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“As the American nation has become increasingly heterogeneous, issues ordering the black-white binary have receded, but not disappeared. Instead, as economic and social factors have attracted Latino, Asian, African and other immigrants in larger numbers, assumptions about who is American and who is a citizen have become increasingly important. This volume offers discussions of citizenship across a number of racially and ethnically distinctive groups, and also locates the concept within the framework of community. Rodolfo Rosales and his colleagues consider how differing communities define citizenship and push us beyond the original definitions, based on individual, male, European, property owners. This will be a challenging, thoughtful, feast for any scholar and teacher of racial and ethnic political and social life.” Dianne Pinderhughes, Chair of the Department of Africana Studies; Professor Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame “In this innovative, thought-provoking book, editor Rodolfo Rosales has orchestrated a brilliant theoretical symphony, in which an interdisciplinary team of scholars presents a modern communitarian view of citizenship, a status made real, they argue, not on the basis of legally prescribed and protected individual rights (which can be, and frequently are, abridged), but because individual participants—citizens—exist within, and draw political meaning and empowerment from, their proximate and cultural communities. This important book is brimming with cutting edge ideas from its authors’ many (but complementary) perspectives, from fields as diverse as political science, human cognition, social theory, labor studies, tribal governance, law and society, feminism, Chicanx studies, environmental and food justice, Asian American studies, Black studies, and many more. With a deeply humanistic view of people and their places, whether large or small, rural or urban, tribal, migratory, or international, this book’s chapter authors show how the profound agency of communities offers hope for contemporary struggles, fostering greater and more powerful democratic participation, even in this profoundly anti-democratic moment. Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship is a vibrant and visionary book, sounding just the right notes of hope and progress, for students and scholars of social and political theory, urban, ethnic, and community studies, race, ethnicity, and politics (REP), critical race theory, and related fields.” Tony Affigne, Professor of Political Science and Black Studies, Providence College
“This volume provides an important road-map for anyone wanting to understand citizenship and belonging in the context of our challenging environment. The authors skillfully weave together critiques of individualistic citizenship with compelling stories of community and empowerment drawn from collective identities tethered to race, ethnicity, gender immigration, self-determination, sovereignty, residency, and space. Whether it is Joy James’s critical account of African American women’s struggle against “dishonored citizenship;” or Marisol Cortez’s analysis of residents of the Mission Trails Mobile home park struggling to claim space in the face of relentless urban development; or Kim Geron and Danvy Le’s examinations of Asian American’s use of cultural citizenship to counter narratives of “perpetual foreigness” the volume serves as a catalyst to challenge, disrupt and revive citizenship through an enduring commitment to community.” Anna Sampaio, Chair, Ethnic Studies Department, Santa Clara University
Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship
Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship addresses community as the site of participation, production, and rights of citizens and brings to bear a profound critique of a collective process that has historically excluded working class communities and communities of color from any real governance. The argument is that the status of citizenship has been influenced by a society that emphasizes the role of property in defining legitimacy and power and therefore idealizes and institutionalizes citizenship from an individualistic perspective. This system puts the onus on the individual citizen to participate in their governance, while the political reality is that organizations and corporations and their interests have great power to influence and govern. The chapters present an exciting departure from the long-standing traditions of the social basis of citizenship. In Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship, Rodolfo Rosales and his contributors argue that citizenship is a communally embedded and/or socially constituted phenomenon. Hence, the unfinished story of American Democracy is not in the equalization of communities but rather in their ability to participate in their own governance—in their empowerment. Rodolfo Rosales, author of The Illusion of Inclusion: The Untold Political Story of San Antonio, 1950 to 1991. (2000) and co-editor of Latino Urban Agency (2013) with Sharon Navarro, obtained his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan, and retired from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Rosales’ theoretical research focuses on the relationship between the structure and agency of communities and their struggle to shape their urban environment.
Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
65 Enlightenment Political Thought and Non-Western Societies Sultans and Savages Frederick G. Whelan 66 Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Social Democracy Thin Communitarian Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Education Mark Olssen 67 Oppositional Discourses and Democracies Edited by Michael Huspek 68 The Contemporary Goffman Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen 69 Hemingway on Politics and Rebellion Edited by Lauretta Conklin Frederking 70 Social Theory in Contemporary Asia Ann Brooks 71 Governmentality Current Issues and Future Challenges Edited by Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke 72 Gender, Emotions and Labour Markets—Asian and Western Perspectives Ann Brooks and Theresa Devasahayam 73 Socialism and Religion—Roads to Common Wealth Vincent Geoghegan 74 Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship The Unfinished Story of American Democracy Edited by Rodolfo Rosales
Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship The Unfinished Story of American Democracy Edited by Rodolfo Rosales
First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Rodolfo Rosales to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-08093-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-11315-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC
We humbly dedicate this to those who refuse to accept an ugly unforgiving political reality. To those communities that struggle everyday for the dreams of their children. To those communities who are conscious of who they are. To those who organize . . .
Contents
List of Contributors Preface Acknowledgments 1 Introduction
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R O D O L F O R OS AL E S
2 The Dialectics of Citizenship and Community
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R O D O L F O R OS AL E S
3 Lost in Migration? On Comitatus, Community, and Citizenship
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L O U I S M E N D OZ A
4 Setting the Stage: A Top-Down Perspective on Factors That Divide Democratic Citizenship
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C A R O L Y. Y O DE R AND CHRI S T I NA VE RZ I JL
5 Dishonored Citizenry: Black Women, Civic Virtue, and Electoral Powers
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JOY A. JAMES
6 Transborder Political Subjectivity and Enacted Citizenship: Toward the End of the Neoliberal ‘State of Exception’?
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D E V O N G . P EÑA
7 No Nos Moveran: Embodying Buen Vivir in the Case of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community M A R I S O L C O RT E Z
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Contents 8 Citizenship and Sovereignty: The Eternal Conflict Between Rights and Community
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D E R O N M A R QUE Z
9 Sovereigns or Citizens? The Paradox of Indigenous Self-Determination
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REBECCA TSOSIE
10 Asian Americans: The Challenge of Citizenship Status and Building Community
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K I M G E R O N AND DANVY L E
11 Conclusion
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R O D O L F O R O S AL E S
Index
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Contributors
Marisol Cortez, Ph.D. works on environmental and social justice issues as a scholar, community organizer, and creative writer. After graduating in 2009 with her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of California at Davis, she organized with the Southwest Workers Union around local climate and energy issues. She has also worked at Esperanza Peace and Justice Center as the coordinator of the Puentes de Poder community school program, developing popular education programming to support local social justice organizing efforts. Dr. Cortez writes and organizes around issues of environmental justice, on land use politics and gentrification struggles, as well as cooperative alternatives to conventional forms of urban “development.” Dr. Cortez’s publications include “Occupy Los Intersticios! Or, In Defense of Carbon-Free Unicorns.” Accepted for publication in joint issue of Cultural Logic/Works and Days, Winter 2015; Alkon, Alison, Marisol Cortez, and Julie Sze. “What is in a Name? Language, Framing, and Environmental Justice Activism in California’s Central Valley.” Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, August 2013. Kim Geron began teaching at California State University East Bay in Fall Quarter, 1999. Dr. Geron is the lead faculty member for the Public Affairs and Administration Option for the Political Science major. He received a B.A. in Labor Studies in 1992 and a Ph.D. in Political Science in 1998. He is the author of Latino Political Power, 2005. Dr. Geron is currently conducting research on the Asian American Movement, Latino politics, race and labor politics, and community based urban politics. His most current publications include (with Michael Liu in 2010) “Against the Tide: Mobilization and Community Planning in Asian Ethnic Enclaves, Contentious Sites between Capital and Community,” Urban Spaces: Planning and Struggles for Land and Community. Edited by J. Jennings and J. S. Jordan-Zachery; and with co-authors, Michael Liu and Tracy Lai. 2008. The Snake Dance of Asian American Activism: Community, Vision, and Power. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Joy A. James received her B.A. from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and her Ph.D. from Fordham University in political philosophy, where she wrote her dissertation on “Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Power as
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Contributors Communication: A Feminist Critique.” She also holds a postdoctorate M.A. from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York in systematic theology. In September of 2005, Williams College appointed Dr. James as the John B. and John T. McCoy Presidential Professor of Africana Studies and college professor in political science. Her work focuses on political and feminist theory, critical race theory, and incarceration. She has received research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NY Public Library), and the Rockefeller Bellagio Center (Italy). Dr. James is the author of a number of books, including “Transcending the Talented Tenth” and “Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics” and forthcoming “Memory, Shame & Rage: The Central Park Case, 1989–2002,” which analyzes the convictions and exoneration of youths in the Central Park Case.
Danvy Le is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at California State University, East Bay. Her research interests include race and ethnic politics, civic engagement, and political behavior. She is particularly interested in how social context influences political behavior. She has done extensive work in the Vietnamese American community to explore the effects of social and physical environment on politics and identity. Deron Marquez is a nationally-recognized speaker and lecturer on economic development, tribal governance and tribal sovereignty. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Arizona, a Master’s degree in Politics and a Ph.D. in community health, politics and public policy from Claremont Graduate University. Marquez served as chairman of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians from 1999 through April 2006. Under his leadership, the Tribe has enhanced its governance capabilities, instituted public services for tribal citizens and solidified intergovernmental relations at the local, state and national levels. The Tribe has also entered into successful business ventures with the goal of securing critical government revenues well into the future. Louis Mendoza received his doctorate in English with a concentration in ethnic and Third World literatures from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently professor of literary and cultural studies and director of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University. He has taught at the University of Minnesota as professor of Chicano and Latino studies for the past decade, and served as associate vice provost in the Office for Equity and Diversity from 2008–2014. Dr. Mendoza also taught in the Department of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he was an associate dean in the College of Liberal and Fine Arts and interim director of the Hispanic Research Center. His research interests include Chicana/o literary and cultural studies, U.S. immigration literature, prison literature and oral histories. The author and editor of six books and numerous articles, in 2012 Mendoza published two books with the University of Texas Press based on his 2007 Journey Across Our America research project on immigration and the Latinoization of the United States.
Contributors
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Devon G. Peña is Full Professor of American Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, and Program on the Environment at the University of Washington. He is the Co-Founder and President of The Acequia Institute, the nation’s first Chican@ charitable foundation dedicated to supporting the environmental and food justice movements. The author of several award-winning books, edited collections, and encyclopedias, and numerous peer-reviewed articles, his most recent works include a co-edited volume, Mexican-Origin Food, Foodways, and Social Movements: A Decolonial Perspectives, published in 2017 by the University of Arkansas Press as part of the new Food and Foodways Series. Rodolfo Rosales is the author of The Illusion of Inclusion: The Untold Political Story of San Antonio, 1950 to 1991. (Univ. of Texas Press, 2000) and co-editor with Sharon Navarro of Latino Urban Agency (University of North Texas Press, 2013) and various other articles focusing on community. His research agenda focuses on structure and agency and its impact on communities and their ability to shape their urban environment. Rosales pursued most of his education in his hometown of San Antonio, leaving only to obtain his Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Rosales recently retired from the University of Texas in San Antonio. Rebecca Tsosie is a Regent’s Professor at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona and also serves as Special Advisor to the Provost for Diversity and Inclusion. Professor Tsosie, who is of Yaqui descent, is a faculty member for the Indigenous Peoples’ Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona, and she is widely known for her work in the fields of Federal Indian law and indigenous peoples’ human rights. Prior to joining the U of A faculty, Professor Tsosie was a Regent’s Professor and Vice Provost for Inclusion and Community Engagement at Arizona State University. Professor Tsosie was the first faculty Executive Director for ASU’s Indian Legal Program and served in that position for 15 years. Professor Tsosie has published widely on sovereignty, self-determination, cultural pluralism, environmental policy and cultural rights. She teaches in the areas of Federal Indian Law, Property, Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, and Cultural Resources Law. Professor Tsosie is a member of the Arizona Bar Association and the California Bar Association. Professor Tsosie serves as a Supreme Court Justice for the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation and as an Associate Judge on the San Carlos Tribal Court of Appeals. She received her B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. Christina Verzijl is pursuing her doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of South Florida, with a particular interest in the role and value of diversity. She obtained her B.A. in Psychology from Trinity University where her research experience concentrated on eating disorders and cross cultural differences in cognition. Christina aims to continue investigations of eating disorders and body image in understudied and minority populations.
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Contributors
Carol Y. Yoder is Professor of Psychology at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas where she teaches Applied Cognitive Psychology, Lifespan Development and Food Matters. Current research interests involve cultural cognition and environmental sustainability. Dr. Yoder’s publications include “Cultural antecedents of green behavioral intent: An environmental theory of planned behavior” in the Journal of Environmental Psychology (2015), “Culture-related factors affect sunk cost bias” in Behavioral Development Bulletin (2014), a co-authored text (2006). “Applied Cognitive Psychology.” New York: Erlbaum; as well as numerous empirical and theoretical articles on thinking, memory, cognitive technologies, and student learning.
Preface
Dear Reader My anticipation is that students, faculty, researchers, and activists who are moved profoundly by the politics that we face today will read this volume. It is quite obvious that the national leadership in place today is not interested in the communities that are now out in the streets protesting a politics that seems so far away from our reality. The upside to that is that communities are coming face to face with the knowledge that protest is not enough. It is the beginning of an awakening of communities that had put to sleep any dreams of political justice. This is what the authors in this volume have to offer: an analysis of a political reality that ties many communities together and that is the struggle for access to the American democratic process. Today these same community people represent the spirit of an American political process that seeks to bring about social justice for not only those who already enjoy that privilege but those who are left out. Each chapter tells a different story about the many ways communities are dealing with a politics of exclusion that has lasted so long that it has almost been normalized. Well, it hasn’t, and these chapters add to that picture where people stand up and speak up for their rights. More important, this era of politics—the elections of 2016 and the ushering in of an almost absolute control of our representative institutions—has brought people out and enabled them to look and recognize each other as democrats with a little ‘d.’ Hopefully these chapters provide insights into what has to be done and what has already been done. Rodolfo Rosales, Editor
Acknowledgments
I want to acknowledge the contributors to this volume who are not strangers, they are intellectual friends and colleagues and I am honored that they contributed to this work. Their acknowledgements are added below. As for myself I owe a deep debt to my sons Gabriel Yaotequia, Miguel Angel, and Rodolfo, Jr. for their intense community activism and my granddaughter Bianca for her beautiful idealism and to my wife Rose for her leadership in the community that has led her politics from the urban to state and to the national level in addressing issues of community concern. Of course I must mention the promise of tomorrow, my rug rat grandsons Gaboli and Nico. My intellectual and activist work is indebted to such a long list of people that I can’t possibly begin to name all of them. The Ford Foundation and my fellow Fordies have been a constant support and inspiration. I owe a debt to Richard Gambitta and Kirsten Gardner, colleagues at UTSA. Thanks to David Montejano for his support throughout the years. I, of course, cannot forget my community from which my inspiration for my intellectual work arises. I would be remiss if I did not mention Professors Hironori Ito and Satoshi Ishida, University of Kumamoto, for their interest in my presentation on community agency in 2007, enough to invite me to their university to give a keynote to their conference. That was my inspiration for this project. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the patience and care that Routledge Publisher’s Natalja Mortensen, Senior Editor, Political Science, Maria Landschoot, Editorial Assistant, Political Science and Chris Mathews have given me as we finish this most important project. Respectfully, Rodolfo Rosales
Acknowledgments From My Contributors I extend gratitude to all involved in reading and advising drafts of my contribution to this volume, including Maria A. Berriozabal, Anayanse Garza, Jessica O. Guerrero, Kamala Platt, and Rodolfo Rosales. Their thoughtful commentary has vastly improved the essay included here. I also thank Greg Harman and Xochitl Garza-Cortez for their patience with me, and for the many hours of family time lost to make possible the work of writing and organizing. Lastly, gratitude and respect to the residents of Mission Trails Mobile Home
Acknowledgments xvii Community, whose spirit of resistance and willingness to share their stories became the bedrock for this analysis. Marisol Cortez We would like to thank Rudy Rosales for putting together this volume and his enduring patience throughout this process. We would also like to thank our families for their continuing support and understanding. Finally, our work would not be possible without the struggles of our parents Al, Kiyo, Thuc, and Ha who found ways to create their own brand of citizenship amid the obstacles they encountered. Kim Geron and Danvy Le My indebtedness to instruction from Mrs. Minnie Lee James and Mattie Mae Bailey who weathered the denigrations of dishonored citizenry and resisted death to outlive adversaries. Joy A. James This work would not have been possible without the support of the Tribal Administration Certificate Program at Claremont Graduate University, Dr. David Wilkins and Indian Country. I am grateful to add a small portion to the continuing conversation regarding the unique status of American Indians and our great country. Deron Marquez I thank Rodolfo Rosales for his persistence and critical vision in bringing this collection together at a time when, more than ever, it is imperative to discuss what it means to be a citizen, to belong, and our responsibilities to each other. Louis Mendoza For acknowledgments, I would extend my deepest appreciation to Rodolfo Rosales for including me in the volume! I’m incredibly honored and really appreciate your hard work and dedication to this volume, as well as your patience in editing the chapters and working with the authors. Rebecca Tsosie Christina and Carol thank our families, in particular Diane and Jean, and partners, Zack and Bruce, for giving us the support and space to pursue psychological issues that influence how people live their lives. We are particularly grateful to Rudy Rosales for his many suggestions and guidance in allowing us to tell a different part of the story. Christina Virgzijl and Carol Yoder
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Introduction Rodolfo Rosales
To understand exclusion in what is one of the most open major democratic societies in the west (at least until now), the analysis must begin at the community. The analysis must take us to where Alexis de Tocqueville ended up in trying to understand the idea of American self-governance: But, perhaps more important, when opportunities for self-governance are combined with the pursuit of common interests and values, civic associations can transform themselves into political organizations—groups aimed at actively shaping political outcomes. The key to the latter involves having a chance to do so, because these associations exist in a democratic polity.1 What de Tocqueville takes as a given, the opportunity “to do so,” is what we address in this “Unfinished Story of American Democracy.” Implied in de Tocqueville was a diversity of citizens and communities. He connected citizen to community in his view of American Democracy as a locally driven democracy. Thus it is through community that we can begin to understand the profound diversity that underlies American Democracy. However, the history of building an American nation was based on the establishment of an identity that is common to all. This effort, although perhaps necessary to consolidate the nation, continued into the twenty-first century despite inmigration of Europeans in the nineteenth century. It intensified with the immigration of Asians, the freeing of the slave community, the growth of the Mexican population through the war with Mexico, the bringing in of Puerto Ricans after the Spanish-American War and the genocidal wars against the original inhabitants, the Native American nations. The consequence has been to drown out any viable diversity in terms of governance. Given this history, one can see that while universalization of citizenship and identity was critical in imposing a government from above, universalization in the end has worked to exclude communities along race, gender, cultural, and sexuality lines. More important, it works to exclude communities along class lines. Thus the citizen finds her/his basis for acting, for agency, in community. The chapters found here challenge the individualistic mode of citizenship but
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they do so indirectly through their focus on excluded communities and how the challenging of that exclusion is based on a citizenship that is collective. Isin establishes three approaches that include “undoing citizenship,” “uncovering citizenship,” and “re-inventing citizenship” to “work out a new conception of political subject.”2 The chapters in this volume variously take these three methodological approaches in untangling the question of exclusion. What is referred to in the literature as “undoing citizenship,” in our context, citizenship, i.e., political subjectivity, goes beyond the individualistic perspective that focuses on rights and privileges to establish their political presence. The second approach, “uncovering citizenship,” takes to task the juridicopolitical meta-narrative that creates the illusion of a universal citizenship. This approach undermines the assumption that the political culture and behavior fits all. “The task here is to reveal forms of knowledge that were masked by juridico-political discourse which not only concealed them but also disqualified them as being below the standard thresholds of legitimacy and acceptability.”3 The issue is that legitimacy and acceptability does not fit all in this scheme and tends to exclude those who don’t fit the archetype of American. The third approach, “re-inventing citizenship,” is the act of politics that creates a collective political presence leading to empowerment. Empowerment is more difficult to empirically show except through analysis of the agency of the community that leads to greater consciousness of the community. Thus the chapters, as stated previously, variously approach their analyses. Finally, it is about addressing the borders that separate communities from each other, perpetuating exclusion. While each chapter has a particular focus in its analysis, each brings out the most profound border that perpetuates exclusion and that is the ability to recognize how isolation perpetuates the exclusion common to each community. As Pablo Casals, the famous cellist, once said, “To love one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?” Casals’ borders in this volume are represented by the national borders as the broader context, but they are also the borders that exclude, alienate, that objectify the “other.” The subtitle, “The Unfinished Story of American Democracy,” then, captures the theme of the volume from several angles. First, it is about the status of citizenship in American Democracy from a community’s struggle for selfempowerment. The objective in this investigation of citizenship as a collective notion is to begin a conversation about how community citizenship can have a greater impact on the political and economic reality around a person than efforts undertaken from an individualistic perspective. Second, it calls into question the intolerance that is implied in the notion that American Democracy is only about “us.” At the risk of overstating the Fourteenth Amendment, it challenges the proposal implied in its extension of the equal protection to all persons. Third, it addresses the contradictions communities face as the nature of American Democracy changes and expands even as some would like to close it up. Finally, it should be noted that the collective theme is not about changing the concept of citizenship as we know it. Indeed, we approach our
Introduction 3 democratic process as an ongoing dialectical process, continuously shaping and re-shaping itself as conditions change.
Community and Citizenship in the Literature The literature on community and citizenship addresses the many facets of citizenship in a myriad of studies on community focusing on the local, city, state, and national, as well as transnational. Many of these studies begin their analysis by de-centering the nation-state focusing on the impact of global actors on local to national to transnational. Saskia Sassen, Seyla Benhabib, Carol HardyFanta, and Giorgio Agamben, for example, address how immigrants have acted out their politics on the streets as they seek ways to protect their families and interest. Even as individual interest may drive many of the immigrants, it is community by which they establish a politics that addresses their presence. Included in this literature is culture and identity, which is addressed in the literature focused on the collective side of citizenship. Hardy-Fanta, Carens, and Flores and Benmayor take to task the tendency to narrowly define who belongs and who doesn’t through culture and identity. They raise the question: can I be of a different culture and still be an American citizen? Hardy-Fanta addresses the inward-looking politics of immigrant groups, especially women, who struggle to protect and stabilize their communities in Boston’s growing Latino populations and in the process re-define politics in their community. 4 Carens addresses the same question of cultural differences, but from a topdown perspective.5 He addresses the tension within and between political communities with an eye to the state to be evenhanded and neutral in its treatment of “others.” Kymlicka and Norman, on the other hand, focus on the individual in contrasting the rights of minorities and the civic duties attached to being a citizen. Delanty says about Kimlicka and Norman that: Communitarian multiculturalism is best represented by Canada, whose constitutional tradition is not based on classical republican democracy. The accommodation of cultural diversity and democracy are not antithetical as they are in the republican constitutional traditions, as in France and the United States. Thus it is possible for different groups to get official recognition by the state, which encourages them to retain their ethnic identity and requires only minimal commitment to a common Canadian identity. This is the basic premise of all the chapters which recognise the validity of minority rights in the sense of limited accommodations of the needs of different communities. In this the traditional equation of citizenship with the individual is abandoned as is the belief that citizenship must be ‘difference blind’.6 Stevenson, Isin and Wood, and Delanty question the relevance of citizenship in the global age, especially in terms of governance. Delanty’s general argument is that globalization has undermined the nation-state’s monopoly over citizenship
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opening up new venues for rights and privileges internationally.7 Isin and Wood argue that while citizenship is a “legal and juridical” definition of membership in a nation-state, identity is the recognition of similar or identical attributes leading to the formation of groups outside the “legal and juridical” box.8 They conclude that the formation of different group identities lead to claims for recognition of citizenship rights from diverse perspectives. Stevenson’s edited volume addresses the tension between citizenship and identity. Citizenship as a universal category comes from the state (from the top, so to speak), while identity emerges from groups or communities (from below) and is connected by the process of group’s efforts to gain or maintain the rights of citizenship.9 On the other hand, Saskia Sassen and Leyla Benhabib in similar but sometimes contradictory ways describe citizenship in between the sovereignty of a nation-state, the global economy, the spaces ceded to corporations in the competition for trade dominance, and spaces occupied by real communities.10 The common argument for both Sassen and Benhabib is that these communities in these spaces are about self-determination on the ground. Giorgio Agamben, with his concept of “state of exception,” analyzes how immigrant groups finding themselves as “stateless” peoples mobilize around that status and build not only community but also a politics that is based on rights to production and space.11 The focus is on sovereignty and self-determination in their production of their lives. Thus, Sassen, Benhabib, Agamben and Hardy-Fanta describe different aspects of communities in their analyses of communities acting out their citizenship in their struggle for their place and space in the constellation of rights, privileges, and governance in our democratic society. They describe how undocumented communities define their space through agency, creating a space and politics between the nation-state and their communities. They act out their citizenship which without community would not be possible.
The Centering of Citizenship in Community In conclusion, most of the literature reviewed in this chapter does address community as the site of participation, production, and rights as citizens. The analyses involved in these various approaches are in terms of de-centering the nation-state in focusing on the overlap of the global with the nation-state and the local. These studies clearly show that community is the most important site for the struggle for political self-determination, as well as for access to governance. Our most important contribution to this literature is to re-envision our democratic process as a collective process, which has thereby included and excluded on the basis of community. The narratives in this collection address the status of community citizens in their analyses of particular communities that have been excluded from the democratic process with dire consequences for the status of their citizenship both collectively and individually. More, our contribution is not imagining a new way of doing things in our political process; rather, it is to bring to a conscious level the collective process
Introduction 5 that has historically existed—albeit with a negative impact on working class communities and communities of color. In distinction from these and other studies of community and citizenship, Community as the Material Basis of Citizenship does not focus on the rights and privileges of individual members of the community specifically; rather, we are taking the community as the unit of analysis in addressing a democratic process that can accommodate all communities. Indeed, we do not separate out citizen from the community. The volume begins with a theoretical discussion of the “dialectics of citizenship and community” In Chapter 2. In essence, the argument is that community is the real motor of democracy. Chapter 3 is based on a broad perspective of immigrants and Mexican communities as they interact and establish themselves culturally, economically and politically in different parts of the nation. Chapter 4 is a social psychological discussion of community and the demands of a national citizenship to fit into one archetype. As the author states: “People are a diverse group, who need to be recognized as such and given reasonable opportunities.” Chapter 5 focuses on African American women excluded from the political process, “Dishonored Citizenship” and their struggle to gain “honorable” citizenship. Chapter 6 focuses on immigrant Indigenous berry pickers from Mexico, some who speak neither English nor Spanish, in the northwest and analyzes how their struggle to establish their rights was, à la Agamben, outside and beyond citizenship. The story is of a community of immigrants who collectively establish their rights to their production in the face of “illegality” with the motto “Sin Tierra, Sin Papeles, Sin Miedo.” (Without Land, Without Papers, Without Fear). Chapter 7 addresses the right of communities to live in one’s urban space, “residentship,” in the context of a politics of urban development that deems the land more valuable than the community itself. The eighth and ninth chapters provide a profound discussion on the question of sovereignty and citizenship. Chapter 8 addresses the conflict between sovereignty and citizenship for the tribal communities. Can the both exist together. Chapter 9 takes the discussion beyond the question of citizenship and argues for a multinationalist approach where tribal boundaries are recognized and accepted despite national boundaries. Finally, Chapter 10 provides an historical and political analysis of the Asian communities in the United States, pointing out that depending on the community, Asians have covered all levels of society from business to farmers to professors and yet have not yet come to full realization of citizenship.
Notes 1. Alexis de Tocqueville on Civic Associations. www.aei.org/htmlpage/iv-alexis-detocqueville-on-civic-associations/ 2. Engin F. Isin, Citizenship after Orientalism: An Unfinished Project. Palgrave Macmillan. Pages 563–572 | Published online: August 30, 2012. 3. Foucault, M., 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, Edited by M. Bertani and A. Fontana. New York: Picador (Orig. pub.
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Rodolfo Rosales 1997). Isin points out that “Mignolo, for example, recovers concepts of ‘city’ and ‘citizenship’ in Aztec history and shows how they were concealed during the colonizing process. He notes that ‘if Tollan is equivalent to city and toltecáyotl to civilization, then all the inhabitants of a Tollan who follow the rules of toltecáyotl are citizens (from civitas, in the west, from where “citizens” and “civilization” were derived)’ Mignolo, W.D., “Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity,” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 312–331. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], p. 316). Yet, he argues, [F]or Christians, Tollan was a place inhabited by barbarians and pagans; and when memories of Tollan had been already significantly (if not totally) erased from the memory of Mexican indigenous memory.
4. Hardy-Fanta, Carol, Latina Politics, Latino Politics. Temple University Press, 1993. 5. Carens, Joseph, Culture, Citizenship, and Community. Oxford Press, 2000. 6. Gerard Delanty, Two Conceptions of Cultural Citizenship: A Review of Recent Literature on Culture and Citizenship. University of Liverpool, 2012. 7. Gerard Delanty, Citizenship in a Global Age: Society, Culture, and Politics. Open University Press, 2000. 8. Patricia K. Wood, Citizenship and Identity. Sage, 1999. 9. Stevenson, Nick (ed.), Culture and Citizenship. Sage, 2001. 10. Seyla Benhabib, “Citizens, Residents and Aliens in a Changing World. Political Membership in the Global Era,” Social Research 66, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 709–744; Saskia Sassen, “Going beyond the National State in the USA: The Politics of Minoritized Groups in Global Cities,” Diogenes 51, no. 3 (2004). 11. Agamben, G., State of Exception. Translated by K. Attell. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Bibliography Agamben, G. State of Exception. Translated by K. Attell. University of Chicago Press, 2005. Benhabib, Seyla. “Citizens, Residents and Aliens in a Changing World. Political Membership in the Global Era.” Social Research 66, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 709–744. Benhabib, Seyla. “Borders, Boundaries, and Citizenship.” PS: Political Science and Politics 38, no. 4 (2005): 673–677. Benhabib, Seyla. “Twilight of Sovereignty or the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Norms? Rethinking Citizenship in Volatile Times.” Citizenship Studies 11, no. 1 (February 2007): 19–36. Benhabib, Seyla. “Claiming Rights across Borders: International Human Rights and Democratic Sovereignty.” American Political Science Review 103, no. 4 (November 2009): 691–704. Carens, Joseph. Culture, Citizenship, and Community. Oxford Press, 2000. Delanty, Gerard. Citizenship in a Global Age: Society, Culture, and Politics. Open University Press, 2000. Delanty, Gerard. Two Conceptions of Cultural Citizenship: A Review of Recent Literature on Culture and Citizenship. University of Liverpool, 2002. Flores, William and Rina Benmayor, Eds. Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights. Beacon Press, 1998.
