machine. Gazing through his window over the
clouds, he told me, “Those of us who are always here have the idea that the
more we help one another the more we can advance. But when someone
comes back from the city they think diff erently. . . . People sometimes get
very apathetic when they migrate. They forget. They leave and they don’t

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 169

send money; they don’t participate. . . . It pains us that they don’t want to
contribute.” Not only had migrants shirked their responsibilities, Tomás
felt, but when they did turn back it had been to “fi x” Partida. The people at
home, he added, were fi ghting for a counterweight to these impositions.
They valued the feeling of community that came from serving the com-
mon good. Doing public service gave them strength, he added, teaching
them to care about the village as a whole.

Such resentment was both material and moral. While one might expect
migrants’ economic success to appeal to other villagers, emigrants threat-
ened Partida’s values of service and equity. Tomás’s views were widely
shared. Almost daily, while I hung out at the taco stand in Partida’s town
square, I heard villagers lament the “egotism” of migrants. As Naila
Marcos, a fi ery young health promoter in her midthirties, complained,

[Migrants] get used to those comforts, and they don’t want to come back
here anymore. They start to think they come from Los Angeles, and they
come to show off and to say how pretty Los Angeles is. . . . Instead of think-
ing about the common good, about our children, people start to think about
why that guy has money and not me. Then they lose the ideology and the
habit of mutual aid. . . . Those people start thinking they can have every-
thing easy, and they come back with very hard hearts.

Like Naila, many villagers disliked migrants’ individualism. In particular,
returned men like Tomás were often especially adamant, having given up
the United States and come back to the village in search of a collective
alternative.

Partida’s rules had key implications for those who returned. If a migrant
was deported or chose to come back for good, he had to petition the pue-
blo to start at the bottom of the local public-service ladder. For instance,
Mario Vargas lived in Los Angeles for almost twenty years. In 2009 he was
deported for drug use. He had nowhere to go but Partida. When he
returned, he described, “I had to start from the bottom. To go to the village
leaders and say, ‘This is what happened.’ I had to promise to stop drinking
and using drugs. And I had to do lots of cargos. I have already been
a guard at the town hall, and now I have to be a guard at the church—
lots of cargos.” For Mario the obligations actually fostered self-esteem.
Staffi ng his new hot-dog stand in Partida, he told me, “Take a picture of

170 c h a p t e r 5

me! I want my boys [in Los Angeles] to see that I’m working. I’m not like
I was there.”

The village also used community service to reindoctrinate returned
migrants to communal life. Abel Espinoza, a former village president,
described one memorable incident. In 1999 and 2000 a set of deportees
returned to Partida and began drinking, beating people up, and vandal-
izing village property, “throwing stones at an old man or any person who
might be passing by.” In a neighboring town the village leaders put these
cholos (gangsters) in jail, throwing them out on the earliest bus in the
morning. In Partida, Abel boasted, the assembly assigned community
service and jail:

There was a time when there were a lot of drunk young men [back from the
United States], and the pueblo had to put them in jail. We said, “If you don’t
have work to do we have some for you here,” and we gave them a few days of
tequio as punishment. And fi nes too. From tequio to jail, then back to
tequio. Tequio is a way to straighten the young people out [enderezarlos]
when they are loitering around.

Later, these returnees complained to the state government that Partida
was abusing their human rights. In answer, the village leaders told the
police, “Here, we don’t live by your laws. We are a village of Usos y
Costumbres, and here we make our own laws.” By asserting collective
practices, the people of Partida disciplined wayward returnees. They also
asserted their independence.

Autonomy from the State

Insisting that migrants support the commune gave Partida tools to rein-
force its autonomy from Mexican government and political party interfer-
ence. Initially, Partida developed its community statute to manage emi-
grants. But the law also helped the village, for instance, to protect its
communal land. Partida’s communal land included resources—such as
wood—that were attractive to corporations. In the 1970s and 1980s sev-
eral nearby villages lost their communal land because paper companies,
and in particular a corporation named Maderas de Oaxaca (Oaxacan
Wood), bought out individual landholders, promising to “help” the sellers
earn money.16

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 171

Mexico’s federal and state governments greased the wheels of such cor-
porate takeovers by pressing villages to privatize land. Starting in 1992
Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari revised article 27 of the
Constitution to create loopholes that enabled communal land like Partida’s
to be converted to private holdings.17 Salinas also created a program called
the Program to Certify Communal Lands, which sent bureaucrats to rural
villages several times a month to induce people to convert their land into
smallholdings. While villagers were not legally required to privatize, rep-
resentatives from the procuraduría agraria (attorney general of agricul-
ture) visited villagers and invited them to meetings. These agents also
mapped and measured villagers’ parcels, off ered them “certifi cates of
rights,” talked about smallholdings, and provided fencing to mark off indi-
vidual territory.18 They also off ered incentives and spoke as if land were
already private. Often, such agents told villagers that the state’s free pro-
gram to measure and certify land was about to end. If the pueblo changed
their minds later, the visitors threatened, they would no longer get money
for reforestation, and they might have to pay for titles to land. Ignacio
Baca, a lawyer for an indigenous-advocacy organization based in Oaxaca
City, became involved with people in Partida as they confronted their
issues with migrants. As he did, he also helped them fi ght back against
such actions by the state. He refl ected, “It’s a daily pressure, every week,
every two weeks, there is the bureaucrat telling them to join the [privati-
zation program].”

By putting their communal status in writing, the people of Partida
resisted this pressure. The village statute reinforced their traditional val-
ues: not only would everyone, including migrants, participate, but
resources would also continue to be held collectively. After passing the
statute, villagers defi ed privatization by actively demarcating communal
land. Ignacio told me, “Now even the young people are really, really
enthused. They have gone around the village on foot, marking off all the
old land demarcation points, interviewing the elders . . . and they made
their own map of all the [communal] lands.” Once again, migrant return-
ees who had grown disillusioned with U.S. unfairness, such as Juan
Serrano and Alejandro Campos, were especially enthusiastic. Such eff orts
helped protect Partida’s valuable forests. Pablo Velasco, a village council-
man, noted,

172 c h a p t e r 5

There is wood [in Partida]. They [corporations] have not exploited the
wood, and we have worked hard to conserve it. . . . No company has touched
it. They have wanted to, but the pueblo is very bullheaded and they say no.
Now, on the contrary, the young people want to reforest more. There are
places where their grandparents planted corn in the mountains, and they
want to put more trees there.

In the fi rst decade of the 2000s Partida also banned felling trees and
began to require members to help reforest whenever the government cut
them down. So when the state cut trees to widen the road, the village lead-
ers called for teqiuo (communal work) to plant new ones. Residents took
pride that they had some of Oaxaca’s only virgin forests, untouched by
corporations.

Linking outside meddling to the degradation of communal life, people
in Partida also rejected political parties and the state’s “productive
projects.” Though political parties were technically illegal in Usos y
Costumbres communities, they often became involved in local elections,
especially as the PRI and the PRD vied for control. This competition frac-
tured many rural communities, leading the state to cut off their funding
until confl icts had been resolved. To avoid such a fate, Partida’s assembly
blocked political parties. When a state senate candidate for the PAN came
to the village in 2010, for instance, residents heckled her and threw stones,
yelling, “Who is this woman to come and tell us what to do in our pueblo?”
When I asked why, Juan explained, “Because political parties come in—
you’re red [PRI], I’m yellow [PRD], and it’s divide and conquer.” Tomás
extended his criticism of migrants to parties as well, telling me, “Political
parties . . . are purely destructive criticism, not constructive. We should
have politics but constructive, to unify people not to separate them. But
we came to the conclusion [that parties] divide.” In Tomás’s reckoning
indigenous pueblos’ hopes lay in their own, grassroots control. Thus,
people in Partida rejected affi liations like Retorno’s alliances with the
FIOB and the PRD.

Partida’s protectionism also extended to the traditional system of car-
gos. Migrants had long insisted that instead of requiring people to serve,
cargos ought to be paid. Then the state of Oaxaca also started off ering
such salaries. People in Partida, however, feared that if cargos were paid
(instead of unpaid, as they had been), they would lose the moral value of

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 173

reinforcing people’s mutual obligations to the community. Refusing
migrants’ and the state’s vision of modernization, hometown citizens
voted to pool the money intended for stipends and use it for public works.
To insist that public posts served the people, they also held civil servants
accountable for every peso that came in from the state. One village presi-
dent carped that in Partida, “They check your accounts; they check every-
thing, and if something comes up they put the evidence before the group
and charge you a fi ne, and if they’re angry, then to jail.”

Because people in Partida were so wary of outside infl uence, they rarely
solicited resources beyond the standard municipal funds. While Retorno
had dozens of state programs during my fi eldwork, Partida had only one
in 2010, for chicken coops, and none in 2011. Though microfi nance insti-
tutions and small NGOs were ubiquitous in rural Oaxaca, respondents
had never heard of such an organization entering Partida. Terrifi ed of cul-
tural degradation, the few funds they accepted tended to reinforce indig-
enous culture, such as a community museum, a village radio station, and
a program to revive the Zapotec language. When funds were tied to out-
side impositions, the village refused.

Patriarchal Backlash

Men in Partida also rejected women’s rights as part of the outside attack
on communal traditions. Historically, indigenous men and women had
practiced gender complementarity, playing reciprocal roles. Men took
responsibility for public service, voting on behalf of their wives and daugh-
ters, while women attended to the family and home. Men argued that pro-
tecting women from the burden of village governance was a form of
respect. Everardo Segura, a former village president, explained, “If us men
don’t want to participate [in civic posts], the women want to less. It’s a
burden. We can’t name women to posts because they’re our mothers. I
would go [serve] on behalf of my daughters but not to take their rights
from them.”

Perhaps surprisingly to a Western eye, most women in Partida accepted
this distribution of work. In surveys 55 percent said they preferred not to
attend village assemblies. These all-day meetings were onerous: tiresome,
boring, and a “lot of work,” the women explained, on top of the chores they

174 c h a p t e r 5

already had to do in the female domain. Tomás’s wife, Victoria Maldonado,
explained, “I don’t go [to the assembly], because my husband goes [for
our family]. No, we [women] don’t go. That’s the custom: the woman
doesn’t go. If she doesn’t go, it’s because it’s our way that men go, not
women. Us women participate only in women’s things.” Those who did
attend assemblies were largely single mothers, who were required to join
and would be fi ned if they failed to appear. As mentioned in prior chap-
ters, women otherwise viewed cargos as an insult. Even when Partida
nominated a woman as town president in 2012, as I describe later, the
nominee started to cry, recognizing how much she would have to give up
in order to run the village.19

When Partida was writing its community statute in 2004, Ignacio, the
nonprofi t lawyer, encouraged villagers to formally include women in their
assembly, where all local voting took place. Yet women themselves refused.
Ignacio recalled,

There was a debate that lasted all day about whether or not women would
participate in the assembly. Because if we were going to defi ne cargos, the
women should be there to defi ne their cargos. So people talked and talked,
and at the end [men] said, “Okay, let women join.” . . . But the women said
it was not the moment, that there was too much to do, and they couldn’t
have the whole family in the assembly. . . . Having gone through the whole
morning, after lunch the women said, “No, we’d rather not return. We don’t
want this to be an obligation or a right to come to the assemblies, because
coming the whole day—no, we’d prefer not to. Let it be optional.”

The men eventually reasoned, “We have to respect women too; we have to
give them their space.” Thus, the pueblo decided that women would be
exempt from public service. While men in Partida told me they allowed
women to join assemblies, I never saw a woman attend. Given that many
women (and men) left the village to escape male abuse in the household,
migration may also have helped to sort people born in Partida, leading the
most rebellious women to leave.

Whether or not women wanted to engage in local politics, their absence
left them with little leverage to stop gendered violence. From the day I
arrived in Partida, doctors, teachers, and other urban workers described
the village as rife with domestic abuse. In the fi rst few hours I spent in

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 175

town, a teacher from the city professed in hushed tones that the gender
situation there was “brutal” (canijo) and that men of Partida were some of
the most abusive in the state. Despite her resentment of migrants, Naila,
too, angrily shook the ruffl ed sleeves of her black shirt as she explained,
“Maybe there’s not as much abuse as before, but, still, if a man hits a
woman, people will say it’s the woman’s fault. Or women themselves
denounce her. . . . [Even] women say that if I have husband, I can’t go
out. . . . They say that if I’m walking around in the street I’m just a cualqui-
era [slut]. Está canijo aquí [It’s rough here].” Others told gruesome sto-
ries, such as one woman’s tale of her sister beaten to death by sillazos
(chair hits) or another’s description of a sixteen-year-old girl “enslaved to
her in-laws.” Men, meanwhile, were known to gather at a local cantina
called Nacho’s Bar to swap stories of hitting their wives with the end of a
hose. They joked, as one confessed to me privately, “You’re not from La
Partida unless you go to Nacho’s Bar, and you beat your wife.”

When women did push for greater political infl uence, men threatened,
teased, or silenced them. Claudia Vega, the fi erce mother who sent her
seven daughters away from Partida to school, had been demanding a say
in assemblies since the 1960s. She attended the meetings, often as the only
woman present. Puttering in her courtyard one day, she railed, “Here they
[women] are used to the idea that women don’t have the right to go [to
assemblies]. ‘No!’ I tell them. ‘You have to see that the women go to the
meeting, to participate, to know. Not from other people’s mouths, who
don’t even talk or know anything.’ ” Yet when women like Claudia did go to
meetings, men mocked and muffl ed them. Several women were afraid of
the village assembly. It was embarrassing, they said. Noemí Torres, for
instance, told me, “If we go to meetings, men are the ones who speak, and
women are still afraid to speak. If a woman speaks up, they make fun of
her.” Lorena Padilla, a single mother, added, “I went to the assembly once,
but they don’t let you speak; they say what we say is worthless. We don’t
talk—because what’s the point of talking?” In short, as Claudia put it, “We
[women] have neither voice nor vote.”

Women’s infl uence in the Los Angeles HTA threatened men in Partida.
Women questioned the pueblo’s traditions of gender complementarity,
and they denounced its widespread domestic abuse. As they raised
money for the village, migrant women also worked to remit some of their

176 c h a p t e r 5

own “liberation,” demonstrating their power to men back home. Those
men resisted. They called migrant women “streetwalkers” (mujeres de la
calle), “bitches” (perras), or “loose” (andalonas) and said that when women
migrated, they lost their honor and respect. Others added, “Over there [in
the United States] men are no longer men.” Otilio Santos—a former presi-
dent of Partida—suggested that the women’s takeover of the HTA left men
in the pueblo especially vexed: “The men are afraid of women, afraid that
at some point one of the women is going to take charge here [in the vil-
lage]. . . . The men of Partida are really defeated, because they got a woman
[as HTA president]. They say, ‘How can it be that this damn old lady is
telling us what to do?’ They’re waiting for her to make mistakes so they can
take her down.”

At the same time, the Oaxacan state had started using women’s rights
to subvert indigenous self-governance. Even though women won suff rage
in Mexico in 1947, many indigenous villages, including Partida, continued
to exclude them from voting and village posts. Generally, this practice was
accepted as part of indigenous peoples’ right to set their own electoral
rules. In the late 1990s, however, the federal government and the state of
Oaxaca began insisting on women’s rights to political participation, prop-
erty, and law enforcement. The state also used women’s individual rights
to question the legality of collective self-governance.20 In 2007, when a
Zapotec village near Partida blocked a woman named Eufrosina Cruz
from running for community president, she appealed to the PRI and later
to the president of Mexico, leading Mexico to impose a constitutional
restraint on indigenous communities’ rights to self-govern. In 2009 the
Oaxacan electoral institute then mandated that indigenous women be
allowed to vote in local elections and considered for municipal councils.21
But men like Everardo, who had been president of Partida in 2008, argued
that these outsiders were trying to square indigenous practices “with
urban eyes.” When the mandate for women’s participation arrived in
Partida, the village assembly ignored it.

State-led women’s empowerment programs also proved sticking points
between outside advocates and men in Partida. One of Oaxaca’s key state
services in the fi rst decade of the 2000s (indeed, its third-largest source of
income) was the conditional-cash-transfer program Oportunidades. Even
though the program off ered villagers cash, Partida refused it for years, due

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 177

to its focus on women. The local doctor—a young woman from Oaxaca City
sent to Partida for her internship—was especially incensed. One evening I
sat with her in the clinic after close, chatting about how stubborn the men
had been. She explained, “I have asked for permission to come speak to
men in the assembly, to talk to them about domestic violence here, but they
won’t give it to me. The problem is they’re very machistas; they’re afraid of
a woman who speaks up.” The more the doctor encouraged women to resist
domestic violence, she added, the more the men refused to listen or help
her—even to help themselves. When the doctor went out of her way to get
supplies for the village, such as dozens of much-needed wheelchairs, the
men retaliated as well, refusing to approve her proposals and costing them
critical support. To men in Partida, gender equality was a symbol of outside
values, incongruent with collective life.

Coda: The Contradictions of Defying the “Outside”

Sometimes villagers’ bullheadedness deprived them of important
resources. Partida relied on migrants and the state for money. At certain
moments, its leaders were so focused on refusing outside impositions that
they put this support in jeopardy.

In particular, if the hometown was too stubborn, it risked alienating its
migrants. Partida’s HTA in Los Angeles played a key role in funneling
money to the pueblo, by monitoring migrants’ participation and collecting
the “migrant tax.” During my fi eldwork in Los Angeles, I often saw HTA
members knocking on doors and checking whether migrants had purchased
their allotted tickets to upcoming fund-raisers. OIP leaders like Blanca
held thirty years’ worth of event tickets, meeting invitations, and other proof
of contributions to the organization. If a wayward migrant returned to
Partida, the local authorities phoned these HTA leaders to verify whether
the person had lent them a hand. Guillermo Reyna, who lived in Los
Angeles, argued that by punishing “reluctant” migrants and appropriating
their property, “they [the hometown leaders] are exposing themselves. . . .
They need things from us, the people who are outside.” Santiago Morales
added that while the villagers had eff ectively manipulated the meaning of
comunero to demand migrants’ participation, migrants also had tools of
their own, including access to government grants like the 3×1 Program. In

178 c h a p t e r 5

his mind, migrants were “the most important [economic] motor of Partida.”
The more money migrants sent, the more they had leverage to change
things back home. Villagers faced a catch-22: while they wanted to “recom-
munalize” migrants, they also depended on those in Los Angeles.

