Winter, Jay M. --- "Human Rights as Lived Experience: Kinship, Fictive Kinship, and Human Rights Among Trans-national Migrants" [2012] ELECD 292; in Porsdam, Helle (ed), "Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations

Editor(s): Porsdam, Helle

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781000519

Section: Chapter 9

Section Title: Human Rights as Lived Experience: Kinship, Fictive Kinship, and Human Rights Among Trans-national Migrants

Author(s): Winter, Jay M.

Number of pages: 27

Extract:

9. Human rights as lived experience:
kinship, fictive kinship, and human
rights among trans-national
migrants
Jay M. Winter

This chapter describes the downward derogation of human rights discourse
and activity in a period when national and state political leaders have
avoided the subject of undocumented immigration like the plague. It is part
of a broader study of human rights as syncretic, the product of social
processes by and large generated from below, through civil society rather
than through the state or the courts.1 Particularly vital roles are played in
the generation of rights talk and rights claims today by people bonded
together by kinship, fictive kinship and communal ties. Here we study links
between migrants and remaining residents in Tlaxcala, Mexico and their
families and friends in New Haven, Connecticut. My central claim is that it
is in the context of this migratory flow that human rights discourses have
emerged. Here the focus is on the linkage between rights talk and lived
experience, derived from field work on Mexican migration, documented
and undocumented, between the state of Tlaxcala and New Haven, Con-
necticut.




1
I am grateful to the Hewlett Foundation and Yale University for generous
funding of this project, which I directed with Gus Ranis. Together with my
co-investigator Gustavo Verduzco of the Colegio de Mexico, we were able to frame
this study, and with the research assistance of Nadia Nehls and Ana Minian, we
undertook the research reported here.

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