Immigration and the Border: Politics and Policy in the New Latino Century (Latino Perspectives) - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

David L. Leal is associate professor of government and Mexican American studies, Director of the Irma Rangel Public Policy Institute, and Director of the Immigration Studies Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin.

José E. Limón is the Julian Samora Chair in Latino Studies and the Notre Dame Professor of American Literature as well as Director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

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In an interdisciplinary examination of the impact of immigration on the North American social landscape at the end of the millennium, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco (1998) noted that the phenomenon is likely to have a “momentous” effect on American culture and society. The current climate of debate over national immigration policy makes clear how prescient Suárez-Orozco’s views were. And if immigration is having a significant effect upon the United States, the same can be said for its impact on the countries immigrants are leaving behind.

The research presented here is primarily interested in this phenomenon in terms of the psychology of immigration in the context of the Mexican experience. This mass migration of Mexicans north of the border is having as profound an impact on Mexico as on the United States. According to the most recent Pew Hispanic Center study on immigration patterns (Passel 2005), one out of every eleven Mexicans now resides in this country―a fact that clearly has equally momentous implications for both Mexico and the United States.

Our interest in the present chapter, however, is not to explore the impact of immigration upon Mexico and Mexicans as such, but rather to explore the ways in which that impact might “live” in the experience of the Mexican immigrant as a kind of imaginary, that is, as a conscious and unconscious “presence” in the psychological experience of the immigrant. This perception is derived from and embedded in an ongoing, explicit, and implicit understanding of how one’s fellow countrymen view the current immigration phenomenon and what the immigrant is undergoing.

Leaving one’s homeland for another land represents a dislocation of varied meanings and implications. In order to understand the psycho- logical impact of that experience, we must first understand the role of culture in identity, since the immigrant’s dislocation stirs, in part, internal, psychological dislocations as well. Elsewhere, the first author has written about culture in relation to the development of identity (Ainslie 1995). Others, too, have theorized related points (see Winnicott 1971; Volkan 1997).

From the very beginnings of human life the internalization of culture is part of identity. Indeed, Winnicott’s implication is that without theorizing culture as a psychological process it is impossible to conceive of relationships more generally. Relatedness between infant and caregiver may be the foundation for identity, but to theorize about relationships as if they stood outside of a cultural embeddedness is meaningless.

(excerpt from Chapter 2)