To keep migrants happy, the people of Partida had to adapt. Thus, the
pueblo acquiesced to migrants’ demands to reform the system of cargos.
In the fi rst decade of the 2000s, they reduced the total number of cargos
by half and the number of years someone worked in each cargo from three
to one. They also monetized these positions, eventually agreeing to use
state funds to pay civic stipends. While villagers initially insisted that
migrants return to serve, they later accepted the HTA’s proposal to pay
substitutes instead. Ultimately, they began allowing community members
to hire other people to do the cargos and tequios they had been assigned,
at the rate of about US$3,000 to $5,000 per year for civil-service posi-
tions and US$15 per day for communal labor.

Monetizing Usos y Costumbres transformed Partida’s communal gov-
ernment. While the pueblo had historically assigned leadership positions
to the most prosperous villagers to equalize income disparities, these posts
now fell on people who could not aff ord to hire substitutes or who needed
the money they’d earn from serving on others’ behalf. As a result, cargos
no longer rotated among citizens. Instead, they became stratifi ed toward
the poor. The shift to a paid system also put migrants in the position of
literally funding the functioning of the hometown government. It was
unclear how long such an arrangement could last.

In what Nazanin Shahrokni and I (2014) call “patriarchal accommoda-
tions,” Partida adapted its gender order as well. Since the 1990s women
migrants had been some of the most active participants and fundraisers in
Partida’s HTA. Therefore, even as village leaders kept women out of
assemblies at home, they encouraged women migrants to stand up to men
in Los Angeles, to convince them to contribute. When Blanca Martínez
was president of the HTA in the early 1990s, for instance, she reached out
to the hometown government to complain about migrant men. She told
the village president,

It’s hard for us women that the men rebel against us and protest. Us women
are contributing more than the men. It’s as if it’s harder for [migrant] men

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 179

to submit to us women. . . . They say that we have no authority to make them
contribute, and it’s hard to fi ght with people who are like that and don’t
want to help. I don’t know what’s in their heads. They think they’re going to
stay here their whole lives, and they won’t need any help from the pueblo.
What can we do with them? If you want support, then help us make them
do their part.

Perhaps surprisingly, the leaders replied, “You women should rule, because
you wear the pants more than us men. Just take a hard rod and make
them do it.” Because the village needed support, men there not only
accepted women in the HTA; they also encouraged them to take a heavy
hand with male migrants who failed to help out.

In 2010–11 Carmen, Concha, and Renata’s leadership also inspired
some of the men in Partida to push for women’s inclusion. Esteban Báez,
who was hometown treasurer during my fi eldwork, was one. He refl ected,

What really gets my attention is that when there were men [leading the
HTA], they never took advantage of the program [3×1], and now that three
women head the group, they’re doing it. . . . [Men in Partida] think that
women are still not capable of being town leaders, and I tell them that’s not
true. The clearest example is what Renata and her compañeras [female
companions] did [in Los Angeles], that women can do it as well as us—or
better.

Esteban was so inspired that when Partida nominated him to serve as
town president the following year, he said he would do it only if they
appointed women to serve alongside him. While the pueblo declined, such
eff orts eventually built momentum to give village women the vote.

In 2012, led by men like Esteban, along with returnees like Alejandro
Campos and Juan Serrano, Partida agreed to shift from voting publicly in
assemblies to voting by secret ballot. They also began requiring women to
vote, just like men. Then, after centuries of all-male politics, the pueblo
elected a woman as president. In a rather literary twist, Isabel Vega—the
president-elect—was the seventh daughter of long-time, outspoken femi-
nist Claudia Vega. The last time I visited Claudia, she bounded around her
small cement patio, clutching her gingham apron and telling me, “It’s high
time that women ruled! How we have fought for this!” Leonel refl ected
more stolidly, “We have made history here in Partida, Abigail.” Ultimately

180 c h a p t e r 5

the shift echoed decade-old changes at work in nearby Retorno. The con-
texts, however, were dramatically diff erent.

a l t e r n a t i v e g l o b a l i z a t i o n i n r e t o r n o

The day I arrived in Retorno, its roads buzzed with women hawking
homemade tamales and tattooed men in baggy black jeans (see fi gure 6
for an image of Retorno’s main road). Unlike in Partida, people talked
often of California. The following week, on a bright July morning, the vil-
lage held its secondary-school graduation. Mothers fi lled folding chairs
fi rst, bedecked in traditional Mixtec rebozos (scarves). Then came a sec-
ond group: young men with shaved heads and jeans, who looked like they
had just landed from California. The contrast between the two groups was
striking. Yet all of their faces shared signs of strength and strain. Both
stayed quiet, arms crossed over their chests. As the ceremony concluded,
the principal gave a speech. He implored the eighth-grade graduates to

continue with your studies. Get college degrees, because in this country of
Mexico we need more professionals. We need anthropologists, psycholo-
gists, biologists, lawyers, and teachers. We have had enough with migrating
to serve as cheap labor in the north [the United States]. Ya basta [enough
already]. Let us stop being slaves to the gringos!22 We need graduates and
no more braceros [manual workers]!23

As he spoke, three girls glanced at me, stifl ing giggles. The speech hinted
at how Retorno’s migration pathway had compelled the pueblo to fi ght for
a future in Mexico. Goaded by cross-border ties, villagers joined migrants,
the FIOB, the PRD, and other indigenous communities to demand repre-
sentation and resources from the shifting Mexican state.

Throwing Out the Caciques

For Retorno’s poorer villagers, aligning with migrants, the Mexican oppo-
sition, and other indigenous villages off ered new leverage at home. Once
migrants organized in California, they inspired their allies to help expel
the PRI caciques in the pueblo.

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 181

For one, migrants’ long-distance advocacy helped link them to a small,
educated, and politically mobilized group of teachers in Retorno who bol-
stered their fi ght. In the late 1970s teachers in Oaxaca had begun to rebel
against the national teachers’ union, which was associated with the ruling
PRI.24 They waged marches and sit-ins to democratize union leadership
and educational practices and to seek change in Mexico as a whole. Many
of the rebel teachers came from rural areas, including Retorno. In the

Figure 6. Women walking down the main street of Retorno. Photo
by the author.

182 c h a p t e r 5

1980s they aligned with the Mexican Socialist Party, the same group that
migrants met in the fi elds of Sinaloa. Like the party, they emphasized
social struggle and solidarity with the vulnerable. Blockading roads and
occupying Oaxaca City, the teachers became the core of popular mobiliza-
tion in Oaxaca in the 1980s and continue to lead its biggest social move-
ments today.25 In the mid-1990s teachers also started to grow increasingly
involved in rural communities. Their class consciousness linked them to
workers and peasants, echoing migrants’ own goals.26

Other villagers were sympathetic to migrants as well. In Retorno 88
percent of men and 57 percent of women had once worked as migrants—63
percent and 20 percent, respectively, in the United States. In addition,
two-thirds of couples had separated across borders, and a third of young
people had at least one parent living elsewhere. Returnees’ and family
members’ stories had a ripple eff ect, convincing villagers that instead of
going north, they should focus on making Retorno a place to feel “free.”
Even those who had never been to the United States would say things like,
“Why would I go to the United States? Only to suff er.” Their experiences
as internal migrants made them receptive to negative accounts of life in
North County San Diego.

In the mid-1990s, such villagers began to rally with migrants to democ-
ratize Retorno. Luis Pérez, a short, eloquent teacher with heavily gelled
hair, became a leader of the opposition—and later of Oaxaca’s branch of the
FIOB. Luis was the youngest child of a family of fi ve. All of his siblings
migrated, and he hoped to avoid the same fate. To make that possible, how-
ever, he had to advocate for government programs and public support. So
he joined the teachers’ movement—and the village rebellion. He explained,

My goal was, above all, the possibility of having a pueblo that was diff erent—
a developed pueblo, a pueblo that could count on educational institutions
that would raise the level of development, a pueblo that might have access
to public programs from the state government. But we couldn’t imagine
Retorno getting access to these things if we didn’t organize ourselves [to
demand support]. Therefore, the fundamental step—in order to infl uence
things and have a diff erent town—was in the organizing.

Together, migrants and teachers recruited much of the village to challenge
Retorno’s inequity. By the late 1990s nearly 90 percent of adults in Retorno

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 183

aligned themselves with the FIOB branch in the village and, with it, the
PRD.

In 1995 local FIOB sympathizers revived the fi ght to overthrow the
local PRI and democratize village control. They physically ousted the sit-
ting PRI president and installed a teacher named Martín Alvarado in his
place, putting FIOB allies into all the village leadership posts. Martín’s
government dismantled the “customs” the caciques had used to exploit the
poor. First, they ended the requirement that villagers do unpaid labor,
insisting that all government jobs be paid. Second, they reduced the
number of cargos in Retorno to ten per year, welcoming state stipends for
those who served. Third, they abandoned public voting in favor of secret
ballots. With the new system, it was harder for elites to suppress indige-
nous voices or deliver votes on the poor’s behalf.

The FIOB-affi liated leaders also enabled migrants, indigenous people,
women, and the poor to vote and hold civic posts. They eliminated all but
one of Retorno’s twelve religious festivals, so villagers would not have to give
so much money to the church. They also ended the requirement that civic
leaders sponsor a village fi esta, which tacitly tied positions of power to
wealth. For the remaining yearly festival, they replaced onerous sponsorship
requirements (cofradías) with a small annual contribution from everyone in
the village. Basilio Ramos, who prodded these shifts from afar, refl ected,

One of the great satisfactions—something that FIOB has given us and that
was in our plans from the beginning, one of the great dreams—was to end
the cofradías in the pueblo. Many people thought that the cofradías were a
detriment to the community, but there was also a lot of resistance to
change. . . . Still, after six or seven years [without them], people were really
happy, because now families don’t sacrifi ce themselves [economically].
Many families from Retorno had to leave, and many couldn’t return because
they were so in debt.

Dismantling tradition alleviated the kinds of debts that had driven migrants
to leave. Ironically, it was only by doing away with Usos y Costumbres—the
very customs that protected participation and redistribution in Partida—
that the new government made Retorno more democratic.

Martín Alvarado and his colleagues also held a series of consultations
with migrants in North County San Diego and Baja California, in which

184 c h a p t e r 5

migrants participated in hometown politics and made suggestions to
restructure the village. The caciques had once barred former migrants
from holding political offi ce. By 2010, however, returnees held ten of
eleven village leadership posts. In that year’s municipal election, ten of
twenty-two proposed representatives had worked in the United States in
the past three years and another ten at some point in their lives. As I dis-
cuss later, the new leaders also decided to require women to attend assem-
blies and serve on public committees alongside the men.

Finally, the FIOB-allied government redistributed resources. Not only
did the FIOB obtain new funding from foundations, nongovernmental
organizations, and the state of Oaxaca, but its allies also spread those
resources more evenly among the people of Retorno. Javier Ortíz, a long-
time FIOB advocate and twice president of the organization’s branch in
the village, explained, “Around that time [the late 1990s] a lot of money
was coming in from the government, from SAGARPA [Secretaría de
Agricultura, Ganadería, Desarrollo Rural, Pesca, y Alimentación; Ministry
of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries, and Food], and
so on. But Martín also distributed a lot of resources, or at least they started
to be distributed more evenly.” Rather than siphoning state funds into
their cronies’ pockets, Martín’s government used the money for infrastruc-
ture, paved roads, and projects that benefi ted the village as a whole.

Nunca Más un México sin Nosotros (Never again a
Mexico without Us)

In 1994 the FIOB opened an offi ce in the Mixteca and established branches
in many migrant hometowns, to fi ght for greater inclusion of indigenous
pueblos in Mexico. Galvanized by strikes in North County San Diego, the
fl edgling organization unifi ed migrants who came from across the region,
and it hoped to animate similar dissent among those on the sending side.
In individual villages, including Retorno, the organization also backed
allies’ bids for control. When they were successful, FIOB allies gained new
leverage over municipal funds. By the late 1990s the organization had also
begun promoting the PRD agenda.

In addition to pursuing municipal seats, the FIOB mobilized pueblos
across the region to fi ght for more state support. Indigenous political

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 185

autonomy, they insisted, did not mean the government could abdicate its
responsibility for community development. In a 1996 communiqué to the
state and federal governments, for instance, the FIOB demanded immedi-
ate assistance in Retorno to install potable and irrigation water and to
pave roads. To promote similar demands across the Mixteca, the organiza-
tion mobilized marches, road blockades, and sit-ins in Oaxaca City.27 In
August that same year, it announced an “indefi nite takeover” of the main
highway near Retorno: the protest that brought Alma Sandoval into poli-
tics. It demanded that the government of Oaxaca provide piped water,
roads, services, solutions to communal-land disputes, productive and cul-
tural projects for indigenous communities, and a halt to the militarization
of the Mixteca and the harassment of FIOB members. By the early 2000s,
the FIOB and its allies in Oaxaca had secured funds from more than ten
diff erent state offi ces as well as direct grants to FIOB leaders and the
municipalities they represented.28

These funds supported irrigation, paved roads, bridges, roofs, cement
fl oors, agricultural projects, and credit and loan groups. They also pro-
vided training in human rights and women’s empowerment. In addition,
the FIOB secured collective taxi licenses (the main mode of public trans-
portation in the area), enabling villagers to earn almost three times as
much driving taxis as they did in day labor. By 2000 the FIOB had more
than twenty thousand members in seventy Oaxacan towns, and its assem-
blies in Mexico drew more participants than its meetings in the United
States.29 By positioning itself as a new interlocutor with the state, the
FIOB gave indigenous people access to resources they had never had
before. These resources also helped the FIOB mobilize votes for the PRD.

Where people in Partida avoided political parties, those in Retorno got
more involved. Not only did the FIOB help solicit funding for migrants’
hometowns; it also promoted the leftist ideals of the PRD. Its movement
in Oaxaca built on demands made by the Zapatistas, in nearby Chiapas,
for inclusion and fair treatment of indigenous people and an end to neo-
liberal globalization. Emphasizing inclusion, the FIOB took up the
Zapatistas’ slogan, Nunca más un México sin nosotros (Never again a
Mexico without us). FIOB leaders, particularly those from Retorno,
denounced Mexico’s disregard for its indigenous people. In a communi-
qué to state and federal authorities, for instance, they wrote, “We are

186 c h a p t e r 5

interested in expressing our opinions in the National Consultation about
indigenous rights and participation, hoping that this is not one more con-
sultation that turns to smoke and leaves our communities forgotten. . . .
We do not permit nor will we permit more discrimination based on the
fact of having deep indigenous roots.”30 They added that they would not
allow the PRI to divide them. Thus, even as Retorno dismantled some of
the customs associated with Usos y Costumbres, it reconstituted indigene-
ity as a tool to unify neighboring villages and oppose state neglect.

The FIOB also backed PRD eff orts to challenge the federal- and state-
level PRI. When the FIOB emerged in Oaxaca, the PRI had held power at
both levels for almost seventy years. The FIOB and the PRD rallied
Retorno and other nearby hometowns to contest its control. In 1998 they
launched Luis Pérez, the teacher from Retorno, as a left-wing PRD candi-
date for Oaxaca’s state senate. Throughout the region FIOB members
knocked on doors, helping the PRD wage a massive campaign to support
him. In 1999 Luis was elected as the fi rst-ever indigenous representative
to Oaxaca’s state congress. The campaign tied the FIOB so closely to the
PRD that the FIOB started describing itself as the FIOB-PRD. A decade
later villagers still had trouble distinguishing between them. Drawing on
the alliances and critical politics that migrants developed in northern
Mexico and the United States, the FIOB helped indigenous people claim
greater voice back at home.

Cross-border connections also helped the FIOB-PRD weather counter-
attacks by the PRI. As I describe at the end of this chapter, in 2002 the
state-level PRI retaliated against the FIOB, slandering Luis Pérez and
throwing him in jail. The FIOB fought back by launching a binational
campaign to defend him. In Europe, Canada, South America, Mexico, and
the United States, human-rights organizations supported their cause.
Thanks to their eff orts, Luis was released after seven days. As the PRI
assaulted the FIOB, its members in the United States also mobilized to
protect their allies in Mexico, waging hunger strikes and demonstrations
at Mexican consulates in California. Given the PRI’s long-standing domi-
nance in Retorno, villagers could not avoid political party competition.
But their cross-border ties gave them strength to push for the parties that
spoke to them best.

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 187

Gendered Jujitsu

In what I call gendered jujitsu, the FIOB also used women’s rights pro-
grams to broaden its movement. Before the FIOB entered Oaxaca in 1995,
women could hardly approach Retorno’s town hall, let alone vote in village
assemblies. By 2010 they were 62 percent of Retorno’s voters and ran
most of its school committees, health councils, and government social
programs. The FIOB promoted this shift, and women, in turn, gave the
movement momentum.

Before the FIOB took off , women had already begun to do civic work in
Retorno when men were absent. From the 1980s on, women had been the
majority in Retorno, the nexus of divided families, and some of the fi rst
returnees. From 1970 to 1990, as more men left for California, the propor-
tion of local men who were working age fell from 60 to 38 percent.31
Several women did public service in their husbands’ stead. Dora López,
the fi rst to serve on a town committee in the mid-1980s, explained,
“Women had to be on the committees because all the husbands went to
the United States, and there were just women alone, so the only ones who
went to the meetings were mothers.” When the FIOB began to organize in
Retorno, therefore, it realized it needed women to serve as its eyes and
ears on the ground.

In the coming years, as the FIOB organized in Retorno, Alma, Adelina,
and a few other female leaders did the bulk of the mobilization, walking
from house to house and inviting other women to meet and march. If a
PRI representative came to the village, the women would grab him and
demand that the government bring them programs. Whether or not they
longed for infl uence as women, most described their early political work
as a burden. Often, villagers shamed them as sluts and streetwalkers. Yet
the women soldiered on, determined to avoid the abuses they’d faced as
migrants in Mexico and the United States. As Alma put it, “We women
made that [FIOB] government.”

