Exit follow by voice : Mexico's migrant civil society

This chapter asks where migrants fit into the debate over how rural citizens can encourage public accountability, drawing on Hirschman's framework of ‘exit, voice, and loyalty’. Though migrants chose exit, they continue to express loyalty by exercising cross-border voice in their home communities, as well exercising voice by constructing a multi-faceted public sphere. This chapter explores how migrants have forged collective civic, social, and political identities, transcending kinship networks and micro-level transnational communities. A new generation of organized migrants is engaging with both US and Mexican states and societies at the same time, constructing practices of ‘civic binationality’ that challenge nationalist pressures to define their engagements in terms of mutually exclusive nation-states. The empirical discussion compares a range of organizations that emerge from different migrant collective identities, including territorial, religious, worker, and ethnic-based forms of membership.