The retablo thus tells one migrant’s story of the
emergence of a transnational region between the
United States and Mexico. The retablo captures
the everyday practices of migrants operating in
the US–Mexico transnational space, and thus
registers their own scale-jumping reterritorializa-
tion of the two nations. The landscape vision also
works to facilitate further transmigration, as
stories of successful crossings and passages home
become woven into the Mexican cultural fabric.
The transnational migration networks that have
developed across the US–Mexico border are
embedded in historical geopolitical and economic
relations, and have arguably existed for many cen-
turies. As with the Canada–US relationship, how-
ever, NAFTA has extended economic and political
links between the United States and Mexico, con-
solidating a transnational economy within which
commodities and investments move freely across
the border. Paradoxically, the porosity of borders
to the flows of capital has led to a contradictory
increase in the militarization of the US–Mexico
border that attempts to limit the flow of (some)
people across it (Andreas, 1998–9; Connolly,
1996; Nevins, 2001; ÒTuathail et al., 1998). This
concomitant opening of the borders to trade and
closing of the borders to immigrants from the south
is legitimized through a neoliberal agenda that not
only promotes freer markets but also argues for the
scaling back of government expenditures (such as
education, healthcare and welfare benefits) for
‘undeserving’ populations.
The retablo shown, however, suggests that
migrants are not passive agents but are in fact
also ‘jumping scales’, and in the process actively
transforming the spaces of the US–Mexico
border. While the US government continues to
construct political franchise and access to social
services within its own borders, migrants are
engaging in transnational practices that delink
social relations from a territorially defined
nation-state. It is worthwhile to be careful about
construing transmigration as an essentially oppo-
sitional or subversive practice (see Guarnizo and
Smith, 1998; Mitchell, 1997; Ong, 1999). It is
often as much a strategy for enabling capitalist
flexibility as it is for contesting hegemonic
narratives. However, to miss the way in which
Braulio Barrientos is reframing and thus rescal-
ing territory from his perspective is to ignore the
way in which human agency and subjectivity
formation are just as much part of the construc-
tion of scale as are the systemic transformations
of a capitalist political economy.
One way we can see transmigrants jumping
scales pertains to the ways in which they are
responding to the erosion of the welfare state and
the denial of public benefits for immigrantfamilies. In interviews undertaken by one of
the authors in southern California,^1 migrants
discussed how economic instability and uncer-
tainty are forcing them to devise economic strate-
gies that rely on flexibility and distributing
resources across multiple locales. Paula, a
Mexican migrant who works as a maid in a hotel
in San Diego, recognizes her tenuous position in
the US economy and sees maintaining ties to
Mexico as an important escape route: ‘I listen care-
fully and when things here start to get too bad I can
go back to Mexico ... [with my] savings I can sur-
vive there.’ Paula knows she will not be eligible for
government welfare assistance if she loses her job.
But because ‘a dollar counts more’ in Mexico, she
is expecting to use her savings to settle there rather
than in San Diego. Ironically, Paula is capitalizing
on the same boundary of ‘difference’ constructed
by the scale of the nation-state as are multinational
corporations when they move south of the border
to escape labor or environmental regulations.
Other interviews illuminated the ways in which
migrants remained politically active in their home
villages (see also Basch et al., 1994; Smith, 2001).
Such transnational practices problematize the idea
that politics are always local, and force us to focus
instead on how migrants construct their own
cultural geographies across multiple scales
simultaneously (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994).
Whether or not all migrants are conscious of
the political ramifications of their transnational
practices, they are nevertheless an important
force rescaling political and economic relations
between Mexico and the United States. The
Mexican state has begun to extend citizenship
rights – including health and welfare benefits,
property rights and voting rights – to nationals
living in the United States, thus reconceptualiz-
ing the historic links between citizenship and the
nation-state to accommodate them. Although this
can also be seen as an attempt to coopt the wealth
and political support of those abroad, it neverthe-
less shows the way in which migrants themselves
play a role in creating a new ‘scalar fix’ for the
Mexican state. Like the retablo, then, the embod-
ied and clearly voiced cultural geographies of
migrants’ daily practices underline the need to
consider the role that transnational practices
‘from below’ play in the counter-hegemonic
construction of scale (see also Silvern, 1999).CONCLUSIONThe three case studies discussed in this chapter
give empirical specificity to the spatial transfor-
mations resulting from and contributing to the494 GEOPOLITICAL CULTURES3029-ch26.qxd 03-10-02 11:05 AM Page 494