Women got involved in this movement because they cared about the
“right not to migrate.” In 1996 Martín Alvarado’s government announced,
“[Women] have a right to participate in the elections too, to have a voice
and vote.” Alma Sandoval, Adelina Juárez, and four other women answered

188 c h a p t e r 5

the call. All had been migrants themselves. When Alma arrived at that
fi rst assembly, she recalled, she felt “such a shame! We [women] would
have preferred to cover our heads and faces with our shawls, and we didn’t
say anything.” At the time, FIOB sympathizers had identifi ed a program
that would replace their thatched roofs with tiles, but it required a woman
to be at the helm.32 They named Alma president of the program. Alma
could hardly speak out of shame, and she never said if she would accept.
Nevertheless, she took the post for the good of the village, thinking, “I care
about my pueblo . . . because I want to live here.” Without the participa-
tion of women like her, Alma worried, Retorno would lose the resources
the FIOB had promised—and with them, her chance to stay home. From
that moment on, Alma added, “We [women] were in.”

Other women mobilized to avoid displacement as well. As a young
woman, for instance, Adelina had worked for nearly a decade in Culiacán,
going on strike at age sixteen and watching her fi rstborn baby die in the
fi elds. Like Alma, Adelina avoided assemblies at fi rst. Yet she eventually
realized, “It’s for a just and noble cause that we [women] are going,
because it’s not acceptable for just a few people to control us and put
whomever they want in as president.” Likewise, Dolores Muñoz recalled
that when she left the fi elds of northern Mexico to come back to Retorno
in the 1990s, she was inspired to change the village. She described,

I used to tell the women, “You [women] have to go [participate]! How
are we going to help Retorno advance if we don’t say anything, if we don’t
speak, if there are meetings, and we don’t go? No. We have to go. We
can!” . . . I told the women they didn’t have to let anyone take advantage of
them. “Stop being abused. You have to fi ght for what is yours. If you see that
something is not working well in Retorno, you have the right, you know?
You have to go to the government, form a group, and ask about the corrup-
tion. You have the right to have the village be diff erent. . . . Don’t let your-
selves be cheated by the people who are high up in [PRI] politics, because
the only thing they do is just come to the village to trick people. And then in
the end, the ones who benefi t are those people, and our village remains the
same.”

In some ways, Dolores’s language sounded like Western feminism. Yet her
reason for urging women to participate was not gender abuse but the risk
of village stagnation at the hands of manipulative politicians. Clientelism,

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 189

she felt, deprived villagers of the only resources that might enable them to
avoid migrating to northern Mexico or the United States.

New programs for women in development also made their inclusion
crucial to garnering state support. Javier Ortíz, who was president of the
FIOB branch in Retorno in the late 1990s, explained, “Foundations [in
the United States and Mexico] also started to see that women’s participa-
tion was critical, so they started to give projects for women.” They off ered
chicken rearing, palm crafts, mushrooms, Lorena stoves, and microbanks.
As they did, Javier added, they made women’s participation “fundamen-
tal.” To get such funding, the FIOB insisted that women like Alma be
involved. They also used women’s rights workshops as organizing tools,
training women to advocate for resources and to contribute to FIOB
mobilization.

As women participated in such trainings, they began to pay increasing
attention to their rights as women. Adelina, for instance, attended FIOB-
run workshops on human and women’s rights. She went to talks on how
women should participate in assemblies. She refl ected, “[The FIOB]
taught us about the rights every citizen has, that every person has. That we
[women] have our own names and that we have the right to travel—they
taught us that, as well as our responsibilities.” A decade later during my
fi eldwork, Adelina led a group of women into the village square for
Retorno’s election. Crowded together, they demanded fair distribution of
state resources and reprimanded men in the pueblo for poor fi nancial
management. Planted at the center, Adelina grumbled when the emcee
did not call on her. To all assembled, she insisted, “It’s because I’m a
woman; he’s ignoring me because I’m a woman.” Adelina’s eff ort to avoid
dislocation and exclusion had driven her into new, gendered struggles.
Now she claimed voice as a woman, even around issues like fi scal trans-
parency, which fell outside the “feminine” domain.

Meanwhile, men in Retorno began to realize that by involving women,
they, too, might get access to resources from the state. Slowly, they began
urging their wives and daughters to serve on municipal committees and
engage in civic aff airs. At fi rst, for instance, Adelina’s husband resisted her
involvement in politics. Then, he realized she could access state funds on
their shared behalf. He started to tell her, “Go [to the assembly], woman!
Go, because they’re going to get support for the pueblo. Support is going

190 c h a p t e r 5

to come for village, and for women! Come on.” Similarly, Tamara Huerta,
one of the early women activists, explained that when she, Alma, and
Adelina began organizing,

There were many houses where the men threw us out with sticks. Yes! Many,
many. But today, everyone participates because ever since the Oportunidades
program came in 1999, support started to come here. That year men set
their wives free to join. Because before that, no; we were only a few that
would go out. We were maybe forty, fi fty women who went out. But then
when the Oportunidades support came, that’s when everyone in the pueblo
joined.

State funds swayed the men to “set their wives free.”33

The more women gained voice in Retorno, the more they saw their
hometown as a dynamic alternative to emigration. Instead of associating
Retorno with patriarchy, for instance, Dolores Muñoz found “liberation” in
the village. Not only could she escape her husband’s beatings by staying in
Retorno when he went on to the United States, but she could also avoid the
“slavery” of farmwork in northern Mexico and factories in North County
San Diego. As Dolores mobilized, she also gained confi dence. She explained,

I was on the school committee, so when the school needed something I had
to go ask for it. For instance, a delegate would come from Oaxaca, and we
would have to go. . . . So I started developing more as a person at that point.
Like I learned how to fi ght for things for Retorno. The people who were
managing things badly—well, I would go and say to them, “No. This is not
okay. You have to do it like this.” So a lot of people told me—a lot of people
started to respect me. . . . So when I was back in Retorno, I was another
person; I was no longer the same submissive Dolores that bowed her head
when they punished her, that just cried and cried and never said anything.
No. At that moment I changed.

Despite the burdens of community service, many women who partici-
pated in politics felt a stronger capacity as women. Activists like Alma and
Tamara described an “awakening,” saying that they could now “see them-
selves,” that life in the village “felt great,” and that they would no longer
tolerate abuse by politicians, employers, or men.34

As women took on new political roles, they also began to confront
domestic violence, the lack of divorce, and men’s control over property

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 191

and children. María Robles, a divorced single mom in her forties who ran
a mini-mart near the town square, remembered that her father had
refused to let her go to school. She quipped, “In the old days almost all the
men used to beat women. But now, no; now it’s the reverse. Women con-
trol the men! [Laughs.]” While women in most Oaxacan villages still
lacked recourse to report domestic violence, with the help of the FIOB,
those in Retorno regularly went to the district court to denounce abuse.35

Yet household relationships were not their only point of comparison.
Rather, women of Retorno measured their quality of life against their
experiences in the United States. They felt “strong,” as they put it, not just
because they gained infl uence toward their husbands but also because
they avoided exploitation, abuse, and discrimination in North County San
Diego. In Retorno they built lives they had reason to value. Of course, they
faced ongoing economic pressure. Many also made great sacrifi ces to sup-
port public programs. Nevertheless, most echoed Alma: in Retorno, they
said, they felt “free.” As in other countries, these women became feminist
activists in and through their other kinds of struggles.36 Fighting against
the degradations of migration gave meaning to their eff orts as women. By
incorporating these women into politics—along with migrants and the
poor—the FIOB transformed the pattern of authority in Retorno.

Coda: The Fragmentation of Solidarity

Still, the FIOB’s gains were fragile. For one, the PRI retaliated. As
described in chapter 1, several of Retorno’s wealthier, PRI-affi liated fami-
lies migrated to Mexico City in the 1970s and 1980s. When these families
heard of the FIOB takeover, their blood boiled. In particular, a sixty-
seven-year-old woman named Esmeralda Ruiz, who had worked for the
PRI in Mexico City for years, decided to return and reclaim her pueblo.
Esmeralda owned a grimy, paid bathroom in the nearby town square,
charging two pesos (about twenty U.S. cents) per person to enter. The fi rst
time we met, she reclined in the entryway to this business, in a billowing
pink poncho and gold earrings. She explained that she had come back to
the pueblo because by 2001, “The PRI was dead in Retorno; [the FIOB]
had blocked the PRI.” Esmeralda took it upon herself to revive Retorno’s
ruling party. Drawing on a wide, wealthy, and long-standing PRI network

192 c h a p t e r 5

of patronage and her ties in Mexico City, she got funds for reforestation,
beauty courses, and even cash handouts. She also twisted women’s empow-
erment to her own ends. In workshops targeted primarily at older women,
she denigrated the “licentious” behavior of FIOB leaders like Alma and
Adelina. She told the señoras that these girls, the wives of their hardwork-
ing sons away in the United States, were getting drunk and prostituting
themselves to activist men. She also trained the elder women to defend
Retorno’s “old stability” by supporting the PRI.

The PRI in Oaxaca City struck back as well. In 2001 Oaxaca’s PRI gov-
ernor José Murat, who was known for manipulating social movements
and their leaders, attempted to pay both Domingo García and Luis Pérez
to abandon the PRD and shift the FIOB’s allegiance to the PRI. Domingo
and Luis refused. In answer, the governor spread word across the press
that the men had failed to account for US$120,000 worth of donated
funds, most of them for women’s committees. In April that year the
Oaxacan newspaper El Universal reported that the state branch of the
Ministry of Social Development (Secretaría de Desarollo Social) had
found corruption in the FIOB, led by Domingo and Luis. The governor
arrested them both. Many people believed these rumors, and they may
have been true. Regardless, Domingo argued, the PRI—profoundly cor-
rupt itself—brought the case to light to break the FIOB. Had the PRD won
in Mexico, the outcome might have been diff erent.

Instead, the PRI accusations dramatically weakened the FIOB. One-
time participants felt angry, insulted, and swindled. As Javier, who was
once again in charge of its node in Retorno, put it, “All the confusion and
chaos means that many people prefer not to participate in any organiza-
tion; they’d rather stay out of it.” Even Alma refl ected that with the FIOB,
“You break off quickly [se zafa uno rápido], because you don’t get any-
thing from them.” Though almost everyone in Retorno had participated in
the FIOB’s actions from 1996 to 2001, by 2007 only 31 percent identifi ed
with the organization and by 2011, only 6 percent. While the remaining
FIOB members continued their grassroots movement, the organization
had far more trouble securing support. Mexican state agencies and U.S.
foundations halted their funding to the group.

U.S. enforcement also weighed on the village. For one, most migrants
stopped circulating, with men either returning or bringing their families

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 193

to the United States. By 2011 only 15 percent of couples were divided,
compared to 67 percent two decades before. A growing number of young
men were also deported to Retorno. While their predecessors had returned
voluntarily, these deportees tended to feel more hostile toward their
hometown. Most had gone to the United States as children, and they fi t
awkwardly in Retorno. Julio Molina’s parents, for instance, brought him
to the United States in 1995, at age fi ve. In 2009 the Vista, California,
police caught Julio in a stolen car and deported him. During my fi eldwork
he was twenty-one. We chatted often, as he hung around Retorno’s streets
with little hope of a job. He constantly complained about being bored.
Gesturing at his father’s house at the bottom of the hill, he grumbled (in
English), “This shit is dirt. . . . In the States when are you going to have a
house like this?” Every so often I heard that Julio had brutally beaten
another young man. One weekend he landed a fourteen-year-old in a
coma. Rumor had it that he was also at the helm of a string of robberies of
elderly women’s homes. When I asked Julio why he and his companions
fought, he replied, “What I see? The main reason is alcohol. That’s basi-
cally it. Because they [we] got no life. They have nothing to do. So you
drink, you drink, you get happy, and you don’t feel so bad. Know what I
mean? Like when you’re drunk, you drink, everything seems fi ne. . . . It
makes you feel good for a certain amount of time.” As we talked, Julio
pointed to a cartridge from a .22-caliber pistol, lying on the ground in his
driveway. “Know what this is?” he asked. Julio promised me he wouldn’t
cause trouble. But his history hinted otherwise. He had been in a gang in
the United States. He was used to a life where, as he put it, “If you don’t
get shamed, you get shot.”

Whereas Partida’s collective structure helped discipline its deportees,
those in Retorno were far less controlled. As people like Julio brought
drug use and petty crime to the pueblo, they also sapped residents’ sympa-
thy for migrants in the United States. Young women began to describe
their male counterparts—both deportees and nonmigrant men—as “slack-
ers,” “scrubs,” or “slimeballs.” Carmelita Caballero, a twenty-nine-year-old
single mother, cut hair in the village salon. She’d been married for a bit but
not for long, she explained, as she spun me in front of her mirror. She
refl ected, “Men are assholes, so I think some women are just meant to be
alone.” In reference to the rise in robberies, others told me that things had

194 c h a p t e r 5

gotten bad. As Ximena Ortíz, a longtime migrant and mother of eight, put
it, “This town is disintegrating fast.”

PRI attacks and U.S. enforcement eroded the ties that had fueled
Retorno’s resistance. They diluted the hometown’s links to both migrants
and the PRD. They also splintered the village itself, crippling its political
capacity. After 2001 the results of every single election in Retorno were
contested, requiring appeals to the state government. Such postelectoral
confl icts were common throughout the Mixteca and sometimes lasted for
months.37 As they went on, the government froze all municipal resources,
leaving the villages starved for money. Sometimes the state even let the
confl icts fester, to avoid distributing funds. Ironically, the entry of compet-
ing parties into Retorno—which began with the goal of getting more state
support—sparked confl icts that ended up inhibiting its access to cash.
Without strong allies and transnational ties, the FIOB was more vulner-
able, Retorno grew less stable, and the PRI reclaimed authority.38
Nevertheless, women, indigenous people, and the poor maintained their
voice and vote. Retorno’s caciquismo was gone for good.

t h e r o l e o f m i g r a t i o n i n m e x i c a n d e v e l o p m e n t

Students of emigration sometimes assume that hometowns get “left
behind.” Others focus on migrants’ remittances of ideas or money as
motors of so-called development. This chapter complicates both models,
illustrating how each community’s migration pathway shapes its relation-
ship to political change. It shows how, even as migrants weigh in from
afar, nonmigrants and returnees also develop their own attitudes about
emigration and, more broadly, globalization. These understandings then
infl uence how hometowns navigate broader political shifts, such as
Mexican democratization.

In a place like Partida, where migration creates tensions between tradi-
tion and Western individualism, it can spark antiglobalization backlash. As
migrants from Partida embraced Los Angeles, their counterparts in Mexico
reinforced their communal participation and landholding. For the latter,
indigenous self-governance was not just an antiquated, passive form of
resistance.39 It also off ered a tool to stand up to pressure to “modernize,”

p a t h w a y s t o h o m e t o w n c h a n g e 195

from both migrants and the state. By reviving communal values and politi-
cal autonomy, the pueblo could make demands of migrants, manage
deportees, and avoid some of the fragmentation associated with land
privatization and Mexican political parties. That said, the insistence on
tradition also tended to re-create characteristics supposedly endemic to
indigenous villages, including being closed, insular, and patriarchal.40

In a place like Retorno, meanwhile, villagers’ sympathy with migrants
can fuel demands for alternative globalization. Due to Retorno’s history of
circulation and family separation, women, teachers, and other residents
often felt close with migrants. Like migrants, they realized that to avoid
the United States and live in Retorno, they had to end the pueblo’s old
hierarchies. Through the FIOB and the PRD, they joined migrants to take
down the PRI caciques and claim a new voice in local politics. The rebels
scrapped the rules elites had once used to pinch their money and time.
They gave migrants and poor people access to leadership roles. They also
sought state funds and representation in Mexico as a whole.

As gender relations shifted in the process of migration, they also got
caught up in hometown battles. In Partida men associated women’s rights
with outside imposition, sparking patriarchal backlash. For many years
they rejected state funding tied to women’s participation. Nevertheless,
the village relied on migrants for money, and some villagers admired
women’s actions in Los Angeles. Ultimately, therefore, the pueblo agreed
to let women vote. By contrast, people in Retorno used women’s empow-
erment programs strategically, drawing women into politics to fuel their
movement for change. Not only were women the majority in Retorno, but
state programs also encouraged the FIOB to include them in funding
requests. Both men and women embraced such gender shifts as a means
to meet their broader goals. As a result, women began to vote, run village
committees, and attend meetings as never before. In short, migration
drew women into politics not just through “social remittances” from the
United States but also through the pueblo’s own mobilization.

As time went by, both hometowns were vulnerable to shifting policies
in the United States and political warfare in Mexico. Though people in
Partida wanted autonomy, they also relied on their counterparts in the
United States. To the extent the pueblo alienated migrants, it risked losing
not only its collective traditions but also its very ability to survive. As

196 c h a p t e r 5

migrants from Partida settled into Los Angeles and grew ever more dis-
tant, the village had to moderate its stubborn commitment to patriarchy
and communalism. Retorno’s democratization also relied on outside sup-
porters—particularly the PRD and the FIOB—who were vulnerable to
fragmentation. Its migrants’ alienation from the United States was not
enough for a transnational movement. Rather, the community needed
cross-border connections and political allies to back its demands on the
sending side. U.S. border enforcement and Mexican party contention
threatened these ties. As my research came to a close, drug violence also
wracked Mexico, destabilizing rural life. While Oaxaca remained rela-
tively insulated as of this writing, other hometowns disintegrated. As
broader politics evolved, hometowns’ struggles remained precarious.

Still, both of these cases highlight how sending sites can be a staging
ground to challenge globalization and question migrants’ experiences of
“illegality” in places like the United States. Some observers argue that
Mexico should stem the fl ow of migrants by building better economic
development. This chapter demonstrates that it is not so simple. Rather,
rural villages’ engagement with party contention and state-run develop-
ment refl ects their ties to migration. Hometowns use state programs to
struggle against the broader process of globalization and the conditions of
U.S. exclusion. As migrant communities seek to maximize democratic
control, access to resources, and environmental stewardship, their
approaches are molded by the political institutions already at their dis-
posal as well as the prospects and threats they face in their destinations.

