This week’s readings delve much deeper into the earlier discussions and comparisons between Latinos and Asians. However, rather than viewing both populations as simply racialized in a black-white binary, Ong and De Genova discuss the implications of transnational culture and capital in Flexible Citizenship and Working the Boundaries respectively.
Ong places the transnational Hong Kong elite into a greater picture of globalization, neoliberalism, and within a context of Chinese and colonial history. Ong establishes the rich entrepreneurs, attempting to maintain “symbolic capital” where they lack social power, and the role of the economically powerful family unit as a means of “subvert[ing] reigning notions of the national self and the other in transnational arenas” (112). The former enter the United States with symbolic capital, which “reproduces the established social order and conceals relations of domination” (89), and are still forces to “contend with the historical construction of Asian others as political and culturally subordinate subjects” (101). The latter, Ong argues, are “othering Chineseness” by discrediting popular notions of power regimes through their “flexible, mobile relations across political borders” and their ultimate ties to capital rather than any particular nation (116).
On the other hand, De Genova argues that Chicago represents a continuation of Latin America within the United States, where Mexican migrant workers work low-wage jobs and are constantly discriminated and perpetually seen as “the other”. The Mexican workers are racialized and “reracialized” in the perpetuation of racial stereotypes.
Although the two populations are at very distant positions within economic and social spheres, Ong and De Genova emphasize both populations’ place in a symbolic limbo between nation states, where citizenship and national boundaries are blurred and flexible. Both authors see the immigrant populations as “agents actively shaping their self-identity in a cross-cultural context” (Ong 88) and see location as central to maintenance and creation of those identities. It is necessary to also see the immigration and perpetuation or subversion of the transnational identities of Mexican and Chinese populations within a neoliberal and market-based frame of reference because both are so distinctly shaped by their economic positions, and their subsequent otherness.
"It is necessary to also see the immigration and perpetuation or subversion of the transnational identities of Mexican and Chinese populations within a neoliberal and market-based frame of reference because both are so distinctly shaped by their economic positions, and their subsequent otherness." Well said. Yet, as both Ong and De Genova emphasize, this does not mean that the state is any less powerful: state practices actively manage these groups' economic opportunities as well as the production of racialized otherness.
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