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Boundaries of Belonging, Moralities of Work
Boundaries are normative in that they are routinely used to establish basic distinctions between good and bad people - distinctions used to determine who belongs where in social space.
Matt Wray in Not Quite White 16 2006
Latino migration into the United States fundamentally concerns a social process of negotiation involving boundaries. Assertions regarding who "belongs" and who does not in particular local communities of settlement are always already articulated with concerns and narratives regarding the boundaries of national belonging and the integrity and security of physical-cum-cultural boundaries such as the US-Mexico border. Both at the national and local levels, such boundaries are symbolically embedded with discourses of morality and human worth; debates regarding the fitness of Latin American migrants to become American are frequently framed in terms of these migrants' moral legitimacy, a frame in which the criminalization of unauthorized status and the imagery of the vulnerable and militarized border have both played a devastating role. This article explores the fraught entanglement of Salvadoran migrants1 in processes of moral assertion and boundary construction in a site of recent Latino migrant settlement in the rural landscape of central Arkansas.
Recent work in anthropology, geography and migration studies has pointed to the segregation and social exclusion of Latin American-born residents in new destinations in the United States and emphasized the ways such exclusion naturalizes and perpetuates exploitation and legal subordination (see Bailey et al , 2002; Holmes, 2007; Nelson and Hiemstra, 2008). Other researchers have found that Latinos have achieved a measure of recognition in certain receiving communities, often sites where the labor of recent migrants is crucial to the economy (Hernández-León and Zúñiga, 2000; Grey and Woodrick, 2005; Stull and Broadway, 2008). It is impossible to consider these case studies of incorporation without considering how immigration policy, in particular the construction of "illegality," creates impossible conditions for social subjects and constructs powerful social boundaries, often racialized (Ngai, 2004; Spickard, 2007; Chávez, 2008; Motomura, 2008).
In my research in a small town in rural Arkansas, I found that an uncanny combination of inclusion and subordination prevailed: Salvadoran2 migrants are, in their own view and in the discourse of many locals, an accepted and important part of the...