This dissertation employs a feminist border praxis to explore the ways in which people shape their own and others' conduct through particular discourses and practices, focusing on Mexican migration and settlement in Washington State's Yakima Valley. As a form of feminist praxis, it uses transnational feminist analyses of race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality in the intertwining work of furthering knowledge and creating a better world. As an example of border praxis, it examines the discursive and material production of borders in the Yakima Valley. The dissertation is produced from a set of disciplinary, political, and theoretical borders between social scientific and cultural studies methodologies, U.S. anti-racist and transnational feminism, and structuralist and poststructuralist analytics.
The study analyzes how residents of the Yakima Valley are reproducing and rewriting borders between "Americans" and Mexican immigrants through discourses of citizenship, national belonging, and reproduction. It conducts this analysis through a multi-sited ethnography that works across two primary sites: debates over immigration in the principal local English-language newspaper and interviews with Mexican migrant women living in the Yakima Valley. It argues that this rebordering must be understood in relation to the increasing embeddedness of Mexican migrants in local social, cultural, and economic relations. This embeddedness is linked to recent shifts in a century-long pattern of Mexican migration to the Valley for farm labor. These shifts include a rise in Mexican migrants' long-term or permanent settlement in the region, increasing numbers of Mexican women migrating to the area, and the particular labor space Mexican migrant women occupy within Yakima Valley agricultural packing and processing plants.