Conversations Across Borders: A Workshop in Transnational Studies

Date: 

Wednesday, March 11, 2015, 4:00pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, S450

"Negative Social Remittances, Civic Engagement, and 'Gray Zones of Politics'"

Speaker:

Clarisa Perez-Armendariz, Assistant Professor, Politics Department, Bates College.

Discussant:

Mao-Mei Liu, Postdoctoral Fellow, Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University.

Contact:

Charlotte Lloyd
charlottelloyd@fas.harvard.edu

Abstract:

Social remittances are the norms, practices and social capital that international migrants learn or observe during their time living abroad and subsequently transmit to their origin country (Levitt 1999). Current scholarship mostly explores the effects of positive social remittances such as “principles of neighborliness, community participation, and aspirations for social mobility…values about how organizations should work, incorporating ideas about good government and good churches and about how politicians and clergy should behave” (Levitt 2001: 59-61). The research generally ignores that migrants can also transmit the negative norms and practices to which they are exposed in their receiving country (such as inside federal prisons and detention centers), and the possibility that migrants involved in clandestine or illicit activities can build social capital—including transnational social capital—that can facilitate undesirable activities that include violence, international trafficking, and organized crime. In sum, little research has explored what happens when migrants transmitnegative social remittances to their origin country.

This paper asks how return migrants who import negative social remittances engage civically in their origin countries. More specifically, it explores the how the norms, practices and social capital that international migrants learn or observed abroad affect their civic engagement when they move back to their origin country to resettle in what Auyero (2007) calls “grey zones of politics.” Gray zones of politics are contexts wherein illicit actors—including violent ones—interact with formal political institutions and/or processes in more or less visible fashions to shift political costs, opportunities and outcomes (Auyero 2007). They prevail in many of the countries and subnational entities from which large numbers of migrants depart and then return, including in Mexico and Central America, and the post-conflict countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where democratic transitions have given birth to citizens—the basic building block of civic engagement—even as the rule of law, civil protections, transparency, and government accountability are not yet consolidated.

I adopt Brettell and Reed-Danahay’s (2011) definition of civic engagement as the process by which individuals “enter into and act within civic spaces to address issues of public concern” (194). Yet I do not limit civic engagement to “civil” actions. I take seriously Auyero and Mahler’s (2011) contention that the tendency to see many informal, violent, and corrupt forms of civic engagement as “lacking the prestige of a legitimate object of political analysis” and to treat them simply as “evidence of the general sordidness of politics and the corruptive influence of power, or as a sign of the backwardness of less that democratic regimes” (p. 199) keeps us from understanding them both theoretically and empirically as routine political activities in which citizens can choose to take part (see also Arias and Goldstein 2010).

My analysis examines a selection of Mexican return migrants who have engaged in nationally visible forms of civic engagement within Mexican subnational localities where gray zone politics prevail including within the Mexican states of Puebla, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Zacatecas and Guerrero. The objective is to determine how their experiences abroad shapes their modes of civic engagement in Mexico upon return, and to explore the varying civic engagement opportunities for individuals who import either negative or positive social remittances. The data come from Mexican and US newspapers, blogs, and personal interviews with leaders, community members, academics and journalists on both sides of the border.

I find that there exist significant leadership opportunities for returnees who import negative remittances to local gray zones of politics. Specifically, within such contexts, migrants who bring negative social remittances with them can contribute to the illicit and invisible funding of electoral campaigns and help finance informal clientelist networks; additionally, they can help organize and equip community police and armed self-defense organizations.

The research findings have implications for democratic consolidation in Mexico and other major outmigration countries where formal and informal actors collaborate at the margins of both the law and formal institutions to carry out the business of politics. Indeed, negative social remittances may be more damaging for democracy than positive remittances are beneficial. We do not know how many migrants transmit negative social remittances. However the fact that return migration is on the rise, at the same time that US immigration enforcement practices during the past decade have pushed the lives of ever-more immigrants to the margins of society suggests reason for concern.