Citizenship Project

Cultural Imaginaries of Citizenship and Borders

Munroe Eagles, University at Buffalo – The SUNY (Principal Investigator)

Michael Ripmeester, Brock University (Co-Investigator)

Francisco Fernández, UADY (Co-Investigator)

Citizenship and borders have tended to be approached through top-down definitions emanating from the law and from the discourse on civil rights and duties. Political geographers, anthropologists and others have long drawn attention to the complexity of borders and borderlands. These scholars show that our borders are complex and historically-constituted institutions that entail diverse consequences for the populations they divide. Yet, since 9/11 these concerns have been all but displaced by a concern with border security. A more nuanced view of borders suggests that they are better viewed as territorial markers at which a number of legal, cultural, and political forces interact to instantiate conceptions of citizenship that are themselves often highly contested. Multiple group identities held by residents brought together within borders pose a challenge to notions of cultural homogeneity within the nation-state. By the same token, many indigenous peoples in all three North American countries find their communities fragmented by national borders. Several of these first nations have not relinquished sovereignty to contemporary states and on this basis invoke their aboriginal right to move freely across borders, to settle where they wish, and pursue their livelihood in either of the bordering states. Our project will explore the impact of borders – represented variously by state boundaries, aboriginal reserve boundaries, or cultural communities, - on the reproduction of cultural identity in North American societies. From our perspective, borders present both challenges for the maintenance of cultural identity, but equally they can provide strategic opportunities as sites of resistance for cultural protection and mobilization that borders present to minority cultures. While at first glance our proposal may not have obvious policy ramifications, we believe that a careful and nuanced look at these alternative perspectives will undermine currently prevailing but over-simple conceptualizations of the border as a simple securitized barrier for the purposes of state control.

Without wishing to sweep all contextual differences aside, it can be argued that the three states of North America – Canada, the United States, and Mexico, are all settler societies in which European immigrants gained control from indigenous peoples of the vast bulk of the landmass of the continent – whether through force, negotiation, and/or duplicity. The twofold result of these processes is that, on the one hand, to greater or lesser degrees the aboriginal peoples in all three countries share a sense of disentitlement. On the other hand, different groups of Europeans, Asians and Africans migrated and continue to migrate, by will or by force, to the Americas, inserting themselves in North American societies through different local and regional contexts and processes, and this has led to highly fragmented notions of citizenship, borders and identities, especially at contact zones among groups upholding what they see as distinctive cultures. In recent decades aboriginal peoples in all three countries have mobilized at a variety of spatial scales to defend and advance their citizenship claims. The same has been true of the Chicano movement in the United States. The continuous in-flow of migrants who claim spaces of their own continues to renew the cities and the countryside as spaces of intense negotiation. International borders have become central in the enactment of these contending views of citizenship as they constitute physical sites at which citizenship claims must be pronounced – and as the borders harden due to security concerns at which they must be validated. As such, they are locations of contention between competing views of citizenship and identity. Similarly, strong regional identities, sometimes accompanied by language and/or cultural claims, as in Quebec, Louisiana, Puerto Rico and Yucatán, question the cultural legitimacy of politics aimed at the homogenization of citizenship, borders and cultural symbols as recognized by nation-states. Citizenship and borders, then, become imagined spaces of belonging and cultural legitimacy the configuration of which cannot be readily assumed.

Format of Proposed Activity

Our proposed collaboration, involving academics and students affiliated with institutions located near national borders, will aim to broaden consideration of the nature and significance of borders beyond the now-dominant security paradigm. Organized by the University at Buffalo/Brock University “Institute on Transnational Studies in the Americas” (we have discussed the possibility of an affiliation with the Autonomous University of the Yucatán (UADY) on a recent visit to Merida and received a very favorable reception), we aim to offer our faculty and student participants an opportunity to learn from one another about the cultural, citizenship, and identity consequences of our respective experiences. Borders, territory, citizenship, culture and identity are all deeply interrelated themes in the understanding of contemporary local, regional and transnational affairs in North America and we view this project as a first step in what we conceive of as a long-term commitment to collaborate to advance our appreciation of our rapidly changing North American environment and to prepare our students for meaningful careers and lives as citizens of our shared continent.

Our faculties collectively have a number of a multidisciplinary group of scholars whose published work reflects deep and abiding engagement with these themes and issues. We will draw upon our collective local expertise and experience to mount two weekend-long seminars exploring a variety of topics that are embedded in these developments and themes. Faculty participants from our three institutions will present two successive drafts of a potentially publishable paper in the course of these two intensive three-day seminars, one of which will be held at UADY, Merida, and a second one held in Brock/Buffalo. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students at the three institutions will be able to audit or enroll in one or the other seminars for academic credit. All three institutions have the technological facilities available to facilitate participation in the seminars remotely. Papers will be published in a working paper series of the Buffalo/Brock “Institute for Transnational Studies in the Americas (ITSA).” Seminar organizers will undertake to collect the best of them to submit for publication either as a special issue of a journal or as an edited collection, possibly to be published simultaneously in English and Spanish. UADY has a university press that has expressed strong interest in this project. Beyond the substantive output of our collaboration proposed here, we see our work at these seminars as building upon the pre-existing but expanding infrastructure for increased exchange of students and faculty among our institutions, ideally culminating in the development of a collaborative undergraduate and graduate degree program in North American Studies. These efforts will help establish a strong foundation for the cultivation of a broadened conception of citizenship in our changing North American environment. Looking beyond our current project, we are also planning future collaborative projects involving our three institutions, with the next one focused on tourism and regional development.

