'Are We Now Equal?' Recent experiences and perceptions of South American migrants in Argentina under MERCOSUR

Broadly speaking, my thesis examines the workings of grounded social, economic and political processes that have contributed, often in a conflicting manner, to the (re)definition of membership criteria in both the nation and the state. It does so in dialogue with two broad, interrelated bodies of literature, those on citizenship and transnationalism, which have examined issues of belonging, exclusion, mobility and access to rights among transnational migrants, while highlighting the renewed capacity of the state to regulate both people’s movements and migrants’ actual access to public entitlements. My dissertation challenges three sets of claims shaping research and policy agendas on migrant transnationalism and citizenship, and questions the hegemonic analytical and methodological approaches underlying them. My research has been carried out at two distinctive analytical and empirical levels. On the one hand, I examine the “technologies of citizenship” (Ong 2003, Fujiwara 2008) deployed by the government to transform Argentina into a diverse, inclusive and Latin American nation over the past decade, paying particular attention to Kirchnerismo’s creation of a “new legality” for the Paraguayans, Bolivians and Peruvians in the country. On the other hand, I analyze the “horizontal dimensions of citizenship processes” (Neveu 2005, Pickus and Skerry 2007, Gagné and Neveu 2009) among these migrants in urban, peripheral and rural areas of the partido of La Plata. Namely, I study the extent to which migrants’ socio-economic circumstances have changed in tandem with their new legal status (as nationals of the MERCOSUR in Argentina with rights equal to those of its citizens) and the “inclusive citizenship” policies deployed by the government. My dissertation pays particular attention to the grounding and embodiment of rights by examining how migrants’ new legal status translates into everyday life depending on a) where they live and work, and b) their perceived social status by other migrants and non-migrants. On the one hand, I look at urban, peripheral and rural areas of La Plata as zones of graduated sovereignty (Ong 1999) where particular governmentality regimes have emerged in tandem with the settlement of often ethnically marked groupings, whose entitlements and obligations differ from those in other zones. On the other hand, I examine how social status is produced through everyday social interaction by transposing socially constructed distinctions, such as race, class, gender and national origin, into formal systems of exclusion (Gregory 2007). My ethnographic analysis of what I shall call limítrofes’ experiences of legality demonstrates that their formal equality vis-à-vis Argentinians, far from being merely given as a new legal status evenly guaranteed to all, is both unequally experienced by diverse migrants and differently enforced in geographic areas governed by distinctive governmentality regimes (Foucault 1978).

Keyphrases: Migration, MERCOSUR, Anthropology, Socio-cultural anthropology, Ethnography, Transnationality, Migration, Regional integration, Citizenship, State, MERCOSUR, Argentina