Introduction 7 Foucault, M. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Edited by M. Bertani and A. Fontana. Picador, 2003. Hardy-Fanta, Carol. Latina Politics, Latino Politics. Temple University Press, 1993. Isin, Elgin and Patricia Wood. Citizenship and Identity. Sage, 1999. Isin, Elgin, Peter Nyers and Bryan Turner, Eds. Citizenship between Past and Future. Routledge, 2008. Kaplan, Joshua. Lectures on Alexis de Tocqueville and his goals in his description of democracy in America. The Modern Scholar: Political Theory: The Classic Texts and Their Continuing Relevance. 14 lectures. Lecture #11: Alexis de Tocqueville 1 & #12: Alexis de Tocqueville 2), 2005. Kymlicka, Will and Wayne Norman, Eds. Citizenship in Diverse Societies. Oxford University Press, 2000. Marshall, T.H. and Tom Bottemore. Citizenship and Social Class. Pluto Press, 1987. Mignolo, W.D. “Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity.” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 312–331. Pocock, J.G.A. “The Ideal of Ctizenship Since Classical Times.” In Theorizing Citizenship. Edited by Ronald Beiner. State University of New York, 1995. Sassen, Saskia. “Going beyond the National State in the USA: The Politics of Minoritized Groups in Global Cities.” Diogenes 51, no. 3 (2004): 59–65. Sassen, Saskia. “Membership and Its Politics: When the Outsider Expands the Formal Rights of Citizens.” Dossier, October 2009. Sassen, Saskia. “Destroying Neighborhoods/Buying Pieces of City Land: Two Faces of the Same Deep Logic?” Urban Controversies, February 3, 2014. Sassen, Saskia. “Who Owns the City?” Governing Urban Future, November, 2014. Sassen, Saskia. “Response [to Benhabib].” European Journal of Political Theory 6, no. 4 (2007): 431–444. Sassen, Saskia. “The Repositioning of Citizenship.” Project Muse, 2003. The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 41–66. Smith, Rogers. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. Yale University Press, 1999. Stevenson, Nick, Ed. Culture and Citizenship. Sage, 2001.
2
The Dialectics of Citizenship and Community Rodolfo Rosales
The city, more than any other product of man’s genius and labors, represents the effort of mankind to remake the world in accordance with its wishes, but the city, once made, compels man to conform to the structure and the purposes he himself has imposed upon it. If it is true that man made the city, it is quite as true that the city is now making man.1
Introduction The premise in this chapter is that citizenship as identity or as agency does not occur in a vacuum. It, citizenship, emerges from the context of community. And that while citizens may be diverse in their particular interpretations and orientations to public policy issues, and even to visions of what society should be like, it is community that ultimately provides the experience and expectations that go into that interpretation or orientation. The focus of this chapter is on the relationship between citizenship and community. What we do as individuals is shaped by the community where we are connected in our everyday interests. The premise of this essay is that cities are geographically bound places where communities are formed and that have an interest in establishing their place in the city and its competitive urban market economy where culture, social relations, politics, and history occur. Another way of stating it is that culture, social relations, politics, and history ultimately shape the relationship between community and business as both work to shape the city to their image, to their interest. Indeed, communities and their citizens are ultimately reflections of very particular historical and social processes which go into the making of politics. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, American Democracy works best through associational activity at the local level.2
Thesis I argue that the juristic, individualistic concept of citizen conceptualized in the state derives its meaning in a collective context, and more, that citizenship does not and cannot exist in a vacuum enveloped in the rights and privileges that
Dialectics of Citizenship and Community 9 are assigned it under the constitution. In a certain sense, the argument is that citizenship once created goes beyond any definition arising from a constitution. Hence, this citizenship, despite its individualistic conceptualization, once established in society is redefined by a community’s experience, including culture, history, socio-economic status, and politics. In essence, once established, citizenship cannot be operationalized outside its particular community context. Following this observation, we can see that even in the face of an ideology that emphasizes individualism, voting blocs are more significant than individual voting, from a quantitative as well as qualitative perspective.3 If we were to analyze how and where survey research collects it data, we would find that while the focus begins with the individual, it is the aggregation of individual data found in the larger context of communities that provides the basis for their interpretation and analysis of political orientations, preferences, and trends. Thus, while votes are cast as individual votes, we ultimately conceptualize the aggregate of those individual votes as the voice of different sectors, i.e., the gender gap, the youth vote, the working class vote, the African American vote, the Latino vote, etc. A second premise, then, is that what is counted as aggregate activity is materialistically the collective actions and concerns of individuals, conscious or unconscious. Following de Tocqueville’s observation that communities represent the diversity of society, then, participation is not simply an individual act but rather a community-shaped act. The importance of this observation is not that civic participation is necessarily a community or class-conscious act, but rather that civic participation is materially based in a community context. Based on this observation, one could argue that there is no such thing as individual choice, that choices come from one’s experience and defined needs and usually those needs are organically tied to a particular community context.4 One more point must be made about this concept. The act of participation is not only defined as participating in the formal political processes in governing institutions. It is also defined in the context of community and its needs. Seen from this broader perspective, citizenship is expressed when a community starts a community garden to serve its aged community or when it establishes a co-op bookstore to serve the needs of its residents or, indeed, when it establishes a Little League team to serve the needs of its youth. Any one of these acts constitutes “civic involvement” on the part of the various members of the community participating. As the given example shows, citizens do get involved in various projects based on their own seen and/or felt needs. But the argument in this chapter is that these actions eventually form the material basis for a citizenship that can claim a role in its governance. Alone they remain volunteer acts by members of the community, as good or beneficial as they may be. While individuals certainly are capable of individual choices in their political and policy orientations, the community background ultimately plays a very important role in the discerning of those choices.5 This implies then that conditions play a very important role in the shaping of the hidden collective side of
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citizenship. The immigrant marches, the civil rights actions, the anti-war demonstrations, and the union strikes are all examples of the exercise of citizenship rights in a collective context. Historically, protests, strikes, and community mobilization, as well as organizational activity, including interest group activity, are what have shaped American politics beyond the political party-dominated individualistic-oriented electoral process. The premise in this approach is that collective and organizational activities are what spawn the notion of citizenship and its claims to governance. The civil rights struggle in the streets is what created the politics that put the final touch in that era with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Going beyond nationalism and the nation-state, one cannot forget the impact that the millions of demonstrators internationally had on how the “initial shock and awe” was conducted.6 Defying the lack of legal status, the recent immigration marches—where both citizens as well as immigrants acted out their ‘citizenship’—have visibly shaped the political discourse in American politics.7 In the context of community, moreover, these immigration marches have reinforced an identity that expresses a transnational identity that has consistently shaped the Mexican American consciousness throughout the twentieth century.8 Finally, the spontaneous demonstrations in Washington, D.C. and across the nation that occurred the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president presents a massive demonstration of the collective side of citizenship rarely seen in American politics. These actions have helped shape the community context of citizenship and given it identity. The most important point contained in those four examples is that community is the basis for their struggle. It is not the establishment of political inclusion aimed at by the civil rights struggle, which it has at least tenuously accomplished, but the establishment of human dignity in a legal system that refused to budge for almost two hundred years; nor the granting of amnesty or citizenship to the immigrants, as just as that claim may be, but the human rights that they earned not simply through their politics but because of their claim to rights as a community serving the needs of the economy of a society; nor finally, is it the establishment of a world citizenship that is expressed in the world protest against the invasion of Iraq, but the notion that we live in a world where what we do affects all of us.9 It is communities, whether defined by class, race, ethnicity, gender, geography, culture, or the unavoidable intersectionality of these forces, that provide the basis for the claim and struggle for political inclusion, political power, political rights, or political dignity—not isolated individuals.10 This notion of citizenship as expressed through the organizational, collective agendas that survive and gain political prominence and importance in the political decision-making processes of governmental institutions shows how individual participation not only has less impact, but is not sustainable in its own right. That is to say, the individual will not have a say in governance. Even in an aggregate form, the individual is the sum of voices expressed in a mosaic of community interests as they are brought to bear in the public arena.
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Citizenship in the Modern Era The roots of our modern western concept of citizenship go back to the idealistic Greek polis notion of politics as the highest level of human activity, as a virtue, and the more practical Roman concept where citizenship as politics was less a virtue and more of a practical way of establishing property and wealth.11 Ultimately both are integral parts of a citizenship that has emerged out of a history that was mired in race, class, and gender privileges. Moreover, the role of citizenship has played a significant role in maintaining these privileges. The development of this concept and its use is contained in the particular relationship between the modern nation-state and the individual referred to as civitas. However the premise here is that there is a relationship between individual, community, and environment that is not necessarily tied to any nation-state; that pre-dates civitas. This relationship is not exclusive of nationstate; rather, it is the basis of nation-state—it is the concrete notion of what the nation-state has abstracted into a legal system in order to define the role of the citizen in its social, political, and legal system. Thus, what we encounter in our definition of citizenship, the legal individualistic concept, is the vehicle by which we order the market economy outside of, or in spite of, community. It is not too far off the target then, to define this citizenship as representing “economic man” à la Locke and Hobbes.12 Stated in contemporary global terms, it is through this individual that society is defined—legally, socially, psychologically, economically, and politically. As Locke points out, the perpetuation and the preservation of this order is based on a social contract, which frees and protects each individual in society in his pursuit of self-interest.13 It follows that self-interest is the basis of the citizen as defined through the social contract—a society organized around the liberal concept of the individual: the isolated, acquisitive, possessive individual established theoretically in the context of a free market economy.14 The premise in this construction is that each individual will act on the self-realized personal self-interest in the competition in the market place.15 Accumulation of property, of wealth, is the defining principle of this competition. Further, the rights to property, accumulated through the pursuit of the individual’s selfinterest, begins with the individual’s claim to their original property represented by the skills of each. Hence, wealth and property are not determined by any claim to rights but through competition. Citizenship simply protects that which is accumulated through competition. Stability is provided by the powers given up through the social contract that become the source of coercive power needed to maintain order and the protection of property. The dynamic of this power relationship between the state that inherits this power, however tentative, as posed by Locke in his discussion of the relationship between the citizen universally under the social contract, is based on competition itself in the market place. The general consent arises, ironically in the very competition that pits one individual against the other. The market becomes indistinguishable from civil society itself. Stated in a different
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way, property becomes the organizing principle of society. In the context of the market place as it is codified into law, the individual rights of each citizen in society arise from property.16 Described this way, then, exclusive membership provides the overarching definition of contemporary citizenship with all the privileges that it implies. While the United States has through history peeled off the layers of restrictions on the practice of citizenship in the area of voting and claims to rights, the definition has not evolved to reflect a more open and dynamic practice of citizenship.17 In applying the notion of civitas in this context, then, the more we narrow the concept to not only a nationalist basis of participation and rights, but also to an individualistic self-interest style of politics, that has, to paraphrase E.E. Schattschneider, created a politics that is dominated by a “heavenly choir that tends to sing with an upper class accent.”18 Citizenship, in this context, provides more of a quieting effect on the exercise of that very same citizenship. It defines how to play the game not to question or change it.
Methodological Considerations A very important observation is that community as participation is a relationship that is overlooked when measuring participation. This relationship is overlooked partly because of the overemphasis on the individual as the key unit of our analysis of voter participation and other forms of formal civic involvement. The narrow concept of political participation also preempts the inclusion of community as a unit of analysis. Indeed, community is carefully compartmentalized as a unit of social movement analysis or of political socialization. At best, community is the venue where the analysis of individual activity—social, cultural, and political—takes place. It is the geographic and social space from which an analysis of citizenship and participation occurs, but it is not seen or conceptualized as an organic part of that citizenship. This conceptual blindness is further compounded by the perception on the part of community residents of what politics and political activity consists and indeed how they engage political activity. Organizing a Little League or cleaning out an abandoned house/ apartment or teaching English to neighbors is not generally seen as political. That is to say, residents themselves perpetuate the narrow conceptualization of political participation, leading to a fragmentation and further alienation from their own governance.19 However, the specter of community has been haunting this nation’s politics since its founding. James Madison, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers and revered as the spokesman for the Constitution, took pains to argue for a system that guaranteed that no other politics would enter and put a claim on a share in the governance and thus disrupt the fragile commercial republic under construction. While property was uppermost in his mind, Madison recognized the potential of those whose interest may run counter to what the founders had in mind in establishing this nation, and as such recognized how their participation may run counter to the commercial republic. His description of the politics of the day was framed in terms of factions in the context of a commercial
Dialectics of Citizenship and Community 13 republic, i.e., a capitalist market economy. However, one can see how although Madison conceptualized these factions as individual interests arising from the Classical liberal definition of human nature as self-interested, what he saw were communities with a different material basis of interest such as debtors, small farmers, shopkeepers. Taking this one step further, we can see how Madison understood the process of nation building as a process of conflict between communities, the “elite” literate propertied community versus the various communities that composed the new republic but with different interests, as Federalist Paper No. 10 indicates.20 In this context, one can hardly see the difference between community and citizenship. In this context, we can also see how this concept of community as the source of citizenship was not a welcomed notion. To build a nation, we must all become one; which did not really occur until citizenship was universalized through the various amendments, beginning with the Fourteenth Amendment, and through the extension of civil liberties and civil rights. The universalization of citizenship, thus, breaks down all divisions between each citizen in their claims to governance. James Madison saw this as a major problem to governance stating: “There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.”21 Indeed, the most profound implication from these brief observations is that the most viable venue by which universal citizenship can have a claim in its own governance has been historically blocked by the very system that produced our representative system. The most important argument in this chapter, then, is that if a democracy is to carry greater meaning in its participatory side then we have to look beyond the representative system—city, state, national—that tends to stand in the way of community participation and engagement.22 We have to look beyond the individualistic claim to rights (not deny them or refuse them) in order to understand the real potential of a democratic process in the market place. The next step is that we have to shift our narrow perspective of what is political to the material conflicts that exist in the market economy. We have to include in the analysis of political democracy the broader context of community interests. In taking into account these community interests we can then begin to construct a citizenship that emerges from community, broadening the democratic sphere of participation.
A Radical Interpretation of Community In The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements, Manuel Castells emerges from his historical and theoretical studies with a dynamic perspective of the process of how we create urban structures and how we then are shaped by them and then how we shape those same structures by analyzing the impact of urban social movements in different cities across time, cultures, and continents.23 The most important lesson that we learn from Castells’ very interesting analysis of the city and its communities is that while cities are products of elites who look to shape the city through
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infrastructure, investment, and process to reflect and enhance their particular market needs, the ultimate shape of those cities is a product of conflict between those elites and the affected communities that strive to shape their urban environment to meet their cultural, social, and daily community needs. While Castells argued that one had to leave “Marx at the door of the city before entering,” he nonetheless had to replace class structure with the “elite” and the “grassroots community” before he could conceptualize the city as a product of conflict. And while one could replace the “elite” with the concept of upper class or bourgeois class and “grassroots” with working class and or middle class, his move to this more generalized nomenclature allows us to capture the notion of “community of interests” à la James Madison. Castells’ most important contribution to this discussion is the focus on communities which forms the heart of his theory of the city as a product of conflict, a process allowing the analysis to shift the unit of analysis from the individual to the community. From a different angle, focusing on structure, Michael Peter Smith in The City, the State, and the Market reminds us that the making and shaping of humankind and community does not come from abstract market forces but rather real economic development and investment decisions made by developers, bankers, and other elite investors in the city.24 The position that a citizen finds oneself in is not an individual good or bad decision or the blind outcome of market forces; they are made by communities of elites protecting not only their own privileges but the very system that produces those outcomes. Power, or lack of it, in this context is not individual; it is community. David Harvey, in Social Justice and the City, observes that the outcome is reflected in the uneven distribution of amenities that communities find in their neighborhoods.25 This uneven distribution is ultimately determined by an individual’s income—thus, his conclusion is that income is not simply measured by individual wages or salaries; these wages/salaries are compounded by the level of community amenities, such as parks, schools, public services, etc. Harvey effectively counters the individualistic approach to defining success. That is to say, even after an individual achieves economic and social success, it is community that then empowers and entrenches that individual’s status. Based on this theoretical understanding, then, it seems that the market not only structures but drives the city as well. More, we can say that the urban market economy shapes everything around it into its own image. It tends to turn everything into a commodity. However, as brought out previously, communities historically have had a tenuous relationship to the market. Moreover, empirical studies show a diverse reality when talking about communities and the market.
Communities as Political Agency While there is much to be learned from the various urban studies that look at local social, political, and economic structures, as well as mobilization, what is missing in these studies is the linking of these analyses of community politics to the concept of citizenship as it is fueled by community.26
Dialectics of Citizenship and Community 15 Considering the privileges that are accrued through the market and translated into political influence, not all politics comes through the formal recognizable processes. In an observation so obvious, that it is almost not worth repeating, E.E. Schattschneider’s A Semi-Sovereign People focuses exactly on that point when he points out that the decision-making process that shapes our policy is influenced by a small percentage of people in our society—essentially those representing corporate economic interest. However, what is not addressed clearly is the study of the political agency of communities that oppose the economic domination of their city. Anthony Giddens’ theoretical notion of structuration links human agency with social structure and thus suggests that individual acts are ultimately linked to community. The point is that agency or in our context citizenship emerges from community.27 Underlying the entire discussion in this paper are the theoretical discussions by Antonio Gramsci that address the role of community from a participatory perspective.28 In his larger concept of hegemony, Gramsci argued that a particular class, the bourgeois class/propertied class/industrial class, depending on the stage of development of that society within capitalist society, exercised a dominant influence in language form, social relations, ideology, and political power over the rest of civil society. Addressing what he described as subaltern communities, Gramsci focused precisely on the historical relationship between the structures that bind communities in their behavior as well as thinking versus their own independent agency as expressed in their political, social, and cultural behavior. From this focus on how communities have historically established their self-determination, Gramsci was able to conceptualize a community’s collective political will in the context of structures and institutions that tend to work against this collective will. That is to say he developed a framework by which one can begin to understand how communities initiate and advance their own view of reality, a view that then goes into shaping the environ around them. In more contemporary terms, from this theoretical approach one can begin to understand how communities establish their agendas reflecting their community needs. The end result represents a profound insight into how communities are able to establish their own citizenship in a reality whose structures and institutions otherwise totally exclude them. These examples point to the practice outside the ideological framing of citizenship. Moreover, as has been pointed out, this kind of citizenship is and has been part of the politics from below. Some say that what we are witnessing is a transition from a normal politics controlled through the usual electoral forms and dominated by privileged lobbying groups to a politics that has begun to pressure the normalcy of hegemony on a broader basis than nation-states.29
Conclusion As the discussion in this chapter implies, the recognition of community as the premise of policy has been there since James Madison wrote his famous Federalist Paper No. 10 as a clarion call to those business and propertied
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communities in power. Indeed, one of the most important facets of American history since the founding of this nation and its commercial republic has been the response by the disempowered communities to their exploitation and their exclusion from the political processes and institutions. One only has to look at the role of populism throughout the history of this nation, as well as the intense labor struggles that have continuously occurred in American history. Finally, if we look at the history of machine politics, municipal reform, and urban social movements in general, one can then recognize that the struggles over policy, over political power, and over space are all community based. The objective has been to sketch out the methodological and theoretical outlines of our project in this chapter that has as its objective to re-conceptualize the role of citizenship and community in the contexts referred to previously in the larger context of a global economy that is redefining relationships and rights and privileges. The ensuing chapters are based on methodological thinking leading to the kind of analysis focused not just on an assessment of how communities are disempowered in today’s global economy, but one that can lead to a broader discussion of how democracy can be brought back to communities as they struggle to establish their diverse needs in the face of a demanding market economy.
Notes 1. Editor’s Preface by Robert Park to Nels Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. University of Chicago Press, 1923, pp. V. 2. Kaplan, Joshua. Lectures on Alexis de Tocqueville and his goal in his description of democracy in America. The Modern Scholar: Political Theory: The Classic Texts and Their Continuing Relevance. 14 lectures. Lecture #11: Alexis de Tocqueville 1 and Lecture #12 Alexis de Tocqueville 2, 2005. 3. Both the quantitative and qualitative analyses examine the casting of votes in the aggregate, sorting the aggregate by count. But the analysis is still approached by identifying bloc votes. 4. This is not to deny that as human beings we are quite capable of going against the grain of that experience. This becomes acutely true as a community changes through time and is seen to be more vulnerable to the larger market economy and its demands. But those changing interests come generationally and indeed are tied the rising or falling expectations of a community. Nor, as discussed later, is it to say that individuals do not discern in their own particular ways their interests vis-à-vis the community. 5. While the media certainly play a role in this process, as well, the argument here is that community has already formed the basis of identity that determines the media’s approach to that community or communities, and where organizations intervene then it tends to take the role of funneling the media information flow. 6. While generally overlooked, I would argue that without the millions of people across the world, including those in England, Prime Minister Tony Blair would not have been restrained and in turn the Bush regime, interested in keeping their allies, would not have been restrained. 7. The argument here is that the discourse on immigration has become a critical issue in the presidential elections of 2008, 2012, and now 2016. This is not to say that something akin to a backlash has been occurring across the nation. Indeed, the raids, the roundups of immigrants in chains, the disruption of families, and the incredible
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8.
9. 10.
11.
12.
number of laws, statutes, and ordinances considered across the urban landscape of the United States are in the thousands. It is worth quoting the statement by the Southern Poverty Law Center, in a report titled “The Year in Hate”—available at https:// www.splcenter.org/issues/hate-and-extremism—that it counted 888 hate groups in its latest tally, up from 844 in 2006 and 602 in 2000. The most prominent of the organizations newly added to the list, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, vehemently rejected the “hate group” label, and questioned the SPLC’s motives. FAIR said the center was using smear tactics to boost donations and stifle legitimate debate on immigration. “Their banner may be ‘Stop the hate’ but it’s really ‘Stop the debate,’ ” said FAIR’s president, Dan Stein. “Apparently you can’t even articulate an argument for immigration reform without being smeared.” The law center’s report contends there is a link between anti-immigrant activism and the significant rise in hate crimes against Latinos in recent years. According to the latest FBI statistics, 819 people were victimized by anti-Latino hate crimes in 2006, compared with 595 in 2003. “The immigration debate has turned ugly and the result has been a growth in white supremacist hate groups and anti-Latino hate crime,” said Mark Potok, director of the law center’s Intelligence Project. “The majority of anti-Latino hate crimes are carried out by people who think they’re attacking immigrants, and very likely undocumented immigrants.” Potok said hate groups were proliferating because a growing number of Americans were agitated by the immigration debate. He said many new groups had appeared in the border states of California, Texas and Arizona where illegal immigration has been a particularly volatile issue. We could argue, which argument I will take up later in this paper, that our society is going through an intense conflict over the definition of what it means to be citizen, a worker, a community person, and ultimately a contributor to the social and economic fabric of this society. Chicano and Chicana historians have provided excellent historical sketches of the roots of twentieth century transnationalism as Chicana/Chicano communities lived, worked, and organized politically throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It is only after World War II with the rise of middle class that Chicano/Chicana communities begin to assimilate or at least accommodate. See Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Workers in Texas. Texas A&M University Press, 1995, for a good description of the transnational character of the Mexican American community in early-twentieth century Texas. Joseph Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community. Oxford University Press, 2000. There are legal cases brought by individuals claiming their citizenship rights, such as Lind, etc. But even here, the ultimate decision was based on community and not simply any particular individual. See Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. Yale University Press, 1999. Indeed, the Greek polis was about a politics where only citizens could participate. Thus, in a two-fold manner, the Greek polis is at the root of modern citizenship. First, it is based on membership, or better said, exclusion. Second, it is based on a hierarchy of privilege. Political virtue, then, in the Greek context is based on the backs of those who have no access to their citizenship. The Romans, on the other hand, presumed property before citizenship and thus viewed citizenship as the license to maintain and protect personal property. See J.G.A. Pocock, “The Ideal of Ctizenship Since Classical Times,” in Theorizing Citizenship, edited by Ronald Beiner. State University of New York, 1995, for a good discussion of the concept of citizenship from classical times. C.B. McPherson, Possessive Individualism, the Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke. Oxford, 1962. In this seminal work, political philosopher C.B. Macpherson provides a rich discussion/critique of Locke and Hobbes as the leading classical liberals of Liberal democratic theory.
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13. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, edited by C.B. McPherson. Hackett Pub Co, 1980. I use “his” rather than hers/his to preserve the political intent of the social contract and its exclusivity. 14. C.B. McPherson, Possessive Individualism, the Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke. Oxford, 1962. 15. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Later Printing edition. Modern Library, 1994. 16. For example, the protection of one’s rights and claims to one’s job by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is based on the definition of that job and its rights as one’s property. 17. It was after World War II, when all those minority “citizens”, including black, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Asian American, finally gained access to the institutions that guaranteed them their citizenship. This was done in the courts, in the voting booth, and in the streets. While not there yet, this politics successfully challenged most restrictions on voting, including the Jim Crow practices, the restrictions along class lines, including the poll tax, the early registration, the annual registration, and finally the residency requirement. The most interesting case, which involved bringing about the definition of the requirement of residence as intent, was the homeless person who filed a suit to claim his right to vote even though he lived in the street. 18. Elmer Schattschneider. The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realists view of American Democracy. Wadworth Publishing. Revised edition March 14, 1975, p. 34 19. Carol Hardy-Fanta, Latina Politics, Latino Politics. Temple University Press, 1993. One could argue that this narrowing of the concept of political participation and politics itself therefore narrows what citizenship is and as a consequence fragments their political consciousness. 20. James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers. Create Space, 2010. 21. James Madison. The Federalist Papers: No. 10. The Avalon Project in Law, History, and Diplomacy, New Haven: Yale Law School. p. 1. http://avalon.law.yale. edu/18th_century/fed10.asp 22. The system of representation that we have, which is based on a single member district, winner-take-all, plurality system effectively eclipses all possibility of communities having a voice in our governing institutions, unless of course you have command of the resources by which to influence the system. 23. Manuel Castells, The City and The Grassroots. University of California Press, 1983. 24. Michael Peter Smith, The City, the State, and the Market: The Political Economy of Urban America. Blackwell Publishers, 1991. 25. David Harvey, Social Justice and the City: The Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation. University of Georgia Press, 2009. 26. Richard Deleon, Left Coast City. University of California Press, 1992. In this study, Deleon describes how an anti-growth coalition of different communities stopped the development regime in San Francisco, and in a more recent unpublished article, analyzes the Latinos in the Mission District and their successful mobilization against development in their community which residents believed would have led to disastrous consequences. 27. Anthony Giddens. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Polity Press, 1984. 28. Antonio Gramsci, Anthony Hoare and Geofrey Nowell Smith, Selections From the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers Company, 1971. 29. Rodolfo Rosales. “Trans-Border Worker Citizens: Hemispheric Labor and the Many Faces of Citizenship.” Latino Studies. Volume 11 Issue 4, Winter 2013. ISSN: 1476-3435 (Print) 1476-3443 (Online). In this essay, I bring to bear the changing political landscape of citizenship as our nation struggles with immigration reform and thus unavoidably encounters the politics of communities that are
Dialectics of Citizenship and Community 19 not citizens of the United States but are heavily invested in our communities and our workforce, both legally and illegally.
Bibliography Benhabib, Seyla. “Claiming Rights across Borders: International Human Rights and Democratic Sovereignty.” American Political Science Review 103, no. 4 (November 2009): 691–704. Carens, Joseph. Culture, Citizenship, and Community. Oxford Press, 2000. Castells, Manuel. The City and The Grassroots. University of California Press, 1983. Deleon, Richard. Left Coast City. University of California Press, 1992. Flores, William and Rina Benmayor, Eds. Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights. Beacon Press, 1998. Hardy-Fanta, Carol. Latina Politics, Latino Politics. Temple University Press, 1993. Harvey, David. Social Justice and the City: The Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation. University of Georgia Press, 2009. Isin, Elgin and Patricia Wood. Citizenship and Identity. Sage, 1999. Kaplan, Joshua. Lectures on Alexis de Tocqueville and his goal in his description of democracy in America. The Modern Scholar: Political Theory: The Classic Texts and Their Continuing Relevance. 14 lectures. Lecture #11: Alexis de Tocqueville 1 and Lecture #12: Alexis de Tocqueville 2, 2005. Kymlicka, Will and Wayne Norman, Eds. Citizenship in Diverse Societies. Oxford University Press, 2000. Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Edited by C.B. McPherson. Hackett Pub Co, 1980. Marshall, T.H. and Tom Bottemore. Citizenship and Social Class. Pluto Press, 1987. McPherson, C.B. Possessive Individualism, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke. Oxford, 1962. Pocock, J.G.A. “The Ideal of Citizenship Since Classical Times.” In Theorizing Citizenship. Edited by Ronald Beiner. State University of New York, 1995. Sassen, Saskia. “The Repositioning of Citizenship.” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): pp. 41–66. Sassen, Saskia. “Going beyond the National State in the USA: The Politics of Minoritized Groups in Global Cities.” Diogenes 51, no. 3 (2004): 59–65. Sassen, Saskia. “Membership and Its Politics: When the Outsider Expands the Formal Rights of Citizens.” Dossier, The Myth of Europa (October 2009). www.saskiasassen.com Sassen, Saskia. “Destroying Neighborhoods/Buying Pieces of City Land: Two Faces of the Same Deep Logic?” Urban Controversies, February 3, 2014. www.saskiasassen. com Sassen, Saskia. “Who Owns the City?” Governing Urban Future, November, 2014. www. saskiasassen.com Sassen, Saskia. “Response [to Benhabib].” European Journal of Political Theory 6, no. 4 (2007): 431–444. Smith, Michael Peter. The City, the State, and the Market: The Political Economy of Urban America. Blackwell Publishers, 1991. Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. Yale University Press, 1999. Stevenson, Nick, Ed. Culture and Citizenship. Sage, 2001. Zamora, Emilio. The World of the Mexican Workers in Texas. Texas A&M Press, 1995.
