"Now my Passport Matches my Face": Dual Citizenship as Ethno-National Recognition of a Racialized Belonging

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 24. Structures of citizenship

Abstract

Changes in Mexican nationality law and rising political tensions in the United States have coincided with a surge in applications for Mexican citizenship among U.S.-born individuals of Mexican ancestry. Drawing on 52 interviews with second- and third-generation Mexican Americans applying for citizenship between 2024 and 2025, this paper examines why ancestry-based dual citizenship is being pursued now and what social processes motivate it. While existing scholarship often interprets second citizenship as primarily instrumental and oportunistic, interviewees’ accounts challenge this view, showing how their decision to apply for a second citizenship is embedded in familial, emotional, and sociopolitical concerns. I identify two compounding mechanisms shaping this trend: the intensification of racialized insecurity in the United States, which produces feelings of political abjection even among citizens, and the documentary recognition provided by Mexican citizenship, which stabilizes belonging that turns ethnic identity into ethno-national belonging. These dynamics reveal a paradox of assimilation. Individuals who have achieved conventional markers of incorporation into American society increasingly imagine mobility beyond it as nationals of another country where their "equality" can be recognized. Rather than reflecting failed assimilation, the pursuit of dual citizenship emerges from socialization into liberal ideals of equality, recognition, and political belonging that interviewees perceive as eroding in the United States.

Author

• Victor Patricio Verde Neri, University of California-San Diego