Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago by De Genova, Nicholas (2005) Paperback

by Nicholas De Genova

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.

Genres: Anthropology, Race, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Nicholas De Genova has taught anthropology, migration studies, and Latino studies at Columbia University, Stanford University, and the University of Bern, and has held research positions at the University of Warwick and the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago and the editor of Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States and co-editor (with Nathalie Peutz) of The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement.

Reviews

[Mario · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chi-town in the mid-90s. Mexican migrants. Mexican Americans. African Americas. White ethnics. Windy City corruption. Factory Work. Factory Work. Factory Work. Immigration Law. Law-in-the-Abstract. Neoliberal Capitalism. White Supremacy, then and now. U.S. Empire--from gunboat diplomacy to the present. Transnationalism.

An ethnographically and theoretically informed work of "anti-anthropological" critique, this book offers up nuanced, fiercely politcal arguments about some of the most central socio-political issues in the contemporary world, and in particular the unequal conjunctures between Latin America and the urban United States. Being an ethnography, this book isn't all just theory. --What makes it most special, perhaps, is its attempt to take the ways in which abstractions like NEOLIBERAL CAPITAL-NEGROPHOBIA-RACIALIZATION are lived by individual human beings as a point of departure to theorize about these things. --I don't know if it succeeds, then, in being anti-anthropological. But it's worth a read.

[FL · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't feel qualified to write a review of this book. Perhaps because I'm not an anthropologist, or perhaps because I'm not a communist. But on the internet, nobody knows whether you're qualified, so I might as well!

I read this book out of personal interest in some areas of Mexican Chicago as a place I've spent some time, albeit in all honesty mostly as a white person in search of tacos. I was instead confronted with blistering critiques of how American factory owners exploit race divisions. Which, in the long run, is probably better for me, and tells me a lot more about the sort of Chicago life that you don't see when you just go around eating at taquerias.

The book makes a few central points, directed at a few different audiences. Anthropology, says de Genova, is an academic project by neocolonial institutions framed around American nativist whiteness. That same whiteness, he observes, simultaneously prevents Mexican immigrants from ever really "becoming American," in their words, while also giving them something to aspire to at the expense of black Americans. And, most crucially, the idea of whether an immigrant is "legal" or not doesn't actually have to do with keeping people out or in, it has to do with keeping their work exploited; it's a lot harder to try to get better hours or a living wage when your employer can threaten to have you thrown out.

These points are made with an---at least to me---odd blend of material, interspersing detailed discussions of the author's time teaching ESL in metal fabrication plants with heavy communist and other theoretical jargon. But it makes for an engaging read with some passages that are skimmable. It might not have been the book I wanted to read, but it was a book that was good for me to read.