3
Lost in Migration? On Comitatus, Community, and Citizenship Louis Mendoza
Cultural citizenship is a deliberate oxymoron, a pair of words that do not fit together comfortably. Cultural citizenship refers to the right to be different and to belong in a participatory democratic sense. It claims that, in a democracy, social justice calls for equity among all citizens, even when such differences as race, religion, class, gender, or sexual orientation potentially could be used to make certain people less equal or inferior to others. The notion of belonging means full membership in a group and the ability to influence one’s destiny by having a significant voice in basic decisions.1 —Renato Rosaldo
This chapter uses the concepts of belonging and cultural citizenship to examine how people of Mexican descent who have lived in the U.S. for multiple generations as well as more recent migrants make and sustain community. In particular, I focus on how Mexicans and Mexican Americans conceive of and practice citizenship to create mutually constitutive experiences of belonging and home, especially when they are neither fully socially integrated in the United States or their countries of origin. In this analysis of Mexican descent communities, the concepts of comitatus, community, and citizenship will be central because collectively they provide contextual and analytical lenses to examine Mexicans’ status as perpetual outsiders, their resilience against systemic violence, and their efforts to actively create and sustain community. While it might seem important to make hard and fast distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, that is between recent migrants and those Mexicans who have been naturalized or who were residents of the land prior to the annexation of Mexican land following the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the dialectics of race and citizenship in the United States have meant that the legal status of Mexicans north of the U.S.–Mexico border is only one of many factors influencing their sense of belonging and their social, cultural, and political inclusion. Rosaldo’s introduction of cultural citizenship into Latino Studies discourse in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter emerged at a time when scholars from a range of disciplines and inter-disciplinary perspectives found it necessary to go “beyond conventional notions of citizenship to come up with new theories and models
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for understanding the political activities and attachments of mobile subjects who either live outside of their country of citizenship or whose attachments otherwise span national borders.”2 I argue that Mexicanos in the United States have redefined citizenship at the local level even as they advocate for more just and inclusive national policies that acknowledge and respect their economic and social contributions to the nation as a whole. As Leo Chavez noted in The Latino Threat, the growing presence and visibility of Latin American migrants in the United States has heightened nativism and numerous anti-immigration laws and policies, constructing migrants and their U.S.-born progeny, particularly those of Mexican and Central American origin, as cultural others whose very presence is perceived as a threat to national stability (Chávez 2008). This essay focuses on the challenges to social, cultural, political, and economic integration faced by those who are part of the Latinoization of the United States. Major demographic changes of the last thirty years are only partially a result of immigration, but the persistent view of Latinos as perpetual outsiders fuels the myth that we are all recent immigrants. Many scholars agree that one consequence of the 2006 immigrant rights marches was a consolidation of a pan-Latino identity in the United States, even as concerns about the homogenization of Latinos have emerged. Gabriel Sanchez has asserted that pan-Latino identity formation in the aftermath of the “negative tone of immigration policy” has fostered “the concept of linked fate, a politicized form of group identity.” He states: In short, although more Latinos prefer to use national origin to identify themselves, Latino pan-ethnic identity is highly relevant to the political behavior of the Latino population and will only increase in salience as long as the political debates surrounding immigration policy is perceived to be hostile to the Latino community.3
Comitatus and Extra-Legal Efforts to Resist Civic Incorporation Within Chicano Studies, the history of racial animus against Mexicans in the conquest and settlement of the Southwest prior to, during, and following the Mexican–American War is well-substantiated.4 Only more recently has scholarship emerged that documents in great detail the level of extra-legal violence that has confronted people of Mexican descent in the United States and inhibited their full incorporation into the U.S. body politic. State sanctioned anti-Mexican violence is perhaps most well known, despite the longstanding failure by many historians of the American West to fully acknowledge it. One such form of rampant state-sanctioned violence was the brutal legacy of the Texas Rangers,5 although they were only one of many institutions of the law that contributed to the deterritorialization and deaths of many Mexicans in the United States. According to William Carrigan and Clive Webb, between 1848 and 1928, mobs lynched at least 597 Mexicans. Carrigan and Webb regard lynching as a
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retributive act of murder for which those responsible claim to be serving the interests of justice, tradition, or community good. In this era, justice, tradition, and community good as justification for anti-Mexican extra-legal violence clearly oriented towards a model of the nation that conflates white supremacy and national identity. While people of Mexican descent have won many, many political and civil rights claims over the course of the twentieth century, the anti-immigrant period of the late-twentieth century and the early-twentyfirst century has witnessed a rise in hate crimes against Latinos committed by individuals and organizations, without regard for their specific nationality.6 For instance, in Patchogue, N.Y., Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero was killed in November 2008 by teens looking to beat up some Mexicans.7 A number of anti-immigrant, nativist organizations have embraced a vigilante model for immigration enforcement. Among the most visible of these organized vigilante groups was the Minuteman Project, which was modeled on the legacy of the Posse Comitatus. Both of these organizations position their members as authentic citizens and defenders of the nation. In doing so they hark back to earlier periods of national formation. In the United States, the posse comitatus was an important institution on the Western frontier, where it became known as the posse. At various times vigilante committees, often acting without legal standing, organized posses to capture wrongdoers. The use of posses was limited by the passage of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricted the use of federal forces in enforcing laws. This restriction advanced the interests of southern white supremacists who sought the end to military occupation of the South following an election in which federal forces protected former slaves’ rights to vote.8 Proponents of the law sought to halt and reverse political reforms related to the inclusion of freedmen in the political system in the American South in the aftermath of the Civil War. While the Posse Comitatus Act sought to limit the power of the federal government to defend the interests of freed slaves, ironically years later the posse comitatus would be resurrected as a strategy for organizing a viciously racist, anti-Semitic and antigovernment group that adopted the rhetoric of patriotism, individual rights, local control, and defense of the Constitution. “Posse Comitatus” was the name taken by a right-wing, anti-tax extremist group founded in 1969 by Henry L. Beach, a one-time member of the Silver Shirts, a Nazi-inspired organization that was established in the United States after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. The group operated on the belief that the true intent of the founders of the United States was to establish a Christian republic where the individual was sovereign. Members of the group were united by the belief that the federal government was illegitimate, being operated by Jewish interests through the Internal Revenue Service, the federal courts, and the Federal Reserve. Although the organization dissolved in the mid-1980s, it became the model for fervent anti-immigrant groups such as the Minuteman project.9 The Minuteman Project was started in August 2004 by Jim Gilchrist and Chris Simcox to extrajudicially monitor the U.S.–Mexico border for
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unauthorized migrant crossings. The name derives from the Minuteman, militiamen who fought in the American Revolution. The Minuteman project sees itself as defending the cultural genealogy of the United States. In a 2005 Intelligence Report10 from the Southern Poverty Law Center, author David Holthouse documents the ideology of Arizona’s Minuteman Project: “It should be legal to kill illegals,” said Carl, a 69-year old retired Special Forces veteran who fought in Vietnam and now lives out West. “Just shoot ‘em on sight. That’s my immigration policy recommendation. You break into my country, you die.” . . . “I agree completely,” Michael said. “You get up there with a rifle and start shooting four or five of them a week, the other four or five thousand behind them are going to think twice about crossing that line.”11 While the effectiveness of the organization has waned after several years of garnering publicity with its violent rhetoric, one of the founders continue to maintain a web presence, where he recently proclaimed in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election on the front page of organization’s website: “Trump Wins! Minuteman Project Mission accomplished!”12
The New Cultural Geography of Latinoization As the actions and rhetoric of anti-immigrant groups has escalated and infiltrated mainstream politics, much of the anxiety regarding demographic change has been primarily projected onto the undocumented population of Latinos in the United States, but analysis of demographic data reveals a much more complex phenomenon that reaches back decades if not over the last century. Since the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the Latino population has grown exponentially and its geographic distribution throughout the country has fundamentally shifted so that it has altered the demographic composition of regions of the country where there was heretofore little or no presence of Latinos. Latinoization refers to the longstanding and increasing impact of Latinos on U.S. culture, society, and demography. This process has been particularly distinctive and intense since the passage of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Bill. Even as the discourse and attention to the impact of Latinoization of the United States has increased, many scholars are wary of the homogenization of Latino identity that occurs when an umbrella term is utilized because of the concomitant loss of cultural, linguistic, and historical specificity that results. Scholars like Rogelio Saenz note that major periods of Latino incorporation into the United States that must be accounted for as part of the Latinoization process include the initiation of patterns of large-scale migration of Cubans and Dominicans in the late 1950s and 1960s, Central Americans in the 1970s and 1980s, and South Americans in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1980, Latinos
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accounted for approximately 6.4 percent of the U.S. population, or about 14.6 million people. By 1990 they were 9.0 percent of the population, in 2000 that number had risen to 12.5 percent, and in the 2010 census they were 16.3 percent for a total of 50.5 million people. In 2003 Latinos surpassed African Americans as the nation’s largest ethnic minority. While these demographic shifts are dramatic, it’s important to understand that immigration is only one factor, with the most salient one being the different nativity and mortality rates between whites and Latinos in the United States. White Americans have a fertility rate of 1.8 while the rate of fertility among Latinas is 2.4. Latino males outlive white males by an average of 2.3 years while Latinas outlived white females by 2.7 years in 2006. Combine these facts with the much younger Latino population, which has a median age of 27 versus 41 for whites, and the fact that Latino youth account for 25 percent of the country’s population under the age of 17, and one can understand how the Latino population is projected to comprise 30 percent of the nation’s population by 2050. People of Mexican descent account for 64.6 percent of the U.S. Latino population, those from Puerto Rico about 9.5 percent, Salvadoran Americans account for approximately 3.8 percent, Cuba Americans account for 3.6 percent, and Dominicans are 2.9 percent of the population. The remainder from the rest of Central and South America represent 11.9 percent, and 1.4 percent are from Spain. Until recently, the geography of the Latino diaspora in the U.S. could be understood by traditional settlement patterns: the majority of Mexican descent peoples could be found in the Southwest, Puerto Ricans were mostly concentrated in the Northeast, Cubans in Florida, Central Americans in the northeastern corridor, and Dominicans in the Northeast. But following the regularization of the legal status of approximately 3 million undocumented Latin American immigrants with the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), the cartography of Latino settlement in the United States underwent radical transformation because legal status brought with it freedom to relocate within the U.S. in search of improved working conditions. Latino communities in traditional destinations have continued to grow, but the fastest growth in Latino population has taken place in what scholars have come to call “new destinations” in the South and Midwest. In New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States, Victor Zúniga and Rúben Hernández-León address the “novel geography of diverse receiving contexts” where each context “has its own racial hierarchy, history of interethnic relations, and ways of incorporating immigrant workers and their families” (xxvi). Between 1990 and 2000, Midwestern states registered the highest rate of Latino population growth (81 percent), followed by the South (71.2 percent). By 2000, 8.9 percent of Latino families in the country resided in the Midwest, up from 7.7 percent in 1990. The change in the South during this time was even more dramatic with the U.S. Latino population doubling in this same time frame, from 2.4 million to 4.9 million. The 2010 U.S. Census showed that the population in the South continued to grow at a dramatic
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rate, with the South experiencing the highest increase in the percent growth of Latino households. The settlement of Latinos in regions of the United States that previously had little permanent presence of Latinos has changed the cultural geography of the country as a whole and these regions in particular. Latino political influence on electoral politics is still emerging, but it certainly played a prominent role in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections. There is great political diversity among Latinos, so no one political party can take their vote for granted. The final layer of history providing the larger context of Latinoization includes the Spanish colonization of the Americas (including in the region now comprising the United States) and the contentious relationship former Spanish colonies had with the United States during the period of U.S. expansion (Manifest Destiny) and throughout the twentieth century. It is this context that provides the common misunderstanding that people of Latin American descent are recent arrivals to the country. What results is a consistent failure to recognize two important moments of the forced incorporation of the two largest subgroups of U.S. Latinos into the population of the United States: the acquisition of half of Mexico’s land and those who populated it following the U.S.–Mexican War of 1846–48, and the 1917 incorporation of Puerto Rico as an organized but unincorporated territory of the United States via the Jones Act. These acts of territorial acquisition by the United States laid the foundation, and to some extent set the pattern for, relationships of economic dependency between these nations that would make necessary a continuous flow of migrants from Mexico and Puerto Rico to the United States.13
Community and Citizenship Within much of the scholarship on Latino cultural citizenship, membership in the nation-state is implicitly ambiguous because it is constantly evolving. Cultural phenomena, community organizing, and issues of identity are often privileged over legal questions that address membership in the polity. In contrast to traditional concepts of citizenship in which the individual is the rights holder, the agents and subjects of cultural citizenship are the group and consequently call attention to the ongoing debate between cultural pluralism and universal citizenship in the nation-state. Irene Bloemraad observes that: The arguments advanced by multicultural theorists suggest that by recognizing and accommodating minority cultures, members of those communities will feel increased attachment to and engagement in the larger polity. Critics retort that excessive emphasis on diversity reifies differences, undermines a cohesive collective identity, and hinders common political projects—from backing the armed forces to supporting social benefits and redistribution. Detractors also worry that promoting multiculturalism leaves minorities living “parallel lives” in segregated communities, retarding majority-language learning, hindering economic integration, and
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Louis Mendoza weakening social ties and, thus, social capital with those outside the ethnic enclave. . . . The reality might lie between these two positions, as the mechanisms tying multiculturalism to outcomes like employment or educational attainment are not clear. . . . The consequences of multiculturalism for immigrants’ civic and political integration are somewhat stronger. Immigrants living in countries that adopt multicultural policies are more likely to engage in nonviolent political activities directed at their country of residence rather than their homeland, more likely to report trust in government, less likely to report discrimination based on their group membership, and more likely to become citizens.14
In his 2016 Mahesh Chandra Regmi lecture, David Geller noted in ‘The Idea of Nepal’ that: Social anthropologists are familiar, at least since Diana Forsythe’s analysis of German identity, that what looks from the outside like a singular national identity, what is supposed to be a nation of equal citizens, is in practice, and in the way people experience it, a hierarchy. Certain people are considered more German than others . . . Thus, there are, at the level of everyday interaction and unthinking assumption, gradations of Germanness (and the same goes for any other national identity). Some belong more than others. Another way to put this is to say that national identities usually have an “ethnic core.”15 In the United States, the presumption that the ethnic core is Western European is being challenged by the changing demographics of the last fifty years. Citizenship is traditionally defined as membership in a political and geographic community. A sizeable body of scholarship on Latino cultural citizenship, civic engagement, and political integration has emerged to demonstrate the impact of local government engagement with new immigrant communities.16 Although citizenship’s definition and scope is contested among scholars, citing Bosniak, Ulla Berg and Robyn Rodriguez note that it is typically disaggregated into four dimensions: legal status, rights, political activity and other forms of participation in society, and as collective identity and sentiments of belonging (2). They assert that in: ‘the current era of globalization,’ pre-existing dominant notions of national sovereignty and citizenship have been profoundly challenged. A variety of phenomena including mass migrations, diasporas, dual citizenship arrangements, neoliberal economic reforms and global social justice movements have since the 1970s produced shifting boundaries and meanings of citizenship within and beyond the Americas. In ‘receiving’ or destination countries, this has raised questions about how or whether to extend rights to newcomers.17
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It is the effort to assert, claim, define, and secure the right to belong on the same terms as legal citizens that is at stake for immigrants. In the larger context, these issues become just as important to those citizens who have been treated historically as second class citizens. It has thus been said that immigrant rights are an important civil rights issue that must be addressed.
Desire and Ambivalence: Conversations About the Latinoization of the United States Karin Amet and Shirly Bar-Lev assert that a sense of belonging and feeling ‘at home’ are expressions used by migrants to articulate their level of comfort in a new environment. When attempting to understand immigrants’ sense of belonging, we must examine the process of development of this feeling after entering the new society. Under what was once the melting pot model of immigrant assimilation, immigrants were expected to gradually release previous attachments, social identifiers and even a sense of national commitment to their country of origin, and develop a local identity and sense of belonging in the host country. However, as Amet and Bar-Lev note, a: growing corpus of studies indicates that immigrants do not simply abandon their previous identities or cultural affinity with their country of origin. Rather, these are used as interpretive tools or templates in constructing their individual and collective identity in their new society. Weingrod and Levi suggest that most immigrants cultivate multiple citizenships, instead of being deeply implicated both ideologically and materially in the nationalist project of their homeland.18 In this sustained period of debates and inaction on immigration reform, migrants have thus forged tenuous relationships with other Latinos in the United States and navigated often hostile relationships with host communities in which attraction and repulsion mutually coexist. I now turn to a review of some original interviews that address these complex and often contradictory dynamics. In the second half of 2007, I conducted a series of ninety interviews with people around the country about their experience with the Latinoization of the United States. This section foregrounds excerpts of conversations with immigrants and their Latino allies, who share with them a vision of social, political, and economic incorporation that enables them to retain their dignity and advocate for recognition that they contribute positively to U.S. society. This study was conducted in the aftermath of the Spring 2006 series of massive immigrant rights marches of hundreds of thousands of people across the country as they sought to counter the rising tide of anti-immigrant discourse in the media and in the public at large. These marches occurred in response to highly visible anti-immigrant, anti-Latino discourse that revolves around the core of who “we” are as an immigrant nation, the cultural, philosophical and political
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qualities that define who “belongs” in the United States. Between the calls for amnesty, guest worker programs, border walls, and the repeal of birthright citizenship, a rampant xenophobia tinged, and continues to inform, debates on immigration as people express their fears that Spanish will supplant English as the national language, or that new immigrants are stealing jobs, social services, and education without paying taxes. Rather than cowering in the shadows, immigrant activists consistently shared with me how they individually and collectively sought to proactively negotiate their relationships and assert rights.19 In recent years, anti-immigrant sentiments have given rise to hundreds of local ordinances prohibiting access to housing, education, and jobs. And since Arizona successfully passed statewide legislation in 2010, we have seen many states strive to follow a trend that had been mostly limited to small communities. Amidst this climate, efforts to reform outdated immigration policies continue to be stalled at the federal level as politicians remain polarized and paralyzed by competing perspectives on the benefits and liabilities of immigrant workers. The 2016 president-elect inaugurated his successful run for the presidency with cries that he would build a wall and that Mexican immigrants were “rapists and drug dealers.” Despite the pervasive media portrayal of a strong anti-immigrant movement and the intensification of rhetoric by politicians during and following this time period, it is also clear that immigrant families routinely forge very strong intercultural community relationships at work and in their personal lives. It is also clear that they have helped U.S. communities sustain their economic viability. In an interview with Raúl Reymundo, the Executive Director of the Resurrection Project in Chicago, he asserted: From my perspective, if you live in places like Iowa, Nebraska, the heartland if you will, you better be welcoming immigrants, because they are the ones who will be paying for your social security. The population is aging and they are taking care of your future. There has been research comparing the economy of Chicago with the economies of Detroit and Cleveland, particularly during the 90s and late 90s when it was booming, and why Detroit’s and Cleveland’s economies didn’t prosper as well as Chicago. Number one reason: immigration. In Chicago, Latinos primarily, but immigrants in general, reversed the decline of the population.20 Many of the people I interviewed shared experiences of Latino workers and their families being welcomed by local institutions, but many also shared stories of ongoing tensions and resistance to their presence despite clear evidence of the need for their labor to the local economy. Zúniga and HernándezLeón argue that new immigrants utilize social capital to become “agents of their own incorporation and integration” into their new communities.21 From a pro-immigrant perspective, these have included efforts to increase access to higher education among undocumented students through state-based versions of the DREAM Act, the passage of immigrant sanctuary ordinances by cities, and public polices declaring non-cooperation with immigrant enforcement
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authorities by local police departments, a sentiment reiterated in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s successful election bid. In many small communities across the country, profound changes have occurred, but they rarely get media coverage because they are not sensational but subtle, even as they are also profound. In the fields of Nebraska or Michigan, the slaughterhouses of Iowa, and the meat packing plants or dairy farms of Minnesota, a dramatic transformation is occurring that involves the out-migration of young whites who, in their pursuit of new opportunities in urban areas, leave behind an aging and low-growth population. The result is that local businesses and manufacturers are left with little recourse but to seek (im)migrant labor to maintain the local economy. Even if this active recruitment of “outsiders” brings with it a certain discomfort among longtime residents, there exists a strong acknowledgment of the role of new immigrants in maintaining the economy and vitality of small towns.22 The result is a cultural paradox in which the way of life of elderly whites is often preserved by the labor of new immigrants who also bring cultural change to their new communities in the form of Spanish language newspapers and radio, Mexican restaurants and tienditas, and a robust presence of Spanish language in the schools and soccer fields. No doubt some resistance, resentment and suspicion exist, but in many rural communities local leaders recognize that change is imminent and their well-being is tied to an influx of new immigrants. Many workers claimed that recruitment is aggressive, with bonuses being offered to new employees and to those who recruited them. In these small towns, chain migration is active and persistent. Katherine Fennelly notes that: “The most dramatic demographic shift in the United States today is the aging of the population—a development that increases the tax burden on young workers who make payroll contributions to cover the costs of Social Security and Medicare.”23 In many parts of the Midwest, the aging of the population has been heightened by the out-migration of young native-born workers, a phenomenon that Peter Rogerson and Daejong Kim aptly call “the emptying of the Bread Basket of its breadwinners.” Bob Lefebvre, President of the Minnesota Milk Producer’s Association, has stated that “about half of the cows that are milked in Minnesota are milked by someone of Latino descent.” For Lefebvre and the Minnesota dairy operations he represents, immigration has become a surprisingly important issue in recent years. Citing out-migration of young people from Minnesota’s rural areas to more urban settings, and the difficulty of dairy work, Lefebvre explains that one of the state’s mainstay industries is having a harder time finding workers.24 As I spoke with white Americans about the changing nature of their communities, feelings were clearly mixed. Without a doubt, there is a persistence of pride in the United States’ immigrant heritage—and this legacy enables many to identify with the struggles faced by new immigrants. There is also an enduring respect for the strong work ethic of immigrants, their family values, and the sacrifices they make in coming here to survive and seek opportunity. For many folks, the idea that we are and should continue to be a “nation of laws” determined whether or not they were open to accepting newcomers. These folks were clearly bothered by the notion that undocumented
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immigrants were “lawbreakers,” and, at times they expressed the idea that their own ancestors had come here “fair and square.” When confronted with the fact that under the present system, labor needs would not be met, I was often told that “something had to be done to fix the system.” Efforts to establish and resist local ordinances have intensified the racialization of the entire Latino community and generated organized grassroots and legal response efforts. The 2008 economic crisis only intensified anti-immigrant sentiment. During the first term of Obama’s presidency, we witnessed an increase of incidents of hate crimes against Latinos, rampant enforcement of immigration laws, intensification of border security, and zero action on immigration reform. Only as he was preparing for his 2012 re-election did President Obama make a bold move by enacting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Program. For the last several years, but particularly since 2005, a number of policy proposals related to immigration at the federal, state, and local levels have been introduced. On the anti-immigrant side, these include: the increased enforcement and apprehension of undocumented immigrants, restriction of immigrants from government-provided services, and English-only ordinances. Comprehensive immigration reform, however, continues to be elusive. Of this phenomenon, Carlos Marentes, executive director of the Border Agricultural Workers Project in El Paso, Texas observed: We . . . are concerned with anti-immigrant discourse in the media and from the TV, and how this anti-immigrant rhetoric creates a situation where extremist groups think that they have to do something against immigrants. . . . Most of the immigration legislation before Congress that failed (in the mid 2000s) included strong measures to control the border. All of them also included a temporary guest worker program. So you have a contradiction. What they want is the same type of policies that have been working in this country for many years. To me the immigration policies of this country resemble a case of domestic violence. The man beats the woman, does whatever he wants to do with the woman, and it’s not because he wants the woman to leave. It’s because he wants the woman to stay under his control. So . . . we have immigration policies that attempt to have an immigrant population under control, but we don’t want them to leave, we want them to do dirty jobs.25 Marentes’ astute analogy between immigration policy and domestic violence speaks to an exploitive, interdependent, and dysfunctional relationship that we all collude and benefit from when we refuse to address comprehensive immigration reform.
Conclusion Immigrants must be integrated into society at every level if they are to realize their potential as fully contributing members of society and create a viable
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sense of belonging that will allow them to be a part of their new home rather than apart from it. Achieving this objective requires eliminating barriers, such as school and residential segregation, xenophobia, and discrimination that limits educational and occupational discrimination. Above all, state governments should provide leadership by articulating goals designed to foster integration and encouraging local governments to follow suit. One common strategy that is being used to bridge cultural divides is the creation of local diversity coalitions. Such coalitions may involve many different types of organizations, and they may take many different forms, but they generally share the goal of working to promote improved relations between foreign-born and U.S. residents. In 2007, immigration scholars Downs Schwei and Fennelly conducted a census of diversity coalitions in rural Minnesota and found evidence of 50 different programs and initiatives, including programs focused on recreational and educational agendas, community educational forums, community festivals, civic engagement campaigns, and human rights commissions.26 Across the country I have seen the dramatic difference between embracing diversity and acknowledging that it has always been a part of our social fabric or resisting it and cultivating an illusion of cultural homogeneity. However much accommodating difference and change is hard work, communities that embrace newcomers have found that they are made stronger. Communities that strive to be inclusive have adopted a moral and ethical framework that views others as whole human beings with distinct histories, values, and qualities that complement their own and enrich their lives—not threaten it.27 National leadership is crucial for ending the deadlock on immigration reform. With the election of Donald Trump and a majority Republican House and Senate, it is difficult to imagine that fair, just, or comprehensive reforms are within the realm of possibility. Although the immigration debate is ostensibly about immigrants and the law, anyone who has experienced social marginalization knows that it’s about much more. Notions of the law, legal status, and belonging are intimately intertwined and often pitted against one another. Any honest assessment of why we have such difficulty expanding our sense of belonging has to begin with the identification of why so many fear demographic and cultural change. Demographic change mandates different conversations about inclusion and exclusion, conversations that should reflect dynamic rather than static regional histories, cultures, and social relations.
Notes 1. Rosaldo, Renato. “Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy.” Cultural Anthropology 9.3(1994): 402. 2. Rosaldo, Renato. “Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy.” Cultural Anthropology 9.3(1994): 402–411. 3. Sanchez, Gabriel. Taking a Closer Look at Latino Pan-ethnic Identity. Website: Latino Decisions. Everything Latino Politics. Accessed 12/22/2016 www.latinode cisions.com/blog /2012/04/18/taking-a-closer-look-at-latino-pan-ethnic-identity/
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4. See Deleón, Montejano, and Saldívar. DeLeón, Arnoldo. They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983; Montejano, David. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987; Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1990. 5. See Américo Paredes. With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970; and Refusing to Forget website accesses 1/2/2017 https://refusingtoforget.org/ 6. See Richard Delgado’s essay, The Law of the Noose: A History of Latino Lynching, for a long view on the purposes and meanings of Latino lynchings. 7. See the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website www.splcenter.org for numerous examples of anti-immigrant hate crimes. 8. West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. S.v. “Posse comitatus,” Retrieved January 3, 2017 from http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Posse+commitatus 9. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s website notes that “The antigovernment movement has experienced a resurgence, growing quickly since 2008, when President Obama was elected to office. Factors fueling the antigovernment movement in recent years include changing demographics driven by immigration, the struggling economy and the election of the first African-American president.” 10. www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2005/minutemen-other-antiimmigrant-militia-groups-stake-out-arizona-border 11. www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/hate-incidents?keyword=immigrant&page=1 12. “Trump Wins! Minuteman Project Mission accomplished!” http://baesic.net/minute manproject/category/jim-gilchrist/ 13. While the 1823 Monroe Doctrine was ostensibly created to protect Western hemisphere nations from foreign military intervention while maintaining the autonomy of Latin American nations, it opened the door for intense U.S. economic involvement in Latin America. Since 1890, the U.S. military has intervened fifty-six times in the affairs of seventeen Latin American nations. Thus U.S. foreign relations with Latin America have directly affected immigration from the region as political and economic refugees have been offered refuge or sought escape from their homelands. 14. Irene Bloemraad. The Debate over Multiculturalism: Philosophy, Politics, and Policy. Accessed 12/16/2016 www.migrationpolicy.org/article/debate-over-multi culturalism-philosophy-politics-and-policy/ 15. David Gellner, 2016 Mahesh Chandra Lecture. 11 December, 2016. http://sos cbaha.org/activities/lectures/mahesh-chandra-regmi-lecture/884-mcrl2016.html 16. See the work of Sandoval and Jennings in particular for an excellent survey of this scholarship. 17. Ulla Dalum Berg and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, “Transnational Citizenship across the Americas,” Identities Vol. 20, Iss. 6 (2013): 1. Accessed 12/22/2016 http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2013.828627 18. Karin Amit and S. Bar-Lev, “Immigrants’ Sense of Belonging to the Host Country: The Role of Life Satisfaction, Language Proficiency, and Religious Motives,” Social Indicators Research 124 (2015): 947. doi:10.1007/s11205-014-0823-3 19. Portions of the analysis provided here are excerpted or paraphrased from Conversations across Our America: Talking about Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States. Austin: UT Press, 2012, and A Journey around Our America. Austin: UT Press, 2012, books based on this research project. 20. Louis Mendoza, Conversations across Our America: Talking about Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States. Austin: UT Press, 2012, 116. 21. Zúniga, Victor and Ruben Hernández León. New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States. Russell Sage Foundation, 2005. 22. Millard and Chapa note similar dynamics in their important collection of essays.
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23. Fennelly, Katherine. Immigration in the Midwest. Policy Brief. Scholars Strategy Network website. Accessed 01/12/2017 http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/ brief/immigration-midwest 24. G. Owens, J. Meyerson and C. Otteson, A New Age of Immigrants: Making Immigration Work for Minnesota. St. Paul: Wilder Foundation, August 2010, 30. 25. Louis Mendoza, “Voces de Nuestra América: Meditations on Latinoization, Citizenship, and Belonging,” in Procesos transnacionales y migración: enfoques sociales, culturales, políticos y económicos de la migración. Edited by Misael González Ramírez, José Luis Sánchez Gavi, and Adriana Sletza Ortega Ramírez. Jalisco, MX: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Spring 2014. 26. Katherine Fennelly and Tamara Downs Schwei. “Diversity Coalitions in Rural Minnesota Communities.” CURA Reporter. Winter 2007, 13–23. 27. See Moving from Exclusion to Belonging for a detailed and nuanced analysis of the myriad of factors impacting a sense of inclusion and belonging in Minnesota.
Bibliography Amit, K. & Bar-Lev, S. “Immigrants’ Sense of Belonging to the Host Country: The Role of Life Satisfaction, Language Proficiency, and Religious Motives.” Social Indicators Research 124 (2015): 947–961. Accessed 12/08/2016. doi:10.1007/s11205-014-0823-3 Berg, Ulla Dalum and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez. “Transnational Citizenship across the Americas.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 20 (2013): 649–664. Accessed 12/16/2016. doi:10.1080/1070289X.2013.828627 Bloemraad, Irene. The Debate over Multiculturalism: Philosophy, Politics, and Policy. Accessed 12/16/2016 www.migrationpolicy.org/article/debate-over-multiculturalismphilosophy-politics-and-policy/. Carrigan, William D. and Clive Webb. “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928.” Journal of Social History 37, no. 2 (2003): 411–438. Accessed 01/03/2017. https://muse.jhu.edu/. Chavez, L.R. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. Stanford University Press, 2008. DeLeón, Arnoldo. They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900. University of Texas Press, 1983. Delgado, Richard, The Law of the Noose: A History of Latino Lynching, 2009. Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Liberties Law Review (CR-CL), Vol. 44, 2009; U of Alabama Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2533521. Accessed 11/21/2016. https://ssrn.com/ abstract=2533521 Fennelly, Katherine and A. Huart. The Economic Impact of Immigrants in Minnesota. Minnesota: Minnesota Business Immigration Reform Coalition, 2010. Accessed 10/16/ 2016. JV6471.F46 2010. Gellner, David. Mahesh Chandra Lecture, December 11, 2016. Accessed 01/03/2017. http://soscbaha.org/activities/lectures/mahesh-chandra-regmi-lecture/884-mcrl2016. html. Mendoza, Louis. Conversations across Our America: Talking about Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States. University of Texas Press, 2012. Mendoza, Louis. “Voces de Nuestra América: Meditations on the Latinoization of the U.S., Citizenship, and Belonging.” In Procesos transnacionales y migración: enfoques sociales, culturales, políticos y económicos de la migración. Edited by Misael González Ramírez, José Luis Sánchez Gavi, and Adriana Sletza Ortega Ramírez. Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Spring 2014.
