Transnationalism and New Visions of Belonging

The fact that children and youths within some transnational families are caught within the ambivalences towards migrants and children and the contradictions of neoliberal economic priorities and liberal-democratic values does not mean that they are passive in the face of this.

Ambitious undocumented Mexican youths, for example, finding the university system in the United States to be unattainable, have taken the risk of returning to Mexico to enroll in university there, with the hopes that a college education will allow them to return legally to the country in which they were raised (Cortez et al. 2014). Many more are staying put in the United States and risking deportation by collectively challenging problematic and arbitrary constructions of illegality and refusing the contradiction between their juridical identities as undocumented and their subjective identities as US-raised children. They are, in other words, “coming out” as undocumented youths. Having internalized a basic tenet of liberal democracy, namely that citizens have the power to make change, undocumented youths are rearticulating the grounds for their inclusion through organizing, for instance, under the banner of being “undocumented, unafraid and unapologetic,” with the understanding that silence is a more dangerous option than speaking out (Negron-gonzales 2014). As Cahill etal. note, analyses of the “school-to-sweatshop pipeline” are powerful tools in this political process because they name and elaborate personal experiences as political and reframe “the problem of immigration” as a “civil rights problem” and a “cheap labor problem.” They delineate the stark contradictions between liberal principles of inclusion and the production of radicalized youths as marginal and exploitable through immigration, education, and other state policies.

So too Filipino youths in Canada have not been passive in the face of the challenges of family separation and they have actively and critically engaged with their transnationalism to rethink their place in Canada (Pratt with FCYA/UKPC 2003, p. 58).

Locating themselves as transnational has led members of the Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance (FCYA) in Vancouver, for instance, to study histories of other racialized immigrant groups in Canada and to develop a broader structural analysis of exploitable labor and systemic racism in Canada. They have also explored different but resonating histories of indigenous dispossession from the land in Canada and the Philippines. This process of study and discussion has been one means for FCYA members to rethink their relationships to and within the Canadian nation and to find a new sense of belonging in Canada as critical and politically engaged citizens (see also Kelly 2015). More recently at the University of British Columbia, graduate students involved in the Philippine Studies Series have been preoccupied with holding their entanglements with colonialism in the Philippines together with their complicities and entanglements within settler colonialism in Canada. They are navigating the difficult conceptual and political terrain of mobilizing an idea of Filipino in Canada that exists beyond liberal categories of identity and a politics of liberal multiculturalism (of inclusion and recognition), in ways that disrupt rather than reproduce settler-colonial relations and its foundational logic of the violent erasure of indigenous peoples. The violence of transnational labor migration, in other words, is leading youths in different countries in different circumstances in different ways to ask creative and searching questions that productively disrupt “the nation” at its very foundation.

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Source: Harker C., Horschelmann K. (Eds.). Conflict, Violence and Peace. Springer,2017. — 456 p.. 2017

Transnationalism and New Visions of Belonging

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