Editorial: Why No Borders?
Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia Wright

Abstract
This editorial article argues for No Borders as a prac-
tical political project . We first critically examine borders
as ideological, generating and reinforcing inequality . We
consider some responses to injustices produced by borders:
the call for “ human rights”; attempts to make immigra-
tion controls more “ humanitarian”; and trade unions’
organizing and campaigning with undocumented workers .
Recognizing the important contributions of some of these
responses, we argue that nevertheless they have often been
limited because they do not question sovereignty, the ter-
ritorializing of people’s subjectivities, and nationalism . No
Borders politics rejects notions of citizenship and statehood,
and clarifies the centrality of borders to capitalism . We
argue that No Borders is a necessary part of a global sys-
tem of common rights and contemporary struggle for the
commons . The article concludes by highlighting the main
themes of the papers that make up the Special Issue, a
number of which explore practical instances of the instan-
tiation of No Borders politics .

Résumé
Le présent article de tête présente le mouvement No Border
comme projet politique pratique . Les auteurs examinent
d’abord de façon critique les frontières en tant qu’idéo-
logie produisant et renforçant l’inégalité . Ils considèrent
quelques réactions aux injustices produites par les fron-
tières : appels aux « droits humains », tentatives de rendre
les contrôles d’immigration plus « humanitaires », mou-
vements syndicaux d’organisation et de lutte avec les tra-
vailleurs sans-papiers . Reconnaissant l’importante contri-
bution de certaines de ces réactions, ils soutiennent qu’elles
sont néanmoins souvent limitées parce qu’elles ne mettent
pas en cause la souveraineté, la territorialisation des sub-
jectivités individuelles et le nationalisme . Le mouvement
No Border rejette les notions de citoyenneté et d’État et met

au grand jour le rôle central des frontières au sein du capi-
talisme . Les auteurs soutiennent que No Border est un élé-
ment nécessaire d’un système mondial de droits communs
et de lutte contemporaine pour les communes . Ils mettent
enfin en évidence les thèmes principaux des articles qui
composent ce numéro spécial, dont plusieurs étudient des
cas pratiques de la manifestation des politiques No Border .

Only the battles which aren’t even begun are lost at the start .
—Madjiguène Cissé,

spokesperson for the Sans-Papiers in France

Across the world, national states, especially in what the Economist likes to call the “rich world,” are imposing ever more restrictive immigration policies .
Such state efforts are being enacted at precisely the time
when migration has become an increasingly important part
of people’s strategies for gaining access to much-needed
life resources . These may be a new livelihood, closeness to
significant persons in their lives, or escape from untenable,
even murderous, situations, such as persecution and war, as
well as the opportunity to experience new people, places,
and situations . That the greater freedom of mobility granted
to capital and commodities through neo-liberal reform has
taken place alongside this lessening of freedom of mobility
for people has been analyzed by many as constituting one of
the great contradictions of the present era .

In contrast, in this Special Issue on the emergence of a
No Borders politics, we show that the simultaneous process
of granting more freedom to capital and less to migrants is
far from a contradiction and is in fact a crucial underpin-
ning of global capitalism and the equally global system of
national states . The growing restriction on the freedom of
people to move has not led to fewer people crossing nation-
alized borders . Exactly the opposite: today more people are
doing exactly this than ever before . The United Nations
Population Division currently estimates that there are now
about 200 million international migrants each year . This

Volume 2

Refuge Number 2

represents a doubling of the numbers of people engaged in
cross-border migration in 1

0 .1

Though their main accomplishment is not the restraint
of people’s movements, restrictive immigration policies do
have an effect . Increasingly militarized border controls, for
instance, have increased the costs paid for migration, be
it the monetary cost of securing passage, the extraction of
labour, or the cost of one’s own life . Not only are there a
growing number of nominally temporary camps (refugee
camps, detention camps, transit camps, and so on), but
more and more dead bodies are being found washed up on
the shore, in scorched desert valleys, on frozen mountain
passes, or in any number of other dangerous crossing points
through which migrants have been funnelled .2 This has
allowed national states to cynically claim that the greatest
threat to migrants are those who assist them in their move-
ment, thereby deflecting blame from their own border con-
trol practices and setting the stage for further criminalizing

“traffickers” and “smugglers .”
The greater though less studied effect of restrictive

immigration policies has been to restrict the rights and
entitlements that migrants can claim once they are within
national states . In practice, rather than simply restricting
movement, restrictive immigration policies have enabled
states to shift the status they accord migrating people . Fewer
people are now given a status that comes with rights (e .g .,

“permanent resident” or “refugee”) and more and more are
legally subordinated (e .g ., through the status of “illegal”) or
are forced to work in unfree employment relations (includ-
ing through the status of “temporary foreign worker”) .3
Since 2005 in the US more migrants are given the status
of illegal than all of the various legal statuses combined .4
In Canada, more people enter as temporary foreign work-
ers than as permanent residents .5 Such a situation calls into
question the oft-stated purposes served by the entire array
of contemporary migration controls—the totality of which
has made many migrants more vulnerable and their lives
and livelihoods more precarious .

One important and underexamined response to this his-
torical conjuncture is the emergence of calls for No Borders .
These are made on the basis of interrelated ethical, political,
social, and economic grounds . Their challenging of nation-
states’ sovereign right to control people’s mobility signals a
new sort of liberatory project, one with new ideas of “society”
and one aimed at creating new social actors not identified
with nationalist projects (projects that are deeply racialized,
gendered, sexualized, and productive of class relations) . As
a practical, political project develops against borders, its rel-
evance to other political projects grows, often challenging
them in profound ways . There is a mounting need, there-
fore, to open an intellectual and political environment in

which arguments for No Borders are further debated . It is
with this goal in mind that we have put together this Special
Issue on No Borders .

In this introduction we first consider what borders are
and how they are constructed and examine some of the
critical responses to borders, their possibilities and lim-
itations . We identify some of the key problems with these
approaches, in particular the assumption that migration
is a problem and that the nation-state framework persists
unchallenged . We then describe some of the elements of a
No Borders approach and refute the claim that it is utopian .
We examine the centrality of migrants to the more general
liberatory project that is No Borders and go on to indicate
some of the contributions made by the papers in this Special
Issue .

Rethinking Borders
What is a border? Any study of national borders needs to
start with the recognition that they are thoroughly ideo-
logical . While they are presented as filters, sorting people
into desirable and non-desirable, skilled and unskilled,
genuine and bogus, worker, wife, refugee, etc ., national bor-
ders are better analyzed as moulds, as attempts to create
certain types of subjects and subjectivities . Thus borders are
productive and generative . They place people in new types
of power relations with others and they impart particular
kinds of subjectivities . Borders, then, are the mark of a par-
ticular kind of relationship, one based on deep divisions and
inequalities between people who are given varying national
statuses . It is important to recognize that this has far-reach-
ing implications and is not simply restricted to the event of
crossing a territorial border .

If not only territorial, where is a border? Borders are not
fixed, even though their work is all about fixing, categor-
izing, and setting people in new relations of power . As Mae
Ngai carefully details, borders are not only territorially
drawn: they inevitably are inscribed “inside” as well as “out-
side” of any given national state .6 Indeed, Étienne Balibar
contends that borders exist not only “at the edge of the terri-
tory, marking the point where it ends” but “have been trans-
ported into the middle of political space .”

Borders follow
people and surround them as they try to access paid labour,
welfare benefits, health, labour protections, education, civil
associations, and justice . Those who are given a subordin-
ated status by the state, such as “temporary foreign worker,”
typically do not have the right to change employer or type
of employment, a right that “citizens” of liberal democracies
now take for granted . Those who are deemed “illegal” are
vulnerable to being reported by employers, landlords, police,
the concerned public, and even “friends .” Breaking the
regulations and laws governing entry, residence, and access

Volume 26 Refuge Number 2

to work and services can result in detention and deporta-
tion . Michael Walzer’s fear of “a thousand petty fortresses”
that he predicted would attend a borderless world is already
being realized, though the barriers pass largely unnoticed
by citizens, who take access across them for granted .8

Nevertheless, despite their assumption of free passage,
citizens are not exempt from the power of borders, and
their impact is both direct and indirect .9 In the UK fear
of “foreign national terrorists” has resulted in the develop-
ment of Control Orders . These originally provided the state
with the legal authority to indefinitely detain non-citizens
without trial if a trial put secret intelligence at risk . When
this was found to be discriminatory, instead of ending the
practice, the state’s powers were simply extended to citizens .
The loss of civil liberties for citizens thus is often foretold
by the treatment of non-citizens . More indirectly, there
continue to be claims by employers that “local workers” (of
whatever nationality) are “lazy” and that migrants have a

“good work ethic .” However, it is immigration controls that
give employers greater power over migrants, particularly
new arrivals or those who are dependent on them for their
visa status, a power they do not always have over citizens .

While these divisions are often naturalized and expressed in
terms of culture and national stereotypes, they are directly
produced, and have the additional merit of serving a disci-
plinary function over citizen-workers, fostering resentment
and competition rather than solidarity .

It is not only “hard workers” who are produced at the
border . “Good wives” who do not challenge patriarchal
families, “straight guys and gals” who adhere to correct sex-
ual scripts, “good parents” whose parenting accords with
the requirements to produce “good children” are policed
through immigration requirements .

Such requirements
rest on ideological, even fantastical, re-presentations of the

“nation” that states nominally “represent .” This is reflected
in a new Citizenship Guide released by the Canadian state
in 2009 . Meant as a study tool for new applicants for citizen-
ship, it not only defines Canadian-ness in starkly neo-liberal
terms—one must be the citizen-worker who is part of a self-
reliant family—it also reproduces old racist, colonial scripts .
Along with “[g]etting a job, taking care of one’s family, and
working hard in keeping with one’s abilities,” the guide
tells immigrants that Canada is a place where “… men
and women are equal under the law” and warns them that

“Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric
cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, ‘honour kill-
ings,’ female genital mutilation, or other gender-based vio-
lence .”

While male violence against women, significant
pay differentials between men and women, sexual abuse of
children, and other heinous activities are not uncommon
features of life in Canada, “immigrants” are ideologically

set apart from “Canadians” so as to imply the latter’s
superiority .

Questions of citizenship point to the temporal aspects of
borders . This leads us to ask: when is the border? Temporal
aspects of migration and their consequences can pass
unnoticed by scholars, but they structure people’s experi-
ences of borders and, increasingly, state responses to migra-
tion . Being able to imagine a future with oneself in it (even if,
at the time of imagining, a person is content with living in
the moment), feeling that one can anticipate and take risks,
and have a sense of possibility, these are important aspects
of human experience and subjectivity . Immigration controls
and the relationships that they generate undermine these
and can force people to live in an eternal present . Studies
of those working without state endorsement, for example,
find that the extreme insecurity of their situation results in
the intensification of their working time and effort—with
increased profitability for their employer .

The temporality of borders mean that migrants on
renewable working permits, spousal visa holders, children,
and students live in a state of dependency on others for their
continued legally recognized residence in a state . Those who
are on temporary visas, like those who are going through
the years of legal wrangling of immigration and asylum
challenges, find themselves suspended in time with devas-
tating consequences . Time, however, does not stop: relatives
may die without being visited, children become too old to
be granted the right to be with parents and carers, oppor-
tunities are missed . Such consequences have intensified as
states have fortified their territorial borders and curtailed
the ability of people to move out of national states in which
they live their lives as “illegals .” There has been an import-
ant and largely unrecognized shift by states to exert greater
control over these temporal aspects of mobililty, in particu-
lar through the encouragement of temporary worker pro-
grams and the ever increasing obstacles to citizenship .

Rethinking Protest
The contradictions and injustices of borders have not passed
unnoticed, and in recent years there has been considerable
debate about the intrinsic tension within the liberal pro-
ject between imagined national belonging on the one hand
and universal human rights on the other . Anti-racist and
transnational feminist accounts

—themselves informed by
migration histories and by activist confrontations with “the
citizenship machinery”

—have begun an inquiry into the
production of non-citizen Others . As we will argue below,
this theoretical legacy, along with labour internationalism,
can be renewed—and greatly extended—through an engage-
ment with an anti-capitalist No Borders politics . There has
also been a myriad of attempts to make ideas of citizenship

Editorial

compatible with human rights, both theoretically and in
practice .

The practices of states in terms of both entry
and deportation are constantly being challenged legally and
politically with reference to human rights claims even as it
becomes obvious that human rights frameworks themselves
assume citizenship, rely on the compliance of national states
for enforcement, and are (therefore) especially unhelpful
when it comes to the claims of the illegalized .

The position of migrants demonstrates the limitations
of theoretical scholarship and practical-political projects
that assume, explicitly or implicitly, national citizenship as
the ground on which political mobilizations, claims, and
rights ought to be organized .

The fact is that citizenship-
rights-based NGO approaches, whether at the national or
transnational level, are very limited in practice .

For a start,
none of the current citizenship-rights-based frameworks
are ultimately prepared to challenge frontally the right of
states to control their borders and territories, or the rights
of states to exclude and deport . Additionally, citizenship-
rights-based approaches often reinforce a rather passive pol-
itics in which, as has been argued, claims are made through
judicial processes and NGO approaches that can take organ-
izing and political contestation—politics, in short—out of
the hands of people .19

Alongside arguments for the extension of citizenship
rights to those currently excluded, there are a number
of attempts (at various scales of space and politics, and
from diverse standpoints) to make immigration controls

“humanitarian .” Among the most globally influential—and
deeply problematic—is purported attempts (whether by
states and policing bodies, NGOs, or religious or women’s
groups) to end “human trafficking .” Indeed, it is the Victim
of Trafficking—often figured as a woman in the sex indus-
try—who has now become the symbol of concern for non-
citizens (until the last decade it was the “refugee”) .20 Under
the discursive practice of “anti-trafficking,” immigration
controls and enforcement are argued as needed for the pro-
tection of migrants themselves, particularly since those who
are illegal can be “vulnerable and often desperate people .”21
The language of harm prevention and protection that has
slipped into immigration enforcement at a now global scale
is extremely powerful . While the scope of positive duties
may be controversial, the prohibition of harm is something
that people with very different political opinions find rela-
tively easy to agree upon . This has meant that borders are
increasingly presented as points of humanitarian interven-
tion where states can protect the local labour force and busi-
nesses from unfair competition, and protect migrants from
abuse and exploitation .

However, the problem with the language of protection
and harm is that it inscribes the state as an appropriate

protector for vulnerable migrants . This is deeply problem-
atic . Firstly, migrants are not naturally vulnerable; rather
the state is deeply implicated in constructing vulnerability
through immigration controls and practices . As has been
argued above, immigration controls are not neutral but pro-
ductive: they produce and reinforce relations of dependency
and power . Concern with trafficking focuses on borders and
immigration controls while missing the crucial point that
immigration controls create the relations of domination
and subordination that they are then said to relieve . This,
handily, leaves the work that national states do to produce
illegality and (im)migrants’ vulnerabilities completely out
of the picture . Secondly, and relatedly, it leaves no room for
migrants’ subjectivities, engagements, and actions . They
are constructed as objects of control, rescue, and redemp-
tion rather than as full human beings . This is especially
the case for anti-trafficking discourses directed at sex work,
since they allow “women’s sexual purity to be rescued in the
national imagination .”22 As Brace has written in her explor-
ation of the politics of abolitionism:

Once you value powerlessness, then you are buying into a politics
that cannot be transformative because it cannot explore capacities,
contingency and multiplicity, or engage in the affairs of the world .
Part of the problem of focusing on the victimhood of slaves, is
that their labour disappears, making it harder to see how they are
engaged with the world and part of our own moral economies and
global markets .23

An engagement with the practices of workers’ rights,
including migrant sex workers, goes some way to coun-
tering these challenges . Rather than construct an abstract
rights-bearing human through human rights discourses, it
makes more sense to start from a theoretical standpoint that
rethinks—and fundamentally relinks—labour and spatial
practices .24 The struggle and power relations that can be
obfuscated by the language of human rights are more vis-
ible in the language of workers’ rights, which also signify a
call to collective action and organizing . Many in the main-
stream of US labour unions, to take one nationalized context,
have since the mid-1970s begun to realize the importance of
showing solidarity with (im)migrant workers, including, at
times, the illegalized and those on temporary labour con-
tracts . Undocumented workers wield strategic power in a
number of sectors of the US economy in key cities such as
Los Angeles, as a substantial labour scholarship and impres-
sive organizing history has made clear . Indeed the solidarity
of some trade unions is often as a result of migrants having
taken a leading role in important trade union organizing .25
This marks a real step forward in practical politics .

Volume 26 Refuge Number 2
8

However, in expanding their organizing efforts to
include the paperless, most US unions (and many unions
globally, especially in the “rich world”) have not given up on
their nation-state-centrism and their advocacy of restrict-
ive border controls . They have not challenged borders and
the institution of national citizenship itself . Their focus, at
best, continues to be on achieving better immigration laws
even while arguing for the further securing of the border
and even, at times, for the placement of migrants into sub-
ordinated categories of “guest workers .” Thus, while organ-
izing those (im)migrants currently within the national state,
unions continue to demand that future migrants be shut
out .26 In this sense, the borders surrounding labour soli-
darity are both spatial and temporal: current (im)migrants
are included within the expanded line drawn by contem-
porary unions and are seen as fit for union membership but
future migrants continue to be seen as a threat to labour
solidarity .27

The limitations of many contemporary mainstream
trade union approaches is not accidental, but written deeply
into the history of nationalized labour movements . Many
of these approaches arose precisely to restrict or exclude
particular forms of subordinated labour including migrant
labour and the labour of women . This was typically con-
structed as “unfree” and consequently racialized, above
all if workers came from currently or formerly colonized
places . As historian Donna Gabaccia argues, “Indeed, it
sometimes seems that nineteenth-century observers had
to label migrants as unfree in order to exclude them as
racially undesirable .”28 In the process, vast differences in
labour practices and levels of coercion were collapsed . Of
course, there was also an alternative internationalism to be
found in this period in such radical proletarian formations
as the International Workers of the World, and the global
syndicalist tradition—a tradition that largely went down to
defeat . As Gabaccia concludes, “To defend free labor, labor
activists had curtailed free migration . Immigration restric-
tions in turn helped to replicate under capitalism some of
the inequalities of colonialism .”29

It is to address these inequalities (and their accompany-
ing forms of racism and xenophobia) that diverse immigrant
rights projects have therefore addressed themselves—some-
times in conjunction with organized labour or para-labour
formations, and sometimes not . Many have focused on “fix-
ing” the immigration system, on seeking legal and legisla-
tive reforms, on making it more “fair and just .” Still other
projects have focused primarily on the many problems
with the post–World War II international refugee regime,
while also often reinforcing unsustainable divisions among
various categories of migrants (“refugees,” “illegals,” “eco-
nomic migrants,” and so on) . In the US and Canadian cases,

demands for legalization (or regularization) of undocu-
mented and precarious-status workers (including failed
refugee claimants) have featured prominently even as the
possibilities for such a policy option have receded rapidly,
thereby opening up the ground (as we shall explore in more
detail below) for more radical alternatives .30 State-led regu-
larization programs, often centred on recognizing a person’s
contributions to a workplace, have typically been tied to fur-
ther tightening of the borders (and therefore have served to
further reproduce states of illegality) .