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Millard, Ann V. and Jorge Chapa. Apple Pie and Enchiladas: Latino Newcomers in the Midwest. University of Texas Press, 2004. Minuteman Project website. Accessed 12/19/2016. http://baesic.net/minutemanproject/ Montejano, David. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas. University of Texas Press, 1987. Moving From Exclusion to Belonging: Immigrant Rights in Minnesota Today. Minneapolis: The Advocates for Human Rights, 2014. http://www.theadvocatesforhumanrights.org/home Owens, G., J. Meyerson and C. Otteson. A New Age of Immigrants: Making Immigration Work for Minnesota. Wilder Foundation, 2010. Paredes, Américo. With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. University of Texas Press, 1970. Refusing to Forget Website. Accessed 01/02/2017. https://refusingtoforget.org/. Rosaldo, Renato. “Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy.” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 402–411. Saenz, Rogelio. “Engine of U.S. Population Growth: Latinos and the Changing of America.” Presentation at the University of Minnesota. Accessed 01/03/2017. http:// slideplayer.com/slide/3142737/. Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Sanchez, Gabriel. “Taking a Closer Look at Latino Pan-ethnic Identity.” Website: Latino Decisions. Everything Latino Politics. Accessed 12/22/2016. www.latinodecisions. com/blog /2012/04/18/taking-a-closer-look-at-latino-pan-ethnic-identity/. Sandoval, Juan Simon Onesiimo and Joel Jennings. “Latino Civic Participation: Evaluating Indicators of Immigrant Engagement in a Midwestern City.” Latino Studies 10, no. 4 (2013): 523–545. Southern Poverty Law Center website. Accessed 01/03/2017. www.splcenter.org/activeantigovernment-groups-united-states. Zuniga, Victor and Ruben Hernandez Leon. New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States. Russell Sage Foundation, 2005.
4
Setting the Stage A Top-Down Perspective on Factors That Divide Democratic Citizenship Carol Y. Yoder and Christina Verzijl
Citizenship is more than an individual exchange of freedoms for rights; it is also membership in a body politic, a nation, and a community. To be deemed fair, a system must offer its citizens equal opportunities for public recognition, and groups cannot systematically suffer from misrecognition in the form of stereotype and stigma. —Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women1
Even superficial reflection about citizenship underscores the abstract and elusive nature of this complex legal, political, and psychological construct. Democratic citizenship depends on citizens and their chosen representatives acting in the public interest. Ideally, citizenship encompasses moral and social responsibility, political literacy, and community involvement, with general consensus among scholars that citizenship encompasses a medley of objective factors such as social rights, general welfare, social identity, and political membership. Citizenship is intended to buffer its members against the vagaries and inequities in social systems, with methods for redistributing resources as needed. However, as Conover, Searing and Crewe note, many people have formal legal citizenship, but do not receive equal respect and fail to feel sufficiently comfortable to fully participate in political and civic life.2 Without the perceived ability to fully engage in this community, many will argue that citizenship is illusory. Conover and colleagues describe three current models of citizenship. The first describes citizenship as a liberal model that sees citizenship as a contractual framework of rights, guaranteeing individuals the right to choose their values and preferred ways of life. Inherent in this approach is respecting individual choices (e.g., living alone), with a state that is neutral to differences in cultural choices (e.g., family values). Therefore, in a contractual framework of rights, all are treated equally and citizenship is decoupled from national cultural communities. The second paradigm is described as a cultural pluralist model, which explains that because of inherent biases and stereotypes, some groups are privileged and used as prototypes that define the culture. Here,
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similar to the liberal model, the goal is also equal citizenship. To achieve this end, minority cultures are valorized and protected with differential treatment to help compensate for poverty which limits full participatory access. Finally, there is a communitarian model, which rejects the previous two models as unrealistic, given the limitations of human nature. Here, citizenship should include shared values and sense of solidarity. As a consequence of people’s experiences in their respective communities, culture cannot be removed from citizenship. In this framework, people need and want to be members of communities with shared identities and moral principles. To preserve identity and values, the model purports that traditional cultural communities have to be maintained. Conover et al.’s interview data using 3000 British and American citizens suggests that most citizens from these communities embrace communitarian assumptions. That focus on traditional, or more accurately, prototypical cultural community does not represent the many other groups constituting the membership of a diverse citizenry in heterogeneous society. Democracy requires participation and action by its members, but many psychological mechanisms are in play that exclude and undercut agency for many poor, working class, and other communities who do not readily fit into these prescriptive definitions of citizenship.
Operationalizing Citizenship Apart from psychological, political, legal, economic and cultural elements, Dahl points to voting, participation, enlightened understanding, control of agenda, and inclusiveness for all non-transient resident adults as behavioral criteria for citizenship.3 For Dahl, the defining feature of membership is willingly subjecting oneself to rules; however, citizenship also entails more subjective features, such as one’s sense of identity. Citizenship is an abstract group identification that influences how we interpret events in our world. As a consequence, a broad range of established psychological principles are salient, especially when trying to understand what citizenship means for members and their communities. For some, citizenship is intensely central to their personal sense of being and purpose; for others, there is little or no bond with the larger group. Experience, values and personality sculpt what citizenship means. Psychological contributions to understanding citizenship often focus on individual responses aimed at identifying universal mechanisms, which impact thought and behavior. Some of these aspects can be extended to communities to which members strongly identify. Capturing the adaptiveness and malleability of different experiences, Shotter explained that the social life of being a citizen depends on ever-changing expectations, driven by circumstances and the particular rights we assign to individuals and the communities where they reside.4 Therefore, any understanding of citizenship requires considering how individuals live in their chosen communities, and the role of self and other evaluations in forging how people perceive the ways they can and cannot behave.
Setting the Stage 37
Cognitive Structures Organizing Citizenship Cognitive Schemas as Interpretive Frameworks Considerable psychological research explores the role of schemas in how we frame and experience our world. These schemas filter our perceptions and interpretations, which in turn impact behavior. Markus and Kitayama describe how these frameworks of expectations include our representations of our own self as well as others.5 These schemas affect what we attend to, how we determine meaning, and even how we remember occurrences. Schemas are built based on how we interpret and experience life’s events. Influenced by family, schooling, cultural institutions and values, these organizational templates help us make sense of what happens and why. Because schemas develop from experience and learning, citizens within a country or designated group are likely to share common elements. We can expect that in a country as diverse as the United States, schemas would be highly variable, reflecting the members of particular communities and their local interests. How we frame situations impacts both the options and behaviors available to us. Schemas can free members from the constraints others experience or work to restrict options already limited by diminished resources. These conceptual frameworks also dictate what actions and behavior are deemed appropriate and necessary (i.e., scripts). Schemas—that recognize the subjectivity and flexibility in how events, roles, and groups are characterized—determine agency. Categorization While schemas provide the frameworks we use to interpret events, people live and work in socially structured systems that require them to constantly sort information. Psychological consequences arise from these group regularities in perception, cognition, and behavior. Turner and associates explain that the self is defined at the level of individual uniqueness and also at the level of the group.6 They argue that individuals must be understood within the context of their group or membership identities. Because the self is partly defined by others’ opinions and perspectives, others’ judgments represent one element contributing to an individual’s self-definition. This presents problems when one’s self-definition is minimized by others, especially because stereotyping and prejudice diminish an individual’s or a group’s perceived opportunities and options. Our need to belong motivates most people to hold a social identity. Identifying with a community allows us to avoid social isolation, and emotionally regulate even when our group is stigmatized. Belonging, however, must be balanced with some separation. Brewer suggests that lack of distinctiveness does not allow us to self-define or comparatively appraise.7 Consequently, an optimal identity satisfies the need for inclusion within the ingroup of people we value while also providing distinctions between subgroups of citizens.
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To understand beliefs about citizenship, Gibson and Hamilton interviewed an ethnically homogeneous sample of young adult U.K. citizens. Respondents reported that excluding people based on rational criteria was acceptable, although exclusion based on racial or cultural categories was not. The majority of participants believed that members of a polity automatically have greater rights to residency and cultural expression than those categorized as non-members (i.e., immigrants).8 Difference was acceptable to these participants as long as it did not conflict with adherence to the British legal system and non-negotiable principles of polity. While this may characterize these participants, in Chapter 7 of this volume, Cortez coherently challenges these purportedly non-negotiable principles as she addresses the “unfinished story of American Democracy.” Similarly, Hopkins and Blackwood interviewed Muslim citizens living in the United Kingdom one year after the 2005 London terrorist bombings to explore their particular reactions as members of a group often characterized as threatening and alien. These citizens reported feelings of shock upon realizing their vulnerability to categorizations that were incongruent with their own self-definition.9 These discrepancies between their self and the categorizations made by others sometimes lead to multiple social consequences, including feeling unable to speak or be heard in public spaces. They reported feeling forced to orient to opinions and agendas that were not their own (i.e., Muslim extremists), which sharply restricted their participation as ‘genuine citizens.’ Being in a position of having to respond to unjust representations may result in alienation or withdrawal for some, while other members or connected communities will be driven to action, to both directly benefit the immediate community and indirectly benefit the larger body of citizens. Like these British Muslims, most people belong to additional social subgroups reflecting political, religious, cultural, and interest affiliations. Sometimes the overlap between the identified subgroups is perceived to be high, resulting in features that converge, where these subgroups are labeled as more inclusive and homogeneous. Alternatively, when there is little overlap between identified subgroups, the features identifying a given subgroup are more separate and cross-cutting. This results in these respective subgroups being viewed as more distinct and more exclusive. Roccas and Brewer found that people who recognized more distinctive and exclusive categories were more knowledgeable and also more accepting of different others.10 In short, greater category complexity was associated with more knowledge, more discrimination of categories, greater acceptance, and less social distance. Improving understanding of cross-cutting distinctions might also work to decrease prejudice and motivation to favor one’s own groups because of increased appreciation of distinct and overlapping features. Non-majority members often embrace multifaceted identities, exactly because of their multiple frames of reference. Others with more prototypical backgrounds may be less likely to grasp the more nuanced and complex facets of this interplay between nation-state and the communities that compose it.
Setting the Stage 39 Stereotyping Our brains are hardwired to instantly categorize, dichotomize, and sort information according to our brain’s schematic organization, but this pattern recognition also results in stereotyping. Stereotyping plays an integral role in understanding citizenship as it influences what kind of opportunities and resources an individual citizen is afforded or denied. McNamara, Muldoon, Stevenson and Slattery asked 214 participants to rate a fictional citizen and complete an implicit association test, measuring unconscious attitudes. All participants displayed negative associations and few positive characteristics to lower-income persons, regardless of the respondents’ personal economic demographics.11 In short, individuals from poorer areas were diminished by both ingroup and outgroup perceptions. To yield a more nuanced understanding of systemic prejudice in the polity, Peffley and Hurwitz discuss the need for interdisciplinary approaches12 that study minorities’ beliefs rather than focusing on beliefs of dominant groups. Sigelman and Welch state, “When we consider almost any controversial issue relating to race, we find that a great deal is known about whites’ attitudes, but little is known about blacks’ attitudes”.13 Twenty-five years later, this statement is still largely accurate. While race is often used to categorize people, it is largely defined by skin color, although the construct of race reflects psychological categories and not biology, as Richeson and Sommers note.14 Peffley and Hurwitz note that psychological research focuses on the underlying processes of biased information processing.15 In contrast, political science research investigates collective sources and political consequences, focusing on the outcomes of stereotypic beliefs. While both disciplines consider the negative fallout for specific groups and their members, they fail to jointly consider process and outcome. In particular, Peffley and Hurwitz discuss the need for enhanced ecological and external validity in psychology and more systematic variable manipulation and random participant assignment to increase internal validity in political science. Noting these significant limitations, we describe a few representative studies. Psychological research indicates that racial stereotype beliefs strongly influence one’s willingness to support different others. Results suggest that in an assortment of social situations (i.e., work and educational settings), light-skinned black persons are more positively evaluated than their darker counterparts.16,17 Political science research demonstrates that greater collective consequences arise from black racial stereotypes. For instance, Entman reported that depicting blacks on television news indirectly encourages racism because black politicians are often viewed as more demanding than their comparable white leaders.18 Terkildsen surveyed 350 randomly selected white participants in Kentucky about their likelihood to vote for a fictitious male candidate running for governor. Participants were given a written description and photograph of the candidate, with the candidate’s skin tone varied from light-skinned to dark-skinned.
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Results revealed that whites’ likelihood to vote for the black candidate varied according to the voters’ degree of self-monitoring (i.e., high self-monitors tend to act on situational cues rather than their own self beliefs). Results indicated that high self-monitors disingenuously reported being more likely to vote for the darker-skinned candidate rather than the lighter-skinned candidate. Conversely, low self-monitors reported being more likely to vote for the lighterskinned candidate compared to the darker-skinned candidate. While those with high self-monitoring claimed they would vote for the darker-skinned candidate in a hypothetical context, their personal beliefs took precedence in a real-world voting scenario.19 In essence, although racial stereotyping may not overtly influence one’s hypothetical actions, it does seem to hold great influence over one’s decision making in the real world. While recent work from Sommers and many others indicate explicit racial bias is declining, ingroup favoritism maintains racial disparities. Perceived threat and concerns about status likely undergird this bias. Even under the unifying umbrella of citizenship, we prefer similar others. Weaver also examined U.S. voting behaviors in a representative national sample with an internet-based survey. Campaign literature for two opposing candidates varied race and skin color. Even when described as a conservative candidate, Republican voters were less likely to select and support the darkerskinned candidate. Correspondingly, male voters were also less likely than female voters to choose a black candidate.20 Similar to Terkildsen, these results demonstrate that while voters indicate their support for black candidates on surveys presenting hypothetical scenarios, they may choose differently in the real-world voting booth. Stereotyping impacts other citizenship behaviors as well. Peffley and associates conducted a welfare policy experiment to explore theories claiming that whites, who hold negative views about blacks, also hold negative views concerning welfare and related government policies. Results indicated that when whites classified black citizens as lacking work ethic and “lazy,” they also held much more negative views concerning welfare policies. Negative views were exacerbated when whites believed that most welfare recipients were black. These results persisted when whites, who stereotyped blacks as lazy, evaluated black welfare recipients more harshly than similarly described white welfare recipients. Racial stereotyping also extended to anti-crime policies. Results demonstrated that whites, who view blacks as “violent,” were also more supportive of harshly punitive anti-crime policies.21 In these assessments, extreme anti-crime policies only appeared to influence crime policy attitudes towards black criminals. Here, initial racial stereotyping had a domino effect, leading to stereotyping occurring in more broadly implemented institutional systems. In the United States, as this volume underscores, African Americans are only one target. Linnerson and associates tested implicit prejudice on hypothetical jury decision making with Dovidio and Gaertner’s integrated model of racism.22 Linnerson and associates asked participants to rate assailants’ guilt. To test racial stereotyping, the assailants’ defining characteristics (e.g., name,
Setting the Stage 41 city) were randomized to suggest perpetrators were either of black, white, Arab or Chinese descent. Results indicated that white assailants were rated as less guilty and deserving of less prison time than suspects of other ethnic backgrounds. Apart from these types of individual evaluations, stigmatized group members may also underperform when concerned about validating a negative stereotype regarding them and their group. In the now classic article by Steele and Aronson, African Americans underperformed on a reasoning test when it was presented as an intelligence measure, but not when it was presented as a general activity.23 Concerns about others’ evaluations cut across most subgroups, as stereotype threat reifies the primitive ways we simplify information by capitalizing on common stereotypes, resulting in short and long-term negative consequences for many subgroups. While racism today may be more subtle, it is pernicious. Brain imaging, targeting the amygdala and more recently the orbital frontal cortex, reveal that people react differently to others who look different from themselves relative to similar others. In Amodio’s review of this literature, he highlights that research also indicates people can engage in self-regulatory processes to mitigate the effects of bias on their behavior.24 These outcomes are more likely when people embrace egalitarian beliefs and promote prosocial norms for themselves and their communities.
Individual Differences Within Communities Values and Personality Citizenship behaviors depend upon community and individuals’ orientation to rules, roles, and values. Some behavioral distinctions are partially dictated by genetics, but many others by particular experience. Passini and Morselli identify three distinct citizen personality types.25 Rule-oriented citizens follow rules and support government policies, in exchange for increased security and order. In contrast, role-focused citizens actively support policies, to maintain their personal role and sense of status within society. Similar to rule-oriented citizens, value-focused personalities support policies unless they view them as violating societal values. Value-focused citizens are most likely to actively resist or oppose unfair policies. That is, citizens with value-oriented personalities are most likely to engage in high levels of critical thinking, which may supersede their willingness to adhere to political authority. To investigate value-oriented citizenship and associated behaviors, Passini and Morselli randomly assigned participants to democratic or authoritarian conditions where they responded to vignettes, which measured participants’ degree of value-oriented citizenship. Those with high levels of value-orientation focused on self-defined, important values within the culture rather than on rolegoverned behavior. The degree of value-oriented citizenship strongly predicted participants’ responses. Those with stronger value orientations focused on the
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legitimacy of the authority’s request, were more critical of authority, and more likely to engage in actions against authority. This prosocial disobedience is differentiated from anti-social disobedience, in that the latter tends to reject authority and resist conformity regardless of the particular issue. Passini and Morselli’s results suggest that citizenship attitudes towards, and relationship with governmental authority, depend upon the values citizens deem most important. In psychological research, representation of the self has been investigated by examining one’s general orientation towards all things in the environment. Markus and Kitayama separated this orientation into interdependence, where there is a strong focus on the more context-dependent group or collective outcome, and independence, which is more focused on personal achievement and individual activity.26 While people generally embrace both interdependent and independent perspectives, cultural research has focused on how income, spatial and geographic proximity, community, and cultural values play a role in each individual’s outlook. Citizens of Eastern, African, and Central and South American countries tend to be more oriented towards the well-being of the group; whereas Western and mid- and upper North Americans tend to be more focused on separate achievements of the individual. One’s self-view frames how schemas develop, what information we attend to and how we categorize it, and what decisions we make. Self-view provides a conceptual bridge between our role as individual citizen and member of a group. Brewer suggests that in our role as citizen we define people in terms of their relationships with others as “I” identities whereas in the application of citizen member we consider “We” experiences.27 National Identity Versus Global Citizenship In a large nation-state, citizenship identity is often tied to community. Being a citizen represents a role identity defined by the rights and obligations associated with membership in a democratic polity. While particular features of citizenship may not be equally important, being a member of a category is more salient in some contexts than in others. Brewer comments that American social identity will probably be more salient for two Americans who meet abroad rather than when they meet in New York. The two different situations highlight how circumstances can create ingroup loyalties, biases, and favoritism. In today’s society, the terms citizenship and national identity have been virtually synonymous. To qualify as a citizen one must belong to a particular country or in the case of the European Union (EU), a group of designated nations. Citizenship in the EU is disentangled from nationality and this separation complicates global and local concerns. While this liberal model of citizenship includes specific legal, political and psychological dimensions, some scholars such as Baubock28 and Habermas29 argue that a multinational-based model of citizenship does not encompass the entire picture. They argue that such models lack grounding in the psychological reality of how people actually experience their citizenship. That is, one’s subjective sense of being a citizen is often tied to
Setting the Stage 43 local concerns and customs that may not fit well with broader economic regulations and values of the composite group. This disconnect grows larger when governmental agencies are unable to be sufficiently responsive to their diverse population. Most larger, heterogeneous democratic states encounter similar conflicts. Current events such as Brexit and the 2016 U.S. presidential election underscore this relationship. The disconnect between members’ experience and the nation-state is amplified when we consider differences created through the diverse experiences of personal and group histories, economic disparities, and needs and values of local communities. This volume pinpoints some of these distinct experiences and disconnections that many communities routinely experience, as they manage expectations from different others who show little understanding of the complexities that local communities of migrant workers, lesbians, or poor working class individuals face every day. National membership was originally generated to actively ‘bracket’ any hierarchical differences that might exist, including socioeconomic status, social status and profession. While the universal scope of today’s concept of citizenship is more inclusive than that of its ancestor, it is grounded in the notion that the humanity is divided into nations, all with distinct national identities. However, these categories blur, as people readily traverse national borders, use digital and global economic systems, and in the case of marginalized groups, fail to identify with national identities where their community resides. Current immigration patterns in Europe and the United States have sharpened attention to physical borders and cultural values, while generating substantial debate and discord. Indeed, Sindic posits that psychological citizenship remains based in national identity. To support his hypothesis, Sindic notes that while global news is relayed world-wide, it also continues to be categorized as either national or international.30 And within the context of the nation, attention still largely remains on local events and communities. As this volume underscores, citizenship is subjectively experienced within the communities where we reside. Attitudes and Expectations As citizens, we hold certain expectations for our group that solidify and reinforce appropriate engagement. Membership in one’s nation or group is affirmed on a daily basis through routine language and symbols that we rarely notice. As evident throughout the period of nineteenth-century nation building, national identity can emerge from the rhetoric of hero figures who symbolize nationality. As explained by Massimo d’Azeglio after the political and social movement of Risorgimento, “We have created Italy, now we must create Italians”.31 This claim reinforces two key points: 1) being a citizen means upholding the expectations of fellow citizens, and 2) there is an archetype of the ideal citizen. While these are arguably worthy goals, it may be unrealistic in light of different resources, goals, and needs of the communities that compose the nation-state.
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While the establishment of national identity can bring a sense of solidarity to its members, it simultaneously acts to separate and discriminate. In some instances, national identity expectations involve majority suppression of minority symbols, such as minority languages. As a way of creating their own minority “national identity,” and as a means to resist majority suppression, persistent minority members fight to retain these symbols. Often, majority members classify these resistant minority members as extremist because their minority national identity is perceived to threaten “official” national identity. As seen with recent global and local events, those who neither understand nor accept the agency and contribution of minority communities often favor a sense of isolating nationalism. When we try to homogenize Americans into a single archetype, we fail to capture the variety of our heterogeneous nation. People are a diverse group, who need to be recognized as such and given reasonable opportunities. Consequently, acts of resistance must be organized to challenge minority citizenship status. This type of resistance helped minority Muslim citizens make certain others recognize them as fellow citizens.32 In the same way that Turner claimed the self can be minimized by the judgments of dissimilar others, minority pride can readjust the majority’s perception of them.33 Engagement and Political Participation Engagement in political systems depends on personal and community values. Kelman and Hamilton posited that group members’ obedience to authority depends on the degree to which they find the authority to be legitimate.34 One’s perceived legitimacy is determined at three levels: 1) legitimacy of the system in which the authority exists, 2) legitimacy of the authority itself, and 3) legitimacy of the demands the authority places on members of the citizen group. Members’ view of authority and perceived responsibility affect their ability to politically challenge or disobey authority. Those citizens who are most likely to oppose authority are value-oriented, in part because they hold equality and justice to be of the highest importance. These citizens reveal their commitment to their political system by actively participating, either through obedience or opposition to political policies. With the actions of value-oriented citizens in mind, political participation in democratic systems presents an interesting paradox. Those citizens who exhibit the greatest degree of support for their democratic system are simultaneously those who are most committed to acts of disobedience. While prosocial disobedience recognizes obedience as an essential component to societal functioning, limits exist. Those practicing prosocial disobedience accept both the positive and negative effects of authority. That is, prosocial disobedience supporters willingly accept appropriate punishment, including jail time and unwanted social isolation after breaking the law. These value-oriented citizens also commonly share feelings of deep responsibility to all members of their society. In that sense, acts of prosocial disobedience encourage greater citizen equality through agentic political participation.
Setting the Stage 45
Conclusion Being a citizen means different things to different people. Regardless of the scope and parameters of polity boundaries, the ambiguously defined organizing framework of citizenship plays a significant role in how we think about ourselves and how we live our daily lives. We have considered how self and group representation dictate citizen choices and behaviors, primarily from the reference point of the individual, while recognizing that tight communities may process information similarly. In this essay, we have introduced how schemas and categorization influence attitudes, expectations, and behaviors of individuals and groups. This need to categorize and simplify information contributes to inequity, injustice, and discordant relations among citizen subgroups. Individual differences between people and their communities also dictate how people respond. Although psychological research offers some useful insights, it fails to capture a holistic understanding of what citizenship means within the contexts of the local communities where people’s allegiances lie. Helping people develop more knowledgeable understanding of different others may eventually mitigate tension between communities and the nation-state. Here, much work is necessary if engaged citizenship is the goal. Cross-cultural longitudinal assessments of community subgroups will also be useful in understanding participatory citizen behaviors. Large-scale, interdisciplinary modeling studies may be an important vehicle for approaching the complexities of citizenship in a more comprehensive way. In addition, as more governmental entities move towards electronic administration of programs, licensing, taxation, and other functions, citizens’ experience will remain dynamic as technologies and circumstances change. Creating a more nuanced understanding of citizenship will clearly require perspectives that evolve and recognize the legitimate needs of all.
Notes 1. Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women. Yale University Press; Reprint edition (2013), p. 66. 2. Pamela Johnston Conover, Donald D. Searing and Ivor Crewe, “The Elusive Ideal of Equal Citizenship: Political Psychology in the United States and Great Britain,” The Journal of Politics 66, no. 4 (2004): 1036–1068. 3. Robert Alan Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (No. 28). University of California Press, 1986. 4. John Shotter, “Psychology and Citizenship: Identity and Belonging,” in Citizenship and Social Theory, edited by Bryan Turner. Sage, 1993. 5. Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98, no. 2 (1991): 224–253. 6. John C. Turner, Michael A. Hogg, Penelope J. Oakes, Stephen D. Reicher and Margaret S. Wetherell, Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory. Basil Blackwell, 1987. 7. Marilynn B. Brewer, “Social Identity and Citizenship in a Pluralistic Society,” in The Political Psychology of Democratic Citizenship, edited by Eugene Borgida,
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8.
9. 10. 11.
12.
13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
Carol Y. Yoder and Christina Verzijl Christopher M. Federico and John L. Sullivan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 299–323. Stephen Gibson and Lorna Hamilton, “The Rhetorical Construction of Polity Membership: Identity, Culture, and Citizenship in Young People’s Discussion of Immigration in Northern England,” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 21, no. 3 (2011): 228–242. Nick Hopkins and Leda Blackwood, “Everyday Citizenship: Identity and Recognition,” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 21, no. 3 (2011): 215–227. Sonia Roccas and Marilynn B. Brewer, “Social Identity Complexity,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 6, no. 2 (2002): 88–106. Niamh McNamara, Orla Muldoon, Clifford Stevenson and Emer Slattery, “Citizenship Attributes as the Basis for Intergroup Differentiation: Implicit and Explicit Intergroup Evaluations,” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 21, no. 3 (2011): 243–254. Mark Peffley and Jon Hurwitz, “Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes: The View From Political Science,” in The Political Psychology of Democratic Citizenship, edited by Eugene Borgida, Christopher M. Federico and John L. Sullivan. Oxford University Press, 2009, 247–274. Lee Sigelman and Susan Welch, Black Americans’ Views of Racial Inequality. Cambridge University Press, 1991, 2. Jennifer A. Richeson and Samuel R. Sommers, “Toward a Social Psychology of Race and Race Relations for the Twenty-First Century,” Annual Review of Psychology 67, no. 1 (2016): 439–463. Ibid., 11. Edward H. Ransford, “Skin Color, Life Chances, and Anti-White Attitudes,” Social Problems 18, no. 2 (1970): 164–179. Darlene Powell-Hopson and Derek S. Hopson, “Implications of Doll Color Preferences among Black Preschool Children and White Preschool Children,” The Journal of Black Psychology 14, no. 2 (1988): 57–63. Robert M. Entman, “Blacks in the News: Television, Modern Racism and Cultural Change,” Journalism Quarterly 69, no. 2 (1992): 341–361. Nayda Terkildsen, “When White Voters Evaluate Black Candidates: The Processing Implications of Candidate Skin Color, Prejudice, and Self-Monitoring,” American Journal of Political Science 37, no. 1 (1993): 1032–1053. Vesla Weaver, “Race, Skin Color, and Candidate Preference,” Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, 2005. Mark Peffley, Jon Hurwitz and Paul M. Sniderman, “Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes: The View From Political Science,” American Journal of Political Science 41, no. 1 (1997): 30–60. Victoria Linnerson, Larissa Hall, Zheng Li, Matthew Kessler and Helen C. Harton, “The Integrated Model of Racism and Guilt Judgments of Suspects With Different Ethnicities,” In CSBS Student Research Conference, April 25, 2015. Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 5 (1995): 797–811. David M. Amodio, “The Neuroscience of Prejudice and Stereotyping,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 15, no. 10 (2014): 670–682. Stefano Passini and Davide Morselli, “In the Name of Democracy: Disobedience and Value-Oriented Citizenship,” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 21, no. 3 (2011): 255–267. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 6. Rainer Bauböck, Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration. Edward Elgar, 1994, 308.
Setting the Stage 47 29. Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Polity Press, 1998. 30. Denis Sindic. “Psychological citizenship and national identity.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 21 no. 3, (2011): 202-214. Ibid., 31. 31. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism. Sage, 1995, 25. 32. Ibid., 8. 33. Ibid., 5. 34. Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility. Yale University Press, 1989.
Bibliography Amodio, David M. “The Neuroscience of Prejudice and Stereotyping.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 15, no. 10 (2014): 670–682. Bauböck, Rainer. Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration. Edward Elgar, 1994. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. Sage, 1995. Brewer, Marilynn B. “Social Identity and Citizenship in a Pluralistic Society.” In The Political Psychology of Democratic Citizenship. Edited by Eugene Borgida, Christopher M. Federico and John L. Sullivan, pp. 299–323. Oxford University Press, 2009. Conover, Pamela Johnston, Donald D. Searing and Ivor Crewe. “The Elusive Ideal of Equal Citizenship: Political Theory and Political Psychology in the United States and Great Britain.” The Journal of Politics 66, no. 4 (2004): 1036–1068. Dahl, Robert Alan. A Preface to Economic Democracy (No. 28). University of California Press, 1986. Dovidio, J.F., & Gaertner, S.L. “On the nature of contemporary prejudice: The causes, consequences, and challenges of aversive racism.” In Confronting Racism: The Problem and the Response. Edited by J. Eberhardt & ST. Fiske, 3–32. Sage, 1998. Entman, Robert M. “Blacks in the News: Television, Modern Racism and Cultural Change.” Journalism Quarterly 69, no. 2 (1992): 341–361. Gibson, Stephen and Lorna Hamilton. “The Rhetorical Construction of Polity Membership: Identity, Culture, and Citizenship in Young People’s Discussion of Immigration in Northern England.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 21, no. 3 (2011): 228–242. Habermas, Jürgen. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Polity Press, 1998. Hopkins, Nick and Leda Blackwood. “Everyday Citizenship: Identity and Recognition.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 21, no. 3 (2011): 215–227. Kelman, Herbert C. and V. Lee Hamilton. Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility. Yale University Press, 1989. Linnerson, Victoria, Larissa Hall, Zheng Li, Matthew Kessler, and Helen C. Harton. “The Integrated Model of Racism and Guilt Judgments of Suspects With Different Ethnicities.” CSBS Student Research Conference, April 25, 2015. Markus, Hazel and Shinobu Kitayama. “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation.” Psychological Review 98, no. 2 (1991): 224–253. McNamara, Niamh, Orla Muldoon, Clifford Stevenson and Emer Slattery. “Citizenship Attributes as the Basis for Intergroup Differentiation: Implicit and Explicit Intergroup Evaluations.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 21, no. 3 (2011) : 243–254.
