AJS Volu me 111 Number 4 (Ja nua ry 200 6): 999–1037 999 ᭧ 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0002-9602/2006/11104-0002$10.00 Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the United States 1 Cecilia Menjı ´var Arizona State University This article examines the effects of an uncertain legal status on the lives of immigrants, situating their experiences within frameworks of citizenship/belonging and segmented assimilation, and using Vic- tor Turner’s concept of liminality and Susan Coutin’s legal non- existence. It questio ns blac kϪandϪwhite conce ptual izationsof doc- umented and undocumented immigration by exposing the gray area ofliminal legality and e xamines how thi s inϪbetween stat us affe cts the individual’s social networks and family, the place of the church in immigrants’ lives, and the broader domain of artistic expression. Empirically, it draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants in San Francisco, Los An- geles, Washington, D.C., and Phoenix from 1989 to 2001. The article lends support to arguments about the continued centrality of the nationϪstate in the lives of immigrants. INTRODUCTION This article examines the effects of legal status on the lives of contem- porary immigrants; that is, the immigrants’ relationship to the body oflaw that governs their lives as it impinges on many vital spheres of their 1 I prepared this article while I was a visiting scholar at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, in spring 2003 and would like to acknowledge the institutional sup- port. I presented it in the thematic session Culture, Migration and Diaspora at the American Sociological Association meetings in Atlanta, August 2003, organized by Min Zhou. I also presented versions at the Center for Migration and Development Col- loquium Series, Princeton University, and at California State University, Northridge. I thank all these audiences for their very helpful comments. I am also grateful to Victor Agadjanian and the AJS reviewers for excellent suggestions, to Belinda Herrera and Cecilia Martinez Vasquez for first-rate research assistance, and to Mary Fran Draisker for preparing this manuscript for submission. All remaining weaknesses are, of course, mine alone. Direct correspondence to Cecilia Menjı ´var, Department of Sociology, Ar- izona State University, Tempe, Arizona, 85287-4802. E-mail: [email protected]
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7/27/2019 Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the United States