Importantly, not everyone counts as a worker, and, not
everyone wants to count as a worker . The gendered history
of the institution of wage labour means that the regular-
ization demand cannot adequately encompass, for example,
gendered unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, not
to speak of paid sexual labour .31 Thus, at the same time as
acknowledging the importance of labour organizing within
a migrant justice context, we must not forget the production
of gender, sexualities, families, and households, as well as
the production of labour relations, that is a function and
consequence of borders . Moreover, we must keep in mind
another border, that between the “public” and the “private,”
a central divide within the institution of citizenship .32 That
divide simultaneously devalues and genders labour, and
means that only certain types of work are regarded as work,
as much rich feminist scholarship on social reproduction,
the welfare state, the institution of wage labour, and citizen-
ship and immigration has elucidated .33

Rethinking Migration as a Human Activity
A general problem with the above approaches is their
shared assumption concerning the human practice of
migration . For them, migration is always-already a prob-
lem: an aberrant form of behaviour in need of fixing .
Consequently, people’s mobility is seen as only ever caused
by crisis and as crisis producing .34 Their ideal view of the
world is one in which people seldom, if ever, move and
societies remain more or less “closed .” Such a view belies
the history of humanity . Historians, archaeologists, biolo-
gists, and the tales that people tell all point to the fact that
around the world human beings have always moved and
that they have done so for reasons not dissimilar to the rea-
sons people move today . Yet, in most nationalist narratives,

“the people” are seen as attached to particular lands in ways
that are either primordial (they themselves are portrayed as

“rooted” to the land) or providential (they were “destined”
to be on certain lands) .35 The invention of human seden-
tarism or doctrines of Manifest Destiny rests on problem-
atic assumptions about what migration actually is and who
engages in it .36

Editorial
9

It is crucial to note that while millions of people move
about, only certain people are classed as “migrants .” This
is not simply to do with length of stay: a tourist may only
be resident for a short period, but then, so is a temporary
worker; neither is it to do with employment—how many of
us attending international academic conferences write down
that we are present “for the purposes of employment” even
though we are scarcely going for a holiday? Who counts as
a migrant depends on who is doing the counting, and on
the purpose of the counting . It is shifting and contradictory .
There are multiple ways and scales by which the figure of

“the migrant” is imagined, defined, and represented (both
in the abstract and in the particular) . The figure is generally
negatively gendered, racialized, and classed: US financiers,
Australian backpackers, and British “expats” are not, gener-
ally, constructed as migrants . It is not just the state, but a
wide range of other actors, including local government, aca-
demia, the media, NGOs, trade unions, and the daily prac-
tices of individuals (both citizens and non-citizens) that
work with and against each other to construct and identify
who counts as a migrant . However, one thing that all these
constructions have in common is that the constitution of

“the migrant” is nation-state-centric . One might move thou-
sands of miles or only a few feet but whether one is seen
to be migrating or not ultimately rests on whether one has
crossed a nationalized boundary . Hence, working with the
often racialized and gendered understanding of who consti-
tutes a national subject, the legal meaning of migrant rests
on the idea of the “foreigner .”37

The “foreigner” is a very special figure in the global sys-
tems of capitalism and national states . Today, the foreigner
is someone who can be legally (and often socially) denied
most, if not all, of the rights associated with membership
in a national state (and the associated ideological under-
standing of membership in a nation) . Mobility controls are
largely directed at “managing” the movement of foreigners .
However, it is important to recognize that in the initial per-
iod when regulations on people’s mobilities were put into
place in the emergent global system, it was people’s move-
ment out of the realms of rulers that was the main concern .
Yet, like today, early controls on mobility were very much
related to the creation and maintenance of a proletariat,
that is, a commodified workforce for (at the time, nascent)
capitalists .

For example, the original Poor Laws in England were
designed both to control the mobility of peasants fleeing
their now-privatized commons and to coerce those clas-
sified as “vagabonds” into working .38 As states developed,
controls of the movement of the ruled were pushed to
nationalized borders .39 Historically (and currently)
coerced immobility acted to discipline the unruliness of the

expropriated in order to make them productive workers
whose labour power could be exploited . Indeed, capturing
and containing a potential workforce by compelling them
into not moving was a key element in making nascent cap-
italist ventures possible . It is in part for this reason that early
passports were designed to control people’s exits from, not
their arrivals into, the territories controlled by various rul-
ing groups .40 Mobility out of a particular space was defined
as a major problem by and for those who needed a sedentary
workforce . Thus, as Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos
note, “It is no coincidence that the word mobility refers not
only to movement but also to the common people, the work-
ing classes, the mob .” It was this mob and their attempts
to flee expropriation and exploitation that posed one of the
greatest threats to the success of capitalism .41 And, it was, in
part, their sedentarization that helped to ensure its success .
The word “state” derives from “stasis” or immobility .

Relatedly, criminalizing people’s mobility and denying
access to resources, services, and rights to those deemed to
be illegally migrating and residing in a place was an import-
ant part of how the modern proletariat was formed . As today,
it also served as a method for the creation of “cheap labour .”

“Above all,” as Sucheta Mazumdar notes, “new states and
institutions marking borders and passports developed
only after the slave trade ended” and in a context in which
migrants and migrations continued to be shaped by the
continuing legacy of slavery, apartheid, and diverse forms
of unfree labour .42 In the context of the formerly colonized
world, immigration controls, and the expelling of “non-
indigenous” workers, as well as other forms of state-spon-
sored xenophobia, was a feature of many newly independent
states .43 That people continued to move, despite strictures
against their mobility, demonstrates both the historical
futility of border controls but it also demonstrates that, like
today, an illegalized workforce was a boon to employers .
Another similarity to today’s world: those who moved with-
out the state’s permission were represented as dangerous for
the emerging world system, even though this same system
was built on the making of distinctions between legal and
illegal persons .

Together, restrictions on mobility and the subordina-
tion of those who moved without permission worked to
territorialize people’s relationship to space, to their labour,
and to their ability to maintain themselves . One’s wage
rates, access to employment, to rights, to welfare benefits,
to land, etc . were all bound to one’s recognized legal resi-
dence in particular spaces . Thus, through attempts at ren-
dering people immobile, “[b]odies become territorialized;
people become subjects of a specific territory, of a sovereign
power .”44 As rights and livelihoods were territorialized, so
were people’s subjectivities . The result? We’ve got a world

Volume 26 Refuge Number 2
10

where nationalism is, as Benedict Anderson notes, “… the
most universally legitimate value in the political life of our
time .”45

Elements of a No Borders Approach
Since the creation of the very first illegalized person, when-
ever and wherever controls have been placed on people’s
movements, they have been rejected . As William Walters
comments, “In certain respects the power of autonomous
movement has been the hidden secret of the history of class
struggle .”46 Some have offered a philosophical rejection of
the limits to the human activity of migration . Others have
rejected the territorialization of their subjectivity and their
relationships . Still others have rejected attempts to make
them live a life that has become untenable due to acts of
expropriation, terror, and/or impoverishment . No set of
border controls has ever worked to fully contain people’s
desire and need to move . In this sense, it can be argued that
an everyday practice of refusing the border has existed as
long as borders have .

A contemporary politics for No Borders can, nonetheless,
be said to have emerged in the mid-1990s . It is marked by
the repoliticization of the very legitimacy of (im)migration
restrictions and the distinctions made between “national”
or even “regional” or “continental” (e .g ., “European”) sub-
jects and their foreigners . What distinguishes a No Borders
politics from other immigrant-rights approaches is their
refusal to settle for “fairer” immigration laws (higher num-
bers, legal statuses, and so on) . Within a No Borders pol-
itics, it is understood that the border-control practices of
national states not only reflect people’s unequal rights (e .g .,
whose movements are deemed to be legitimate and whose
are not) but also produce this inequality . Thus, their signal
demand is for every person to have the freedom to move and,
in this era of massive dispossession and displacement, the
concomitant freedom to not be moved (i .e ., to stay) .

In this, a No Borders politics, far from reaffirming the
significance of citizenship, even if it is understood “… not
an institution or a statute but a collective practice,” as
Étienne Balibar contends, calls into question the legitimacy
of the global system of national states itself and the related
global system of capitalism .47 In making these demands, a
No Borders politics clarifies the centrality of border controls
to capitalist social relations, relationships borne of—and
still dependent on—practices of expropriation and exploita-
tion . They show that social justice movements must not
only “confront” the question of the border, they must reject
borders that work to multiply both control devices and dif-
ferentiated labour regimes .48 In so doing, they distinguish
themselves from calls for open borders made by the Right,
calls that centre on the availability of persons made mobile

largely because of prior instances of dispossession and dis-
placement .49 The Right’s call for open borders, thus, can
be seen as a continuation, in new form, of the strategy of

“accumulation by dispossession .”50
While most associated with events in Western Europe, a

current No Borders politics also has its immediate predeces-
sors in North America and is linked to prior movements for
free mobility there . For instance, the popular No Borders
cry that “No One Is Illegal” first arose against Operation
Wetback, a 1954 US government program which resulted
in over one million people being forced to leave the US for
Mexico . The Sans Papiers in France, widely credited with
first articulating a contemporary No Borders politics, gave
new life to this slogan . Largely made up of migrants from
Africa who found themselves categorized as “illegals,” the
Sans Papiers began in 1996 by refusing to accept the right
of the French state to control their lives through rendering
them “paperless .” Their radical stance, and the outpouring
of solidarity for them from people across the spectrum of
state statuses, stood in marked contrast to the wide legit-
imacy given to Operation Wetback in the US and can be
seen as part of the legacy of the Paris Uprising of 1968 .51
Part of the French state’s efforts to lessen the impact of this
uprising was to begin deporting activists categorized as
(im)migrants . An important response to these deportations
was captured in the slogan, “We are all foreigners .” That the
slogan was not “We are all French” is significant and sig-
nals a kind of nascent No Borders rejection of having one’s
subjectivity aligned with the national state by which one is
governed .

The rejection of borders and the differences they make
among people (as labourers and lovers, as comrades and
classmates, etc .) comes from a shift in standpoint from
one centred on citizens and “their” organizations or “their”
state to one that begins from the standpoint of migrants
themselves . The initial organizations of a movement for No
Borders were led by migrants who insisted that migrants
were legitimate political actors within national polities
and did not want or need citizens’ groups to act as a cover
for their activities . Such acts of autonomy brought back to
people’s attention that, in the struggle for liberty, freedom,
democracy, livelihoods, and more, one needed to act with,
and not against, those defined as (im)migrants and foreign-
ers . That is, that interests between people in these two cat-
egorical groups were shared rather than conflicting .

The recognition and naming of people’s refusals to accept
borders is of crucial importance in the light of the typical
response to calls for No Borders: that it is utopian and
impractical . This is often accompanied by what Phillip Cole
calls the “catastrophe prediction .”52 This argues that No
Borders would undermine equality and welfare protections

Editorial
11

within liberal democratic states and this would have an
impact on the most marginalized and disadvantaged . It is
also said that a lack of borders would also erode national
identities and commitments to liberal democratic values . It
is this dystopic vision that allows for either the consequent
Hobbesian response (that states must be given sovereignty
and the power to enforce compliance in the interests of cit-
izens)53 or the related communitarian response (in which
national state formations are defended on the grounds that
democracy itself can flourish only if bounded with strong
insides and outsides) .54 In both scenarios, national sover-
eignty, although potentially unjust, is cast as a necessary
evil .

This vision must be challenged . It has been countered by
some through claims that a world without borders would
not be altogether that different: not many people would
move, migration has a very limited impact on labour mar-
kets, and non-migrants as well as citizens would continue to
be able to enjoy the privileges of citizenship, even if they are
somewhat diminished .55 We reject the politics of these sorts
of arguments . A radical No Borders politics acknowledges
that it is part of revolutionary change . If successful, it will
have a very profound effect on all of our lives for it is part of
a global reshaping of economies and societies in a way that
is not compatible with capitalism, nationalism, or the mode
of state-controlled belonging that is citizenship . It is ambi-
tious and requires exciting and imaginative explorations,
but it is not utopian . It is in fact eminently practical and is
being carried out daily .

This raises the question of what sorts of political com-
munities are desirable, and we would suggest that one way
of framing our responses to this could be by considering the
struggle for the commons . The No Borders demand for the
right to move/stay is not framed within a liberal (capitalist)
praxis as are the rights of states, citizens, private property
owners, or even the ambiguous and largely symbolic arena
of human rights . Instead, the rights to move and to stay are
understood as a necessary part of a contemporary system
of common rights . Thus, while focused on realizing their
demand for freedom of movement (which includes the free-
dom to not be moved), a No Borders politics can be seen as
part of a broader, reinvigorated struggle for the commons .

Peter Linebaugh, in his Magna Carta Manifesto, has iden-
tified four key principles historically evident in the practice
of commoning and in the rights held by commoners, rights
that differ substantially from the modern regime of citizens
or human rights .56 First, common rights are “embedded in a
particular ecology,” one that is reliant on local knowledge of
sustainable practices .57 In this sense common rights are nei-
ther abstract nor essentialist but are based on one’s actions .
Secondly, “commoning is embedded in a labor process” and

is “entered into by labor .”58 Hence, commoning, by def-
inition, rejects parasitic class relationships centred on the
dialectic of exploiters and producers . Third, “commoning
is collective .”59 That is, it is a social practice . Fourth, com-
moning is “independent of the state” and the law .60 There
are no sovereigns in the commons . In sum, commoning is
the realization of not only political rights but also social
and economic rights of the commoners . Commoning, as
a practice, then, resolves the capitalist separation of falsely
divided spheres . Common rights have historically included
the principles of: neighbourhood; subsistence; travel; anti-
enclosure; and reparations .61

Key to the realization of a commons is the nurturing
of relationships of mutuality with fellow commoners . The
rights held by commoners are the rights of persons . In
contrast to the rights of property, consisting of the right
to exclude others from enjoying that which has been pri-
vatized, the right of persons consists of the right to not be
excluded .62 Thus, the right of persons is not something that
is granted . Instead, it is an entitlement that each person car-
ries in her/himself . Dependent upon adherence to the above
key principles of commoning, to have the right of persons
entitles one to the resources of society . It includes the right
to not be distinguished from others who also carry the right
of persons . We contend that it is this right of persons in the
commons that alone can build the foundation by which to
construct a society of equals . Indeed, we argue that the pol-
itical, No Borders demand for the right to move and to stay
ought to be seen as a necessary part of a contemporary com-
mon right of persons .

Today’s commons is seen as being operational only at a
global scale and, therefore, against the nation (e .g ., citizen-
ship) or even the region or the continent (e .g ., the European
Union) . From an ecological perspective, we have long
known that destructive (or helpful) practices in one part of
the globe have effects, sometimes immediate, on all others .
From a social perspective, creating restrictions on the move-
ment of people, plants, animals, food, fuel, medicines, ideas,
and more in a world that has long come to be shaped by
such movements is tantamount to accepting the impos-
ition of inequalities of one sort or another . Thus, the com-
mons for which a No Borders politics struggles is a global
one . Many taking a No Borders political position, therefore,
move from challenging national forms of belonging to try-
ing to activate new subjectivities, ones that correspond with
the global level at which human society is actually organ-
ized, in order to affirm a conception of freedom based on
the collective political action of equals . A No Borders pol-
itics, thus, redefines equality by positing it as a relationship
among co-members of a global society and not one among
national citizens .

Volume 26 Refuge Number 2
12

What a No Borders politics demonstrates is that despite
the proliferation of what Walter Mignolo has called “bor-
der thinking,” borders and their institutional relation, cit-
izenship, like states and nations, are highly volatile and
unstable .63 While this means that borders are adaptable it
also means that their authority can be challenged, indeed
it is challenged on a daily basis . Awakening ourselves to the
political potential of these challenges is an important aspect
of No Borders struggles .

Under a general rubric of No Borders (if not always
explicitly) are a wide variety of individuals and groups .
They include groups of self-conscious activists directly
confronting the state’s imposition of barriers to people’s
mobilities (be they migrant detention camps, deportation
schemes, harassment by various arms of state, and ejection
by landlords) . Examples of such groups are the Sans Papiers
in France mentioned above and groups inspired by their
actions, such as the Sin Papeles in Spain . In Europe, there
is also the broader No Border network, a loose affiliation
of individuals, sometimes in organizations, who unambigu-
ously reject any controls on people’s migration and stage
demonstrations and solidarity events with detained
migrants . In South Africa, the recent wave of terrible attacks
on migrants, resulting in dozens of murders, led to import-
ant organizing among shack-dwellers who issued a powerful
manifesto against such killings, against xenophobia and for
common rights for all .64

Informed by a No Borders politics there also exist cam-
paigns that attempt to eliminate the use of (im)migration
status as a tool of control of migrants . These include “Don’t
Ask; Don’t Tell” campaigners in the US and in Canada call-
ing for an end to citizenship and immigration status dis-
tinctions among people in the provision of social services
and in the receipt of protection (against patriarchal vio-
lence, substandard employment conditions, etc .) . Elsewhere,
there exist groups such as Doctors of the World who pro-
vide needed medical assistance without applying status or
residence restrictions on the receipt of aid . Such groups
often call for legalization (or regularization) of illegalized
migrants as a means by which to gain rights and entitle-
ments currently restricted to citizens and some permanent
residents .