Proposed Timeline

October 2008 – First seminar held in Buffalo/St. Catharines, over a 3-day period.

February 2009 – Second seminar held at UADY, Merida, also over a 3-day period.

March 2009 – Final papers to appear on-line as ITSA working papers.

Post-award period – Submission of selected papers to suitable academic outlets.

Participants

UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO – THE SUNY

Munroe Eagles, Professor of Political Science, Geography, and Director of Canadian Studies. Eagles is a political geographer who has written widely about political borders at a variety of spatial scales, considerations of citizenship and political diversity, and of minority nationalism (see curriculum vitae). He will present a paper entitled “Territory, Borders, and Aboriginal Citizenship – Political Geographic Perspectives on Indigenous Communities Located on State Frontiers” in which he extends his interest in borders and citizenship to include the distinctive perspectives of border-dwelling indigenous peoples in the three countries.

Donald Grinde, Professor and Chair of the Department of American Studies. Himself a noted and widely published aboriginal scholar with long-standing interest and publication record dealing with border-related citizenship issues, Professor Grinde will present a paper entitled “Haudenosaunee/Iroquois People and the Border: Culture, Identity and Place for the Last 200 Years.” The struggle to maintain the border crossing rights by Iroquois people became a symbol of sovereignty and maintaining that right became crucial for the survival of Iroquois people on both sides of the U.S. and Canadian border. It has been a struggle with both the Canadian and U.S. governments and it continues today.

Theresa McCarthy, Assistant Professor of American Studies. Professor McCarthy is a promising young Haudenosaunee scholar who will draw upon her doctoral research at McMaster to present a paper entitled “We didn’t draw those lines!”: Advancing Assertions of Haudenosaunee Citizenship and Nationhood and the Current Reclamation Era at Six Nations of Grand River.” Her work reviews the progress made by members of the Grand River indigenous community to reclaim their historical homeland, and the reaction of non-native communities to these struggles. Assertions of Haudenosaunee land rights, nationhood and sovereignty remain central to these endeavours and continue to enliven the lengthy and often gruelling processes associated with the reclamation and negotiations.

Theresa E. Runstedtler, Assistant Professor of American Studies. Professor Runstedtler is a young African-Canadian scholar who is a specialist in the transnational dimension of race. She will draw on her doctoral research at Yale to present a paper entitled ““Viva Johnson!” African Americans and the Fight over Race in the Americas.” Because of their mobility and celebrity, men like Johnson helped to highlight the transnational dimensions of racial politics in the Americas for people of color both at home and abroad. Not only were they defiant in the face of white authority, but they also refused to be held, and exploited, in one geographic space. As such, their experience is instructive of the opportunities for resistance made available by national borders.

José F. Buscaglia-Salgado, Associate Professor and Director of the Program in Caribbean Studies. Professor Buscaglia-Salgado is a specialist in race, culture and identity. He is the author of Undoing Empire, Race, and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).Using the recent furor surrounding Absolut Vodka’s running of an advertising campaign in Mexico showing a map of North America with Mexico’s pre-conquest borders, Buscaglia-Salgado will present a paper entitled "Remapping Borders at the End of Empire" that examines the "less-than-absolute" contact zones of the US-Mexico border and making comparisons to similar dynamics in the Canada-Six Nations-US, and in the Mexico-Belize-Mayab-Guatemala contact zones.

BROCK UNIVERSITY

Michael Ripmeester, Professor of Geography. Lead contact for Brock. Professor Ripmeester will draw upon his extensive research on Canadian First Nations communities and present a paper entitled “Gaps and Silences: Mississaugan Autoethnography and Landscape Management Strategies.” Since 1837 a portion of the Mississauga First Nation have occupied a reserve in Alnwick Township Ontario. This reserve can, as can all such places, be viewed as the pivot in the drive to assimilate First Nation peoples. However, the Mississaugas have been able to use the reserve as an essential component in the tactics of cultural survival. The paper explores these tensions in the context of the evolution of the reservation ideal as experienced by the Mississauga First Nation.

Maureen Lux, Assistant Professor, Canadian and Aboriginal History.

Professor Lux will present a paper entitled “Health and Colonialism on Turtle Island” The paper shows that Euro-Canadian medicine determined that disease among aboriginal Canadians was a function of the peoples’ determination to preserve their cultural and spiritual connections to land and community; and until the people assimilated to Canadian cultural notions of normalcy they would be denied the rights of citizenship. Moreover, continued poverty and illness justified the exclusion and isolation of Aboriginal people as threats to the public health. The denial of citizenship to particular groups in a liberal democracy like Canada exposes the colonialism that underwrote state formation and national expansion. Lux’s latest book, Medicine that Walks: Disease, Medicine and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) examines the impact of colonialism on the health of Aboriginal people in the Canadian west.

