Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and "Illegality" in Mexican Chicago

While Chicago has the second-largest Mexican population among U.S. cities, relatively little ethnographic attention has focused on its Mexican community. This much-needed ethnography of Mexicans living and working in Chicago examines processes of racialization, labor subordination, and class formation; the politics of nativism; and the structures of citizenship and immigration law. Nicholas De Genova develops a theory of “Mexican Chicago” as a transnational social and geographic space that joins Chicago to innumerable communities throughout Mexico. “Mexican Chicago” is a powerful analytical tool, a challenge to the way that social scientists have thought about immigration and pluralism in the United States, and the basis for a wide-ranging critique of U.S. notions of race, national identity, and citizenship.De Genova worked for two and a half years as a teacher of English in ten industrial workplaces (primarily metal-fabricating factories) throughout Chicago and its suburbs. In Working the Boundaries he draws on fieldwork conducted in these factories, in community centers, and in the homes and neighborhoods of Mexican migrants. He describes how the meaning of “Mexican” is refigured and racialized in relation to a U.S. social order dominated by a black-white binary. Delving into immigration law, he contends that immigration policies have worked over time to produce Mexicans as the U.S. nation-state’s iconic “illegal aliens.” He explains how the constant threat of deportation is used to keep Mexican workers in line. Working the Boundaries is a major contribution to theories of race and transnationalism and a scathing indictment of U.S. labor and citizenship policies.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Preface xv Introduction: Working the Boundaries 1 I. Politics of Knowledge/Politics of Practice 1. Decolonizing Ethnography 13 2. The “Native’s Point of View”: Immigration and the Immigrant as Objects of U. S. Nationalism 56 3. Locating a Mexican Chicago in the Space of the U. S. Nation-State 95 II. Everyday Life: The Location of Politics 4. The Politics of Production 147 5. Reracialization: Between “Americans” and Blacks 167 III. Historicity: The Politics of Location 6. The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant “Illegality” 213 Conclusion 251 Notes 255 Bibliography 281 Index 311

About the Author :
Nicholas De Genova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Latino Studies Program at Columbia University. He is a coauthor of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship.

Review :
"In this stunning ethnographic achievement, the Mexican workers of Chicago reinvent the city, the labor process, the United States, and 'our America' as a whole: a region that knows no borders. But at the same time the nation-state, the systems of law and politics, and their working lives confine and encumber them. Working the Boundaries shows how much agency and insight are built into the realities of immigration, how limited and self-defeating are the core politics of U.S. nationalism and racism, and how powerful a weapon ethnography can be in the fight for freedom and justice. Nicholas De Genova has produced a book of great insight and beauty. Highly recommended!"--Howard Winant, author of The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice "Nicholas De Genova vividly renders 'Mexican Chicago,' where social relations are simultaneously imbricated in the U.S. political project of regulating labor and immigration and Mexican workers' immersion in regional economies and politics in Mexico. His at times provocative assessments of current scholarship will engender further clarity in research and policy discussions about Mexican migration, contributing to American studies, Chicana/o studies, and the ethnography of North America."--Patricia Zavella, coeditor of Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader "Working the Boundaries is a timely book that will likely make waves in a number of fields in the social sciences and the humanities." --Peter Benson, Journal of Latin American Anthropology