Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago

Abstract

This is a book about the laborious condition of working men and women, and about the borders and boundaries that have meaningfully framed their lives and labors, but above all, it is about the everyday struggles that go into producing those boundaries.It is not a book that pretends to be a complete or comprehensive scientific account of fixed and finally knowable objective truths.Although it is very much a book about social realities, it is less about how a thing called society really is than about how social life comes to appear so thinglike, and about how people immersed in those processes seek to make sense of them.In other words, this book is about the inherently contradictory messiness of ongoing social dynamics and conflict, and the always unresolved processes of social becoming and transformation.It takes as its fundamental starting point the premise that ''things'' could have been di√erent, and that nothing has to remain as it presently appears.Thus, this is a book about how specific people in a particular place have inherited the manifold consequences of a complex history but also have been and continue to be vital participants in the making of that history and their distinct location within it, in a manner that necessarily leaves them ultimately situated at the center of an openended historicity.Therefore, this book is more about questions than conclusions, and the critical formulation of problems that ought to be even more vexing by the end of the book than they were when it began.In this sense, this is a book not only about the ways that the significant boundaries that define social life get elaborated in everyday practice, but also about working and reworking the boundaries of how we even begin to understand and think about those lines of di√erence and division that impose their dreadful order on the sheer restlessness and creative ferment of living and historical becoming.More specifically, this book examines the everyday processes of transnational migration, racialization, labor subordination, and class formation, as well as the historical production of the structures of citizenship