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Learning There and Doing Here:
Transnational Politics, Civic Engagement Among Latino Migrants
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Louis DeSipio
University of California, Irvine
Over the past decade, scholars of international migration have increasingly analyzed the
degree to which immigrants, and in some cases their U.S.-born children, engage the society and
politics of their sending communities and countries. This emerging scholarship of immigrant
political transnationalism has made important, if sometimes overstated, contributions to our
understandings of the mechanisms of immigrant participation in home-community and home-
country society and, to a lesser degree, of politics and of immigrant settlement in the United
States. For the most part, the case studies of active social or political transnationalism examine a
specific immigrant sending community (e.g. Levitt 2001) or a specific form of transnational
behavior across multiple immigrant-ethnic populations, e.g. migrant remittances (de la Garza and
Lowell 2002). Some transnational scholarship theorizes about the opportunities for the creation
of sustained transnational connections between immigrants and their sending communities
(Appadurai 1991; Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992; Smith and Guarnizo 1998).
The new scholarship of transnational politics has also explored the administrative
structures and political implications of sending-country efforts to extend nationality or
citizenship to emigrants abroad (de la Garza and Velasco 1997; González-Gutiérrez 1999; de la
Garza and Pachon 2000; Jones-Correa 2001). Scholars have also begun to explore whether
transnational political attachements extend into the second generation (Fouron and Glick Schiller
2001; Levitt and Waters 2002). Finally, political theorists have also begun to explore the impact
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I presented an earlier version of this paper at the University of California, Berkeley conference entitled “A Nation
of Immigrants: Ethnic Identity and Political Participation.” I would like to thank the conference organizers: Bruce
Cain, Jack Citrin, Taeku Lee, Karthick Ramakrishnan, and Ricardo Ramirez and also thank Rodney Hero and the
conference participants for thoughtful comments about that earlier draft.
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