Gender and Migration
Week 5: Gender and Diasporic Identities: Borders and Boundaries
Introduction
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1. Avtar Brah: Diaspora and Diaspora Space
Brah’s theorizing of migration revolves around the concept of diaspora.
The image of a journey to settle down somewhere else is at the heart of the notion of diaspora.
What distinguishes diaspora is the configuring of a cluster of migrations into one journey through narrative.
It is through narration that the narrator is produced as belonging to the diaspora.
Diaspora as historical narrative is concerned with the story of what happened, what marked the journey, how the group is positioned after arrival and as settling down occurs
Diaspora as theoretical concept recognizes that experience is always mediated – the narratives will shift over time
It is within this confluence of narrativity that “diasporic community” is differently imagined under different historical circumstances. By this I mean that the identity of the diasporic imagined community is far from fixed or pre-given. (Brah, 1996, p. 183).
Brah is also concerned to recognize that the diaspora is not homogeneous:
As such, all diasporas are differentiated, heterogeneous, contested spaces, even as they are implicated in the construction of a common “we”. It is important, therefore, to be attentive to the nature and type of processes in and through which the collective “we” is constituted. Who is empowered and who is disempowered in a specific construction of the"we”? How are social divisions negotiated in the construction of the “we”? (Brah, 1996, p. 184).
The ‘other’ against which the ‘we’ is constituted is not homogeneous either.
And nor is it adequate to mediate relations between diasporas be mediated always via the ‘dominant’ group.
Diaspora space - inhabited by those who ‘stayed put’ as well as migrants
Myths of origin must be exposed - there must be no originary absolutes
Intellectually this refuses the essentialism in claiming a privileged space of belonging.
Politically this refuses to privilege the claims of one group to a territory over those of the other.
Nobody belongs naturally either to the diaspora space or the migrants’ origin
Home
While being critical of discourses of fixed origins, the concept of diaspora nonetheless recognizes a desire for home.
Home is the site of everyday lived experiences - a place where we practise our daily routines, where we are physically located. It can be cited as the basis of claims to belong to the nation, but these claims can be denied, often in racialised ways.
Home is also a ‘mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination’.
A black British woman of Caribbean origin may define her home as the Caribbean precisely because the claim of home in terms of everyday lived experience is not afforded her in racist Britain. Or she may claim Britain as her home precisely to oppose the narrative that says it cannot be.
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To study migration using the concept of diaspora and diaspora space means to pay attention to the following:
The way the narratives of the journey are told and re-told and how this telling shifts over time.
How and why originary absolutes are imagined, how home and belonging are constructed and felt by all groups in the diaspora space.
How the diasporic community fits into the world in terms of economy and polity; how it is represented and how it represents itself.
How regimes of power inscribe the formation of the diaspora, and how diasporas relate to one another.
2. Anzaldua: Borders and Borderlands
The actual physical borderland that I'm dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S., Southwest/ Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands, and spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. (Anzaldua, 1987)
The border is constructed but also material - it is a place where the third world grates against the first world and bleeds
Anzaldua explores what it means to live in the borderlands between Mexico and the US
And in the borderlands of sexuality and gender, as a lesbian and a feminist.
‘Borderlands’ are a space of betweenness, of being neither insider nor outsider
Identity is plural and unstable, reflected in the book by combining poem and prose, myth and autobiography, spanish and english, past and present.
Anzaldua writes herself into the book, defined as "chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist".
Born in 1942 to sharecropper/field-worker parents n South Texas Rio Grande Valley, the family relocated when she was 11 to the city of Hargill, Texas, on the border.
She worked in the fields from a young age and throughout her education
She taught in schools then University, specialising in chicana and feminist studies
The history of the Tex-Mex border:
Pre-Aztec Indians (indigenous north americans) migrated south from what is now Texas and the SW US into what is now Mexico and Central America.
Spanish invaded in early 16thc and intermarriage and interbreeding produced mestizos
Mestizos dominated native americans to inherit Central and South America
Mestizos/Chicanos/Mexican Americans began going back North as porters to the ‘gold hungry conquistador and soul-hungry missionaries’ (originally and secondarily indigenous to the SW).
1800s - white Americans push into North Mexico, driving out Chicanos
Mexico won Battle of the Alamo but in 1846 US troops invaded, occupied and forced ceding of half the territory - what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and California.
Whites, gringos, lynched, dispossessed and cheated Chicanos out of their land
Agribusiness irrigated the desert and established fruit farms
Further South millions of American Indians dispossessed of their land
Dependence on migration to US extreme in Mexico today, migration not to a white land but to their homeland.
Access of migrants restricted, while capital moves freely
Fee to traffickers in 1998 was US$600 from Matamoros to Houston
Telling how the Tex-Mex border has been created and ‘defended’ disrupts and destabilizes the myths of a stable and naturalized nationhood - the nation becomes a story that is told, contingent, discursively produced, rather than ‘real’.
The story of the stable and naturalized nation depends on the imagination and what Bhabha calls ‘forgetting to remember’.
Anzaldua also delineates the gendered and sexual borders and boundaries that she experienced within Mexican-American culture.
Men were in control, women were expected to conform to religious life or motherhood, the only other recognized outcome being ‘the fall’ into sex work.
There was no greater deviance imagined for women than being queer. How then is home to be imagined by a lesbian Chicana, given her fear of being rejected, as being seen as a traitor of the ‘true’ culture, abandoned by her mother?
No, I do not buy all the myths of the tribe into which I was born… I will not glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me and which have injured me in the name of protecting me… And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture – una cultura mestiza – with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture’ (p. 22).
3. Among my Own in Another Culture
Maitrayee Chaudhuri’s account of researching cultural identity among Asian Indian Americans in Massachusetts suggests that the stories told at any one time about diasporic history differ between groups that have made the same journey.
The Asian Indian Americans saw themselves as broken from their land of origin and therefore needing to hang on to and perform culture more urgently.
Most professionals repudiated any connections with earlier working class immigrants from India, saw Asian Indian Americans as only MC high flyers (recruited very selectively in the late 1960s).
Meanwhile small Indian business people claimed direct descent from Punjab peasants discriminated against in the early 1990s in order to claim economic benefits from affirmative action programmes.
India’s pre-colonial heritage formed the basis for claiming a common past with the author – a fictional ‘we’ constructed across difference
But the author’s post-colonial political Indian identity was often eschewed.
Some feminists were close to the authors’ identity, looking back to ‘first wave’ WC immigrants and celebrating their role in labour, race and immigrant politics of early 20th century
The US privileges not the story of leaving but that of arrival and, hopefully, ‘success’ – the rest of the world is rather invisible.
Asian Indian American identity is hybrid, both Indian and American, whereby the Indian identity is expressed through culture – food, family, music- and the American through political allegiance.
Indianness for the author was defined through political identity as a citizen in contemporary India.
Indianness for the informants was Indian culture implicated in today’s America.
Women carried the cultural identity in the diaspora – speaking an Indian language, wearing Indian dress, learning Indian music and dance.