Configurations of Political Citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean

• In Event: Políticas migratorias regionales y subregionales en Latinoamérica frente a la reorientación política de gobiernos

Abstract

In this piece I look at the different configurations of political citizenship –formal political rights- arising in Latin America and the Caribbean for emigrants and emigrants, which seem to provide an enlarged recognition of political participation rights for migrants. I focus on citizenship as relation between individual and state from which political rights and duties derive. My research shows that for some cases in the region the identification between citizenship and nationality is obsolete, and in others, it never held. On top of these, I observe emerging innovations at the sub-regional level which base citizenship on different principles than nationality and national territorial jurisdictions. The new kinds of citizenship relationships I want to shed light upon in this paper are contained in the triadic relation between residence, jurisdiction and nationality, but are not always coherent for emigrants and immigrants. These are transformations at the core of political understandings of citizenship prompted by the extension of citizen rights to non-national residents (immigrants), as well as by the extension of voting rights to non-resident nationals (emigrants). In the paper I observe at which countries in the region display coherence in the orientation of these extensions of rights for these two groups of migrants.

Author

• Luicy Pedroza Espinoza, German Institute of Global and Area Studies/ Institute of Latin American Studies