Janet Conway, Canada Research Chair in Social Justice and Associate Professor of Sociology

Professor Conway will present a paper entitled “Indigenous peoples and their nations: border politics in global

justice movement” at our seminars. This paper focuses on the knowledges produced by contemporary social movements, especially in the context of conflicts over globalization, and investigating their relevance to theories of democracy, citizenship and justice. One strand of this research has been on the transnational politics of indigenous movements in the Americas and their relations to the wide global justice movement, especially as seen through the regional Americas Social Forum process and the hemispheric Gathering of the Indigenous Peoples and Nations of Abya Yala (the Americas).

Ingrid Makus, Associate Professor and Chair, Political Science.

Professor Makus has published widely on the subject of citizenship and will present a paper entitled “Reproducing Citizenship: Aboriginal Community in Canada.” This paper will examine the issue of generational continuity in aboriginal communities in Canada, using the situation in Winnipeg – a site that has been called the largest `off-reserve reserve’ in Canada – as an example. Focusing on the reproduction of citizenship leads to an understanding of how generational continuity is established as a way of maintaining and sustaining a culture.

Marian Bredin, Associate Professor in the Department of Communications, Popular Culture and Film.

Professor Bredin is a specialist in aboriginal media. She will present a paper entitled "Indigenous Media in the Americas: Representation and Cultural Citizenship" that focuses on links between media representation and social and political change. Beginning in the 1970s indigenous groups in North America, and later in Central and South America, began to gain practical experience in the use of radio, film and video. Access to media is closely linked to social movements for aboriginal rights and indigenous autonomy, although the strength and exact nature of this link varies widely in local, regional and national contexts. The paper will consider the place of indigenous media in global cultural exchange and their contribution to international recognition of indigenous rights in ‘settler societies.'

AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF THE YUCATÁN (UADY)

Francisco Fernández, Professor, Anthropology and General Coordinator for Extension. Lead contact for UADY.

Professor Fernández is a prominent anthropologist who has published widely on Mayan culture and Yucatán society. He will present a paper entitled “Two Sides of a Coin: Policies Towards a Mayan Imagined Community, Indemaya and the State Ministry of Tourism.” In this contribution he explores and analyzes the narratives, discourses and politics of identity, citizenship, territory and borders that come into action when trying to formulate, design and apply general indigenous policies in the State of Yucatan. He will focus on two developments - the creation of specialized agencies that deal with this population have appeared in the landscape and in particular that of INDEMAYA (Instituto para el Desarrollo de la Cultura Maya del Estado de Yucatán or the Institute for the Development of the Mayan Culture of the State of Yucatán), and the state’s tourism policies. In different ways, both initiatives serve to preserve a distorted and incomplete version of Mayan culture and the condition of indigenous peoples in the region.

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, Professor, Anthropology.

Professor Vargas-Cetina will present a paper entitled “Yucatan, Trova, Guitar. The Musical Coordinates of Being Yucatecan Inside and Outside Yucatan.” This paper draws on fieldwork among musicians in the city of Merida, between 2001 and 2006. The origins of the conflation “Yucatecan = good guitarist” are explored here by looking at the place Yucatecan trova music has played in the last two centuries in Yucatan. The paper shows that it is not only people outside the peninsula, but Yucatecans themselves who make automatic associations between Yucatan, music and the guitar. This understanding, however, has to be consciously nurtured by music patrons and regional authorities. Professor Vargas-Cetina describes the ways in which the state and local patrons’ politics have promoted and continue to promote Yucatecanness through music instruction and performance.

Margaret Shrimpton Masson, Assistant Professor, Latin American and Caribbean Literature.

Professor Shrimpton Masson will present a paper entitled “Overlapping identities from Yucatan to Guyana: literary constructions of displacement in the Continental Caribbean.” Her paper focuses on the ways in which identities are constructed in border areas, and more specifically in regions that articulate or negotiate several identities within their region-national context. The analysis uses the region extending from Yucatan to the Guyanas as a case study of the formation of complex identity processes, where the regions display a pendulum-like articulation or negotiation between nation-centre and cultural region, and between island and continent. my research explores how these overlapping identities challenge and redefine our concepts of nation, borders, and belonging. Within the Caribbean area migration, travel, exile and displacement are vital everyday experiences that have marked in a particular way their formation, highlighting simultaneous, overlapping patterns of identity.

Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz, Professor, Anthropology.

Professor Ayora-Diaz will present a paper entitled “Hospitality, Food, and the limits of Yucatecan Society in the Post-National Mexican State” that addresses the creation of cultural borders within and across political borders, and cultural citizenship as it relates –or does not, to political citizenship. Hospitality, in Yucatan, has traditionally played a twofold part: through the practice of different forms of sociality, Yucatecan individuals and families produce, re-create, maintain and mend their social ties; also, hospitality allows Yucatecans to introduce outsiders to local values, cultural practices and social norms, neutralizing any threat they may represent to regional culture. This paper explores, describes and discusses the political uses of food in the construction of regional identities within the framework of a post-national, neo-colonial State.