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Passini, Stefano and Davide Morselli. “In the Name of Democracy: Disobedience and Value-Oriented Citizenship.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 21, no. 3 (2011): 255–267. Peffley, Mark and Jon Hurwitz. “Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes: The View From Political Science.” In The Political Psychology of Democratic Citizenship. Edited by Eugene Borgida, Christopher M. Federico and John L. Sullivan, pp. 247–274. Oxford University Press, 2009. Peffley, Mark, Jon Hurwitz and Paul M. Sniderman. “Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes: The View From Political Science.” American Journal of Political Science 41, no. 1 (1997): 30–60. Powell-Hopson, Darlene and Derek S. Hopson. “Implications of Doll Color Preferences among Black Preschool Children and White Preschool Children.” The Journal of Black Psychology 14, no. 2 (1988): 57–63. Ransford, H. Edward. “Skin Color, Life Chances, and Anti-White Attitudes.” Social Problems 18, no. 4 (1970): 164–179. Richeson, Jennifer A. and Samuel R. Sommers. “Toward a Social Psychology of Race and Race Relations for the Twenty-First Century.” Annual Review of Psychology 67, no. 1 (2016): 439–463. Roccas, Sonia and Marilynn Brewer. “Social Identity Complexity.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 6, no. 2 (2002): 88–106. Shotter, John. “Psychology and Citizenship: Identity and Belonging.” In Citizenship and Social Theory. Edited by Bryan Turner, pp. 115–138. London: Sage, 1993. Sigelman, Lee and Susan Welch. Black Americans’ Views of Racial Inequality. Cambridge University Press, 1991. Steele, Claude M. and Joshua Aronson. “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 5 (1995): 797–811. Terkildsen, Nayda. “When White Voters Evaluate Black Candidates: The Processing Implications of Candidate Skin Color, Prejudice, and Self-Monitoring.” American Journal of Political Science 37, no. 1 (1993): 1032–1053. Turner, John C., Michael A. Hogg, Penelope J. Oakes, Stephen D. Reicher and Margaret S. Wetherell. Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory. Basil Blackwell, 1987. Weaver, Vesla. “Race, Skin Color, and Candidate Preference.” Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Chicago, IL, 2005. Weisseno, Georg and Valentin Eck. “Concepts on the European Union—A Teaching Project.” In Teaching European Citizens: A Quasi-Experimental Study in Six Countries. Edited by Georg Weisseno and Valentin Eck, pp. 9–18. Waxmann Verlag, 2009.
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Dishonored Citizenry Black Women, Civic Virtue, and Electoral Powers Joy A. James
Introduction1 Historically, the rights of U.S. citizenship were delineated by property, gender, and race. Discriminatory violence and law worked to set the parameters for community and citizen and created outlying communities that would organize, petition, and work to gain entry into democratic citizenship. Thus, safety from political violence and economic deprivation required civic powers. The enslaved/free dichotomy in which racial hierarchy and “plunder”2 were the foundations for democracy and republic meant that the concept of “community” and “citizen” have been exclusionary constructs: the frame of the “citizen” is defined by the space relegated to the non- or anti-citizen. Whatever (public) realm the citizen occupies within the racial imagination and quest for capital, empire and domination, the non- or anti-citizen is restricted in terms of access and influence. The “birther” campaign against former President Barack Obama promoted by President Donald Trump for years before he ascended to the presidency is an illustration of the delegitimizing of what is “foreign” to male-dominated white nationalism and heterosexism. The discussion here, though, focuses on women—specifically, black women—and how their depiction as unworthy of leadership (through vote or office) reinforces a category of the “dishonored citizenry,” a burden for this democracy that emerged from within a peculiar institution. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt, celebrating the Athenian polis, posited a dichotomous public realm of the citizen separate from the private realm of domesticity, the terrain of the laborer and the workers. Black women and their families, however, have traveled between these allegedly distinct realms, expanding the possibilities of a greater democracy. They had to make de facto the theory behind laws that were not always enforced with fairness. The 13th Amendment emancipated the enslaved but reserved involuntary servitude for those duly convicted of crimes, which led to slave labor in the convict prison lease system and exploitation in mass incarceration today. Even with a black President and First Lady for eight years (2009 to 2017), how we view community and citizenry has been fought along racial fault lines. Laws designated to bring honor to dishonored citizenry included 14th Amendment political
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personhood granted that the U.S. Supreme Court would gradually transfer over to corporations; and the 15th Amendment ensured the right to vote which would be met with voting restrictions, voter intimidation, and gerrymandering. Black women—saddled with racial-sexual stereotypes, low pay, and aggressive policing—sought a greater humanity through political and electoral power. In spite of—or at times in response to—growing black female political power, contemporary U.S. democracy continues to reflect the founders’ intent: exclusion, racial hierarchies, gender and sexual castes to create power differentials. In such a diverse nation, the cultural, economic, and political needs of those considered to be outside of empowered communities means that the very essence of “community” revolves around the need for power, particularly where “out” communities are led by “dishonored citizens”—black women stigmatized as lacking virtue, intellect, and industry due to implicit and explicit biases. Where the right to political personhood is challenged based on historical exclusion from political power, community-as-citizen is contested terrain. Citizenship as a civic virtue works for democratic communities. Yet, even after the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and more than a century of movements for civil and human rights to enforce the amendments and constitutional rights, whole communities are marginalized within U.S. democracy, targeted for racial profiling by police, disproportionate sentencing by courts, predatory lending by banks, and substandard education. When economic and political structures are opaque, in a representative democracy heavily influenced by lobbyists, millionaires, and billionaires, the onus of proving one’s worthiness is critical for sovereign citizenship. Citizenship status and civic virtue are related to the accumulation of property, where capital is a defining marker for legitimate power. Black household wealth return to an additional $1 of income is $4.80, a fraction of that of white wealth.3 Prosperity as a premise of community-as-citizenry reveals that some property accumulated by the founders and their heirs entailed possession of other people. These people and their descendants who sought citizenry through electoral power and advocacy is the focus of this chapter which examines the political persona of the “dishonored citizenry” of black women seeking political power to benefit their communities. Black women and their families survived slavery, Reconstruction, the convict prison lease system, Jim Crow segregation, and mass incarceration. They did so by creating and working within movements for civil rights, feminism, and black power movements. The value and agency of their communities and citizenry have a direct relation to white male elites whose consolidation of power has been assisted by law (three-fifths clause of the U.S. Constitution, electoral college, ownership, transfer, and sale of enslaved people). The wealth of elite communities derived in part from law and structures that engineered theft of labor, time, and capital from subaltern communities enabled sovereign citizens to dominate dishonored citizenry. To further complicate the problem of power, property, and citizenship is that while the rights and privileges of citizenship are constitutionally guaranteed
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for each individual, the path for many communities to full access to these rights and privileges is cluttered by race, class, gender, sexuality, and culture. It seems some things haven’t changed much since the Romans’ practical approach to citizenship as a way to gain and preserve individual property and power. To find where the citizen and family find her/himself in the absence of property and wealth in our modern commercial republic, then, one has to locate community. Citizenship tied to presidential elections manifests in black women’s lives in various ways. Although black women have pursued political power through conservative politics (e.g., Condoleezza Rice served as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration and was instrumental in persuading the nation to believe that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and should be invaded), the focus here is on liberal politics and the Democratic party, and presidential elections. In the Obama administration, Valerie Jarrett as special adviser to the president, Susan Rice as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and then National Security Advisor (NSA), and Michelle Obama as First Lady constituted a formidable formation of surrogates and advocates for the United States’ first black president. The visibility and role of black women in electoral politics under the Obama administration is noteworthy (and would likely have been surpassed if Hillary Clinton had been elected president and likely would have helped to determine that Donna Brazile would replace Debbie Wasserman Schultz after Wasserman Schultz was removed as chairperson of the Democratic National Committee during the July 2016 Democratic National Convention. The following examines the dishonored citizenry of black women in U.S. (presidential) politics and related roles of public servant or politician; victim of social and police violence; activist; and Clinton surrogate.
Dishonored Citizenry and the Public Servant and Activist When I die, I want to be remembered as a woman who lived in the 20th century and who dared to be a catalyst of change. I don’t want to be remembered as the first black woman who went to Congress. And I don’t even want to be remembered as the first woman who happened to be black to make the bid for the presidency. I want to be remembered as a woman who fought for change in the 20th century. —Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm4
In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress, representing a Brooklyn district of low-income black and Puerto Rican families. In 1971, Congresswoman Chisholm co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) with Gloria Steinem, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, and Flo Kennedy (discussed below). Chisholm in 1972 crafted a national grassroots democratic presidential that also challenged
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the conventional Democratic Party. Her ’72 “Chisholm Trail” campaign galvanized multi-racial, progressive youth seeking an end to racism, sexism, and the war in Vietnam. Although leadership in the NWPC and the Black Congressional Caucus chose to support Senator George McGovern rather than Chisholm’s attempts to make the party platform more ideologically progressive and inclusive, she inspired young women to run for office in order to support their communities and social justice. Losing the nomination, Chisholm won by shaping the public memory of and template for mobilizing voters seeking economic justice, non-militarist foreign policies, and dismantling of institutional racism and (hetero)sexism. The DNC convention betrayals of Chisholm and radical progressivism aided by organizations she had helped to co-found—the NWPC and the Congressional Black Caucus—meant that McGovern received support without demands that the party platform support equal rights. The fear of the “alternative” to McGovern meant that dishonored citizens would have to sacrifice radical agency to win an election for liberalism. In 1972, Richard Nixon was re-elected despite his duplicity, racist animus, and authoritarian tendencies, defeating McGovern. Chisholm’s primary battle was replayed in 2016 when visionary progressivism (embodied by Sanders) and Clinton’s (neo)liberalism were defeated. Although it was Chisholm, who as the first black and first woman presidential candidate in the Democratic Party embodied both Obama and Clinton, the 2008 Democratic primary battles between senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York rarely referenced Chisholm. By 2016, Chisholm’s name and legacy were frequently referenced. Sanders’s campaign on income inequality, which Clinton would eventually embrace, reflected Chisholm’s legacy as an outsider agitating against income equality, poverty, and the diminishment of workers’ rights. Clinton not only embraced Chisholm’s legacy by incorporating economic justice into her campaign (not all Sanders supporters were convinced about her commitments to populism; Clinton, though, reflects Chisholm’s legacy of compromise to attain political goals: maintaining that she was “unbought and unbossed,” Chisholm exchanged favors with conservatives to rise in New York politics). Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders was more closely aligned to Chisholm’s legacy focused on the agency of the poor and radical activists. While Chisholm was an independent “maverick” who irritated and challenged the establishment in both parties to further social justice movements, Clinton was a centrist and managerial policy wonk who harnessed social movements to her agenda of incremental progress while rewarding entrenched wealthy elites. Unbought by corporate or banking interests, she was “bossed” by establishment elites if backing party bosses for favors and returning them in kind proved advantageous for her political ambitions and the needs of her constituents. In some ways, Chisholm seems to have bequeathed distinct parts of her political DNA to the 2016 Democratic presidential candidates. A consummate politician and crusader, Congresswoman Chisholm cracked the party establishment even
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while she played it and often opposed it. In the end, it was the Establishment, the lack of support from black elected officials (the “Black Establishment”), rejection by white feminists who shared her gender ideology but not her radicalism shaped by proximity to poverty, and racism that curtailed her attempts to reshape the Democratic Party by pulling its nominee and platform to the “left.” She never gained the necessary traction with voters who did not share her idealism or passion for justice. In 1972, Congressman Ron Dellums and feminist Gloria Steinem chose McGovern as a more realistic candidate than Chisholm. In 2016, both backed Clinton during the Democratic primaries as more pragmatic than Bernie Sanders. Both feminism and black power morphed into Establishment power as civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis chastised Bernie Sanders as an improbable candidate and questioned his authenticity as an activist. The events of 1972 in various ways were replayed in 2016 in the presidential contests enveloping dishonored citizenry. In several ways, Chisholm’s battles for honor and justice presaged the present moment, including the uneasy alliance between politicians and political radicals. As Chisholm’s alter ego, Flo Kennedy (1916–2000), a co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus and a feminist leader and attorney. Whereas Chisholm presented herself as unbought and unbossed (in fact she worked with conservative if not racist white male political bosses to further her agenda by supporting theirs, Kennedy was a consistent maverick and has been quoted saying: “Sweetie, if you’re not living on the edge, then you’re taking up space.’ ”5 A political provocateur and legal theorist, Flo Kennedy created room for those facing discrimination, domination, and violence by embracing as a provocateur the racist-sexist stereotypes appended to women. After threatening to bring charges of discrimination after being denied admission based on gender (which she linked to her race), Flo Kennedy became Columbia Law School’s first black woman graduate in 1951. Kennedy’s work as an attorney revealed the corruption and bureaucracy of the legal system and thereby radicalized her. Working first on behalf of the estates of “Lady Day” Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, she successfully recovered their earnings from record companies and developed skills that she would later use as a leader in civil rights and radical politics. Kennedy also sued the Catholic Church on behalf of women’s reproductive and abortion rights. She advocated for men incarcerated and violently repressed in Attica; and like Chisholm supported the right of the Black Panther Party to legally organize against racist repression. Kennedy made political space for dishonored citizens with a savvy sense of publicity that furthered causes and an irreverence that marked unwavering faith in the trickster dancing within an angel. Kennedy fought while shrugging off pretensions of civility and social management. Unlike Chisholm (and later Clinton), she embraced rebellions for social justice. First in cowboy hats and finally in a wheel chair, Flo Kennedy was likely the first black feminist to give the digitas impunitas in the face of repressive law and governance contemptuous of black female life. Linking ideological commitments to end racism, imperialism, and (hetero)sexism,
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Kennedy’s anti-racist feminism offered an etiquette of political agitation. Her solidarity with Gloria Steinem, Chisholm, and radical activists such as Black Panthers H. Rap Brown and Assata Shakur, was based in activism waged from a precipice. Unlike politicians, Flo Kennedy was a political agitator who embraced the category of being dishonored only in order to subvert it. She was most likely to climb to a political ledge to better view the trajectories for political flight, whereas Chisholm stayed within the confines of party politics. However, it was Kennedy who would be most equipped to perceive the vulnerability and violence surrounding dishonored citizenry.
Dishonored Citizenry and Resistance to Police and Prison Violence Any chronic illness is a curse . . . the nature of the beast is a complete loss of control—of your emotions, of your intellect, your instincts, your common sense—basically your sense of yourself, a really frightening aspect of this insidious disease. —Deborah Danner, “Living with Schizophrenia”6
The dread that Deborah Danner—a sixty-six-year-old black woman living in the Bronx—had concerning herself, family, society, and police meant that her prescient fear of becoming a fatality of poorly-trained, indifferent, or hostile police became a reality on October 18, 2016. Nude in her apartment, armed with a baseball bat, she confronted a police officer who chose his revolver over his Taser. Yet the community of citizens generally exhibits a limited capacity to focus on Danner’s anxiety and death. And so a month before the presidential election, most media and the electorate seemed disengaged of the meaning of Danner’s death in the rise of “law and order” rhetoric exonerating police violence from Republicans and conservatives, and calls for compassion and acceptance of the poor, racial minorities, and those with disabilities managed by centrists and liberals, amid that the demands for power articulated by advocates and activists seeking transformation and police accountability. Concepts of community and citizenship or community-as-citizenship are influenced by government treatment of those vulnerable to mental illness and poverty, and police violence. Danner’s potential as a political reminder to community of the risks that dishonored and fragile people face in democracy dissipated as she was reduced to merely a frightened individual coping with dread and depression. Her insights and experiences could have been valuable to political leadership, yet her anxiety as a dishonored citizen was eclipsed by the collective anxiety of privileged citizens who feared a Trump presidency. (NPR’s WNYC and The Nation chronicled the collective electoral fears of the middle class and more affluent in their co-produced podcast “The United States of Anxiety”.) With or without mental illness, as a member of overlapping communities of dishonored citizens, Deborah Danner had been outvoted
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in electoral democracy by the social workers, advocates, and police who regulated and eventually terminated her life. In U.S. elections, October Surprises are events that influence the presidential contest the month before the election. In October 2016, citizens witnessed: the tragedy of Danner’s killing; Trump’s Town Hall denial of engaging in sexual assaults (Trump deflected by declaring Bill Clinton a rapist and Hillary Clinton an attorney who had defended a child rapist, and mocked his victim); and declaration of the Central Park Five as guilty (the men were exonerated through DNA after a sensationalized racist 1989–1990 interracial rape prosecution during which Trump advertised in the New York Times calling for the death penalty for the black and Latino teenagers). Another October Surprise included black filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s Netflix documentary 13th, which dissects slavery and mass incarceration (and features clips of Clinton and Trump promoting racist and classist planks to further imprisonment and criminalization). The documentary features Angela Davis, who describes how the U.S. government violently persecuted activists—including political prisoner/ fugitive Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther Party member targeted by the illegal FBI counterintelligence program—and used political imprisonment to stalk and derail liberation movements. The month prior, on September 9, 2016, imprisoned activists went on strike for an abolitionist democracy, and calling for the elimination of the exception clause for slavery in the 13th Amendment which legalizes slavery if one has been duly convicted of a crime.7 The abolition of prison slavery is not central to any major or minor party. Those striking against prison labor as slave labor, and the indignities of captivity, define the scope and potential of democracy by liberation from its most predatory practices. Yet, these remained discredited topics in a campaign where candidates bemoaned their “victimization” by the media and town halls allowed citizens (even black women) to raise questions scripted to electoral victories, not pointed towards addressing the relationship between political power and predatory powers within US democracy. Police function adjacent to political campaigns. Like the ballot (irony of Malcolm X’s choice when police embody both—ballots with bullets) police unions express the “will of (some) of the people”—unfortunately, it is generally not the will of dishonored citizens who are disproportionately violated or killed by police. Police use an unofficial acronym “NHI” (“No Humans Involved”) for murder victims who are African Americans, prostitutes, and the drug afflicted. Police fail to find and grieve with the kin of the deceased (aka “NHI”), or adequately investigate their murders, because this political speech nullifies embrace and protection as a civic and governmental duty. NHI is its own political campaign that predates presidential elections, as policing sectors conflate blackness with criminalized labor and/or disease. Such political speech or campaign rhetoric constitutes electioneering. This starting point—that no humans are involved in democracy—is an aspect of policing that diminishes reforms. Dishonored citizenry and allies pursue progressive politics to oppose voter intimidation;
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racist “voter fraud” charges; felon disenfranchisement; biased redistricting or gerrymandering. Yet, law works against progressivism and community and citizenry. Civil rights protections were gutted in Shelby County v. Holder; and, “shadow” political parties or patrons were expanded through Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Progressivism fails to fully grapple with hierarchies of citizenry and the anti-democratic attempts to diminish the quantity and quality (i.e., informed and educated with facts) of voters.
Dishonored Citizenry and Black Surrogacy for Clinton During the 2008 Democratic primaries, Michelle Obama was a constant supporter of her husband’s candidacy and critic of his opponent Hillary Clinton. Depicted as an “angry black woman” who wanted to derail U.S. democracy with her “constant” talk about white racism, Obama was transformed as FLOTUS. Unlike previous first ladies, she did not take on weighty issues such as health care reform (dubbed “HillaryCare” during the Clinton administration) or even education and literacy which Laura Bush as a former elementary school teacher had championed. Instead, Obama, with a BA from Princeton and a JD from Harvard, the former director or supervisor of her husband as she worked as a powerful attorney and legal advocate in Chicago, focused on eating healthy and childhood obesity, the domestic realm of the household of early childhood development, and child rearing. This brought “honor” to the category of “dishonored citizen” that she sought to convey to Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Obama became the most powerful surrogate and feminist icon in 2016 for Clinton during her and surrogate for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 bid for the presidency.8 During February (black history month) and March (women’s history month) in 2016, black maternal grief was displayed prominently as black women who lost children to police violence or vigilantes made presidential endorsements to only one candidate: Hillary Clinton. During the Democratic southern primaries where states with sizable, active black voting populations would determine Clinton the victor (the opposite would be true in the general election). Gatherings and meetings with the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner and others were continuous. When the primaries shifted to the Midwest and “whiter” states where Sanders was more competitive among progressives and independents, black maternal grief and images of Latino/a children with fear and anxiety that they or their parents might be deported largely disappeared. In April 2016, Clinton defeated Sanders in the New York primary, taking 58 percent of the vote and winning 130 delegates to his 108. In May 2016, Sanders defeated Clinton in the Indiana primary with 53 percent of the vote, earning 42 delegates to her 36. Yet, with her insurmountable hold on super delegates and pledged delegates, Clinton easily won the Democratic nomination. All credible polls indicated that both Clinton and Sanders could defeat Donald Trump (Sanders by much more). Yet, although the Democrats’ stance
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on gender equity and reproductive rights, gun control, and public denouncements of racism and discrimination offered a striking contrast to the Republican Party, Donald Trump prevailed in the national election—receiving the majority of votes from both white men and white women. In 2016, unprecedented levels of unease and combativeness among Americans who consider themselves valued citizens focused on whether U.S. democracy remained “the greatest nation on earth” or would decay under the leadership of immensely unpopular presidential rivals. Clinton prevailed in the popular vote by nearly three million in low voter turnout, while Trump won the electoral college. Neither Clinton nor Trump advocated the abolition of prisons, white supremacy, poverty, and sexual violence. Ideological differences are not the sum of electoral battles. During the 2016 presidential campaign, progressive Senators Sanders and Elizabeth Warren decried that democracy is “rigged” by corporate wealth and politicians lacking political ethics. Both later endorsed and campaigned for Clinton in the general election. Liberal-centrist Clinton adapted the progressive populism of the Sanders campaign and deployed black women as her surrogates. The most prominent would be FLOTUS Michelle Obama as an elite public servant who had been shown racist contempt by various sectors. Although lauded for her speech at the DNC in July 2016 and later for moving testimony that Trump’s lewd commentary bragging about his impunity from consequences for committing sexual assault. In contrast, working and middle class women, traumatized by the killings of their sons, constituted the “Mothers of the Movement” to inspire voters. Although Clinton did not have the backing of radical activists or intellectuals who actively supported Black Lives Matter (many recalled President Bill Clinton’s role in fueling mass incarceration and First Lady Hillary Clinton’s advocacy of racially-driven policing and imprisonment), she had the black mothers whose children (Trayvon Martin, Eric Gardner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland) had become icons of police brutality and anti-black violence. Repeatedly demeaned and criminalized by her Republican opposition, Clinton’s surrogates supported her, because she needed them. Trump encouraged his supporters to chant “lock her up!” at rallies. He also raged against a “rigged” electoral system when he thought he would not win the election and spoke of “Second Amendment solutions” to Clinton (which some viewed as vaguely veiled threats of gun violence against her). While admonishing Trump for “whining” about losing the election during the primaries, Obama stated that “one of the few regrets” of his presidency was that citizens increasingly viewed democracy as “rigged” against them. Regular citizens’ exclusion from power and resources reflected the dishonored citizenry of black working class and poor women who for generations seeking or not seeking their right to vote in a representative democracy, or perhaps run for office, endured the denigration that Clinton felt during a heated campaign. The daily conditions of black women’s lives were drastically different from that of Clinton, who had also wrapped herself for decades into the “community” of
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Wall Street bankers and international donors to the Clinton Foundation. Yet, black women’s need for political efficacy drew them to Clinton’s campaign platform and promises. The Clinton campaign and its 2016 slogan “Stronger Together” became a weaker version of the 2008 soaring rhetoric of “Hope” and “Change We Can Believe In,” that expanded the concept of community as citizenry beyond racial, economic, and gender divides (and least in theory and emotional affect). Clinton’s campaign slogan was chanted as she amassed the majority of the black and Latino vote, the electoral power of dishonored citizenry confronting racism. While 94 percent of black women and 68 percent of Latinas voted for Clinton, the majority of white women, 53 percent, voted for Trump. Because of the votes of women of color (women demonized as “illegals” or “welfare queens”), Clinton received the majority of the female vote. However, black and brown communities did not come to the polls in record numbers as they had for Obama in 2008. Dishonored by the majority of white voters, Clinton lost the white male vote along with the white female vote. She was attacked by opposition research and disinformation funded by wealthy donors and campaign operatives, hacked by Vladimir Putin of Russia, dogged by Wikileaks’ release of emails from John Podesta and the DNC (which revealed that the DNC had worked to benefit Clinton during the primaries while DNC staffers were instructed to chant “Black Lives Matter!” at the July Democratic National Convention while avoiding substantive policy and advocacy to end anti-black violence),9 and hounded by FBI Director James Comey’s unauthorized, unprecedented public statements about her private email server. Although there could be no indictment due to lack of criminal intent, Hillary Clinton’s whiteness, wealth, expertise, and connections could not undo the distrust and slander that surrounded her candidacy. Her proximity to black and brown people also rendered her a threat to white nationalism. Without the daily indignities of dishonored citizenry, Hillary Clinton came close to experiencing the routine contempt levied at black women seeking political power.
Conclusion U.S. electoral democracy values stable and predictable structures. Yet, its relationship with dishonored citizenry has always been volatile. The splintering of community into racial and gendered hierarchies was normative for the founders of the republic. The resulting disenfranchisement of those stigmatized by racism, (hetero)sexism and poverty has been resisted through movements, voting rights campaigns, and human rights advocacy. Still, black women as a demographic, a real or imagined community, in public service, activism, and surrogacy, do not constitute a protected demographic as they struggle with a citizenry where wealth and racial animus, and gender stereotypes continue to unduly influence elections and access to resources such as quality health, dignified work, safety.
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During presidential elections, dishonored citizenry becomes more sought out by those seeking to court or suppress their votes. Battles for citizenry and community extend beyond the boundaries of party affiliation. Where electoral democracy does not seek equity and political power for dishonored citizens, it seeks “winners” as sovereign elites and disdains “losers” as disenfranchised communities. In theory, the voter is the paramount citizen. In fact, voter suppression increasingly and disproportionately targets brown, black, and low income communities. The political will of (some) of the people expressed in political intimidation and police violence. Thus, explicit campaigns to redress the status of dishonored citizens and to empower communities through full and unabridged citizen rights is the hallmark of civic virtue and political struggle.
Notes 1. Segments of this chapter first appeared in “Abolition Democracy,” October 24, 2016. https://abolitionjournal.org/abolitionist-democracy-dispelling-fear-loathing-2016campaign/# 2. See Naomi Zack, “Gender Theory in the Philosophy of Race,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 3. See: Racial Disparities in Net Worth. http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/pdf/201003/ 20100309_womenincome.pdf; and www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL= www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/03/26/the-racial-wealth-gap-why-a-typicalwhite-household-has-16-times-the-wealth-of-a-black-one/&refURL=www.google. com/&referrer=www.google.com/ 4. For a critical analysis of the FLOTUS as Clinton advocate in the 2016 Presidential Campaign, see Janine Jones, “The Pitfalls of Being the Best Black Surrogate a White Woman Could Hope For,” 2016 Elections Blog, Abolition Collective, November 3, 2016. https://abolitionjournal.org/pitfalls-best-black-surrogate-white-woman-hope/ 5. Jone Johnson Lewis. Florynce Kennedy Quotes, Florynce Kennedy (1916-2000) Humanities, History & Culture. Updated March 25, 2017 https://www.thoughtco. com/florynce-kennedy-quotes-3530008 6. Deborah Danner, Living With Schizophrenia. https://assets.documentcloud.org/ documents/3146953/Living-With-Schizophrenia-by-Deborah-Danner.pdf 7. https://supportprisonerresistance.noblogs.org/post/2016/04/01/announcementof-nationally-coordinated-prisoner-workstoppage-for-sept-9-2016/ 8. For more about Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005), see: www.nwhm.org/educationresources/biography/biographies/shirley-anita-chisholm/ 9. “Leaked 2015 Memo Told Dems: ‘Don’t Offer Support’ for Black Lives Matter Policy Positions,” The Huffington Post. www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dnc-blacklives-matter-memo_us_57c6f80de4b078581f1072ca
Bibliography “Announcement of Nationally Coordinated Prisoner Workstop.” April 1, 2016. https:// supportprisonerresistance.noblogs.org/post/2016/04/01/announcement-of-nationallycoordinated-prisoner-workstoppage-for-sept-9-2016/ Center for Community Economic Development. Racial Disparities in Net Worth, 2007. http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/pdf/201003/20100309_womenincome.pdf
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Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 310 (2010). Craven, Julia. “Leaked 2015 Memo Told Dems: ‘Don’t Offer Support’ for Black Lives Matter Policy Positions.” The Huffington Post, August 31, 2016; updated September 1, 2016. www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dnc-black-lives-matter-memo_us_57c6f80de4b0 78581f1072ca Danner, Deborah. Living With Schizophrenia, January 28, 2012. https://assets.document cloud.org/documents/3146953/Living-With-Schizophrenia-by-Deborah-Danner.pdf DuVernay, Ava. “13th.” Netflix Documentary, October 2016. www.youtube.com/watch? v=V66F3WU2CKk James, Joy. “Abolitionist Democracy: Dispelling Fear, Loathing and Violence in the 2016 Campaign.” Abolition Collective 2016 Elections Blog, October 24. https://abo litionjournal.org/abolitionist-democracy-dispelling-fear-loathing-2016-campaign/# Levy, Gabrielle. “How Citizens United Has Changed Politics in 5 Years.” US News & World Report, January 21, 2015. SCOTUSblog. Shelby County v. Holder.” SCOTUSblog. www.scotusblog.com/casefiles/cases/shelby-county-v-holder/ SCOTUSblog. “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.” SCOTUSblog. www. scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission/ Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 2 (2013). Shin, Luara. “The Racial Wealth Gap.” Forbes, March 25, 2016. www.forbes.com/ sites/laurashin/2015/03/26/the-racial-wealth-gap-why-a-typical-white-householdhas-16-times-the-wealth-of-a-black-one/#1dad79256c5b Weiser, Benjamin. “5 Exonerated in Central Park Jogger Case Agree to Settle Suit for $40 Million.” New York Times, June 19, 2014.
