Even Beyond the Local Community: A Close Look at Latina Youths' Return Trips to Mexico

Drawing from nearly four years of qualitative research, this article examines the lives of three second-generation mexicanas living in northern California who maintain close ties to their families' natal communities in Mexico. This ethnographic portrait outlines the contours of belonging in these spaces, including the affection and close relationships established with members in Mexico and the enactment of their ritual and spiritual personae in local religious shrines in Jalisco. While the youth and other family members experience certain discrimination and marginalization in the United States--or are not treated as full citizens because they are immigrants of color--the local and family knowledge that the young women gain during their return trips to Mexico serves as a powerful counter-story of existence and helps temper the subtractive aspects of assimilation. ********** This article examines the lives of three transnational immigrant youth living in the United States who maintain close ties to their families' country of origin. Though they permanently reside in urban communities in northern California, these second-generation mexicanas frequently visit the small ranchos and pueblos where their parents and grandparents were raised. As "transnationals," the students participate in local U.S. practices engendered by their immigrant social networks while simultaneously engaging in a host of social, religious, and economic activities in their families' homeland through both return trips and various forms of telecommunications (i.e., internet, telephone, etc.). While schools sometimes only see the absences or missed days that transnational students accumulate during return trips to their homeland, in this article I provide the greater context and details of how Genobeba, Carlota, and Maria--the focal youth of this study--experience return stays in Mexico. (1) On different occasions, I have described in detail the context of "being family" in a transnational setting (Sanchez, 2004, 2008) as well as the ways in which Genobeba, Carlota, and Maria acquire world learning across nation-state boundaries (Sanchez, 2007b). The present article--based on nearly four years of field work and participatory research--expands upon the notion of growing up in a transnational family and examines the wider concept of "membership" within a transnational community. Such membership entails a set of attachments that are positive and enduring as well as a set of dislocations, or difficulties, in belonging to two places at once. In some cases, the pain of certain dislocations makes the need to maintain attachments that much more pronounced. As second-generation immigrants, the young women make transnationalism not only work in their lives but also see it as a vital part of their adaptation and existence in the U.S. They need their trips in Mexico--as well as participation in their immigrant ethnic enclaves in the U.S.--to carve a space in a country that still does not value, as a whole, bilingual and bicultural lives, let alone immigrants of color. In the following sections, I provide a brief review of transnationalism, focusing on the Latino experience as well as the complex nature of attachments (positives) and dislocations (negatives) pertinent to living as a transnational. I also point to ways in which transnationalism and assimilation are connected. I then present the methods and context of the study, including a description of the youth's lives in their U.S. communities. In the findings, I discuss the dislocations experienced by the youth and briefly those of their fathers; these are comparable to having partial membership or fragmented citizenship in spaces where mainstream white people marginalize or discriminate them. Next, I depict the ways in which the Latina immigrant youth feel special in Mexico and how they enact their Catholic spirituality while there. These transnational attachments serve as a cultural and familial resource to buffer the dislocations experienced as immigrants of color in the U. …