Identities in Transition

The Enkidu Summer Conference 2007

June 1 - 5, 2007

Mexico City

in:

Migration Politics and Human Rights: Mapping Guatemalan Forced Migrant Gendered Identities in Mexico and the United States

Oscar F. Gil-García

University of California at Santa Barbara

(Estados Unidos)

How is gender framed in mobilization strategies among displaced individuals, families and communities in different contexts? How are “masculine” and “feminine” scripts managed under tense political and social conditions such as conflict over where displaced families can live? How do men and women interpret citizenship when confronted with long-term forced migration? These questions inspired my feminist ethnographic sociological study of forced migrants living in the Guatemalan refugee community of La Gloria in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, and their kin living in the United States (US).

Forced migration of Guatemalans and their participation in the labor markets of Mexico and the US has led to their categorization as economic migrants. This identification loses sight of the contextual experience of forced migration for more than economic reasons. My research methods apply a cultural analysis that blends feminist ethnography with photography. By distributing disposable cameras, participants’ have been able to record aspects of their lives of greatest concern. Our analysis resituates the use of visual images in humanitarian work into a transnational framework using photography by forced migrants and of forced migrants by a professional “other” to triangulate an analysis of gendered agency in creating community. These images and participants’ interpretations of them will enhance globalization/gender theories by capturing the cultural practices that enable or prevent women or men from participating in particular forms of production and exchange.

My use of a feminist ethnographic approach aims to challenge the dominant representation of migrants, based on a heteropatriarchical gendered script, which defines women as domestics and nurturer’s of children, while men are viewed as mobile wage earners.  This gendered construction has become the dominant form of photographing forced migrants by International Humanitarian Organizations such as the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees[1]. 

Our photographs challenge today’s photo-documentary practices furthered by UNHCR, which has adopted the framing techniques to construct the refugee as “apolitical”.  UNHCR’s focus on prevention and containment in countries and regions of origin, and early repatriation, rather than the reconstruction of refugee livelihoods in countries of asylum, are reinforced by photo techniques that diminish migrants’ access to freedom of movement and residence within and across the borders of the state and to a secure existence and social protection. Our photographs of forced migrants provide a contextual account of forced migration outside the dominant heteronormative framework.  This is accomplished by our deconstructing the dominant mother-and-child pictures, where women are defined as domestic nurturers while males are viewed as mobile wage-earners.  This has allowed us to take pictures of men with children to examine masculinity, and mobile women engaged in religious ceremonies and political activity. 

About Oscar F. Gil-García

Grants and Awards: Irmgard Coninx Foundation Essay Competition Finalist, Berlin, Germany (Feb 2007); American Sociological Association (ASA) (May 2006); Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship Doctoral Program (April 2006); UCMEXUS Dissertation Grant, (Jan. 2006).

Research Experience: Visiting Fellow, Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford University, The United Kingdom (2007-2008) Summer Institute on International Migration, Ethnic Diversity, and Cities, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Summer 2006); Estudiante Huésped, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social-Sureste (Summer 2004); Human Rights Observer, Global Exchange, San Francisco, C.A (Winter 2003).

Conferences and Presentations: International Symposium on the Arts in Society, New York University – New York, N.Y. (Feb. 2007); Symposium on Technology and Society, McGill University – Montréal, Canada. (June 2006).  Pacific Sociological Association Conference, San Francisco, C.A.  (April 2004).