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Transborder Political Subjectivity and Enacted Citizenship Toward the End of the Neoliberal ‘State of Exception’? Devon G. Peña [D]oes terrorism have to work only through death? Can’t one terrorize without killing? And does killing necessarily mean putting to death? Isn’t it also ‘letting die’? Can’t ‘letting die’, ‘not wanting to know that one is letting others die’— hundreds of millions of human beings, from hunger, AIDS, lack of medical treatment, and so on—also be part of a more or less conscious and deliberate terrorist strategy? Derrida, Philosophy in a Time of Terror Sin tierra. Sin papeles. Sin miedo. (Without land. Without papers. Without fear.) Familias Unidas por la Justicia, strike slogan, Burlington, WA; July 2016
State-Sponsored Environmental Violence and the Shifting Subjectivities of Citizenship Since at least the time of Pericles, one dominant view of dēmokratia defines the polity as comprised of institutions charged with enacting a society’s ability to make possible the ‘care of the self’ in order for the self to care for others. When this fails—usually because of conflicts over the definition of ‘others’ or the exact nature of the ‘self’ and ‘care’—the prospects for democracy are endangered. Pericles understood how such failures were shaped and constrained by the territorializing identity politics of the partisans. Through the apparatus of the police and military, elite families asserted control of the boundaries designating bodies (persons) granted rights to govern the city-state. Contrasting the presumably more civil and polite society of Athens with that of the rebellious slave warriors of Sparta, Pericles made the case for privileging the elitist citystate on the basis of the idea that “the way we live differs . . . from that of our enemies.” Note how ‘differs’ means ‘better’ or ‘superior.’ The Myth-sustaining Alcmaeonid continues: Our city is open to all the world. We have never had any aliens’ laws to exclude anyone from finding or seeking anything here, nor any secrets of the city that an enemy might find out about and use to his advantage. For
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Actually, Athens had an excess of open secrets exploitable by enemies and aliens. The principal ones were slavery, patriarchy, concentrated wealth, and ruinous usury and debt peonage. Pericles’ argument requires a masculinist settler colonial view of democracy: one in which only the uncircumscribed law-making powers of the city-state’s male elite are viewed as true to place and not alien; one in which the invader (colonizer) is reinvented as the telluric partisan with a manifest mission to protect a peculiar idea of freedom naturalized as universal truth—come to our city where we can exploit you under our inalienable rule of law. Pericles appealed to “telluric” partisans for his conception of a state of war and emergency—a contagious sentiment addressed by Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben in more modern times.2 In ancient Greece, this state of exception was required to appease the demands of the wealthy who were vehemently opposed to dēmokratia because it increasingly placed limits on the mistreatment of Athenian slaves and those in debt or trapped in precarious work.3 Is any of this sounding familiar? What I hope to show in this chapter is how in 2016 the United States aspires to emulate Athens ca. 380 BCE and we, the Mexican-origin people, are the Helots among the Spartans—those who have become accustomed to surviving and even thriving under harsh and precarious conditions. This deep, largely class-based, conflict and ambiguity within democracy has an ecological parallel also dating to ancient Greek war societies: As Hughes and others have shown, the Greeks (and the Romans) deforested huge swaths of the Mediterranean to build war and trade fleets, forts, and other defensive structures, and to clear land for agriculture to feed the large standing armies. Deforestation and land degradation greatly accelerated during the time between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars.4 The same cannot be said of Mayan, Olmec, and Mexica antecedent cultures and other Mesoamerican civilizations whose watershed forests were remarkably intact at the time of contact. Sustainability and resilience is verified by ‘conquest narratives,’ modern studies of the ‘Maya managed mosaic,’ and the hydraulic, agroecological city-states of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco during the famed Triple Alliance.5 This has implications today because the people of the Mesoamerican diaspora are the ones remaking space into place across the United States— pushing back against the feigned new urbanism of neoliberal enclosures and security-minded gentrification—by cultivating figuratively ancestral gardens and opening spaces of community autonomy. Today, one indisputable fact forcefully clarifies how ecology affects all matters of life and death for members of groups targeted under the current state of exception: The U.S.–Mexico border ranks high among the most thoroughly militarized zones on the planet. It is a zone of exception—a space defined by the suspension of the rule of law and the heightened possibility of death or grave injury from the use of deadly force with impunity by border control,
End of Neoliberal ‘State of Exception’? 63 police, military, and paramilitary agents of the state and allied partisans. In this sense, the hyper-militarization of the U.S.–Mexico border is comparable to other ‘walled states’ across the planet; the iconic example being the Israeli encirclement, fragmentation, and enclosure of Palestine.6 Border militarization has been long decried as inhumane and as a threat to traditional ‘American’ democratic values.7 Today, it seems especially important to observe how this peculiar apparatus of re-territorialization by the sovereign, in a time of borderless capital, is consciously designed to use the unwelcoming heat chamber of Southwestern deserts as an environmental technology of deterrence, illustrating the multifaceted nature of the biopolitics of border militarization and control strategies. Consuelo Crow, a ‘border checkpoint anthropologist,’ observes how Border Patrol logic views the “desert as deterrence by death.”8 While this remote and inaccessible environment poses challenges for effective surveillance and control, the desert ecosystems of Arizona and other Southwestern states have been re-deployed as tactical weaponry in a strategy of governmental environmental rationality—or ‘environmentality’—designed to co-opt the landscape itself as part of the apparatus of border control. This is a central feature in the contemporary exercise of biopower on the border and signals the centrality of struggles over re- and de-territorialization via the landscape ecology of deserts (and other places) reconstructed as part of the apparatus of weaponized barriers to human entry and spaces beyond which and wherein displaced peoples seek new senses of place, home, belonging, and sanctuary. It signals a willingness on the part of the sovereign nation-state to ‘let die’ the ‘others’ by increasing the risk of death, injury, and illness among transborder travelers negotiating unauthorized entry through these multiply hazardous zones. Jason De León does not hesitate to place the blame for these deaths on “a strategic federal plan . . . that simultaneously uses and hides behind the viciousness of the Sonoran Desert.”9 In the weaponized desert of the border zone, nature has become a hidden-in-plain-sight slow death machine. The ‘War on Terror’ is the opposite: A legal civil war deploying statesponsored terror and systemic violence against dispossessed and displaced peoples—including the waves of economic, environmental, and narco-war refugees fleeing the effects of decades of U.S. foreign ‘shock doctrine’ policies and continuing neoliberal enclosures that have ushered Indigenous transmotion from Mexico and Central America, especially during the post-NAFTA and post-9/11 periods. These ‘others’ face a national security dispositif (apparatus) that the displaced correctly perceive as an unmistakable instance of ‘thanatopolitics’—a politics of death—because every transborder traveler surely understands their crossing journey as a matter of life and death, a contemporary Jornada del Muerto. They see a system built to let people die simply to affirm the state’s paranoid and excessive exercise of sovereign control over the imagined national territory, despite the fact the sovereign’s policies and actions play a pivotal role in creating the forces that displace people from their own homelands so their lives ‘wash up’ on our shores, or perhaps, more
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apropos, lay strewn across an unforgiving desert as desiccated remains of persons whose only ‘crime’ was a failed attempt at escape from the violence the very same banal regime perpetrated back home for the advantage and interests of borderless capital. Forced migration is part of a neoliberal death sentence, especially for Indigenous peoples, a point made by the Zapatistas in 1994 and repeated by activists who declare the “Right Not to Migrate” as the most important one at stake. But the death machine of border militarization continues to operate unabated and is constantly rationalized as a necessary means to guarantee the life and welfare of those deemed qualified members of the ‘citizenry’ or legal population: Effete Athenians against a mass of ingeniously persistent Helots who refuse to become ghosts of the primitive accumulation, “Aqui estamos, y no nos vamos” (“We are here and we are not leaving”). While the border is a militarized zone of exception, we must further understand how the policing and surveillance of our barrios in the interior of U.S. territory render all the spaces where we live, work, study, eat, pray, and play into slow death zones constrained by structural violence and a built environment that enhances social control while reinforcing existing environmental and economic inequities. The violence exercised with impunity by white partisans on a daily basis enacts this regime through over-policing and the privatizing of industries gleaming profits from mass incarceration, detention, and deportation.10 This fast and slow death machine extends northward from the border into every ‘racialized’ barrio and community rendered as “social control districts” by police, border control, immigration, and anti-terrorism law enforcement organizations. Ecology, once thought of as a living and lifegiving entity, is now part of the apparatus of death, incarceration, and illness associated with an “ecology of fear.”11 Despite this hellish and violent scenario, we must avoid conflating the twisted configuration of the neoliberal state of exception apparatus, and its narrowly racialized and disruptive geopolitical conceptions of citizenship and the ‘good life,’ as the end of the political history of North America; au contraire, as dissidents we are just getting started. My concern is for understanding and defending the political subjectivity and agency of a massive, sprawling, and growing transborder community that links Mesoamericans from Chiapas and Oaxaca all the way north with families living and working in California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. We are the rabble that is democracy’s best hope. There can be no denying that the complicated and convoluted act of unauthorized entry into the United States is itself a powerful rebuke of the sovereign exception. This is why ‘Entry Without Inspection’ (“EWI” in Border Patrol parlance) seems so threatening to white nation-state building narratives, especially among self-identified ‘telluric partisans.’ Assessing the subjectivity of transborder crossers, and citing the work of David Spener and others, De León, et al. argue that: [S]everal generations of crossing experience . . . created a unique form of ‘migration-specific habitus’ that pre-disposes working-class border
End of Neoliberal ‘State of Exception’? 65 crossers to tolerate abnormal levels of misery and death during this process . . . and also having a unique understanding of how to overcome particular technological constraints . . . migrants embody particular ways of being during border crossings. . . . Importantly, the embodied practices and identities of unauthorized border crossers emerge in relation to the technologies and habitus of Border Patrol agents.12 I believe the subjectivity of transborder travelers is more complicated than the binary imagined by De León and other observers who appear to generalize sufrimiento as an affect condition of the transborder traveler, an argument reminiscent of Seth Holmes’ essentialist construct of the “broken” migrant body.13 The issue is that, while subjectivity is situated, a singular phenomenological context does not define the entire subject. Yes, these bodies are suspended in a state of exception and denied political existence (bios) as they are reduced to the precarious status of the ‘bare life’ (zoe) and face death or life-impairing harm during the journey and crossing. Yes, they have developed a ‘migration-specific habitus’ by adapting new tactics of survival. A successful journey across the border involves an exceptional set of skills, knowledge, and accurate information about conditions pertinent to a landscape weaponized for border control. Crow’s research gives us pause because it reveals how knowledge of the desert environment is often clouded and distorted by myth, misinformation, and fragmentary knowledge, all of which are also vulnerable to the old-style problem of contextual fallacy and some of all this is promoted by coyotes (smugglers) misapplying ideas that may work in one context but are inoperative in another. Crow concludes that the application of traditional environmental knowledge (TEK), say from Chiapas, Jalisco, Guerrero, or Oaxaca, is ineffective during transborder travel in the Sonoran Desert. The cognitive maps transmitted over the generations may also come to include misinformation or knowledge that is too easily overlooked in the midst of an emergency whenever travelers face the threat of apprehension, assault, lack of water, and injury, illness, or even death. The relevance of ecology for understanding the state of exception on the border and beyond should be clear. I now wish to highlight the opposing social forces and sociopolitical significance posed by the multitude of rebellious acts of EWI. The agency of the ‘undocumented’ transborder traveler does more than circumvent the border control apparatus; it undermines the production of the bare life whenever subjects, surviving the journey, find ways to flourish in new destinations against the odds. I therefore wish to refocus attention on the constituted political subjectivity of the people who survive the ordeal of crossing and establish themselves as cohabitants in many welcoming communities of Mexican-origin and other Native American peoples, a diverse multitude of mestiza/o and Indigenous peoples with origin backgrounds and extant relations across more than sixty ethnic and linguistic groups comprising more than a quarter of the ‘out-of-status’ population living and working north of the border.14 The rise of hometown associations, mutualist groups, transborder migration networks, or youth activist organizations (e.g., Undocumented and Unafraid)
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are important and have been thoroughly considered by other scholars.15 The aim in this chapter is to explore how members of the transborder Indigenous diaspora themselves ‘theorize’ political subjectivities as seen through the expansive terrain of their activism in food autonomy and food justice movements. This focus allows me to highlight several significant dimensions of the biopolitical terrain that might otherwise be overlooked. With the DREAMer generation, we witness the emergence of the “undocumented/unafraid” identity location. This defiant expression of political agency is enacted by those who may have cultural and social citizenship but are subject to the vagaries of ambiguous legal standing. This type of political subjectivity is often deemed to be more likely to be found among children who were minors and infants upon arrival and grew up in the United States; my work suggests otherwise, and it is also common among all ages from Mesoamerican Indigenous origin backgrounds. The youth are in some ways perhaps as ‘American’ and in tune with the language and popular culture of the country as other youth of color and many white children from working-class backgrounds. The Mesoamerican farm workers in many cases do not speak Spanish let alone English, and yet they are also exercising robust forms of political agency. What strikes me as significant is how the “undocumented/unafraid” movements are producing new forms of ‘enacted citizenship’—forms anticipated in the work of del Castillo in an insightful study of “unauthorized acts of social citizenship.”16 To distance myself from the widespread tendency among social scientists to reduce social relations and culture to ‘capital’, I prefer the term ‘enacted citizenship’ because it conveys a clearer sense of the overlap between self and collective forms of mobilization (that predate capital) and involve an immense reservoir of cultural knowledge, beliefs, and practices that are tapped as the source of exercises in coordinated political agency to make and renew community and forge new senses of place; this activism transcends the ‘economism’ of capital, whatever form it is presumed to take.
Beyond Bare Life/Bare Habitance: Political Agency and the Food Autonomy Movement The political subjectivity of campesinos, farmers, and farm workers is constantly enunciated in poignant declarations like the slogan of a three yearlong strike by Triqui and Mixtec berry pickers in Washington: “Sin tierra. Sin papeles. Sin miedo” (“Without land. Without papers. Without fear.”) This enunciation constitutes a decolonial political subjectivity because it directly challenges the racialized telluric logic of the partisans embracing the U.S. state of economic exception and its attack on transborder Indigenous populations and other ‘undesirables.’ By insisting that the Indigenous peoples of North America are not immigrants, these subaltern voices assert a native right to political agency, regardless of legal status as determined under extant settler colonial regimes. This is a refusal of the refusal; a negation of the negation; and a major challenge to state-sponsored violence as the means for defining and
End of Neoliberal ‘State of Exception’? 67 policing citizenship to defend the boundaries of sovereign national territory. The legitimacy of the sovereign ban directed against labor and diaspora flows lacks ethical virtue (legitimate authority) because we already live in a world that compromises state sovereignty through the power dynamics of borderless globalizing capital flows as witnessed under NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Into this breach in absolute state sovereignty steps the marginalized other, becoming a self-constituted political authority in the mobilization of mass movements for citizenship rights across borders. The states (for Mexico is part of this equation) that serve borderless capital are increasingly confronted by the activism and radical political subjectivities of Mesoamerican diaspora peoples in transmotion; these states of economic exception created the antagonism underlying the rupture of absolute sovereignty. Carl Schmitt made the argument that the Holocaust signaled the end of the Westphalian order and the advent of a permanent state of exception (or emergency) in Western liberal democracies. This new fixed state of exception includes the enduring possibility of the suspension of due process (habeas corpus) and equal protection rights. Agamben echoes Schmitt by observing how the state of exception is a “legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.” These are the biopolitics of ‘letting die.’ Indeed, for Schmitt the definition of the “enemy” is quite clearly rendered “the other, the stranger . . . existentially something different and alien.”17 Left unclear in the Schmitt–Agamben framing are several problematics at the center of the shifting subjectivity of those considered unfit for “integration” today and targeted by a ‘legal civil war’ waged against entire categories of people (tribal peoples, undocumented workers) and more-than-human beings (endangered plants and animals, ecosystems). This legal civil war produces the ‘bare life’—a being suspended in a condition of rightlessness and denied biological flourishing or survival because non-subjects can be killed or, say, denied water (as in the case of a recent anti-immigrant Alabama state law);18 this happens without such acts constituting murder, extirpation, or extinction. Agamben overlooks this as a condition Indigenous and other colonized peoples and ecosystems have experienced for more than five hundred years. For us the sovereign exception did not begin with the prelude to WW II or after 9/11, and resulted in more than just bare life. Instead, the Doctrine of Discovery, the Papal Bulls, and the varied forms of Manifest Destiny including ‘Indian Removal’ and the Monroe Doctrine and its many progeny all produced the Indigenous problem of ‘bare habitance’. Decolonial scholar Mark Rifkin defines bare habitance “as the biopolitical project of defining the proper ‘body’ of the people . . . subtended by the geopolitical project of defining the territoriality of the nation.”19 The Indigenous diaspora from Mexico and Central America is comprised of people whose experiences include dispossession (of ancestral lands) and displacement as Indigenous people, north of the border, who are subordinated to the category of “illegal aliens” by a newcomer settler
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colonial regime seeking to justify a misplaced and aggrieving resentment fed by telluric nativist delusions. Indigenous people are neither alien nor illegal! By focusing on the reduction of our bodies to bare life, Agamben has a missing subject, and as Negri has noted, there is no room for agency to be found in this rendition of hell.20 This deprives us of access to the myriad forms of agency producing the use-values required for life itself. This misrepresents the value-creating capacity of the excluded subject, which is independent of the effort by the state of exception to erase our political life (bios) and suppress or co-opt our autonomous (beyond the market) value-creating agency (e.g., in urban agriculture networks). I agree with Tezozomoc that agency is a “latent property of the subject and is perceived and perhaps enacted only by virtue of the multiple shifting and evolving subjectivity of the self in relation to others in a field of power/knowledge relations.” Capital does everything it can to restrict agency to a naturalized quality of what being human means through the ontological precept “that no one, including government, can interrupt or prevent the individual from realizing self-interest through the pursuit of profit” (echoing Pericles). As Tezozomoc argues, this neoliberal narrowing of possible ontological horizons is a strategy of “de-subjectivation”—that is, the destruction and suppression of alternative (nonmarket-steered) ways of being human “because it denies us access to . . . multiplex subjectivity as a deliberative and relational practice.” From this standpoint, subjectivity is a “reiterative and reflexive process-of-becoming” rather than the rationally narrow self-interested behavior inscribed as an eternal desire by the neoliberal imposition of an inflexible and fundamentalist commitment to only one way of being human; this unquenchable desire to consume one’s way to self-realization is a key despotic signifer. Herein lies a part of the challenge of the state of economic exception: This is not just a “philosophical” discussion. A narrowly constructed juridical regime compels all of us to accept the sanctity of private property rights as paramount above all other types of claims, including collective demands for a new form of democratic biopolitical existence.
Food for Biopolitical Autonomy, or: Farming in the ‘Republic of Property’ It takes land to farm. Under conditions of neoliberal enclosure of public and common property in the ascent of the tyranny of private property, the right to food becomes a struggle for the right to land, seed, and water. Nowhere is this more evident than in the urban spaces of U.S. metropolitan areas where collective grassroots struggles have taken hold for food autonomy and environmental justice. If we think about this straight on—that is, without the re-signification of ‘food deserts’ as matters of ‘consumer choice’ and epiphenomenal consequences of market adjustments (as if Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ will eventually bring food to the table) instead of seeing these as the unsignified reality of a form of dietary class warfare—we also immediately come to understand how displaced persons of the late Mesoamerican
End of Neoliberal ‘State of Exception’? 69 diaspora are struggling for land to farm and garden in order to defy the death sentence of neoliberal austerity and the structural violence associated with the current wave of xenophobic white nationalism and rampant capitalist globalization. Having land to produce food becomes a death-defying act in the political environment of a severe state of economic exception targeting Mexican-origin and other Indigenous and peoples of color for elimination and expulsion from both the body politic and the imagined national territory. Take your pick: Trump’s deportation army (or Obama’s, for that matter); or a wondrous mosaic of Indigenous home kitchen and communal gardens in a revolutionary—because restorative—urban ecology that brings Condor and Eagle peoples together? Growing your own food is a way of avoiding others ‘letting you die’ from physical and spiritual (cultural) hunger. This act presupposes much more than adaptive cultural orientation or even the use of shared ancestral knowledge and values associated with a radical subaltern political subjectivity. These escapes from neoliberal death involve the mobilization of institutions of collective action that displaced persons have brought along with their seeds, rootstocks, and tubers and extensive agroecological and ethnobotanical knowledge. These institutions are the web and maw of support for new forms of ‘unauthorized acts’ of cultural and social citizenship and are able to sustain the political life and agency of the collective transborder community. The epochal struggle of the South Central Farmers (SCF) cooperative in Los Angeles is one significant precursor and progenitor of these new forms assumed by Indigenous diaspora peoples’ institutions of collective action. These institutions, like the SCF general assembly and various spun-off cooperative projects, understand the limits and contradictions of ‘identity politics’ and this is one reason these organizations rely on women’s leadership at the base in the self-organizing process of governance. The rise of transborder Indigenous political subjectivities is evident in the multi-ethnic membership of SCF but is also instructive as an instance in which the food autonomy movement challenged the construction of property itself as a legal and political category. The SCF represented a challenge to the hegemony of the Republic of Property because it involved a struggle in which constituent power re-appropriated and re-territorialized privatized, enclosed space. This set in motion a crisis for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his band of realtor-advisors resulting in a clash between the dominant idea of property as possession and the Indigenous concept of property as relation. This was above all an example of the process of “de-territorialization,” which refers to the “dissipated nature of human subjectivity in contemporary capitalist cultures.”21 It further implies both the ‘end of history’ and the ‘end of place’ (of the local) since globalization unleashes new waves of accumulation by means of dispossession to impose a universal regime of the commodification of everything: Every lot of land and drop of water; every seed, cell, and organism; and every molecule and constituent of Earth’s life-support systems including atmospheric processes of climate change (e.g., through carbon off-set markets).
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Rampant global and local enclosures—all sources of dispossession and displacement—reinforce the environmental and economic inequities produced by settler colonial structural violence. Letting die means accepting a regime of environmental violence (racism) that allows millions to go hungry, and to suffer the slow death of malnutrition in so-called food deserts. But it turns out that the existence of food deserts presents an intolerable dilemma for capital because the SCFs, like other grassroots autonomía mobilizations, refuse to submit their political will and discourses to nonsensical theories that postulate how hunger is ultimately about consumer choices (between, say, eating or paying the heating bill) or accepting the idea that the quest for speculative real estate profits outweighs the community need for ecological democracy and right livelihoods. As Tezozomoc has argued, it is difficult to conceal and reify “structurally-induced hunger just because it is embedded in the finance nexus of governmentality and its regimes of accumulation/signification.” The multitude of alterNative heterotopias of food autonomy forged in the spaces of systemic hunger by Mesoamerican diaspora peoples reveals “how the bare life is an everyday form of structural violence against the propertyless . . . rather than some unusual state of exception.” But this also reveals another world is possible and is already coming into existence.
Other Worlds Are Possible: Subaltern Revolt and the End of the State of Exception? Burlington is a significant agricultural district located just north of Seattle and is known as one of the principal producers of berry fruit products for the Pacific Northwest. On July 11, 2013, more than two hundred mostly Triqui and Mixtec farmworkers observed the first of seven work stoppages that occurred during the 2013 harvest at the Sakuma Bros. Farms. Tomás Madrigal notes that the strike was not spontaneous and the participants in this community of Indigenous migrant farmworkers had previously stopped work at least once a season over the decade prior to this historic action.22 This was possible because the workers arrived as part of a coordinated relocation of related families and villages from the same bioregion of Oaxaca and they were already experienced as a self-organizing multitude. To an informed observer, the Sakuma workers’ campaign is an example of classic worker-capitalist conflict over wages and productivity: The piece-rate system that was being imposed on the workers at Sakuma is an age-old practice used by capitalist producers and is designed to control the productivity of workers while breaking down their capacity to create a sense of community. The “piece-rate” requires the worker to accelerate the pace of and intensity of harvest labor expended to receive the bare minimum payout. The producer most often uses this strategy of Taylorism or scientific management to make workers compete against one another by rewarding the rate-busters or workers that set the upper limit of the productivity curve. This promotes horizontal conflict between workers and allows the capitalist to deflect or suppress vertical
End of Neoliberal ‘State of Exception’? 71 or bottom-up conflict. The point is to use piece-rates to exploit ‘uncondensed’ or ‘raw’ living labor capacity more efficiently and to divide and conquer the workforce. This remains part of the focus of the workers’ struggle at Sakuma as it winds down the third year of organizing activity. In the 2013 statement of demands, the workers’ proposal sought to address this system and focused on a “hybrid” model that guaranteed at least the minimum wage while implementing a participatory or worker co-managed approach to the setting of future piece-rates. So, the struggle was not just over piece-rates; it was also about workers gaining a participatory foothold in the workplace—in other words, they were demanding democracy so as to engage themselves in changing the precarious nature of their work. This demand suggests that the Mesoamerican farmworkers are not just resisting capital at the point of production; they are also demanding control over the conditions of their own reproduction—or the entirety of their biopolitical life including how the workplace affects their health and well-being—and asserting the right to humane housing, access to health care, education for their children, and the marking of a new path toward their own future as farmers and food producers rather than just as farmworkers for the established commercial growers. The struggle for community among the Mixtec and Triqui farmworkers in their union, Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, is one centerpiece of their political activism and radical decolonizing Indigenous subjectivity: People forget that before they were farmworkers, many of these strikers were independent and communal farmers. During a protest and solidarity march held in July 2016, I spoke with one of the huelguistas. She explained some of the motivations behind the strike: “This is about our power and autonomy; about our dignity as human beings; and about ending the super-exploitation we suffer every day working hard to put food on other peoples’ tables.” When I asked if she could share a vision of the future, she replied: We are also human beings and we wish to be part of the community. Community is everything. It is of all the things that make us who we are. Human beings, social beings. We are not really human unless we can be ourselves in relation to others with respect and dignity. This government and the businesses it serves; they have no idea what it means to be a worker, a decent human being. We are going to teach them what that means. That is the future as I see it. The idea that displaced Indigenous people now living and working in the United States are human beings should not strike anyone as an overly radical proposition, regardless of how they came to live and work within our overmilitarized, semi-permeable borders. What makes this a radical political subjectivity is evident in how these workers offer the audacious enunciation that they are the ones who can and have to teach the rest of us how to be decent, life-affirming human beings. Their identity location challenges us to reject the behavioral economics of the neoliberal worship of the lone, selfish
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individual. That this seems radical is a testament to the tragic condition facing our democratic prospects in a political world dominated by a pathological commitment by the government to the lone individual, left free to pursue profit and property, and to wither and die under the sway of an ideology of disconnection. This subjectivity is also a rebuke of any ideology presuming democratic prospects are to be constrained by nativist (as distinct from native) telluric partisans who believe themselves to have a preemptive stake in the future and should be able to apprehend, detain, and deport any human being that “looks illegal.” This refusal of hostile white supremacy is made clear in another enunciation, a 2014 poem, from the Mixtec-Triqui berry workers. They have also been involved in the anti-deportation mobilization challenging the unconstitutional and abusive practices of a privatized detention center in Tacoma where many of the transborder workers, hunted like prey, are held captive. In the poem, they envision themselves as the unknown creators of future change: We are the names you will never know. The faces erased from history. We are the statistics on your fact sheets. The fulfillment of your quotas. We are one link in a long chain of struggle. We are the lion in a history written by hunters. But we do not need to be known to create change.23 This enunciation suggests that the Mixtec-Triqui rebel workers are ‘new nomads’ in a chain of struggle deeper and beyond a simple call for human rights. Deleuze and Guattari note in A Thousand Plateaus, “[W]ith the legal [State] model, one is constantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of constant relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself ” (p. 372). The extension of transborder Indigenous territory by virtue of diasporic flows and attendant political agencies discussed in this chapter features the unknown as embodiments of the “difference between the skilled itinerant worker and the dequalified State laborer [which] is the difference between following a nomadic flow and reproducing an already determined norm.” The reinvention of our democratic prospects and the end of the state of economic exception demands the immanent skillfulness and mindfulness of those who remain unknown to all except the direct and active creators of impossible worlds.
Notes 1. Excerpt is from Pericles’s Funeral Speech for Athenian War Dead, p. 1. 2. Schmitt 2004: 52; my use of the term “telluric partisan” derives precisely from Schmitt’s definition: “The autochthonous defenders of the home soil, who died pro
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3.
4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
16. 17. 18.
19. 20. 21.
aris et focis [for our altars and our hearths], the national and patriotic heroes who went into the woods, all elemental, telluric force in reaction to foreign invasion.” In U.S. context, the telluric partisans are actually descendants of settler colonists rather than defenders of an originary homeland; it is the people of the Mesoamerican diaspora who possess telluric status, along with other Native Americans. My use of the concept of the ‘state of exception’ derives from and modifies its use by Agamben 1998, who postulates that the “camp” (concentration or refugee camp) has become the paradigm of “political modernity” impelled by the aims of the “sovereign ban” to alienate or segregate “enemy bodies” to zones outside “strict legality.” Extending Agamben, I also seek to illustrate how Indigenous peoples, resisting the logics of coloniality, confront both bare life and bare habitance, as discussed in this chapter. Powell 2016: 271–347. The Athenians divided ‘citizens’ from ‘metics.’ A citizen was born to Athenian parents and could take part in the government of the polis and, after compulsory service in the army, they were expected to serve as government officials and take part in jury service or even serve as judges. A metic was of foreign birth and could include persons who had migrated to Athens to trade or pursue artisan craftwork (often for the armies or the continuous civil engineering projects). Metics were compelled to pay taxes and were sometimes required to serve in the army and they could never achieve full rights as citizens; they could not own houses or land; and were not allowed to testify in law courts or serve as jury members. This was a patriarchal order, and women were not permitted to take part in public life or to own property. Hughes 2014: 68–87; 150–62. Fedick 1996; Peña 2005. For example, Brown 2010; Dear 2013. Dunn 1996. For a more recent view see, Slack, et al. 2016. Crow 2017. De León 2015, The Land of Open Graves: 3. I note how the Indigenous people of this desert bioregion—the Tohono O’odham among them—can point to their successful inhabitation of this ecosystem for thousands of years, suggesting that the desert is vicious only to those who lack sufficient environmental knowledge and are thus unable to adapt to its stringent, unforgiving demands. On problems and strategies for environmental justice and the anti-ecological rationality of the “carceral” state see, Richards and Peña 2016. On the ‘ecology of fear’ and social control districts, see Davis 1999: 382–87. De León, et al. 2015: 454. Holmes 2013; this book uses the essentialist construct of “Broken Bodies” in the title and as a principal argument of the text. Cengel 2016. On hometown associations, mutualism, and cooperative organization among Indigenous Mexicans in the United States, see Fox and Rivera-Salgado 2004. On DREAMer activism see, Corrunker 2012; Gonzales 2009, 2016; on the “undocumented/unafraid” movement see, Negrón-Gonzales 2014; and on the convergence of the two, see Nicholls 2013. del Castillo 2007. Schmitt 1996: 27. Alabama’s H.B. 56 included a provision requiring proof of citizenship or legal residency for the approval of water utility service to a home or apartment and was championed by anti-immigrant legislators as a strategy designed to increase the likelihood of ‘self-deportation.’ For discussion, see Peña 2012. Rifkin 2009: 94; also see pp. 90–91. Negri 2008. Tezozomoc 2017.