Under the rubric of No Borders there are also groups
who may not be entirely committed to the abolition of bor-
ders, nation-states, and capitalism but who, in their every-
day activities, provide much-needed support, be it in the
form of information, shelter, water, and food to travelling
migrants, or when trade unions purposefully ignore a per-
son’s (im)migration status in their organizing drives or even
specifically address the vulnerabilities faced by persons
because of their lllegal or temporary status . Also active are

other individuals and groups who argue for the abolition
of the multiple borders that national states impose, such as
borders created by laws regarding “official languages” and
other, “banal nationalisms .”65 These include groups such
as “No More Deaths” which works at the US/Mexico bor-
der and labour unions such as Justice for Janitors in the US
and Canada and the United Food and Commercial Workers
Union in Canada . These unions have crossed the ideological
divide created by the state between nationals and foreigners
in order to secure higher wages, better working conditions,
and health care for any worker in the occupational sec-
tors they organize . Indeed such a rejection is what, in part,
links disparate campaigns, groups, and individuals together
within a broader No Borders politics .

The Challenge of No Borders
This issue considers practical No Borders politics across a
range of sites engaged with a wide range of political projects .
What they have in common is their de-naturalization of the
figure of the migrant or the refugee, and a refusal to accept
dehumanizing bordering practices . This necessitates going
beyond state-imposed categories and, as Shourideh Molavi
and other contributors argue, that we also move beyond the
rehearsing of the arguments about de facto and de jure cit-
izenship to think about new forms of relating each to one
another other than the model of citizenship and subject-
hood . One of the most obvious consequences of these, as
we have discussed above, is the promotion of competition
among workers: immigration controls promise to protect
a nationalized labour force from competition by foreign-
ers said to threaten to undermine terms and conditions .
However, rather than keeping non-citizen workers out, in
practice they help create a group of workers that can be
more preferable to employers because they have additional
mechanisms of control over them, including the threat of
deportation . This may be through illegalizing their labour,
or it may be by tying them to particular employers . As Luke
Stobart argues in his essay, organizing migrant workers,
whatever their legal status, needs to be centralized rather
than an “optional extra .”

The call for No Borders requires us to rethink our
responses to what Michael Billig called “banal national-
ism .”66 This theme is taken up by Carolina Moulin who
describes how cities can be the site of new forms of pol-
itics and struggle—as well, of course, as administrative
units that are used by the state in its creation and enforce-
ment of borders . No Borders politics demands a response
and engagement from all of us, not only migrants, trade
union activists, and those who are engaged with migrants’
struggles . For we are all implicated in the endless draw-
ing and contesting of borders . Clemence Due and Damien

Editorial
13

Riggs explore empirically how borders are created on the
playground through the practices of teachers and children .
The paper presents the difficulties of “integration” as not
being about a deficit in individual migrant children but
about their differential categorization and the steadfast
refusal to see their relations, contributions, and needs . This
is a refusal, in fact, to see the border as created and enacted
in the playground, partly because of the naturalization of
categories of migrant and refugee and can be seen as acts of
banal anti-nationalism .

Jean McDonald critiques regularization programs at the
same time as acknowledging that they do bring practical
improvements to the lives of some individuals . She dis-
cusses how criteria for regularization produce subjects and
reproduce ideas of the nation . Migrants must prove them-
selves “deserving” of regularization . There is an explicit
discussion of criminal inadmissibility for regularization
programs . This is the case not just in Canada but in many
states, including the US and the UK . The “Foreign National
Prisoner” is an important (spectacular) figure in the justifi-
cation of enforcement policy and practice, a rallying point
whose deportation can be universally agreed on . While
there may be protest at the deportation of “hard work-
ers,” “good neighbours,” and “lovely parents,” this can rest
on communitarian ideals of belonging . There are few anti-
deportation campaigns fought in solidarity with foreign
national prisoners, and this group has become an important
figure in liberal democracies’ enforcement as the acceptable
face of deportation .67

There is a spectacular nature to border control, manifest
in the deportation of foreign national prisoners: for instance,
high profile raids, and the panoply of walls, technologies,
and uniforms that mark them out . But at the same time
borders are normalized and mundane . Andrew Burridge
reveals the brutal mundanity of borders . The spectacular,
with its tales of victims and villains, can divert attention
from the structural underpinnings of the life stories that are
held up to view . As the paper points out, dramatic rescue
narratives avoid the question of who and why people need
to be “saved” in the first place . Witnessing and rejecting the
mundane is clearly an important aspect of the work of bor-
der activists .

No Border politics can also be an everyday practice, as the
paper by Tara Polzer makes clear . People endlessly learn from,
relate, and adapt to each other, and these relations, processes,
and practices are often distorted, rather than facilitated,
by “integration policies” that are imposed from above . The
social practices of bordering which are crucial to rendering
it so mundane are also emphasised by Nick Gill . His discus-
sion is useful because it discusses the different politics of No
Borders and shows that the call for No Borders can mask very

different attitudes to capitalism as well as to nation-states . In
this respect, the importance of the challenge to work-centred
instrumentalism as described by Amarela Varela becomes
particularly clear . Borders and nationalized identities are a
key strategy in dividing and subordinating labour and this
insight is important to an anti-capitalist No Borders pol-
itics, but it is important too to recognize that not everybody
imagines themselves as a “worker,” and there are more ways
of engaging with the materiality of the world and with each
other than is captured by the term “work .” Thus Amarela
Varela describes the possibility of moving away from “work-
centred instrumentalism .” In a very direct way she demon-
strates how the granting of the call for the right to reside “sta-
bilized” people and brought them under state authority . The
documents were granted only contingently and in such a way
that they required migrants to work and pay taxes in order to
maintain their status . She argues that it is not “regularization”
that is required and, instead, calls for “a different politics”
that entails equality and respect for all .

It is clear that there is a great deal of discussion and
debate within the emergent politics of No Borders, a discus-
sion we hope to contribute to with this Special Issue . The
papers gathered here acknowledge the many new oppor-
tunities for praxis which require listening to the theor-
izing of those who reject borders and the entire apparatus
of nation-states, global capitalism, and bounded imagina-
tions which give them support . These papers further dem-
onstrate the enormous and always hierarchical differences
organized through the institutions and relationships made
by borders, nation-states, and capital, differences often fur-
ther ensconced by current social movements which advance
the rights of only one or another particular state category
of persons, be they “citizens,” “immigrants,” “refugees,” or
others . Taken in their entirety, these papers offer us a “line
of flight” away from the struggle of differentiated rights and
towards the recognition of a common right of movement,
livelihood, and full and equal societal membership for all .

Notes
1 . From 1980 to now, there has also been an increase in

the overall global population of humans . Taking this
into account allows us to understand that international
migration has remained more stable than the sheer
numbers would indicate . Nonetheless, it is important to
note that a large proportion of the world’s people continue
to see migration as an important part of their life strategies .
Unlike in 1980, however, their ability to secure rights
following migration has become severely restricted . See the
Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM),

“Migration in an Interconnected World: New Directions for
Action,” Report (2005):1; 5–6 . GCIM; online: http://www .

Volume 26 Refuge Number 2
14

unhcr .org/refworld/docid/435f81814 .html (accessed July
20, 2010) .

2 . Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal
Alien” and the Making of the U .S .-Mexico Boundary (New
York and London: Routledge, 2002); Liz Fekete, “Death at
the Border—Who Is to Blame?” European Race Bulletin
no . 44 (2003): 2–3 .

3 . We initially place state categories of citizenship and immi-
gration within quotation marks to problematize them and
highlight their socially constructed character . We don’t
continue with this practice for the sake of easier reading .

4 . Jeffrey S . Passel and Roberto Suro, “Rise, Peak, and Decline:
Trends in U .S . Immigration 1992–2004” (Washington, DC:
Pew Hispanic Center, 2005), online: http://pewhispanic .
org/reports/report .php?ReportID=53 (accessed July 12,
2010) .

5 . Nandita Sharma, “‘Race,’ Class and Gender and the Making
of ‘Difference’: The Social Organization of ‘Migrant
Workers’ in Canada,” Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal
24, no . 2 (2001): 5–15; Nandita Sharma, Home Economics:
Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) . The latest sta-
tistics on “temporary foreign workers” in Canada show that
there has recently been a significant increase in the number
of people brought to Canada under this subordinated status
since 2005 . As per Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s

“Facts and Figures 2009,” on December 1, 2009, there
were 282,771 temporary foreign workers in Canada; see,
online: http://www .cic .gc .ca/english/resources/ statistics/
facts2009/temporary/02 .asp (accessed July 29, 2010) . For
comparative Canadian statistics, see also Delphine Nakache
and Paula J . Kinoshita, “The Canadian Temporary Foreign
Worker Program: Do Short-Term Economic Needs Prevail
over Human Rights Concerns?” Study no . 5 (Institute for
Research on Public Policy, May 2010), online: http://www .
irpp .org/pubs/IRPPstudy/IRPP_Study_no5 (accessed
July 29, 2010) .

6 . Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making
of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2004); see also Peter Nyers, “No One Is Illegal between City
and Nation,” in Acts of Citizenship, ed . Engin Isin and Greg
M . Nielson (London: Zed, 2008) .

7 . Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections
on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2004), 109 .

8 . Michael Walzer, “The Distribution of Membership,” in
Boundaries: National Autonomy and Its Limits, ed . Peter
G . Brown and Henry Shue (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1981) .

9 . Peter Nyers, “The Accidental Citizen: Acts of Sovereignty
and (Un)Making Citizenship,” Economy and Society 35,
no . 1 (2006): 22–41 .

10 . Bridget Anderson, “Migration, Immigration Controls and
the Fashioning of Precarious Workers,” Work, Employment
and Society 24, no . 2 (2010): 300–317 .

11 . Eithne Luibheid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the
Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002);
Sarah Van Walsum, The Family and the Nation: Dutch
Family Migration Policies in the Context of Changing Family
Norms (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) .

12 . Citizenship and Immigration Canada, “Study Guide—
Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of
Citizenship” (2009) online: http://www .cic .gc .ca/english/
resources/publications/discover/index .asp (accessed July
13, 2010) .

13 . M . Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures
(New York: Routledge, 1997); Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing
Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Carole
Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity:
Migrations of the Subject (London: Routledge, 1994) .

14 . Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: On the Inadequacy and
the Indispensability of the Nation,” in After the Imperial
Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed . Antoinette
Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) .

15 . See, for example, Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir, eds .,
People Out of Place: Globalization, Human Rights, and
the Citizenship Gap (New York: Routledge, 2004); Brian
Barry and Robert E . Goodin, eds ., Free Movement: Ethical
Issues in the Transnational Migration of People and Money
(London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992); T .
Basok, S . Ilcan, and J . Noonan, “Citizenship, Human Rights
and Social Justice,” Citizenship Studies 10, no . 3 (2006):
267–273; Philip Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal
Political Theory and Immigration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000) .

16 . Linda Bosniak, “Human Rights, State Sovereignty and
the Protection of Undocumented Migrants,” in Irregular
Migration and Human Rights: Theoretical, European and
International Perspectives, ed . B . Bogusz, R . Cholewinski, A .
Cygan, and E . Szyszczak (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2004);
Alice Bloch, “The Right to Rights? Undocumented Migrants
from Zimbabwe Living in South Africa, .” Sociology 44, no . 2
(2010): 233–250 .

17 . Donna Baines and Nandita Sharma, “Is Citizenship a Useful
Concept in Social Policy Work? Non-Citizens: The Case of
Migrant Workers in Canada,” Studies in Political Economy
69 (Autumn 2003): 75–107; Linda Bosniak, “Critical
Reflections on “Citizenship” as a Progressive Aspiration”
in Labour Law in an Era of Globalization: Transformative
Practices & Possibilities, ed . Joanne Conaghan, Richard
Michael Fischl,and Karl Klare (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002): 339, 340; Francis B . Nyamnjoh, Insiders and
Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary
Southern Africa (London: Zed, 2006) .

18 . For an argument for “transnational labour citizenship”
see Jennifer Gordon, “Transnational Labor Citizenship,”
Southern California Law Review 80, no . 3 (2007): 503–588 .

Editorial
15

19 . Michael Neocosmos, From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native
Foreigners’ Explaining Xenophobia in Post-apartheid South
Africa, Citizenship and Nationalism, Identity and Politics .
(Dakar: CODESRIA, 2010) .

20 . Nandita Sharma, “Travel Agency: A Critique of Anti-
Trafficking Campaigns,” Refuge 21, no . 3 (2003): 53–65;
Kamala Kempadoo, “Victims and Agents of Crime: The
New Crusade against Trafficking,” in Global Lockdown:
Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex, ed . Julia
Sudbury (New York and London: Routledge, 2005): 35–55;
Kamala Kempadoo, “The War on Human Trafficking in the
Caribbean,” Race and Class 49, no . 2 (2007): 79–85; Bridget
Anderson, “Where’s the Harm in That? Immigration
Enforcement, Trafficking and Migrants’ Rights’ (paper
presented at workshop Human Rights, Victimhood and
Consent, University of Bergen, 10–12 June 2010); Laura
Brace, “The Opposites of Slavery: Contract, Freedom and
Labour” (paper presented at workshop Human Rights,
Victimhood and Consent, University of Bergen, 10–12
June 2010) .

21 . United Kingdom Home Office, “Enforcing the Rules: A
Strategy to Ensure and Enforce Compliance with Our
Immigration Laws” (London: Home Office, 2007) .

22 . Kempadoo, “The War on Human Trafficking in the
Caribbean,” 81 .

23 . Brace .
24 . Nicholas de Genova, “The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty,

Space, and the Freedom of Movement,” in Deported:
Removal and the Regulation of Human Mobility, ed . Nicholas
de Genova and Nathalie Peutz (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010); Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, “Border
as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor,” European
Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, online: http://
eipcp .net/transversal/0608/ mezzadraneilson/en (accessed,
July 21, 2010) .

25 . David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates
Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2008); Hector L . Delgado, New Immigrants, Old
Unions: Organizing Undocumented Workers in Los Angeles
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Kim Moody,

“Harvest of Empire: Immigrant Workers’ Struggles in
the USA,” in Socialist Register 2008 (Global Flashpoints:
Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism), ed . Leo
Panitch and Colin Leys (London: 2007); Ruth Milkman,
ed ., Organizing Immigrants: The Challenge for Unions in
Contemporary California (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2000); Ruth Milkman, L .A . Story: Immigrant Workers and
the Future of the U .S . Labor Movement (New York: Russell
Sage, 2006); Jennifer Gordon, Suburban Sweatshops: The
Fight for Immigrant Rights (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Immanuel
Ness, Immigrants, Unions, and the U .S . Labor Market
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005); Ai-Jen Poo
and Eric Tang, “Domestic Workers Organize in the Global
City,” in The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New

Feminism, ed . Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin
(New York: Anchor, 2004) .

26 . Gordon, “Transnational Labor Citizenship .” Also, for an
interesting exchange within the US labour context on
the politics of open borders, see Dan LaBotz and Ana
Avendano, “Open Borders? A Debate,” New Labor Forum
17, no . 1 (Spring 2008): 9–24 .

27 . Ibid .
28 . Donna Gabaccia, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and the ‘Chinese of

Europe’: Global Perspectives on Race and Labor, 1815–
1930,” in Migration, Migration History, History: Old
Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed . Jan Lucassen and Leo
Lucassen (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 186 (emphasis in the
original) .

29 . Ibid .,195 .
30 . Cynthia Wright, “Against Illegality: New Directions in

Organizing By and With Non-Status People in Canada,” in
Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social
Research, ed . Caelie Frampton, et al . (Halifax: Fernwood,
2006); Peter Nyers, “Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics
of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement,” Third
World Quarterly 24, no . 6 (2003): 1069–1093 .

31 . Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body
and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia,
2004) .

32 . Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted
by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American
History, ed . Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006) .

33 . For a recent contribution, see Seyla Benhabib and Judith
Resnik, eds ., Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders,
and Gender (New York: New York University Press, 2009) .

34 . Bob Sutcliffe, “Migration and Citizenship: Why Can Birds,
Whales, Butterflies and Ants Cross International Frontiers
More Easily than Cows, Dogs and Human Beings?” in
Migration and Mobility: The European Context, ed . Subrata
Ghatak and Anne Showstack Sassoon (New York: Palgrave,
2001) .

35 . For some suggestive remarks on challenging “nationalist
historiographies” in Asian context, see Sucheta Mazumdar,

“Localities of the Global: Asian Migrations between Slavery
and Citizenship,” International Review of Social History 52
(2007): 124–133 .

36 . Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “Migration, Migration
History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives,” in
Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and
New Perspectives, ed . Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (Bern:
Peter Lang, 1997) . See also Leo Lucassen, “Migration and
World History: Reaching a New Frontier,” International
Review of Social History 52 (2007): 89–96 .

37 . For some reflections on understanding “internal” and
“international” migrations together, see David Feldman,
“Global Movements, Internal Migration, and the Importance
of Institutions,” International Review of Social History 52
(2007): 105–109 .

Volume 26 Refuge Number 2
16

38 . On vagabonds in European context, see Leo Lucassen,
“Eternal Vagrants? State Formation, Migration, and
Travelling Groups in Western-Europe, 1350–1914,” in
Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and
New Perspectives, ed . Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (Bern:
Peter Lang, 1997) .

39 . John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance,
Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002) . See also Radhika Viyas
Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the
Passport,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and
through the Nation, ed . Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003) .

40 . Torpey .
41 . Dimitri Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vasily

Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the
Twenty-First Century (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluro
Press, 2008), 55 .

42 . Mazumdar, 128 .
43 . Aderanti Adepoju, “Creating a Borderless West Africa:

Constraints and Prospects for Intra-Regional Migration,”
in Migration without Borders: Essays on the Free Movement
of People, ed . Antoine Pecoud and Paul de Guchteneire
(New York: Berghahn Books and UNESCO, 2007), 163 .

44 . Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos, 48 .
45 . Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections

on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,
1991), 3 .

46 . William Walters, “Acts of Demonstration: Mapping the
Territory of (Non-)Citizenship,” in Acts of Citizenship, ed .
Engin Isin and Greg M . Nielson (London: Zed, 2008); see
also N . Rodriguez, “The Battle for the Border: Notes on
Autonomous Migration, Transnational Communities, and
the State,” Social Justice 23, no . 3 (1996): 21–37 .

