Week 13: Transnational Spaces/Place-Based Activism and Social Change

(On Ong's Flexible Citizenship: The cultural Logics of Transnationality
and De Genova's "Locating a Mexican Chicago in the Spce of the U.S. Nation-State)

We read "Latino and Asian Racial Formations at the Frontiers of US Nationalism" by Nicholas De Genova during Week 3. I particularly liked this text the most out of the three text that we had to read during that week. Ngai's account of the history of immigration and Kim's theory of racial triangulation were very intriguing but many of the sentences of De Genova's text made a lot of sense to me. This week's text by De Genova, however, didn't similarly put a lot of my abstract impressions into words. Whereas the earlier text seemed more philosphical and provided more general insight, this text focused more and contextualized within the setting of what De Genova calls "Mexican Chicago."(Perhaps I wasn't able to relate as much because I've never been to Chicago for long to be able to observe and get impressions of what he describes.) As he explicitly lays it out for the reader, his text "considers the ways in which the spatial topograph of the Americas historically has become intrinsically racialized and involves a continuous work of reracialization" (96). Later, he states that he wants to "emphasize the production of Mexican Chicago as a conjunctural space with transformative repercussions in all directions [..] to assert with the idea of Mexican Chicago that something about Chicago itself has become elusive, even irretrievable, for the U.S. nation-state" (99). I don't have much knowledge about Chicago to reflect on his text well, but I have learned in pervious courses that the concept of ethnic enclave (by I-forgot-who) was based on Chicago with the black belt and immigrant communities. While it is true, as De Genova states, that space is racialized and there are repercussions, I would like to think that it has not become impossible for the U.S. to express or define or otherwise have a mental grasp of Chicago as a state. De Genova's assertion that Chicago should properly belong within Latin America seems controversial.

On the other hand, Ong describes the situation in northern California where what she calls the Chinese "money elite" lives in exclusive communities. (It's always interesting to note how more often than not the author belongs to the racial or ethnic group that he or she studies. Well, I'm assuming based on their last names.) I wasn't able to study this text in depth, so I'll add on more later...