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22. Madrigal 2017. 23. The author gratefully acknowledges Tomás Madrigal for sharing the berry workers’ poem.
Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. University of Chicago Press, 1998. Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Zone Books, 2010. Cengel, Katya. “The other Mexicans: Indigenous People Come From a World Apart From Spanish-Speaking Mexicans.” National Geographic, June 23. Accessed July 8, 2016. http://goo.gl/Wnio0I. Corrunker, Laura. “Coming Out of the Shadows’: DREAM Act Activism in the Context of Global Anti-Deportation Activism.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 19, no. 1 (2012): 143–168. Crow, Consuelo. “Tracing Food Packs and Tuna Cans on La Linea: Food, Water, and Foodways during Transborder Travel.” In Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives. Edited by Devon G. Peña, Luz Calvo, Pancho McFarland and Gabriel R. Valle. University of Arkansas Press, 2017. Davis, Mike. 1999. The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Vintage Books. Dear, Michael. 2013. Why Walls Won’t Work: Repairing the US-Mexico Divide. Oxford University Press. del Castilllo, Adelaida R. “Illegal Status and Social Citizenship: Thoughts on Mexican Immigrants in a Postnational World.” In Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader. Edited by Denise A. Segura and Patricia Zavella, pp. 92–105. Duke University Press, 2007. De León, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. University of California Press, 2015. De León, Jason, Cameron Gokee and Ashley Schubert. “ ‘By the Time I Get to Arizona’: Citizenship, Materiality, and Contested Identities along the US—Mexico Border.” Anthropological Quarterly 88, no. 2 (2015): 445–480. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues between Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Compiled and edited by Giovanna Borradori. University of Chicago Press, 2004. Dunn, Timothy. The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border. CMAS Books/University of Texas Press, 1996. Fedick, Scott L., Ed. The Maya Managed Mosaic: Ancient Maya Agriculture and Resource Use. Utah University Press, 1996. Fox, Jonathan and Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, Eds. Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States. Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, Lynne Rienner Press, 2004. Gonzales, Roberto G. Young Lives on Hold: The College Dreams of Undocumented Students. The College Board, 2009. Gonzales, Roberto G. Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America. University of California Press, 2016.
End of Neoliberal ‘State of Exception’? 75 Holmes, Seth. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. University of California Press, 2013. Hughes, J. Donald. Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans: Ecology in the Ancient Mediterranean, 2nd ed. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014 [1994]. Madrigal, Tomás. “ ‘We Are Human!’ Farmworker Organizing across the Food Chain in Washington.” In Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives. Edited by Devon G. Peña, Luz Calvo, Pancho McFarland and Gabriel R. Valle. University of Arkansas Press, 2017. Negri, Antonio. Sovereignty: That Divine Ministry of the Affairs of Earthly Life. Translated by Gabriele Fadini with assistance from Robert Valgenti, 2008. Accessed 09/08/2016 www.jcrt.org/archives/09.1/Negri.pdf. Negrón-Gonzales, Genevieve. “Undocumented, Unafraid and Unapologetic: Re-Articulatory Practices and Migrant Youth ‘Illegality’.” Latino Studies 12, no. 2 (2014): 259–278. Nicholls, Walter. The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate. Stanford University Press, 2013. Peña, Devon G. Mexican Americans and the Environment: Tierra y vida. University of Arizona Press, 2005. Peña, Devon G. “Alabama’s Ecology of Fear: National Immigration Law Center Releases Important Study of Racial Profiling; Disturbing Patterns Emerge after HB 56.” History and Politics of Mexican Immigration (blog), September 11, 2012. Accessed 09/07/2016 goo.gl/TsRwk. Pericles. n.d. Funeral Speech for Athenian War Dead Given in the First Year of the Peloponnesian War, 431/430 BCE. Accessed 07/14/2016 http://goo.gl/lOVDDQ. Powell, Anton. Athens and Sparta: Constructing Greek Political and Social History From 478 BC, 3rd ed. Routledge, 2016. Richards, Shamelle and Devon G. Peña. “An Environmental Justice Critique of Carceral Anti-Ecology.” In The Erosion of Youth in Urban Schools: The Politics of Environmental and Food Justice in the School to Prison Pipeline. Edited by Anthony J. Nocella II, Kishi Animashaun Ducre and John J. Lupinacci. The MIT Press, 2016. Rifkin, Mark. “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples.” Cultural Critique 73, no. 3 (2009): 88–124. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab. University of Chicago Press, 1996. Schmitt, Carl. The Theory of the Partisan: A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of the Political. Michigan State University Press; Duncker and Humblot, 2004 [1963]. Slack, Jeremy, Daniel E. Martínez, Alison Elizabeth Lee and Scott Whiteford. “The Geography of Border Militarization: Violence, Death and Health in Mexico and the United States.” Journal of Latin American Geography 15, no. 1 (2016): 7–32. Tezozomoc and the South Central Farmers. “Fragmentary Food Flows: Autonomy in the ‘Un-signified’ Food Deserts of the Real.” In Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives. Edited by Devon G. Peña, Luz Calvo, Pancho McFarland and Gabriel R. Valle. University of Arkansas Press, 2017.
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No Nos Moveran Embodying Buen Vivir in the Case of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community Marisol Cortez
Introduction Like many cities around the United States, San Antonio has undergone extensive redevelopment of its downtown in the 2010s, emerging from a visioning process known as SA2020. These changes have been promoted by city leadership according to New Urbanist discourses about creating a revitalized, sustainable and walkable city that attracts people back to the central city. Implicitly, this discourse also promises to correct decades of uneven development and racialized neglect created by deliberate policy decisions to promote Northside growth and development at the expense of basic infrastructure and quality of life on the city’s largely Mexicanx West, East, and Southsides. However, as recognized by urban scholars as far back as the 1970s, the sort of “urban renaissance” imagined by the “Decade of Downtown” is more accurately “a back to the city movement by capital, not people.”1 As with other cities globally since the 1960s, the move to return capital to inner city San Antonio has been framed by neoliberal theories of wealth generation through the attraction of “creative class” professionals and private investment. For the historically neglected neighborhoods peripheral to downtown, redevelopment has primarily meant the various displacements of gentrification: land grabs, privatization of parks and public spaces, demolition of historic landmarks and sacred spaces, and the expulsion of the poorest and most vulnerable residents from the urban landscape, primarily the poor and homeless of San Antonio’s majority Brown and Black population. Of the many impacts of the city’s push for downtown redevelopment, the most egregious has been the case of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community. Located on a stretch of the San Antonio River that became valuable overnight after completion of a $271M, publicly-funded river improvement project, Mission Trails became a target for redevelopment when the City of San Antonio approved a rezoning request that allowed developers to construct luxury apartments on the site. Over their pleas and protests, approximately three hundred residents were displaced—half of them elders and children, half of them monolingual Spanish-speakers, many of them disabled, many undocumented, almost all of them low- or very-low-income, almost all of them Mexicanx
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and Chicanx. This removal, and the more subtle evictions, privatizations, and enclosures that both preceded and followed it, in turn anticipated UNESCO’s 2015 designation of San Antonio’s Spanish Colonial Missions as a “World Heritage” site, which has only intensified the push to make over the central city for an influx of cultural tourism and “young professionals.” In fact, Mission Trails was the second mobile home park in the Mission Reach area to face demolition; at the time of the rezoning, the Rolling Home Trailer Courts had already been leveled to construct another higher-end complex. To the aesthetic delight of downtown boosters, this one was a community of “tiny home” condos whose design and footprint found inspiration from the trailer homes they had disappeared from urban space.2 For the families of Mission Trails, the human cost of relocation proved inestimable. Interviews conducted with thirty-seven households, approximately a third of those displaced, reveal that three residents died within eighteen months of moving, and one in four experienced a period of homelessness—a few on the streets, but more frequently doubled up with friends and family as part of the “hidden homeless.”3 Half reported health impacts that they attributed to the stress of displacement, with one in six reporting severe or lifethreatening impacts requiring hospitalization—stroke, panic, depression, and in particular worsening of chronic conditions like diabetes, leading to use of additional medications or medical equipment, and in some cases amputation or dialysis. Nearly one in three households reported a strain on or disruption to family relationships. In one case, the adoption of two already-traumatized foster children by their grandmother fell through; in another case, breakup of a grandparent-led household resulted in an extended period of homelessness for two adult daughters and their children. In yet another case, an elderly woman died, possibly murdered by an abusive housemate, after moving away from a close friend who had always played a protective role. Two years after the rezoning process began, only a third of households interviewed had attained stability both housing-wise and economically; the remaining two-thirds were still unsettled due to one or more forms of displacement pressure at their new location (high housing burden relative to income; no water, electricity, or air conditioning; overcrowding; poor physical conditions of housing or mobile home park, and others). Because the rushed conditions of the original displacement forced residents to move to undesirable locations, about two of five households interviewed or reported within interviews made multiple moves in a short span of time.4
Political Belonging Beyond Propriety This chapter opens with the story of Mission Trails, in part simply to bear witness to what happened, although a deeper consideration of resident experiences and voices is beyond the present scope and will appear in forthcoming writing. The more modest goal of this chapter is to elevate and begin to theorize
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the community claims to urban space that emerged from the Mission Trails struggle. From participating in efforts to support residents in their cries of no nos moveran—we shall not be moved—as they organized first to protect their homes and later to insist on a just and dignified relocation to safe and secure housing, I see in this case not simply the tragedy of displacement that earned it the name of “Mission Trail of Tears,” but also possibilities for an alternate polity. More specifically, learning from residents’ insistence on a right to stay despite an absence of de facto, and in many cases legal citizenship, I want to outline the contours of a model of political belonging based on residence or “inhabitance,” drawing on urban geography’s revival of this term from French theorist Henri Lefebvre. Hegemonic constructions of citizenship often imagine “legality” as a kind of propriety: as captured in a definition given by Tony Roshan Samara, citizenship is the “container for the bundle of rights that come with political membership.”5 The implication is that one self-evidently possesses (or doesn’t possess) citizenship much in the way one might self-evidently possess (or not possess) property. Moreover, since antiquity, this possession of rights has been premised on actual property ownership. “Citizenship” emerged to denote a particular relationship to the Greek city-state, a “right to the city” bestowed by ownership of land and slaves. Although property ownership is no longer a requirement for U.S. citizenship as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we can recognize a vestige of this earlier set of meanings in the way full or de facto citizenship, a real belonging to the nation and its political processes, continues to rest on a relationship to capital—and in particular to control and ownership of land. Hegemonic notions of citizenship, then, are rooted in deeply Western and capitalist assumptions that land is commodity, with real decision-making power a function of its accumulation as property or wealth. This is not constitutionally-specified so much as it is qualitatively experienced by communities involved in contests between public goods and private interests. One only has to attend a zoning commission meeting in any U.S. municipality to understand who actually has rights—who matters—in such contests. By contrast, inhabitance is a belonging-to, a living with or reinhabitation of, a decommodified nature. While at the same time caught in the labyrinth of a nation-state and its property-based construction of rights, inhabitance nonetheless sees through constructions of nation, city, and development, which impose themselves upon nature in order to commodify it as land that can be accumulated. The beginning point for this elaboration is the recent recovery of Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” concept, which has greatly informed both urban studies and urban activism in the twenty-first century, particularly in relation to gentrification. While gentrification, and cases like Mission Trails, are frequently discussed superficially as struggles over housing, the move to understand gentrification within the rubric of a “right to the city” suggests that something deeper is at stake. Gentrification struggles are ultimately urban land struggles, struggles over the rights of the most dispossessed and deterritorialized communities to remain in place, claiming a right to inhabitation—a right
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to live where one lives, and to live well. But this in turn depends upon a different understanding of and relation to the land one inhabits. My intervention, then, is to suggest that a “right to the city” does not go far enough, does not do enough to address the commodification of nature/place itself which is at the heart of a polity whose access to decision-making power is based on accumulation of land-based wealth rather than community interest/ empowerment. To that extent, I want to end with alternate, decolonized constructions of political belonging already in practice across the Americas. As I argue, the call for a “right to the city” can be fruitfully deepened via the Indigenous concepts of buen vivir and derechos de la madre tierra. For a city like San Antonio, whose historical roots, economic base, and political structure continue to be colonial even as these transform under neoliberal restructuring, our best bet for imagining alternatives to exclusionary and insufficient forms of citizenship lie in this direction. The struggle to imagine a model of social wellbeing that moves beyond neoliberal calls for “economic development” must ultimately encompass the wellbeing of nature itself—the right of nature itself to simply live and thrive—in imagining an expanded political community that includes both humans and other-than-human inhabitants.
Defining the Decade Before we can get to these more theoretical elaborations, it is necessary to understand the historical and sociological contexts that have produced a case like Mission Trails. The case of Mission Trails lies at the confluence of two world historic forces, one broadly global in character and one particular to San Antonio. First is the global shift to a neoliberal urbanism welldocumented in urban sociology and urban geography; however, this has been layered onto and complicated by a second, deeper colonial history that continues to shape the city’s approach to economic development, reflected most recently in the push to designate the city’s five Spanish colonial missions as “World Heritage” sites. With a population just shy of 1.5 million, San Antonio is the seventh largest city in the United States and the second largest in Texas.6 It is known as a Sun Belt city, a designation that emerged in the 1970s, coincident with broader “transformations in the national capitalist economy,” as historically industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast lost their manufacturing base to corporate outsourcing and consequently lost population. Southern cities in turn experienced population gains and also economic growth, with Texas considered a premiere location for economic growth among all sunbelt cities because of its “business climate—a favorable tax structure, lack of unionism, and general probusiness sentiments.”7 Yet Jones argues further that even within Texas, San Antonio is distinctive in that it has always had a “low industrial profile,” with its economic base long rooted in the service industry—especially tourism—and military/government employment, reflecting the city’s historical origins in Spanish colonialism and
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Anglo settlement. In the eighteenth century establishment of the Missions as military outposts and centers for Native conversion, and in the Battle of the Alamo which came to symbolize the triumph of Anglo settlement westward, we see the foundational removals on which San Antonio has been built as a city. One has been physical, in the extermination and enslavement of Indigenous and African populations; while the latter has been economic and political, in the subordination and segregation of their Mestizx and Black descendants. In this way, the urban removals of twenty-first-century gentrification can be understood as an extension of a longer colonial history that dates back to the sixteenth century. The Austin-based organization PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources) suggests as much in its argument that gentrification in East Austin represents the “continued relocation of native people from their homeland,”8 as do Atkinson and Bridge in their description of gentrification as “the new urban colonialism.”9 San Antonio’s colonial legacy continued in a different form after Anglo settlement began full force in the early nineteenth century, driven by desires to extend slavery into Texas. The political structure which emerged after the city’s incorporation in 1837 reflected this new social order. Despite the majority Brown and Black demographics of San Antonio, Anglo rule in local government prevailed from incorporation until the 1970s. Whereas the first city council in 1837 was entirely Spanish-surnamed, by 1850 only one Spanishsurnamed alderman remained on Council; and from Reconstruction through the early 1950s, when the rise of the Good Government League institutionalized tokenized Brown and Black representation, only seven council seats of 399 were held by councilmembers with Spanish surnames.10 Only since the late 1970s have city councils reflected San Antonio’s demographics, after a Department of Justice ruling which required the city to shift from at-large elections to single member districts. Despite this apparent shift in complexion, the policy agenda in San Antonio has remained the same from the mid-twentieth century until today—economic growth and development, as analyzed by Rodolfo Rosales from a race/class perspective.11 As with other municipalities, urban policy in San Antonio is driven by what urban sociologists John R. Logan and Harvey Molotch famously called “growth machines” in their classic Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place.12 According to Logan and Molotch, growth machines are the coalition of business and civic interests that promote economic growth, seemingly at any cost, as both taken for granted good and proper object of policy. This growth is measured not in terms of population, but rather the city’s ability to attract private investment and lure large employers. We can see the outline of this growth agenda in the city’s many public subsidies for incentivizing private development—tax abatements and refunds, fee waivers, tax increment financing, and inner city incentive funds, as well as the historic role of utility rate hikes as a regressive tax that offloads the costs of expansion onto the poorest households. This agenda is also reflected in the influence of a development lobby that is still overwhelmingly white, male,
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and wealthy, despite the demographic changes in who occupies mayoral and council seats.13 This influence is abetted, too, by the political structure of the city, which since the 1950s has placed day-to-day policy implementation in the hands of an unelected city manager and staff, precisely to avoid the ethnic- or class-based interests possible under a mayor-council system, which would risk compromising the “value neutral” appearance of a unified growth agenda.14 These features of the city’s political structure have locked in place the racialized patterns of uneven development resulting from a growth agenda, with the affluent and historically Anglo Northside developing at the expense of the largely Mexicanx and African-American South, East, and Westsides. Although these dynamics have been muddied by the northward migration of middleclass Latinxs, uneven development to the North has been the overarching trajectory that even today informs the rationale for the Decade of Downtown. While a consensus on growth and the racialization of uneven development characterizes many U.S. cities, in San Antonio these dynamics coincide with a geographically unique feature in the city’s hydrology. From the city’s founding in the eighteenth century with the establishment of Spanish missions along its riverbanks, the San Antonio River, along with the springs that feed the river and the aquifer that feeds the springs, has been central to the political geography of colonial and neocolonial development in San Antonio. In the nineteenth century, the spring-fed headwaters of the river—now dry except during heavy rains—became the city’s main source of water for residential needs and industry, including the Riverwalk that lies at the heart of San Antonio’s contemporary tourist economy. In the late-twentieth century, new understandings of the Edwards Aquifer as the lifesource of San Antonio’s watershed played a significant role as a limit to northward growth, suggesting that environmental degradation and structural inequalities of race, gender, and economics have a common root in the growth machine that privileges private interests over public goods. And in the twenty-first century, the river has again become the focus of efforts to redirect capital back to the center city, reflecting conflicting impulses between newer emphases on ecological preservation and a vision of the river as an “amenity” for cultural tourism and downtown redevelopment. From the beginning of San Antonio’s colonial history to the present moment, then, the river has served as “anchor/pawn” for destruction of Indigenous lifeways and relations to place.15 Yet it has also been a symbol of survival and resistance to those same forces of destruction and a powerful physical check on growth politics. Contemporary understandings of San Antonio’s political geography frame it less in terms of colonialism or racism than poverty concentration and income segregation, but contemporary maps of these phenomena are nonetheless striking. In 2012, the Pew Research Center released a study showing that among all large U.S. cities, the San Antonio-New Braunfels metropolitan area has the highest level of income segregation.16 The geographical pattern of this segregation reflects the racialized histories of uneven development that have promoted growth to the north at the expense of the inner city (Figure 7.1).
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Figure 7.1 Income segregation in San Antonio17 Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Research by Joe Yerardi, Data Editor
The Decade of Downtown in some ways has responded to these entwined patterns of uneven development and environmental degradation, seeking to reverse sprawl to the north and return investment to the center city. Both the name and the concept emerged from a visioning process called SA2020, instigated by then-Mayor Julian Castro soon after his election in 2009. The purpose of SA2020 was to bring hundreds of community leaders together—selected with the help of the Greater Chamber of Commerce—to examine “the city’s
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challenges and goals for the next decade,” as described by Jennifer Hiller in the Express-News on June 20, 2010. Much of the emphasis focused on “revitalizing” downtown to create a “lively 24–7 urban vibe” marked by walkable sidewalks and bike lanes; a “world class” performing arts center coupled by a “world class” park at Hemisfair Plaza; a downtown grocery store; a street car connecting two major mixed-use development projects; and, most importantly, the construction of multifamily housing that would add 7,500 units and attract new residents to the downtown area. These residents would be young, single, and professional: “It’s the ‘Decade of Downtown’,” Julian Castro commented in an Express-News article by Vianna Davila from September 24, 2011. “It’s making our city more attractive to the creative class.” Toward this end, the policies associated with the Decade of Downtown intended primarily to attract private capital to the downtown core, remaking historically disinvested neighborhoods so as to attract workers from new “creative” professional sectors. To facilitate these transformations, the city created new organizations, passed new ordinances, and developed new policies, the most significant of which has been the Inner City Reinvestment Infill Policy (ICRIP). Created in February of 2010, ICRIP identified large areas inside Loop 410—the local term for Interstate 410, a loop route of Interstate 10 which rings the city—within which development projects would be eligible for fee waivers, tax abatements, grants, and loans (Figure 7.2). Simultaneously, the city created Centro Partnership, a private-public partnership charged with undertaking downtown redevelopment. This was followed in June of 2012 by the creation of the Center City Housing Incentive Program (CCHIP), which updated the incentives offered by ICRIP specifically to encourage the construction of apartments and condos in the central city. Originally inscribing a target zone that covered roughly the original 36-square-mile footprint of the city, CCHIP offered lowinterest loans to housing developers, along with real property tax reimbursement grants, San Antonio Water Systems (SAWS) fee waivers, and a more streamlined, guaranteed process for accessing incentives.18 In other words, under CCHIP, the city relaxed its permitting process so that developer incentives would be more automatic—a technicality rather than a matter for public discussion—and center city housing projects would move through the permitting process more quickly, in 2–6 weeks instead of 3–12 months. Other policies which have assisted the displacement of working class and poor people from the central city include a tougher downtown panhandling and solicitation policy, grants of up to $10,000 to city employees for down payment and closing cost assistance for homes within the ICRIP zone, and a vacant building ordinance that makes no distinction between absentee corporate owners sitting on property for purposes of land speculation and small property owners lacking resources for maintenance. Zoning processes (as in the case of Mission Trails) and code compliance enforcement (used as a tool of house flippers looking to acquire inventory in hot housing markets) have also been used to remove long-time residents from land become suddenly valuable due to publicly-subsidized reinvestment.
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Figure 7.2 City-granted incentives for new residential development: the Inner City Reinvestment Infill Policy zone19 Source: City of San Antonio (Cosa Letter)
There is a progressive case to be made that the goals of these policy shifts are admirable—reversing sprawl to the north, reducing development over the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone, and lessening the subsidies extracted from inner city residents to support new growth. However, it is important to note that the ICRIP map and the map of income segregation in San Antonio are
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virtually the same, meaning that the lowest-income neighborhoods are those most incentivized for redevelopment and thus prime for the appearance of “rent gaps”.20 Without policy protections whose strength matches the support given developers, the importation of higher income residents into poor neighborhoods to produce “mixed income” neighborhoods has meant the ravages of displacement, as in the case of Mission Trails. On a national scale, Mission Trails inevitably evokes histories of Urban Renewal for those who lived through it. As a major metropolitan area, San Antonio took part in Urban Renewal policies intended to remake downtowns through the removal of “blighted” neighborhoods and houses. Perhaps the most famous local example is the clearing of 1,200 homes on the eastern edge of downtown to construct Hemisfair Park as the site for the 1968 World’s Fair; but residential and commercial areas on the near-Westside were also removed, as were neighborhoods on the western edge of downtown, only to sit vacant for decades. Mission Trails also recalls the razing of Victoria Courts, a public housing complex across the street from Hemisfair Park, as part of 1990s welfare reforms. Under President Bill Clinton’s HOPE VI, what Tony Roshan Samara calls a “dispersal consensus” led to the closure and demolition of public housing under theories of poverty deconcentration, a close cousin to the “culture of poverty” argument that the cause of generational poverty is living around other poor people, and the solution thus to move them out “for their own good.”21 The most recent history to inform the Decade of Downtown is also the largest in scale: namely, the global economic shifts to a neoliberal form of capitalism that have equally shaped relationships between corporate and state actors at the local level. Neoliberalism refers to a form of governance specific to post-industrial capitalism, characterized primarily by a closer, more accommodating relationship between capital and the state. Under industrial or monopoly capitalism, corporate power was held in check by the “Keynesian compact,”22 consisting of a New Deal safety net and large national trade labor organizations. Under neoliberal capitalism, however, austerity politics have prevailed, with services and public goods previously ensured by local and national governments increasingly outsourced to non-state and quasi-state agencies. This is often interpreted as a rollback of state protections, but it is better viewed as an active handing over—the state on all scales (global, regional, local) actively relaxes its responsibilities for human and environmental wellbeing in order to facilitate a more intensive mobility of capital across national borders. For these reasons, neoliberalism is famous for undermining the democratic process, relocating the externalities of profit accumulation so that national governments have no mechanism for holding corporations accountable for their environmental and social impacts. Numerous urban scholars have understood gentrification as neoliberalism on a neighborhood scale, arising from transformations in the relationship between capital and municipal government. Purcell has argued that while local governments previously were points of distribution for federal money, the slashing
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of public budgets generally has meant that cities are forced to function like businesses, competing on the global market for private investment.23 Similarly, Lees et al. state that “city governments now act less as regulators of markets to protect marginalized residents and more as entrepreneurial agents of market processes and capital accumulation.”24 In this way, real decision making, particularly around land use, is increasingly made behind the scenes by developers and their lobbyists—the “Seventeen White Men”—or by the public-private partnerships that effect subtle forms of eviction with less accountability to public participation (for example, park conservancies whose formation restricts long-time small vendors for expensive food trucks). The Decade of Downtown is not exceptional, then. In fact, it is textbook— an outgrowth of the broader economic shifts reorganizing cities globally, according to the dual logics of austerity on the one hand and privatization on the other. Because San Antonio’s economy was never heavily industrial to begin with, it perhaps took longer for “third wave gentrification” to reach San Antonio’s shores compared to highly deindustrialized metropolitan centers like London, New York, and San Francisco.25 Nonetheless, what is happening in San Antonio in the 2010s is part of the same unfolding process that Lees et al. describe as “the leading edge of neoliberal urbanism.”26 The neoliberal turn in San Antonio intersects with another world historical force that is as long-running as it is contemporary, and as specific to San Antonio as it is global—namely, the colonial histories of European settlement and Indigenous removal embodied in current efforts to orient development around the recent World Heritage designation of San Antonio’s Spanish Colonial Missions. While the Decade of Downtown preceded UNESCO’s designation both chronologically and within the public imagination as a primary driver of inner city redevelopment, the relationship is arguably reversed: it is the global push for “creative cities” which has thought up the Decade of Downtown. For instance, a report back from a 2010 conference on the “Creative Cities movement” identifies this movement as a well-established global force since the turn of the twenty-first century: “Since 2004, UNESCO has promoted a Creative Cities Network highlighting cultural diversity, heritage and the unique products of urban centers.”27 Although discussed as temporally and geographically distinct phenomena, both the Decade of Downtown and World Heritage designation can be viewed as local, contemporaneous expressions of the same global movement to place culture at the center of local economic development strategies.28 And while the “world heritage” on display here may be specific to San Antonio, further evidence of the global scope of this strategy can be seen in other cities reorganizing land use policies around efforts to cultivate a cosmopolitan image. For example, half a world away from South Texas, slum clearance and mass displacement is on the rise in millennial Delhi too, driven by the same aspirations to “world class city” status. As Gautam Bhan points out, neoliberal restructuring in India has shifted views of both the government’s role and the rights of the poor to occupy urban space, such that eviction of informal
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settlements—once condemned by the courts as unjust—is “understood as acts of governance rather than violation.”29 With the poor now represented as illegal squatters and defilers of public land, Bhan argues that the visual dimensions of poverty come to eclipse its historical and social production, such that “the slum is . . . consumed as an image: flat, without history, without structure and emptied of those who live within it.”30 The solution becomes to simply banish it from sight through mass eviction, an erasure which “is necessary to transform the city’s appearance into a ‘world class city.’ ”31 Like the slum, the city itself is aestheticized: flattened to an attractive image for global consumption. Mission Trails, then, has been as much a casualty of the “creative cities” push for World Heritage recognition—or, to be more specific, the celebration of Spanish colonial histories of Native removal and assimilation—as of the Decade of Downtown. For it was the river restoration project known as the Mission Reach, which preceded but also led to World Heritage designation, which triggered the rising land values that attracted speculators to the area not long after. The Mission Reach development, an eight-mile stretch of river south of downtown which connects four of the city’s five Spanish Colonial Missions, was part of a larger $381.4M project to extend the Riverwalk, San Antonio’s famous downtown tourist attraction, to the north and south, from the river’s headwaters all the way to its southernmost Mission. Construction of the Mission Reach segment began in 2008 and was completed in October of 2013 with $271.4M in federal, city, county, and private funds, the bulk contributed by Bexar County at $196.3M. One of the objectives of the Mission Reach portion of the project was to ecologically restore a river that had been channelized in the 1960s and 1970s by the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control, renaturing its banks and planting native habitat; another was to create a recreational space that would function as a linear park along the river, with funds used to construct fifteen miles of hike and bike trails, foot bridges, park pavilions, and other amenities. And a third objective was to angle for World Heritage recognition for the Missions. While UNESCO did not declare the Missions a World Heritage site until July 2015, lobbying efforts began nine years earlier, in 2006—not coincidentally in concert with the genesis of the project. In 2017, you can walk or bike along the banks of the San Antonio River and see egrets flying overhead and black river snakes poking their heads above stands of native grasses, startled to attention. Indeed, all the artifacts of nature and its preservation are there for the enjoyment of residents and tourists alike. Ironically, a key part of this restoration process has been the literal removal of human inhabitants from the riverbanks to make room for an aesthetics of restoration. As in India, the global push for “creative cities” has flattened the mobile home park as an eyesore so that it can be literally emptied of its residents, in the process generating an image of the river for consumption as World Heritage site. Almost three years after the rezoning of the park, the former site of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community sits vacant, empty, and overgrown, weeds and grasses reclaiming the asphalt streets where children once played. Almost to a person, the former residents of Mission Trails mention this when
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interviewed, asking: So what was the big hurry to get us out? We could have stayed all this time.