47 . Étienne Balibar, “What We Owe to the Sans-Papiers,” in
Social Insecurity, ed . L . Guenther and C . Heesters (Toronto:
Anansi, 2000), 42 .

48 . Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, “Border as Method,
or, the Multiplication of Labor,” European Institute for
Progressive Cultural Policies, online: http://eipcp .net/
transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en (accessed July 21,
2010) .

49 . Editorial, Wall Street Journal, July 3, 1984; Jason Riley, The
Case for Open Borders: Six Common Arguments against
Immigration and Why They Are Wrong (New York: Gotham
Books, 2008) .

50 . David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003) .

51 . Kristin Ross, May 68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2002) .

52 . Cole .
53 . Ibid .
54 . Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and

Equality (Basic Books, 1983); Walzer, “The Distribution of
Membership”; Gary Freeman, “Migration and the Political

Economy of the Welfare State,” in Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 485, no . 1 (1986):
51–63 .

55 . Theresa Hayter, Open Borders: The Case against Immigration
Controls (London: Pluto Press, 2004) .

56 . Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and
Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007), 45 .

57 . Ibid .
58 . Ibid .
59 . Ibid .
60 . Ibid .
61 . Ibid .
62 . Thomas Dye, “The Maka’ainana Transformation in Hawaii:

Archaeological Expectations Based on the Social Effects of
Parliamentary Enclosure in England,” (Honolulu: T . S . Dye
and Colleagues, Archaeologists, Inc ., 2009) .

63 . Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border
Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12,
no . 3 (2000): 721–748 .

64 . “Statement on the Xenophobic Attacks in Johannesburg”
(May 2008), online: http://www .abahlali .org/node/3582
(accessed July 25, 2010) .

65 . Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995) .
66 . Ibid .
67 . For discussion, see Jacqueline Bhabha, “‘Get Back to Where

You Once Belonged’: Identity, Citizenship, and Exclusion in
Europe,” Human Rights Quarterly 20, no . 3 (1998): 592–627 .

Bridget Anderson is a senior research fellow at the Centre on
Migration, Politics and Society at the University of Oxford . Her
research interests include migration, low-waged labour markets,

“victimhood,” and immigration enforcement . Theoretically this
empirical work leads to questions of the relation of the state
to the construction of certain categories of person as being
worthy of protection or of work and others as threatening or
dishonourable, and also to considerations of migrant sub-
jectivity and theories and practices of citizenship, She has
worked as an adviser and activist, with a range of migrants’
organizations and trade unions .

Nandita Sharma is an associate professor in the Department
of Ethnic Studies and the Department of Sociology at
the University of Hawaii at Manoa . Her research inter-
ests address themes of human migration, migrant labour,
national state power, ideologies of racism and nationalism,
processes of identification and self-understanding, and social
movements for justice . Sharma is an activist scholar whose
research is shaped by the social movements she is a part of .
In 1999 she helped to form Open the Borders!, an organiza-
tion committed to the development and advancement of a
No Borders politics .

Editorial
17

Cynthia Wright teaches in the School of Women’s Studies and
the Department of Geography at York University, Toronto .
Her diverse research and teaching interests include: the state
production of “ illegality” and the origins of immigration con-
trols; social justice movements, especially migrant activism;
transnational feminism and sexuality studies; twentieth-
century “ international history from below,” including migra-
tion practices; colonialism and imperialism; and methodolo-
gies for transnational history . She has been part of several
research projects on im/migration involving alliances among
scholars, scholar/activists, community services, and migrant
justice campaigns .

Volume 26 Refuge Number 2
18

Chapter Title: Introduction: Neoliberalism and the Philippine Labor Brokerage State

Book Title: Migrants for Export

Book Subtitle: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World

Book Author(s): Robyn Magalit Rodriguez

Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.cttttb3s.4

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Introduction

Neoliberalism

and the Philippine

Labor Brokerage State

Not only am I the head of state responsible for a nation of 80 million people.
I’m also the CEO of a global Philippine enterprise of 8 million Filipinos who
live and work abroad and generate billions of dollars a year in revenue for
our country. — President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, May 2003

A “Global Enterprise” of Labor

During a state visit to the United States in 2003, Philippine President
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo aggressively encouraged U.S. business-
people to hire Philippine workers to fill their employment needs in
the territorial United States and beyond. When American coloniz-
ers encountered Filipinos in 1898, they considered them a backward
and savage lot who were, nevertheless, sufficiently educable. The
United States proceeded to violently conquer the Filipino people
and then, with a policy of “benevolent assimilation,” schooled them
into being proper colonial subjects who could labor for the nascent
empire. Arroyo assures her audience that American colonial education
adequately served its purpose and even exceeded it.1

Today, Arroyo suggests, the Filipino is a thoroughly modern and
civilized global worker who can labor anywhere and under any set of
circumstances for American as well as other employers. The presi-
dent insists that Philippine workers can be relied upon to labor for
the contemporary U.S. empire, pledging that Philippine workers will
“play a role in helping rebuild the land for the people of Iraq.” No

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x Introduction

matter how difficult or dangerous a place of employment may be,
Filipinos and Filipinas are ever-willing workers. Employers can even
be spared the expense of training workers because it is a task done
in the Philippines, one that the Philippine government has “worked
hard to support.” Though not stated explicitly by the president, her
speech does suggest that employers can save on labor costs because
Philippine workers are a temporary workforce ostensibly less able or
willing to demand wage increases or better benefits over time. In
short, the promise of the Philippine worker is not merely the promise
of a worker of good quality, but ultimately one who is cheap.

According to Arroyo, she is not merely president but also the
“CEO” of a profitable “global enterprise” that generates revenues
by successfully assembling together and exporting a much sought-
after commodity worldwide: “highly skilled, well-educated, English-
speaking” as well as “productive” and “efficient” workers. By calling
herself a “CEO” Arroyo represents herself not as a head of state
but as an entrepreneur, the ideal neoliberal subject, who rationally
maximizes her country’s competitive advantage in the global market.
I suggest that the Philippines, especially when it comes to migrants,
is a labor brokerage state.

Labor brokerage is a neoliberal strategy that is comprised of insti-
tutional and discursive practices through which the Philippine state
mobilizes its citizens and sends them abroad to work for employers
throughout the world while generating a “profit” from the remit-
tances that migrants send back to their families and loved ones
remaining in the Philippines. The Philippine state negotiates with
labor-receiving states to formalize outflows of migrant workers and
thereby enables employers around the globe to avail themselves of
temporary workers who can be summoned to work for finite periods
of time and then returned to their homeland at the conclusion of
their employment contracts. As Antonio Tujan of IBON (a nonprofit
research-education-information development institution), a longtime
critic of the government’s labor export program, puts it, the Philip-
pine state engages in nothing more than “legal human trafficking.”2

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Figure 1. Brochure produced by the Philippine Overseas Employment
Administration.

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xii Introduction

If, as many scholars have argued, global capital demands “flexible”
labor, Philippine migrants are uniquely “flexible” as short-term, con-
tractual, and incredibly mobile workers. Employers of Philippine
workers need not “race to the bottom” by relocating to the Philip-
pines but can actually stay in place as Philippine workers can be
conveyed directly to them. The Philippines offers a reserve army of
labor to be deployed for capital across the planet.

The Philippine state, in fact, distinguishes itself in its capac-
ity to facilitate the out-migration of its population to destinations
spanning the planet. It is undeniably the world’s premier “global
enterprise” of labor as the Philippine migrant worker has become
practically ubiquitous around the globe. The worldwide distribution
of Philippine migrants is staggering and perhaps unmatched by any
other labor-sending country.3 According to the most recent (2008)
statistics from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration
(POEA) one of the key institutions in the Philippine government’s
transnational migration apparatus, 1,236,013 Filipino and Filipina
workers were deployed in some 200 countries and territories around
the globe. These workers joined the millions of Philippine migrants
already employed overseas to total an estimated 8,233,172.4 With
a population of over 80 million people, that means that nearly
10 percent of the Philippine population is working abroad.

Among newly deployed migrants, the top occupations in which
Philippine migrants are employed are the following (in order):
household service workers; waiters, cleaners, and related workers;
charworkers, cleaners, and related workers; nurses, professional; care-
givers and caretakers; laborers/helpers, general; plumbers and pipe
fitters; electrical wiremen; welders and flame-cutters; building care-
takers.5 Both men and women leave the country although in the
past decade women’s out-migration has outpaced the out-migration
of men. However, statistics collected from April to September 2008
indicate that 51.6 percent of migrants were men while 48.4 per-
cent were women. One in four migrants were between the ages of
twenty-five and twenty-nine, and one-third were unskilled.6

Philippine migrants’ global mobility occurs in the face of increas-
ing immigration restrictiveness around the world. Many countries

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Introduction xiii

are strengthening their borders, especially against those hoping to
immigrate and settle with their families.7 In spite of this trend, out-
migration from the Philippines continues to increase. The Philippine
state has been central to the globalization of Filipina and Filipino
workers. While people from the Philippines actively seek out oppor-
tunities to live and work overseas for a variety of reasons, ultimately
the countries they imagine as possible sites for temporary sojourns as
well as the jobs they apply for are determined in large part by the
Philippine state’s labor brokerage strategy.8

President Arroyo, for example, played a vital role in securing new
jobs for Philippine workers in the Middle East to support U.S. military
operations. After meeting U.S. businessmen, she met U.S. govern-
ment officials to discuss the two countries’ shared interests in the
global “war on terror” and, it can be assumed, transfers of Philip-
pine labor, for not long after her brief stint in the United States,
Iraq was added to the ever-growing list of Philippine migrants’ coun-
tries of destination. Moreover, according to a report by the POEA
published shortly after President Arroyo’s U.S. visit, ten thousand
to fifteen thousand jobs were expected to open even beyond Iraq in
countries including Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar because of expected
“billion dollar infrastructure development projects in the Middle East
(gas, electricity, water, finance, communications, engineering design,
retail, health services, construction, IT, hotel/tourism),” attributed
“to the presence of US forces.”9

If the Philippine state facilitates the out-migration of its citizens,
just as importantly it attempts to shape its overseas citizens’ eco-
nomic and political connections to the Philippines. The Philippines’
“profitability” as a “global enterprise” hinges on its ability to main-
tain its overseas citizens’ relations to the homeland. Labor brokerage
requires a particular set of relations between state and citizen. Under
a migration regime of labor brokerage, Philippine citizens are to leave
their families behind in the Philippines while giving themselves over
to employers in faraway destinations. At the same time, they are
to continue being linked to the homeland, especially through their
remittances, as the foreign exchange generated by migrants’ over-
seas wages has become vital to the Philippine economy. In 2008

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xiv Introduction

Product Earnings

Electronic products $1.915 billion
Remittances $1.494 billion
Articles of apparel and clothing accessories $125 million
Coconut oil $80 million

Figure 2. Earnings from the three top export products compared with
remittances for the month of July 2009. Sources: POEA, National
Statistics Office (NSO).

alone, migrants remitted over U.S.$16 billion through official bank-
ing channels.10 It is true that the very structure of the migrant labor
system functions in such a way that individuals working overseas nec-
essarily remit their earnings to their dependents left behind in the
Philippines.11 Still, the state invests heavily in channeling migrants’
remittances back to the Philippines, with special emphasis on secur-
ing their remittances through official banking channels as well as
state-sponsored development projects.

The Philippine state’s transnational migration apparatus has be-
come something of an “export-processing zone” that assembles and
mobilizes and exports a commodity, workers, that actually rivals other
export commodities in terms of profitability. A comparison of earnings
from the Philippines’ top three highest earning export products with
remittances in the month of July 2009 indicates that remittances
from migrants are second only to electronic products (Figure 2). In
other words, in the Philippines the export of people can be more
profitable than the export of clothing.

It is because Philippine migrants are short-term employees that
labor-receiving countries source their workers from the Philippines.
The Philippine state’s future deployments of migrants (and ulti-
mately remittances), therefore, depend on its ensuring that migrants
are compliant with the terms of their employment contracts. In
other words, the Philippine government requires that migrants return
home to the Philippines immediately upon the completion of their
work. The Philippine state’s investments in its relations to its
citizen-workers globally are crucial for accomplishing that task.

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Introduction xv

This book examines how and why the Philippine state has emerged
as a “global enterprise” of labor. It uses a case study of the Philippines
to understand contemporary processes of neoliberal globalization. As
Neferti Tadiar argues, “The Philippines is, as a supplier of global
labour, a constitutive part of the world-system.”12 A key objective
here is to map what Saskia Sassen calls a “countergeography of glob-
alization,” that is, a form of globalization “either not represented or
seen as connected to globalization,” yet is “deeply imbricated in some
of the major dynamics constitutive of globalization.”13

My findings draw on qualitative methods including ethnographic
research of the government’s migration bureaucracy, interviews with
state officials and migrants, and archival work of government docu-
ments conducted over the course of the last decade.14 I examine the
mechanisms by which the Philippine state mobilizes, exports, and reg-
ulates migrant labor to meet worldwide gendered and racialized labor
demand. At the same time, I examine how the state has reconfigured
Philippine citizenship and produced novel invocations of Philippine
nationalism to normalize its citizens’ out-migration while simultane-
ously fostering their ties to the Philippines. Though I begin with a
quote from the Philippine president, this book is fundamentally about
the quotidian institutional and discursive practices of the state.15

To get at why the Philippines has become a global broker of labor
and the kind of functions it performs in the contemporary global
order, however, requires first an understanding of how neoliberal
globalization has reshaped the role of states more broadly and an
understanding of the new forms of labor demand engendered by
contemporary globalization. I turn to a discussion of the existing
scholarship on the state and globalization and international migration
in the sections that immediately follow.

Brokering Labor as a Neoliberal Strategy

Neoliberalism, “Development,” and the Nation-State

Under conditions of neoliberal globalization, the forms and func-
tions of the nation-state have been shifting quite dramatically. While

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xvi Introduction

many scholars have lamented the eclipse of the state by the forces
of global capital, many others suggest that what we are apprehend-
ing is in fact its reconfiguration. Rather than being hollowed out,
the state has created new apparatuses by which to actually facilitate
neoliberalism. As David Harvey argues, the neoliberal state seeks
out “internal reorganizations and new institutional arrangements that
improve its competitive position as an entity vis-à-vis other states in
the global market.”16 In her critique of Harvey Aihwa Ong suggests,
first, that neoliberalism, although hegemonic globally, should not be
understood as having common, universalized consequences. She fur-
ther argues that “rather than taking neoliberalism as a tidal wave of
market-driven phenomena that sweeps from dominant countries to
smaller ones, we could more fruitfully break neoliberalism down into
various technologies.”17

Neoliberal orthodoxy consequently takes different shapes in dif-
ferent states. Moreover, it requires that states develop an arsenal of
strategies to meet its imperatives. In the Philippines, for instance,
the state has introduced numerous measures to create “new institu-
tional arrangements” necessary to neoliberal globalization. Like other
developing countries, it has complied with the mandates of what
critics of neoliberalism have called the “Washington Consensus,”
which involves privatization, deregulation, and liberalization among
other sets of economic reforms or “structural adjustments.”18 But
unlike other states in the global South, the Philippines has crafted a
strategy of labor brokerage by which it mobilizes and deploys labor
for export to profit from migrants’ remittances. Remittances from
migrants’ overseas employment has strengthened the government’s
foreign exchange reserves, helping the Philippines pay off the oner-
ous debts it has incurred from lenders like the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, along with a host of private banks, as
a consequence of structural adjustment programs.

The Philippine state is not, however, simply a passive actor in the
global order as elites at its helm have enthusiastically implemented
policies compliant with the neoliberal Washington Consensus. Devel-
oping countries “are undertaking restructuring and serve the needs
of transnational capital not simply because they are ‘powerless’ in the

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Introduction xvii

face of globalization, but because a particular historical constellation
of social forces now exists that present an organic social base for this
global restructuring of capitalism.”19

Neoliberalism in the Philippines and other formerly colonized
areas needs to be understood within the context of legacies of imperi-
alism. For the Philippines neoliberal strategies of the state have long
been shaped by its status as a neocolony of the United States. One
can argue that neoliberalism in the formerly colonized global South
is a contemporary form of coloniality.20

In a neocolonial, neoliberal state like the Philippines, labor broker-
age functions to address the failures of so-called “development.”21
It is a peculiar kind of “trickle up” development as individual
migrants’ earnings abroad become a source of foreign capital for
the Philippine state. The Philippine state remains committed to
drawing direct investments from foreign capital through neoliberal
economic reforms; however, it also heavily draws on “investments”
from its very own citizens. The strategy of labor brokerage merely
“perpetuates the conditions this policy claims to ameliorate and
reinforces the IMF structural adjustment policies’ grip on Philip-
pine underdevelopment since remittances mainly go to debt servicing
rather than to generating new local employment projects,” as Ligaya
McGovern suggests.22 It is still a cornerstone of Philippine neoliberal
“development” today. As E. San Juan acerbically, though accurately,
puts it, the globalization of Philippine workers “is primarily due to
economic coercion and disenfranchisement under the retrogressive
regime of comprador-bureaucratic (not welfare-state) capitalism.”23

Neoliberal Governmentality
Though neoliberalism is characterized by a set of economic rational-
ities, as distilled in the Washington Consensus, neoliberalism is also
a technology of governmentality. Aihwa Ong, drawing from Fou-
cauldian understandings, suggests that neoliberalism is a mode of
governing populations. She argues that the “neoliberal politics of
‘shrinking’ the state are accompanied by a proliferation of tech-
niques to remake the social and citizen-subjects.”24 By brokering
labor, the Philippine state attempts to contain the multiple social

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xviii Introduction

dislocations that are the consequence of its aggressive implemen-
tation of neoliberal economic policies. It represents employment
abroad and remittances as the fulfillment of a new form of national-
ism. Contemporary Philippine citizenship has become a modality of
governmentality.

