Customer Reviews

Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States

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In this book, Susan Coutin calls both El Salvador and the USA nations of emigrants, and describes the policies, laws and boundaries that shift and move along with their moving and entangling populations.

She focuses on the experiences of Salvadorians in the US and in El Salvador, and suggests that our definitions of terms such as nation, immigrant, and citizen set artificial lines in reality. These lines then lead people and nations to fight against what (or who) crosses the line. Coutin looks at government policies in both countries which have excluded Salvadoran emigrants, and at how Salvadorans have both belonged and not belonged to both countries as a result of their emigration (in the context of civil war).

When we set up realities in absolute ways, she suggests, then when we recognize one reality, we exclude others. So the nations are formed by disruption, as "nation," "immigrant," and "citizen" become shimmering and multiple realities that imply exclusion of other realities.

Our attempts to make social, legal, and political realities match (by deportation, immigration, naturalization) lead to other disjunctures. She structures her ethnography of Salvadorian emigrants to mirror these disjunctures. In the end, she recommends that for more aspects of person and nation to be fully present to each other, people need to be allowed to belong: there needs to be ways that emigrants' legal status can more fully match their social and physical presence.

This is a strong ethnography, and worth a read for scholars of citizenship, immigration, and the Americas.