Abstract:
This thesis aims to investigate the political acculturation of Mexican migrants in New Zealand. More specifically, it is an exploration of the processes undertaken by people to re-construct the political world in which they now live, having been brought up in a different political context. Unlike most studies on the subject which rely on positivist assumptions, this one is based on an interpretive semiotic perspective through which political acculturation is understood as a process that leads to the construction of understandings of a new political world upon which political action is taken. Drawing on theories of acculturation and political culture, and through the analysis of the narratives of sixty members of the Mexican community in New Zealand collected over the course of three years, this study sees culture as a relevant aspect of adapting to a new political environment. From this perspective people are born and brought up not only in specific territories, but inside semiotic communities, cultural circles of shared intelligibility that guide the relationships between individuals and the state. Whenever people enter a new country they do so accompanied by a full political semiotic repertoire that they have extensively used throughout their lives. By centring attention on acculturative processes, the study unveils a complex world of cultural re-construction to which four intertwined dimensions are crucial: perception, cognition, emotion and action. It argues that the constant interplay of these elements in a transnational political environment shapes a unique political cultural framework used to understand New Zealand political culture, its institutions and practices. It is in this context that political acculturation is neither seen as a knowledge transferring process nor as a mere product of exposure but as an intricate and long-term process of individual and group negotiations undertaken by people living simultaneously in two political worlds. Overall the thesis shows how although cultural reconstruction is inevitable this mostly occurs based on long-held notions and positionalities guiding the interactions between individuals and the state.