The consequences of the neoliberal Washington Consensus have
been disastrous for ordinary people in the Philippines, as they have
been for most people throughout the world as they face increasingly
precarious conditions of employment (if they are employed at all)
and the elimination of state services.25 In the Philippines, structural
adjustment has resulted in currency devaluation (meant to be an
enticement for foreign investors), which has reduced real incomes
in the Philippines, making it difficult for people to cope with the
rising costs of living, which include the burden of having to pay
for what were once state-subsidized public services. As the already
small middle class tries to maintain its tenuous status, the difficulty
of everyday life for the working classes and the poor compel many to
join up with militant leftist movements, both legal and underground,
to contest the state’s neoliberal orientation.26 Economic and political
elites in the Philippines are all too familiar with the sorts of explosive
upheavals these tensions can give rise to.

When the state’s neoliberal policies are coupled with charges of
graft and corruption, as was the case for President Joseph Estrada in
2001, mass protests can bring an administration down. Overseas jobs
address Philippine citizens’ dire need for livable wages and arguably
contain social unrest to some extent.27 Under conditions of globaliza-
tion, elites have to deal with “the contradictory pressures of (global)
accumulation and (national) legitimation. This enduring contradic-
tion is being managed by a restructuring of the capitalist state and a
realignment of internal power relations within national state appara-
tuses.”28 Successive Philippine presidents have offered up the promise
of employment (albeit overseas) during the bleakest economic crises
to calm citizens’ growing anxieties about job prospects, and in the
Philippines labor brokerage is an important legitimization scheme for
the state.

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Introduction xix

Of course, states’ legitimacy is not confined to the national arena.
According to Aihwa Ong, developing and newly industrializing states
concern themselves with accumulating status and recognition in the
global context.29 Social prestige in the world order is also gendered
as well as racialized. L. H. M. Ling argues that “biological males
(the ‘native man’), masculinized conventions (‘Third World state’),
and even socioeconomic systems (‘developing economies’) can be
feminized if they are viewed as backward, weak, or poor — traits
conventionally associated with femininity” and, it can be argued,
with nonwhiteness.30 “The accumulation of capital, the organization
of the labor process, the construction of the modern nation-state,”
as Winant argues, was “all fashioned in the global racial workshop.”31
Represented by neighboring Asian leaders and economists as Asia’s
perennial failure,32 the Philippine state is invested in recuperating
its feminized status through policy interventions that conform to
hegemonic white, masculinized global conventions.

It is within the context of tremendous uncertainty that the gov-
ernment’s relentless pursuit of neoliberal restructuring has produced
the Philippine state’s promotion of overseas employment among
its citizens. Employment abroad allows Philippine citizens to earn
incomes far greater than would be possible in the Philippines (in part
because the peso is so devalued) and therefore sustain their fami-
lies’ well-being, at least for the immediate future. There is something
quintessentially neoliberal about labor brokerage as a technology of
government. It requires the responsibilization of Philippine citizens
who are to directly bear the costs of neoliberal restructuring as their
remittances go to debt servicing. Moreover, as the Philippine state
withdraws social supports and thereby passes on the costs of educa-
tion, health care, and other expenses to its citizens, brokering labor
absolves the state from having to provide services directly to its citi-
zens. Ordinary people are forced to bear sole responsibility for the
costs associated with newly privatized services with the wages they
earn abroad.

The labor brokerage state simultaneously extends new kinds of
“rights” and benefits to its overseas citizens. New iterations of
citizenship, what might be termed oxymoronically enough migrant

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xx Introduction

citizenship, become a means by which the state deftly masks how the
entitlements of Philippine citizenship are in fact dwindling under
conditions of neoliberalism. Since its inception, the Philippine state’s
migration regime has included provisions that are supposed to protect
migrants from exploitative working conditions as well as entitlements
reserved only for overseas workers. These protections promise, for
example, the Philippine state’s extraterritorial intervention in con-
tractual disputes workers may have with their employers. As women’s
migration began to outpace men’s migration and moral panics about
the absence of mothers from their families proliferated, the state also
created mandatory training programs for women seeking employ-
ment in what have been officially categorized by the government
as “vulnerable” occupations (domestic work and “entertainment”).33
Migrants are eligible for skills training and upgrading while they are
abroad and when they return to the Philippines. Their children can
even qualify for scholarship funds. In fact, overseas employment itself
is cast as a “right” of Philippine citizens, which the state pledges to
guarantee.

Migrant citizenship is aimed at placating migrants’ fears about
being vulnerable as foreign workers abroad. It is a reactive measure
to Philippine citizens’ transnational protests against the unjust treat-
ment of migrants at the hands of foreign employers and governments
through migrant citizenship. The state pledges particular kinds of
protections and entitlements to secure legitimacy for its migration
program among it citizens — both those who leave as well as those
who stay. By offering migrants what is essentially a portable set of
“rights,” the state can represent itself as a caring and virtuous state
committed to its citizens. Moreover, through migrant citizenship, the
Philippine state can secure the legitimacy of labor brokerage as a
strategy on an international scale as rights regimes are a hallmark of
democratic governance, necessary for acceptance into the fraternity
of nation-states. For the most part, migrant citizenship comes with
few guarantees, yet it becomes an important technique by which the
Philippine state reshapes its relations to its citizens under conditions
of neoliberal globalization.

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Introduction xxi

If the Philippine state has reconfigured citizenship, it has necessar-
ily rearticulated ideas of nationalism and national belonging for the
purposes of brokering labor. After all, in a society where people are
forced to secure their livelihoods far from their families and country
of birth, ideas of “home” and “the nation” are destabilized. With the
increasing importance of overseas employment, the Philippine state
has come to represent migrants as “new national heroes.” Rather
than denigrating out-migration as a “brain drain” (and therefore some
kind of nationalist betrayal) or employing punitive methods to force
migrants to remit their earnings back to the Philippines, working
abroad and remittances are recast as nationalist acts.

“Heroism,” however, comes with responsibilities. While migrants
are valorized as “heroes,” the state also expects them to be exem-
plary representatives of the nation abroad. Workers are expected to
be law-abiding, diligent workers who return to the Philippines once
their employment visas expire. When workers fail in their nation-
alist duties, the Philippine state deploys numerous mechanisms to
discipline them transnationally. Here migrant citizenship becomes
a means by which the Philippines can, in fact, regulate migrants to
obtain their remittances on the one hand and, on the other, intervene
extraterritorially when migrants need to be brought under control
since foreign states increasingly defer to the Philippine state as the
appropriate custodian over unruly Philippine workers.

The Brokerage State and the
Regulation of Global Labor Flows

While brokering labor serves the Philippine state’s neoliberal impera-
tives domestically, it also performs the function of regulating flows of
workers globally. As neoliberal globalization engenders new kinds of
racialized and gendered labor demands, the Philippine state’s system
of labor brokerage enables the controlled flows of temporary work-
ers across national borders, mobilizing them out of the Philippines
and then ensuring their return back home. I would even suggest
that labor brokerage might be a necessary institutional form (though

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xxii Introduction

problematic, especially for workers) under conditions of neoliberal
globalization.

Neoliberal globalization is giving rise to the restructuring of labor
markets and the reorganization of work and thereby creating struc-
tural demands for foreign migrant workers. Demands for foreign
workers in the more economically privileged areas of the world system
and prevailing inequalities between those areas and the periphery
create the macrostructural conditions for international migration.
Employers’ ability to secure migrants is often mitigated by the resur-
gence of varieties of xenophobia and nationalism that are partly, it
can be argued, a response to the new kinds of insecurities citizens of
different countries around the world experience as a consequence of
neoliberalism. In the face of precarious employment and dwindling
social supports, many people are compelled to safeguard whatever
limited entitlements their citizenship may offer under neoliberalism
and call for immigration restrictions.

Regimes of labor brokerage, therefore, might offer a kind of
institutional “fix” resolving global capital’s demand for labor and neo-
liberalizing labor-importing states’ demand for temporary migrants
who will not make claims for membership and will return to their
countries of origin once their jobs are done.34 Labor brokerage sys-
tems can operate therefore at the convenience of global employers
and host states. Employers need not assume liability for immigration
law violations by employing “illegal” workers, yet they can still profit
from wage differentials between native-born and foreign workers.
They can, moreover, continue to exercise tremendous control over
migrants whose legal status is attached to them. Employers are also
able to take advantage of a temporary labor force that will not bur-
den them with demands for wage increases or seniority benefits over
time and is less likely to be organized by unions. They can, further-
more, benefit from the embodied labor of migrants, taking advantage
of their bodily capacities for labor while they are yet in their physical
prime. Labor-receiving states, meanwhile, can be assured a stock of
temporary migrants who are tethered to their home countries and
less likely to partake of government services.

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Introduction xxiii

International organizations like the World Bank (WB), the World
Trade Organization (WTO), and the International Organization for
Migration (IOM) have increasingly been championing guest worker
programs (which systems of labor brokerage are) as the solution
to the contradictions between global labor demand and immigra-
tion restriction. These organizations anticipate that guest worker
programs will have:

“win-win-win” outcomes, as migrant workers win by earning higher wages
abroad, migrant-receiving countries win with additional workers who
expand employment and economic output, and migrant-sending coun-
tries win via greater remittances and the return of workers who gained
skills abroad. Workers often lose in the process.35

The Philippines is often held up as a “model” of “migration manage-
ment,”36 and there is in fact growing evidence that developing states
around the world are engaging in their own kinds of “migration
management” or what I call “labor brokerage” systems. Critically
analyzing labor brokerage in the Philippines, therefore, becomes an
urgent project, especially if we are concerned about what labor
brokerage means for people’s prospects to live and work with dignity
and under conditions free from exploitation.37

The labor-sending state is perhaps the institution most able to
effectively resolve the contradictory forces of labor demand and
immigration restriction. It can perform regulatory functions that can
be performed only by states. While private labor recruiters might
be able to mobilize workers for overseas employers, they will ulti-
mately confront state borders that may or may not permit migrants
entry.38 It is true that labor recruiters often move workers across
these boundaries clandestinely; they may even produce fabricated
documents to get past immigration authorities. Unauthorized migra-
tions, however, pose too many challenges for labor-receiving states.
They are forced to deal with multiple and contradictory domestic
pressures from nativist groups, immigration rights advocates, and
employers, as well as international pressures to conform to human
rights conventions with respect to so-called “illegal immigrants.” It
becomes necessary for labor-receiving countries to identify alterna-
tives to stringent immigration restrictions and the undocumented

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xxiv Introduction

migrations they produce. Labor brokerage states may be precisely
what labor-receiving states need to regulate global circuits of migrants
as the labor-sending state has the authority to claim and the capac-
ity to execute control over its population. States have “monopolized”
the authority to legitimately control the movements of people across
national borders.39 It is with respect to the issue of national belonging
and citizenship, on which this authority over border crossings rests,
that labor-sending brokerage states are able to play a role in the global
regulation of workers in a way nonstate actors simply cannot.

States continue to need to assert symbolically, if not actually, their
sovereignty over their territory against encroachments from outsiders.
Nowhere is the idea of open borders considered acceptable with
respect to people. Yet given the global demands for workers, sov-
ereignty may be taking new forms: “The scope of sovereignty is not
essentially and in all respects tied to the territorial limits of states, and
the way in which the exercise of sovereignty is related to territory can
vary over time and place.”40 One way labor-receiving states may be
able to secure their sovereignty in the face of international migration,
undocumented and documented, may be to actually concede sover-
eignty to labor-sending states within the scope of their territory. That
is, labor-receiving states can formally grant labor-sending states cus-
todial power over their citizens. I would argue that the bilateral (and
in some cases multilateral) negotiations that are increasingly vital to
international transfers of labor are evidence of new configurations of
sovereignty in labor-receiving and labor-sending states. One impor-
tant bargain that is struck between these states is labor-receiving
states’ relinquishment of control over migrants to their home states,
control that labor-sending states are only too eager to accept. This
seems to be the model favored by groupings like the newly formed
Global Forum on Migration and Development, for instance, which
I will discuss in more detail in this book’s conclusion. As Sassen
correctly anticipates: “Reality has forced new conditions and new
practices on the inter-state system. This contributes to the interna-
tionalization of the inter-state system and may well be an important
precedent for handling other policy issues, including immigration, in
a more multilateral manner.”41

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Introduction xxv

The international system of states sustains the national “differ-
ence” on which migrant labor systems, as a source of cheap workers
for global capital, depend. Because systems of labor brokerage rely on
the reification of national identities and citizenship, labor-sending
states become ideal suppliers of workers for the world. As William
Robinson suggests, “National boundaries are not barriers to trans-
national migration but are mechanisms functional for the supply of
labor on a global scale and for the reproduction of the system.”42
Global capital continues to rely on national boundaries even as neo-
liberalism demands the diminishing of these boundaries. The unequal
value ascribed to different forms of national labor, which is often ren-
dered in racialized and gendered terms, is the means by which capital
can extract surplus value from workers.

Book Overview

In chapter 1, I provide historical context for the emergence of labor
brokerage in the Philippines. I suggest that the institutional precur-
sors for contemporary labor brokerage can be traced to the colonial
labor system established under the Americans at the turn of the twen-
tieth century. Moreover, I argue that U.S. colonialism has had deep
and lasting consequences for Philippine state formation and for the
constitution of class relations in the Philippines well beyond formal
national independence in 1946. Fundamentally a neocolonial state
administered by elites long favored by the Philippines has been com-
pliant with the U.S hegemonic neoliberal economic prescriptions.
The government has introduced export-oriented development to at
once sustain a social order favorable to domestic elite interests while
maintaining the Philippine state’s legitimacy in the global arena,
where international recognition in the system of nation-states ulti-
mately requires conformity to capitalist logics. Because neoliberalism
has fundamentally destabilizing effects — effects that are significantly
gendered — labor brokerage has become necessary to contain the
social, political, and economic dislocations it produces. Labor broker-
age became a practicable strategy for the government as international
migration from the Philippines had already been normalized under

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xxvi Introduction

the U.S. colonial administration. The Philippine state opportunisti-
cally took advantage of these historical legacies, on the one hand,
and new forms of labor demand globally on the other in order to
profit from the export of its citizens.

In chapters 2 and 3, I illustrate the specific mechanisms by which
the Philippine state mobilizes workers for out-migration by examining
the functions of the Philippines’ transnational migration bureaucracy.
I get at the “micropolitics” of power, those realms of state prac-
tice that often go overlooked and yet are essential to processes of
globalization. I illustrate how the state has created education and
training programs that are actually matched to the demands of labor
markets around the world, which are monitored by the Philippines’
global network of embassies and consular offices. I show how the
state, moreover, uses its transnational apparatus to actively advertise
Philippine migrants to overseas employers and to begin bargaining
with foreign governments to facilitate their workers’ out-migration.
The state draws on racialized and gendered logics to pitch Philip-
pine workers to foreign employers and governments (as Arroyo does
above) as race and gender structure global demands for migrant labor.
My discussions in this chapter draw from archival research of Philip-
pine government documents, interviews with Philippine migration
bureaucrats, ethnographic observations of the migration bureaucracy,
as well as interviews with migrant workers themselves.

In chapter 4, I explore how the state has reconfigured meanings of
nationalism and national belonging with respect to overseas migra-
tion, what I call migrant citizenship, to make the act of temporarily
living and working abroad a commonsensical practice for ordinary
people. The system of labor brokerage in the Philippines rests on a
particular (one might dare say peculiar) sort of state–citizen rela-
tion. Under a regime of labor brokerage, Philippine nationalism is
accomplished through one’s departure from the nation-state. One
is not, however, conscripted into military service, for instance. One
is instead conscripted to serve as part of a reserve army of labor.
State–citizen relations in the neocolonial, neoliberal Philippines is
necessarily fragile, and it is therefore a site of persistent investment.
The state engages in the active construction of citizenship through

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Introduction xxvii

a myriad of practices. In this chapter, I am interested in its everyday
bureaucratic practices as well as more formal policies. Bureaucracies
and various kinds of bureaucratic practices are especially rich sites
of study because it is in bureaucratic spaces and through both the
banal and ostentatious practices of government that states and citi-
zens encounter one another most intimately.43 Hence, in addition to
examining laws and other legal–juridical instruments to track shifts
in citizenship, this chapter draws on ethnographic research, inter-
views with migration bureaucrats, and examinations of government
documents produced and circulated within migration agencies.

The meanings of citizenship are often structured by gendered
logics, as men and women figure very differently in the national
imagination. Chapter 5 explores public debates about women’s migra-
tion that plagued the Philippine state throughout the 1990s. As
women’s out-migration as domestic workers (as well as other gender-
typed workers) began to outpace the out-migration of male migrants,
public debates raged about whether the Philippines should either
curtail or better regulate women’s emigration. Nationalist anxieties
were heightened by what was perceived as the “shame” women’s
out-migration as domestic workers brought to the Philippines’ sub-
ject status globally. These anxieties fed into mass protests with
the hanging of a Filipina domestic worker, Flor Contemplacion,
by the Singaporean government in 1995. Protesters were outraged
that the Philippine state did not prevent her execution. The trans-
national mobilizations, however, forced the Philippines to introduce
new migration reforms manifested in the Act of 1995. In this chap-
ter, I explore the gendered consequences these reforms had for
understandings of nationalism and national belonging as they apply
specifically to migrant women.

Chapter 6 focuses on the processes and outcomes of a wildcat
strike where Philippine migrant workers employed in Brunei, exert-
ing some of the very “rights” spelled out in the Migrant Workers and
Overseas Filipinos Act, enlisted the assistance of Philippine state
representatives to advocate on their behalf for higher wages and
working conditions. Here I examine what migrant citizenship means
for migrant workers and for the Philippine state in practice. On the

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xxviii Introduction

one hand, the case demonstrates how the Philippine migrants often
see their interests tied to and guaranteed by the Philippine state. On
the other hand, as the outcome of the struggle reveals, though Philip-
pine officials intervene on their citizens’ behalf to some extent, they
are willing to discipline those who threaten the Philippines’ relations
with foreign employers and host countries through forced repatriation
and other sanctions.

In my concluding chapter I discuss the key insights my work on the
Philippines offers to the scholarship on the state and international
migration within the context of globalization. I then briefly describe
emergent forms of labor brokerage outside the Philippines and suggest
how my study here might inform future studies of this phenomenon.
Finally, I discuss alternative meanings of rights and membership that
migrant workers’ groups like Migrante International offer. Migrant
activists construct important visions of more equitable ways of being
and belonging that become vital to consider in today’s neoliberal
global order.

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