Abstract
The issue of “separation of families” has emerged in the debate over immigration as a humanistic appeal to those who favor a legal absolutist approach to deportation. However, the image of the “family” privileged in this national discussion mobilizes a highly gendered, racialized, and monolithic portrayal of the ideal US Latino family unit to the exclusion of the many relationships forged in the context of transnational migration which are not limited to those of “nuclear families.” This article explores how the act of kinning, or creating family, among migrants exceeds the conventional emphasis on mainstream notions of the idealized Latino family. I turn to the concept of “chosen families” as a way of conceptualizing the vernacular theorizing migrants engage in creating complex relationships of intimacy amid the challenging pressures of transnational mobility, which I argue must be woven into conversations surrounding the social injury of deportation.
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Notes
Rebecca Traister’s recently published All the Single Ladies tells the story of Ann and Amina, who define each other as “chosen families,” which Ann describes as “I mean that I believe if you choose to invest in people, the people you invest heavily in and heavily invest in you, and that is emotionally sustaining” (2016, p. 98).
Carol Stack’s All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (1974) laid the groundwork for recent work with its hardnosed rebuke of commonly held mainstream beliefs about supposed black pathology with a critical and culturally sensitive look at black family life and how malleable notions of kinship are realized through relations of kinfolk and fictive kin amid the challenging pressures of poverty.
As Lamphere, Ragoné, and Zavella comment in the introduction to Situated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life, “just as reproductive technology is shaping alternative notions of family, changes in the US economy have fueled a vast transformation of family structures at home and in developing countries” (1997, p. 9).
“Debate: Ann Coulter and Mickey Kaus, in Honor of W. F. Buckley’s Firing Line,” 2014. American Conservative Union (ACU) Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), 8 March https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0xfjM_9z2o.
Ibarra draws on Yunxiang Yan’s work on love and intimacy among families in China, where he defines kinship as “a set of flexible interpersonal relations… made through specific practices by [individuals]… in response to social changes” (Yan 2001, p. 226, in Ibarra).
In her chapter “Fictive Kin, Paper Sons, and Compadrazgo: Women of Color and the Struggle for Family Survival,” Bonnie Thornton Dill similarly explores how kinship practices are constituted across black, Latino, and Asian migrant contexts (1994).
De Genova (2010) also argues that queer politics, simply put, is a counter-normative (sexual) politics of unapologetic and antiassimilationist nonconformity.
In accounting for such contexts, I do not intend to idealize the settings in which these intimacies are forged. For instance, in the recently published Revolutionary Mothering (2016), Latina contributors attest to the realities of sexual abuse in migrant contexts of kinning. Furthermore, the field of choice in family, as must be obvious by now, does not necessarily occur in a wider field of voluntarism and open-endedness, but rather, not adhering to the genealogical grid through chosen intimacies occurs amid social and affective constraints and boundaries under duress.
Huapango arribeño, a musical genre little known outside its region of origin in the Mexican states of Guanajuato, Querétaro, and San Luís Potosí, takes its name from the Nahuatl word cuauhpanco—cuahuitl meaning “wood,” pan designating “atop,” and co “place”—together signifying “on top of the wood” and referring to the wooden platform (tarima) atop which people perform patterned footwork (zapateado) to vernacular Mexican stringed music. The term arribeño (highlander) refers to the mountainous region of the states of Guanajuato and Querétaro (known as La Sierra Gorda) and to the midregion of San Luís Potosí (La Zona Media), which sits higher in altitude than the huasteca portion of the state, home to the Téenek (or Huastec) Indians and the more widely known huasteco style of huapango. See Chávez (2012).
Translated into English by author.
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Acknowledgements
This article benefited from the suggestions of the anonymous reviewers of Latino Studies and editor Lourdes Torres. I am grateful for their commentary and assistance. I owe a very special debt of gratitude to both Jennifer Kotting—without her the publication of this paper would not have been possible—and Todne Thomas Chipumuro for her insight at a critical stage in the writing of this article.
