Abstract

Through auto-ethnographic and ethnographic methods, this thesis explores the dominant theories around identity formation and their applicability within an intersectional U.S./Mexican migrant context. It involves a case study of my grandmother’s history of moving between various parts of California and Mexico as a migrant field worker, as well as personal reflections on my own experiences of otherization as a first-generation US Citizen working in academia dealing with the afterlife of migrations. By bridging these two different experiences of othering in the US, I will challenge the ways in which we think about the migrant experience as having a definite beginning and end, the modes of resistance and negotiation migrants use to challenge the notion of assimilation, as well as the continuing legacy of migration that US-born Latinx people continue to deal with. This thesis will include an analysis of the creation of the Latinx/Chicano identity through various critical race scholars, primarily Frantz Fanon and Gloria Anzaldua, as various different discussions on the legal creation of the undocumented Mexican migrant and the specificity of the female Mexican migrant experience. I will challenge the conventional understanding of immigration as a process with an end and argue that immigrating and finding belonging is an on-going generational practice.