(In)visibility and resistance. Clandestine citizenships and transnational migrant activism

Abstract

Migrations, as part of power relations, often involve resistance processes linked to important social and political issues such as citizenship, residence or movement rights. These struggles become apparent in acts against detention centres, claims for regularisation or campaigns for decriminalization of subsistence activities. Framed as non citizens, irregularized migrants keep a problematic relationship with their own (in)visibility, which becomes strategic when they get involved in resistance processes. The struggles of the sanspapiers in France in the late 90s and the more recent of street sellers in Spain are good examples. In this context, struggles around citizenship go beyond legal considerations to be situated in the pursuit of recognition as a political subject able to exercise their rights even when they have not been granted them. Thus, undocumented migrants should be considered as subjects whose acts are able to render visible the role they play within the labour market and the very dynamics of social reproduction. This migrant citizenships show that citizenship is not just a governance, exclusion and differentiation device, but also that could be thought as a process leading to the creation of identities and different forms of belonging, while helping rethink and go beyond nation-state as the only framework to manage it.