What do governments do when much of their population simply gets up and walks away? In Mexico and other migrant-sending countries, mass emigration prompts governments to negotiate a new social contract with their citizens abroad. After decades of failed efforts to control outflow, the Mexican state now emphasizes voluntary ties, dual nationality, and rights over obligations. In this groundbreaking book, David Fitzgerald examines a region of Mexico whose citizens have been migrating to the United States for more than a century. He finds that emigrant citizenship does not signal the decline of the nation-state but does lead to a new form of citizenship, and that bureaucratic efforts to manage emigration and its effects are based on the membership model of the Catholic Church.

Mexico, Nation in Transit examines how the Mexican migrant population in the United States is represented in the Mexican national im-aginary—on both sides of the border. Exploring representations of migration in literature, film, and music produced in the past twenty years, Christina Sisk argues that Mexico is imagined as a nation that exists outside of its territorial borders and into the United States. Although some Americans feel threatened by the determined resilience of Mexican national identity among immigrants, Sisk counters that the persis-tence of immigrant Mexicans’ identities with their homeland—with the cities, states, regions, and nation where they were born or have family—is not in opposition to their identity as Americans. Sisk’s transnational investigation moves easily across the US–Mexico border, analyzing films made on both sides, literature de la frontera, Mexican rock music, migrant narratives, and texts written by second- and third-generation immigrants. Included are the perspectives of those who left Mexico, those who were left behind, and the children who travel back “home.” Sisk discovers that the loss of Mexicans to the United States through emigration has had an effect on Mexico similar to the impact of the perceived Mexican invasion of the United States. Spanning the social sciences and the humanities, Mexico, Nation in Transit poses a new transnational alternative to the postnational view that geopolitical borders are being erased by the forces of migration and globalization, and the nationalist view that borders must be strictly enforced. It shows that borders, like identities, are not easy to locate precisely.

This Conditions and Performance (C&P) report is intended to provide decision makers with an objective appraisal of the physical conditions, operational performances, and financing mechanisms of highways, bridges, and transit systems based both on the current state of these systems and on the projected future state of these systems under a set of alternative future investment scenarios. This report offers a comprehensive, data-driven background to support the development and evaluation of legislative, program, and budget options at all levels of government. This report consolidates conditions, performance, and financial data provided by States, local governments, and mass transit operators to provide a national-level summary. Illus.