CRITERIOS

How do privileged Mexican migrants in Barcelona account for their own political activation?

In order to answer this question, each chapter focuses on a specific sub-question. These are:

1. How do privileged Mexican migrants portray the the personal implications of migrating to Barcelona?

2. Why were emotional reactions to the news implicated in a sense of politicised,

personal transformation amongst individual migrants?

3. How do migrants portray emotion as cementing political commitment?

4. What were the implications of asserting emotional or cosmopolitan tropes of

experience when conversing with other Mexicans?

5. How was an individual’s engagement with activism shaped by cosmopolitanism and differential understandings of the place of emotion in political action?

I begin by giving an account of my time in the field. In chapter two I describe each of the activist groups I worked with, and explain the ways in which memberships could overlap. I discuss the kinds of relationships I was able to build with my participants. I describe the qualities which our interactions assumed, and how they allowed emotion to become visible in their interview narratives. I also explain my decision to dwell on the extended interview narratives of my participants in this account. I then discuss the difficulties which participating in the activism of those

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I worked with presented me with as a researcher. I do so by describing the problems I faced in finding an analytic route which did not simply reproduce the narratives of my informants. I also describe the challenges presented by the guilt I felt in shifting from an activist to researcher position. I explain the problems I encountered when coming to terms with the idea of conducting research on ‘elites’, and the role my data played in contradicting my original preconceptions.

In chapter three I explore the implications of migrating to Barcelona for individual migrants. I focus on the migration narratives of a number of activists, and show how they belie a sense of ambiguity with regards to life in Catalonia. This ambiguity, I argue, had the ability to engender both a strengthening of attachment to Mexico and a newly articulated sense of critique against Mexican society within their narratives. I discuss the extent to which their accounts suggest that this ambiguity arose from Barcelona specifically, or whether it referred to a generalised condition of modernity and city life. I then focus on the specific characteristics of Barcelona as a place and its capacity to generate some of the ambiguity present in activists’ interview narratives. I also ask whether it could be related to the condition of ‘being a migrant’ in general. Ultimately, I argue that the narratives of individual migrants dwell on the innerliness of migration’s impact (its ambiguity and resulting emotions), and show how it could provoke changes in the way in Mexico was viewed.

Chapter four moves on to look at the way emotional discourses and performances permeated the way migrant activists thought about and discussed what was happening at home. By analysing the words individual migrants chose to describe their feelings upon reading the news, the tones in which those narratives were delivered, and their reactions to events unfolding in Mexico when amongst other migrants, I show how they experienced the news as a site of intense personal transformation. I argue that emotionally reacting to the news meant that it became a sight of self- and societal-critique in which individuals felt a need for the comfort of others undergoing similar intensities of feeling. This formed part of a continuation of a particular cultural mileau of revolutionary socialy change within Mexico, and charged such narratives with a certain cultural coherency containing within it the potential for politicised and cosmopolitan social action. I

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demonstrate how the ambiguities of the migration experience as described by individuals were important in framing the way in which news from home was received by migrants, and became part of the transformative process in which Mexican society, and personal complicity with structures of inequality, became visible to individual migrants.

Chapter five then addresses the extent to which emotional narratives played a role in solidifying the political commitment of my participants. It does so by focusing on the experience of activists participating in the project ‘Menos Días Aquí’. This carried out a daily count of those who had died as a result of the drugs war in Mexico. I explore how activist accounts emphasise the role of engagement and detachment in influencing how they related to the victims of the conflict. I show how participants in the project describe the count as a site of closeness with those who were suffering in Mexico. By emplacing themselves in lives of those they counted, I argue that individual activists suggested that they came to ‘know’ the victims. As such, emotional experience became a site of knowledge creation. I also describe how practices of detachment became important in ensuring the completion of the project’s aims. I argue that the overall experience of the count meant that individual activists experienced it as a sight of privileged knowledge about the conflict, and as a sight of increased personal responsibility to act. I end the chapter by discussing the potential of the project, and the emotions it engendered, to create a form of cosmopolitanism amongst counters, in which an openness to unequal others within Mexico could be asserted on the basis of shared suffering.

In chapter six, I discuss the implications of emotional and cosmopolitan tropes of experience amongst migrants. I describe the way some migrants carried out protest events in ways which heightened the emotional intensity of their activities. I show how their emotional responses to their activism could overlap with, and engender, assertions of the legitimacy to act from abroad. However, I also argue that not everyone related to their activism in this way. The political life- histories of individuals were important when it came to articulating protests. This meant that some activists sought to reduce the emotional content of certain events in an attempt to achieve other

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aims. I show how such desires were implicated in universalised inhabitations of cosmopolitanism which sought to include local people in Mexican struggles (and vice-versa). As a result, I argue, multiple forms of cosmopolitanism could come into friction with one another, and create a forum for the critique of the activities of others. As such, both emotional and cosmopolitan tropes had repercussions for the way in which activism was experienced by individual migrants, and for how it was interpreted (or intended to be interpreted) by others.

Chapter seven extends this theme and asks how cosmopolitanism could shape the experience of activism. I discuss the conflicting viewpoints which could exist amongst the members of a group, and which became apparent during my interviews. By bringing the perspectives of multiple individuals into conversation with one another, I show how debates about class and political affiliation could preclude the possibility of mutual comprehension between group members. I also illustrate how individuals could end up talking past one another when it came to reaching consensus in group assemblies. However, I then show that, in some cases, tolerance between activists of different political sensibilities was possible by practicing a politics of patience. In the act of reaching consensus, certain activists could try to overcome intra-class differences in the interest of getting things done. I argue that looking at the way activists related to one another highlights the presence of multiple forms of cosmopolitanism within the same field of action. These could act to truncate or extend one another depending on the individual perspective in question. It is important to understand the influences of such different cosmopolitanisms, I argue, since they affected individual desires for continued collaboration – the existence or decline of activist groups depended upon them.

In chapter eight, I return to the central question of the thesis: how do privileged Mexican migrants account for their political activation from abroad? I argue that a focus on emotion, affect and cosmopolitanism opens a window onto how migrants themselves understood and articulated their own experiences. I argue that a focus on the interview narratives of my participants throughout this account allowed the importance of emotion (and the sense of it rising from within)

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to become ethnographically visible. It also brought into view the multiple forms of cosmopolitanism which were being practiced at any one time. Ultimately, I highlight the importance of affect, emotion and cosmopolitanism within migrant narratives, and emphasise their cultural coherence within a historicised milieu of processes of social change within Mexico. As such, migrant narratives take on a particular coherency when relating instances of emotion rising uncontrollably from within to experiences of politicisation and long-distance activism.

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Chapter Two:

The Field

2.1 Introduction:

This chapter will describe my field experience. I begin by introducing the collectives with which I worked in Barcelona. In the text-boxes provided I describe the main aims of each group and give an account of how they were founded. In the main text, I explain why so many activist groups existed when so few Mexicans in the city participated politically with Mexico. I also give an idea of the similarities and differences between their approaches to political protest. I then proceed to describe the complexities of negotiating the anonymity of my participants in this account. I describe the kind of data I was able to gather in the field, and explain why I have chosen to build this account around my interview data. I discuss the potential of my interviews to create spaces for the emotional narration of activists’ experiences and offer some thoughts on why that was so. I reflect upon the difficulties I experienced in distancing myself from the political anxieties of my participants, as well as from the topics of their activism. I describe the analytic process I went through after leaving the field in order to be able to ‘see’ my data from an ethnographic, rather than activist, perspective. I also describe the guilt I felt when attempting to do so and how I tried to overcome it. Finally, I reflect upon how I experienced the field as a site through which to overcome my prejudices about studying ‘elite’ groups. I discuss the impact this has had upon the way I view

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the approach taken towards the study of elites within anthropology, and give some thoughts on how this could be conceptualised alternatively.