Rooting a Right to the City in the Rights of Nature The case of Mission Trails is undoubtedly an extreme example of development politics in San Antonio. But it is an extreme example that bears out something far more pervasive, the tip that reveals the iceberg of a deeper logic at work in all struggles over “development”—not just in San Antonio, but in cities around the world. What was most striking about the case of Mission Trails for those who lived and witnessed it is true in a more general sense, whether the conflict is over the construction of hotels on parkland or the expansion of a nuclear power plant or the approval of a giant pipeline importing water from rural communities or the protection of the world’s largest cave of Mexican Freetail bats: not only did residents have no right to remain in their homes, but more fundamentally they had no rights to participate meaningfully in decisions about where they lived, even when those decisions would threaten their lives. While superficially they may have had a right to address elected officials, their interests and input were of no material consequence. This was true for those whose rights were curtailed by their legal status as noncitizens—and indeed, being undocumented compounded the violence of displacement all the more— but it was also true for all Mission Trails residents regardless of legal status, and true too for the broader community of San Antonio residents supporting resident organizing at Mission Trails. None of us had the right to participate in such a critical decision about the place we call home. In his discussion of public housing demolitions under HOPE VI, Samara has made similar observations: “Below the national scale,” he writes, “there is in practice very little an individual or community can do through their identity as citizens to protect their status as belonging to a neighborhood to which they have laid claim or feel a part.”32 Of course, here he refers only to those with formal/legal citizenship, but his broader point stands: “citizenship”—whether defined narrowly as legal status or in its more inclusive sense as “democratic participation”—is not enough to ensure the ability of residents to determine their basic conditions of existence. For Samara and other theorists of neoliberal transformation within cities, this reality stems from the ways neoliberalism has restructured citizenship (in both its exclusive and inclusive aspects) alongside economies and governments. Since the Enlightenment, the hegemonic form of citizenship in Western countries has been what Mark Purcell calls the “liberal-democratic/Westphalian” (LDW) model.33 By “liberal-democratic,” Purcell refers to the idea, deriving from the political philosophy of Locke and Rosseau, that citizenship is based on a social contract between subjects who agree to be ruled in exchange for certain protections and privileges, primary of which is “institutionalized say in the decisions of the state” (i.e., electoral participation). “Westphalian,” referring to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, describes the primacy of the nation-state
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as the political community of the citizen, which thereby subordinates membership in other political communities (region, city, ethnic group). Within the LDW model, it is the nation that defines citizenship, bestowing rights on the individual who then possesses citizenship as one might personal property— Samara’s image of a “container” for a “bundle.” Given that nation-states as political units were forged from histories of colonial expansion and conquest, this model of citizenship has always been insufficient in that it has always been structured by exclusion, chiefly by race and gender. Within the Southwest specifically, histories of Spanish colonialism, U.S. nation-building, and contemporary border militarization have marked Indigenous bodies as second-class citizens if born within the United States, criminals if born outside. Taking a long historical view of citizenship as concept and practice, Luis Eduardo Guarnizo argues that citizenship has always been characterized by a dialectic between exclusion and inclusion.34 Mustafa Dikec and Liette Gilbert echo this observation, writing that citizenship is both an inclusionary criterion for the allocation of entitlements, and . . . an exclusionary basis for building solidarity and creating identity. In this sense, national citizenship is constructed around institutionalized racism because it excludes outsiders from access to entitlements, characteristically on the basis of a racial or national identity.35 Within in an era of global capital and neoliberal forms of governance, in which the state increasingly hands over political authority to unaccountable private entities, Samara argues that the hegemonic LDW model has undergone a second crisis, in which citizenship fails to ensure rights not only because it excludes, but also because it no longer can guarantee rights that actually matter: “It might be useful to think of the crisis of citizenship in terms of disenfranchisement: not disenfranchisement through formal exclusion but through inclusion. National citizenship has become increasingly ineffective as a form of political subjectivity.”36 On the other hand, new cross-border mobilities—of bodies, goods, and capital—have also given rise to new political communities, as citizenship shifts its reference point away from the nation-state and undergoes a rescaling both upwards (to new transnational forms) and down (to local and non-state forms).37 As Dikec and Gilbert write, where the neoliberal state is marked by a concentration of corporate power and ever-greater criminalization of migration, it is also marked by an upswell of marginalized people making new claims at a local, urban scale.38 Recalling the huge immigration marches that took place in 2006, Guarnizo states, for example, that While officially excluded from the right to possess formal political rights and even from the very right to move to the United States, millions of undocumented migrants publicly demonstrated that they could and indeed do have the ability to exercise substantial political rights. Migrants’ public
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This brings us to the other striking thing about the Mission Trails case, which was residents’ fierce insistence on claiming rights they did not have, and which the system of both legal citizenship and neoliberal governance are in fact set up to deny. In fighting for their homes, they embodied, and thereby called forth, a vision of political participation rooted in residence or inhabitance. In this last section, I want to take the time to try to put into words what this embodiment means for our efforts to protect and build the commons in the face of parasitic forms of “development.” Starting from Mark Purcell’s thorough reading of Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the “right to the city,” I suggest that residents have proposed an alternate model of political belonging that spatializes citizenship as residence or inhabitance, but which also points to the need to understand urban space itself (is there anything more abstract than “space”?) as particular home places and “nature/culture nexuses.”40 Urban sociologists John R. Logan and Harvey Molotch pave the way for this analysis in their central distinction, derived from Marx, between the use value and exchange value of places. “The earth below,” they write in their opening to the classic Urban Fortunes, “the roof above, and the walls around make up a special sort of commodity: a place to be bought and sold, rented and leased, as well as used for making a life.”41 As they argue, the conflict between the use and exchange value of places—the collective interests of residents seeking to meet basic needs and those of place entrepreneurs looking to maximize rents— is in fact the central organizing logic of cities within the United States, a country characterized by an “extreme commodification of place” even among other Western industrial societies.42 The distinction between use/exchange value is likewise central to recent invocations of a right to the city based on inhabitance. Originally articulated half a century ago by the French Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre, this concept has been more recently deployed by urban scholars and activists to describe new forms of urban citizenship which have emerged in resistance to neoliberal urban governance. Over a series of articles, urban geographer Mark Purcell has one of the best “excavations” of Lefebvre, who developed the concept around the time of the Paris revolts of 1968, in response to efforts to push the city’s working class and poor away from the center city—as in the current era of third wave gentrification. For Purcell, the right to the city “constitutes a radical rethinking of the purpose, definition, and content of political community.”43 This political community is “not defined by formal citizenship status” but on the basis instead of inhabitance. It is a spatial claim on rights that arises from a need to shift urban decision-making away from capital and the state and into the hands of urban residents. “Those who inhabit the city have a right to the city,” writes Purcell.44 They are “citadins,” as Lefebvre referred to them—urban dwellers.
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The rights springing from inhabitation are twofold, and arise from the simple fact of everyday activity. First is what Lefebvre calls the “right to participation,” which is straightforward. Because residents use the space of the city (to work, to play, to create, to meet basic needs), and in fact make the city as an act of creation through that everyday use (Lefebvre refers for this reason to the city as the “oeuvre” of residents), they therefore have the right to participate in decisions about production of the spaces they use. This refers not just to state decisions, but to any decision that produces the spaces where people live, work, play, and create. “For example,” writes Purcell, “citadins who have a right to Seattle would have the right to participate centrally in an investment decision of a corporation like Boeing (now headquartered in Chicago) that would affect urban space in Seattle.”45 The second right, the “right of appropriation,” is more fundamental, and refers not to private property rights but in fact to their contestation. The right to appropriate space is the right of residents to participate in decisions about space that prioritize its use value over its potential exchange value. Residents have the right, in other words, not just to weigh in on decisions affecting the places they live, but also to produce space so that it meets their needs (for shelter, food, play, work), above and beyond the right of owners to accumulate exchange values. The right of appropriation is also the right of residents “to physically access, occupy, and use urban space . . . the right of people to be physically present in the space of the city.”46 Purcell writes that toward the end of Lefebvre’s life, he imagined the right to the city as a new social contract, a “new contract of citizenship” whose ultimate end was autogestion, or self-determination, in which “ordinary people refus[e] to allow others to control the conditions of their existence, and instead [control] those conditions themselves. . . . It is a struggle against representation, against the alienation of one’s power to another entity”.47 Purcell stresses that the right to the city is not the endpoint but an opening onto a political process that is undetermined from its outset, and as such never guaranteed to produce equitable outcomes. “It can only ever be a starting point,” he writes, because groups must forge their shared vision together through actual discussion and struggle.”48 The right to the city gets to the problem at the heart of the Mission Trails case, which is that the real decisions about land use happen outside of state purview, so that they are not part of the public process to which residents have access or right to participate. Residents who want to contest particular land use decisions are thus locked into a reactive position, coming into the process at the very end, when it is too late. If, as David Harvey argues in Rebel Cities, class struggle within neoliberal capitalism is geographical as much as it is industrial—waged within city streets and neighborhoods as much as worksites—a right to the city can be thought of as a seizing of control over the means of the production of urban space.49 But I would argue that prioritizing the use values of places over their exchange values requires a more fundamental effort. To fully realize a politics
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of inhabitation, we need to take the concept of a “right to the city” further, not only decommodifying space but also decolonizing it—seeing it as land and seeing land as nature with rights itself. Purcell comes close to this in his case study of a struggle in Seattle over the cleanup of a Superfund site on the Duwamish River, which examines how a politics of inhabitance centered on distinctions between the use and exchange value of places plays out on the ground. As he writes, even the names of the two main coalitions involved in the cleanup embody this distinction, suggesting two very different ways of envisioning what the river is and thus what accountability for its cleanup means. For instance, the community coalition providing public input on the progress of the cleanup is named the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition. “Although they have not explicitly used the concept of the right to the city,” Purcell writes, “they have constructed a shared vision around the river as an inhabited place . . . that supports many different kinds of inhabitants, both human and nonhuman[.]” On the other hand, calling themselves the Lower Duwamish Waterway Group, the corporations and state agencies charged with cleanup “imagine the Duwamish primarily as a waterway . . . whose primary function is to ensure economic accumulation.”50 These different ways of seeing urban space in turn shaped understandings of the goal of cleanup, with the LDWG calling to restore the river only to legal maximums for pollution, so that the land could be rehabilitated as saleable property. The DRCC, by contrast, called for the river system to be restored so that it would be “more fully inhabitable by humans and other species in the very long term.”51 In this way, the idea of the “rights of nature,” recently given official purchase in Ecuador’s constitutional revisions to include a “Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth,” is implicit in Purcell’s later work on the right to the city. For instance, referencing Indigenous participation in the DRCC, he writes that for the Duwamish Nation, the cleanup is “an opportunity for, in some sense, a reparation . . . of the idea that the Duwamish River is not just an industrial waterway but a complex riverine ecosystem that should be preserved, restored, and valued for its own sake.”52 Similarly the DRCC makes the case that the river “is in fact unowned. . . . It is not private property, nor is it public property in the sense that it is owned by a public agency. . . . It is, therefore, legally, truly a commons, a public trust, a space that is the collective responsibility of all its inhabitants.”53 While state and private agencies may own the banks and have certain jurisdiction over cleanup as the agencies responsible for the mess, “inhabitants have a right to decide what happens to the river because they are its stewards. . . . [P]ublic participation in the cleanup should not be an addendum to the primary decision-making process. It is instead fundamental.”54 However, Purcell stops short of recognizing that the right to the city in fact depends upon the rights of nature, ultimately folding river health and integrity into an expanded human right to inhabit urban space well: Claiming a right to the city is claiming a right to inhabit well, to have access to the things one needs to live a dignified life. . . . [I]nhabiting
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well would necessitate affordable, comfortable shelter; meaningful work at good wages; convenient movement around the urban environment; stimulating recreational spaces for children; public spaces to gather, interact, and demonstrate; ecologically sustainable urban development; physical safety in space, especially for women and gay men and lesbians; and affordable, high-quality food, childcare, education, and health care.55 While stopping short, this idea of inhabiting “well” is nonetheless on the right track, pointing in the direction we ultimately need to go. It points south, to the concept of buen vivir, a model of social and ecological wellness that has emerged from Indigenous movements in Latin America as an alternative to “development.” Buen vivir is a mestizx term, a translation into Spanish of concepts from Indigenous cosmovisions, most frequently the Kichwa idea of “sumak kawsay,” meaning “a fullness of life in a community, together with other persons and Nature.” However, other Indigenous groups in the Andean region have similar concepts, such as the Aymara concept of “suma qamana” and Guarani ideas of “nandereko” (harmonious living).56 Eduardo Gudynas, the Uruguyan scholar who is the most well-known translator of the concept for a Western, English-speaking community, states that “the richness of the term is difficult to translate into English,” but that it presents a vision for a quality of life or “harmonious balance between material and spiritual components”57 in which “well-being is only possible within a community. Furthermore, in most approaches the community concept is understood in an expanded sense, to include Nature.”58 Buen vivir has grown alongside efforts to strengthen Indigenous cultural identities in the face of decolonization struggles, especially fights over extraction, but Gudynas stresses that as a concept it is neither nostalgic nor static but emerging and contemporary, plurinational and dialogic. While it arises “especially from indigenous communities,” it does not “deny the technological advances of the modern world or the possible contributions of other cultures and sources of knowledge that challenge different assumptions of the dominant form or modernity.”59 For instance, a significant overlap exists between buen vivir and Western intellectual traditions that critique development as a paradigm deeply rooted in capitalist/colonialist histories of domination (i.e., ecofeminism, the “degrowth” movement, deep ecology, and other biocentric environmentalisms, steady state economics, and others). In particular, buen vivir shares with these traditions a rejection of several key assumptions of modernity: that the single highest goal of all societies is development, epitomized by the living conditions of the global North; that progress toward this goal is linear; and that the best expression of this progress is economic growth, a “productivist logic of always having more and more.”60 This concept of progress depends on an additional assumption: that humans are outside of and above nature, which is an object to be controlled and manipulated in the linear process of things getting better and better. As Alberto Acosta has written, from its first articulation in the post-war United States, modern Western nations have not stopped seeking to impose
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“development” on the rest of the world as the supreme social aspiration, including among the poor within their own cities (“economic development”). Whenever internal contradictions or unintended consequences have emerged from “development,” prefixes have been appended to soften the edges (“sustainable development,” “human development”), yet its core logic and assumptions have remained. In this way, writes Gudynas, development has been a “zombie category”—we slay it but it returns, its central paradox that even as it is “declared defunct . . . yet in the next step [it is] promoted as the only way forward.”61 “It’s not that I’m against development,” many a community member feels forced to state before the Zoning Commission or City Council—before testifying to the ways a particular project presents an inherent threat to their access to housing or clean water or air. Buen vivir, however, breaks from development entirely as a paradigm, and one of the primary ways it does so is in rejecting the instrumentalization of nature as an object to be controlled in the interest of “progress.” The Ecuadorian constitution, for instance, was revised in 2008 to incorporate the concept of buen vivr, maintaining in the “Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth” that the earth is “a self-regulating community of interrelated beings that sustains, contains and reproduces all beings,” and which as such possesses inalienable rights “to continue its vital cycles and processes free from human disruptions.”62 The earth too has a right to remain. Buen vivir, then, abolishes the nature/culture dualism that feminist philosopher Val Plumwood has argued is central to Western ways of knowing and being in the world,63 and which Acosta argues is also at the root of colonization within the Americas and in Africa. “Human beings were separated from Nature,” he writes, “transforming the latter into a seemingly inexhaustible source of business” and prompting “a ruthless exploitation of natural resources . . . leading to the genocide of indigenous peoples and the subsequent incorporation of slaves from Africa in the emerging global market.”64 By contrast, buen vivir posits not only an ontology and epistemology but also a polity in which nature has agency and political subjectivity. This is the key point, which Purcell’s concept of inhabitating well whispers at but doesn’t quite fully articulate. As Gudynas writes, with the repair of nature/culture dualism, “the polis is expanded, and the concept of citizenship is widened to include these other actors within environmental settings.”65 To be fully realizable, then, the right to the city—the right to inhabit our home places well—must be grounded in a more primary ascription of rights to nature itself to be free from commodification. Acosta acknowledges that this is currently unthinkable within Western modernity; however, “throughout legal history, every extension of rights was unthinkable before it happened. . . . Throughout history it has been necessary to recognize ‘the right to have rights.’ ”66 Like the communities of the South, we are done with “development” as a model of wellbeing. We who call this place home, who stood with the ones who stayed at Mission Trails until the end, who tracked their dispersal across the city, the state, the nation, indeed the continent after their removal, and who
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insist on a right to remain and to migration both, know that place is important because it is polity. To paraphrase Tony Rosham Samara, our power resides in our connection to the places where we belong. And the strength of that connection derives from our knowledge that the earth itself, the river on whose banks Mission Trails sat, is alive and cannot be owned; it has its own rights to be healthy and to thrive. “One of the fundamental tasks,” writes Acosta, “lies in the ongoing and constructing dialog between ancestral knowledge and know-how and the most advanced universal thought, in a continuing process of decolonization within society”67 Yet buen vivir does not merely juxtapose or combine Indigenous with non-Indigenous ideas; instead, it presents something new and entirely different. Moreover, it is not generically Indigenous but rather culturally and regionally specific, grounded in particular places; it is inherently pluralist. “It would be better to speak of ‘good lives’ or ‘good living together,’ ” Acosta writes.68 Gudynas concurs that there is not one buen vivir but many, emerging from many specific home places. “The suma qamana position [from Aymara communities in Bolivia] is only possible in the cultural and ecological landscapes of the Andes. There is no sense in trying to apply the concept to other regions; other cultures will have to explore and build their own Buen Vivir.”69 As a vision of wellbeing whose demand embodies and prefigures a polity of inhabitance—human and other-than-human—buen vivir in this respect does not need to be imported, nor does it have to be created. It is always-already practiced here, in this place, by those who live here and insist on a right to remain: I have only written it down.
Notes 1. Smith 1979: 538. 2. McNeel 2013. See http://therivardreport.com/roosevelt-townhome-development/ 3. Children’s Health Watch 2016. See http://childrenshealthwatch.org/housinginsecurity/ 4. Vecinos de Mission Trails 2016. See https://vecinosdemissiontrails.wordpress. com/research/ for the full report. All figures cited here are preliminary, as interviews are still in progress; a final, peer-reviewed report is pending. 5. Samara 2012: 42. 6. Retrieved 07/01/2013 from census.gov. 7. Jones 1981: 30. 8. Almanza, Herrera and Almanza 2003. 9. Atkinson and Bridge 2005. 10. Numbers have been compiled from historical records maintained by the City of San Antonio for each City Council from 1837-present (see www.sanantonio.gov/Municipal ArchivesRecords/AboutArchivesRecords/Officials.aspx#13098666-1850-1837). David Montejano has made a similar point in Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (1987, 40), as do David R. Johnson, John A. Booth and Richard J. Harris in The Politics of San Antonio (1981). 11. Rosales 2000. 12. Logan and Molotch 1987. 13. For this reason, Maria Antonietta Berriozábal, former San Antonio Councilwoman and the first Chicana Councilwoman on any city council in the United States, refers
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14. 15.
16. 17. 18.
19. 20.
21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
Marisol Cortez to this lobby as the “seventeen white men.” In her political memoir Maria, Daughter of Immigrants, she describes how she arrived at this name. “One day,” she writes, “I made a list, drawing on my experiences in City Hall. I counted the big developers, bankers, realtors, construction magnates, media moguls, environmental engineers representing big businesses that wanted to locate over the aquifer, and other major business leaders. These were the individuals in town who wielded the power in City Hall to determine when, how, and where our city would invest major resources. That day I counted seventeen people—they all happened to be men and they were all white. So instead of using the terms ‘the establishment’ or ‘the business elite,’ I started describing our establishment as ‘the seventeen white men’ who run our city. Over the past twenty years when I have used the term to drive home the point that ‘we, the people’ are not determining our city’s future, some have taken exception to the use of the term ‘white.’ But that is simply a fact, as much as is the fact that all are men. Most who hear me use the phrase want to know the names of the men, but that is irrelevant. One will leave and another one with the same interests and power to advance them will replace him” (2012: 236). Booth and Johnson 1981: 24. For a powerful statement that connects the dots between the long histories of genocide and the contemporary realities of displacement that San Antonio’s Missions represent, see Vecinos de Mission Trails’s response to a city-sponsored World Heritage celebration that took place in October 2015, with support from the CarrizoComecrudo Tribe and the American Indian Movement of Central Texas: www. facebook.com/events/438602016328045/ Taylor and Fry 2012. See www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/08/01/the-rise-of-resi dential-segregation-by-income/ Image printed in Hamilton and Hicks 2012. See www.mysanantonio.com/news/ local_news/article/Income-is-S-A-s-great-divider-3755547.php In June 2016, in response to concerns that these incentives were promoting gentrification, the CCHIP zone was restricted geographically from 36 square miles to the 5.2-square-mile Central Business District (see www.mysanantonio.com/realestate/article/Council-shrinks-coverage-area-of-downtown-8247682.php). City of San Antonio 2013. See www.sanantonio.gov/CCDO/Resources/ICRIPMap Originally formulated by geographer Neil Smith, the concept of the rent gap is foundational to studies of gentrification. In his pioneering essay “A Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People,” Smith defines the rent gap as “the disparity between the potential ground rent level and the actual ground rent capitalized under the present land use” (1979: 545). For example, in the case of Mission Trails, rising land values following the redevelopment of the Mission Reach created a significant differential between actual rents if the land remained zoned for mobile homes and total possible rents if it was rezoned for luxury apartments. This rent gap then attracted the attention of both American Family Communities as investor owners and White-Conlee Builders as developers. Samara 2012: 39. Purcell 2012: 173. Purcell 2002: 100–101. Lees, Slater, and Wyly 2008: 49. Jason Hackworth and Neil Smith (2001) have proposed a “wave” or “stage” model of gentrification, according to which gentrification becomes more nakedly corporate-driven and global in nature as it progresses. First wave or “classical” gentrification began in 1960s London and New York City and is associated with individual, middle-class homebuyers restoring homes in “blighted” neighborhoods with some public subsidy. In the post-recession 1970s and 1980s, second wave gentrification moved out to non-global cities and to more stable neighborhoods,
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26. 27. 28.
29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.
41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.
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becoming more integrated with “new cultural strategies of economic redevelopment, meaning new investments in museums and art galleries” and at the same time with “global systems of real estate and banking finance” (Lees et al. 2008: 177). Beginning at the turn of the twenty-first century, third wave gentrification has become “more corporate, more state facilitated, and less resisted than ever before,” (Ibid.: 178). Here it is corporate developers and finance capital buying and flipping properties—hardly the quaint image of aspirational young couples investing sweat equity into run-down neighborhoods. Lees et al. 2008: xvii. Borrup 2010. See http://wayback.archive-it.org/2077/20100903210459/www. communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2010/03/creative_city_f.php Tellingly, the city’s mission statement (appended to all press releases and official communications) was revised in 2015 to reflect this cultural focus, emphasizing San Antonio’s “vibrant culture and economy” amidst its continuing economic base in military employment and tourism. Titled “One San Antonio,” this statement reads, in part: “We are ‘Military City USA,’ home to crucial military commands supported by a patriotic citizenry. We welcome 31 million visitors annually who inject $13.4 billion annually into our economy, and UNESCO recently designated the city’s Spanish colonial missions as a World Heritage Site. Celebrating its 300th anniversary in 2018, San Antonio is a city with a storied past and an even brighter future.” Bhan 2009: 131. Ibid.: 140. Ibid. Samara 2012: 47. Purcell 2013: 565. Guarnizo 2012: 12. Dikec and Gilbert 2002: para. 20. Samara 2012: 42. Purcell 2003: 566. Dikec and Gilbert 2002: para. 14. Guarnizo 2012: 30. This is Yuchi/Muskogee scholar Daniel R. Wildcat’s term for the “symbiotic relationship that recognizes the fundamental connectedness and relatedness of human communities and societies to the natural environment and the other-than-human relatives they interact with daily” (2009, 20). For Wildcat, the nature/culture nexus is the grounding for an Indigenous epistemology, identity, and resistance to ideologies of extraction and development. However, this is not an essentialist vision. For instance, it finds resonance with Devon G. Peña’s concept of “Chicana/o bioregionalism”—a call for Mestizxs of the Southwest to reinhabit homelands lost in plain sight. And, indeed, Wildcat locates “hopefulness” with anyone “willing to imaginatively reconstitute lifeways emergent from the nature-culture nexus” (20). Logan and Molotch 1987: 1. Ibid., 2. Purcell 2003: 576. Ibid., 567–570. Purcell 2002: 103. Ibid., my emphasis. Purcell, 2003: 572. Ibid., 565. Harvey 2012. Purcell 2013: 569–570. Purcell 2012: 181.
98 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.
63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.
Marisol Cortez Ibid., 180. Ibid., 182. Ibid. Purcell 2013: 567. Gudynas 2011: 442–443. Ibid., 444. Ibid., 441. Acosta 2012: 195. Ibid., 194. Gudynas 2011: 441. See https://pwccc.wordpress.com/programa/ for the full text of the Declaration, initially drafted by Ecuador in 2008 and revised in 2010 during the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. Convened by Bolivian president Evo Morales in Cochabamba, Bolivia, this conference was an Indigenous response to the failures of COP 15, the global “Conference of the Parties” on climate change convened in 2009 in Copenhagen. Plumwood 1992. Acosta 2012: 197. Gudynas 2011: 445. Acosta 2012: 198. Ibid., 195. Ibid. Gudynas 2011: 444.
Bibliography Acosta, Alberto. “The Buen Vivir: An Opportunity to Imagine Another World.” In Inside a Champion: An Analysis of the Brazilian Development Model. Edited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, pp. 192–210. Berlin: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, 2016. www. boell.de/sites/default/files/Inside_A_Champion_Democracy.pdf Almanza, Susana, Sylvia Herrera and Librado Almanza. SMART Growth, Historic Zoning, and Gentrification of East Austin: Continued Relocation of Native People From Their Homeland. People Organized for Defense of Earth’s Resources, 2003. Atkinson, Rowland and Gary Bridge. Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism. Routledge, 2005. Berriozábal, Maria A. Maria, Daughter of Immigrants. Wings Press, 2012. Bhan, Gautam. “ ‘This Is No Longer the City I Once Knew’. Evictions, the Urban Poor and the Right to the City in Millenial Delhi.” Environment and Urbanization 21, no. 1 (2009): 127–142. Booth, John A. and David R. Johnson. “Power and Progress in San Antonio Politics, 1836–1970.” In The Politics of San Antonio: Community, Progress, and Power. Edited by David R. Johnson, John A. Booth and Richard J. Harris, pp. 3–27. University of Nebraska Press, 1981. Borrup, Tom. “Creative City Fever: The 2010 City, Culture, and Society Conference, Munich.” Community Arts Network Reading Room, 2010. http://wayback.archiveit.org/2077/20100903210459/www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/ 2010/03/creative_city_f.php Children’s Health Watch. Housing Insecurity, 2016. www.childrenshealthwatch.org/ housing-insecurity/ Davila, Vianna. “New Streetcar Route Is Mapped.” San Antonio Express-News, September 24, 2011.
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Dikec, Mustafa and Liette Gilbert. “Right to the City: Homage or a New Societal Ethic?” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 13, no. 2 (2002): 58–74. Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo. “The Fluid, Multi-Scalar, and Contradictory Construction of Citizenship.” In Remaking Urban Citizenship: Organizations, Institutions, and the Right to the City. Edited by Michael Peter Smith and Michael McQuarrie, pp. 11–35. Transaction Publishers, 2012. Gudynas, Eduardo. “Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow.” Development 54, no. 4 (2011): 441–447. Hackworth, Jason and Neil Smith. “The Changing State of Gentrification.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 92, no. 4 (2001): 464–477. Available at http://neighbourhoodchange.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Hackworth-Smith2001-Changing-State-of-Gentrification.pdf Hamilton, Tracy Idell and Nolan Hicks. “Income Is S.A.’s Great Divider.” San Antonio Express-News, August 2, 2012. Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to Urban Revolution. Verso, 2012. Hiller, Jennifer. “Giving Downtown a Future; Mayor Plans an Effort to Map Out the Route to Area’s Revitalization.” San Antonio Express-News, June 20, 2010. Jones, Richard C. “San Antonio’s Spatial Economic Structure, 1955–1980.” In The Politics of San Antonio: Community, Progress, and Power. Edited by David R. Johnson, John A. Booth and Richard J. Harris, pp. 28–52. University of Nebraska Press, 1981. Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly. Gentrification. Routledge, 2008. Lefebvre, Henri. Le Droit a` la Ville. Anthropos, 1968. Logan, John R. and Harvey Molotch. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. University of California Press, 1987. McNeel, Bekah. “One of the Last Inner City Trailer Parks Going Condo.” The Rivard Report, July 1, 2013. http://therivardreport.com/roosevelt-townhome-development/ Montejano, David. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986. University of Texas Press, 1987. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1993. Purcell, Mark. “Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and Its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant.” GeoJournal 58 (2002): 99–108. Purcell, Mark. “Citizenship and the Right to the Global City: Reimagining the Capitalist World Order.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27, no. 3 (2003): 564–590. Purcell, Mark. “Insistent Democracy: Neoliberal Governance and Popular Movements in Seattle.” In Remaking Urban Citizenship: Organizations, Institutions, and the Right to the City. Edited by Michael Peter Smith and Michael McQuarrie, pp. 173–190. Transaction Publishers, 2012. Purcell, Mark. “To Inhabit Well: Counterhegemonic Movements and the Right to the City.” Urban Geography 34, no. 4 (2013): 560–574. Rosales, Rodolfo. The Illusion of Inclusion: The Untold Political Story of San Antonio. University of Texas Press, 2000. Samara, Tony Roshan. “Citizens in Search of a City: Towards a New Infrastructure of Political Belonging.” In Remaking Urban Citizenship: Organizations, Institutions, and the Right to the City. Edited by Michael Peter Smith and Michael McQuarrie, pp. 39–56. Transaction Publishers, 2012. Smith, Neil. “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People.” Journal of the American Planning Association 45, no. 4 (1979): 538–548.
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Taylor, Paul and Fry, Richard. “The Rise of Residential Segregation by Income.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C., 2012. www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/08/01/ therise-of-residential-segregation-by-income/ Vecinos de Mission Trails. “Preliminary Findings and Analysis From a Case Study on the Displacement of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community.” Report presented at the City of San Antonio’s Housing Commission on Protecting and Preserving Diverse and Dynamic Neighborhoods, San Antonio, Texas, March 20, 2016. https:// vecinosdemissiontrails.wordpress.com/research/ Wildcat, Daniel R. Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge. Fulcrum, 2009.
8
Citizenship and Sovereignty The Eternal Conflict Between Rights and Community Deron Marquez
Introduction In the beginning, Indian Country, through treaties and statutes, received citizenship status and presumably the rights forged in the United States Constitution. However, in those formative years and into the present, the United States’ major efforts have been to “civilize” the Indian so to incorporate him, and her, into the national collective. Many in Indian Country1 are not aware of the historical ebbs and flows of their status. Indeed, it has become such a given, much like the notions of freedom and sovereignty. American Indians faced a different path to citizenship, a path not understood by many. This chapter will focus on the path of citizenship, exploring various federal actions from the second half of the nineteenth century and crossing over to the twentieth century. Then, in the first part of the twentieth century, federal actions sought to re-empower tribal governments, a federal ideal that continues to this day. The re-empowering of tribal governments created an unforeseen tension and contradiction within the essence of citizenship, casting an eternal conflict between the individual and the tribal community. Finally, in 1978, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez set in motion tribal government’s ultimate authority to decide the population base of their communities by limiting the functionality of due process to the individual, a process thought to be secured by a constitution citizen and an act of Congress. This chapter addresses the questions of conflict between sovereignty and citizenship, and all its incumbent rights. To manifest a collective identity, i.e., community, can be said to be one of the basic premises of citizenship. As Antonio Gramsci once asked, “how will each single individual succeed in incorporating himself into the collective man?”2 Following his inquiry, is citizenship the essence of a nation’s consciousness? Is it symbolic or functional? Is it inclusive or not? Through years of ebb and flow, the status of American Indian citizenship is brought into question; is American Indian citizenship sacred or hollow?
The Later Years of the Nineteenth Century In 1866 Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act, stating that “all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power” were deemed citizens,
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“excluding Indians not taxed,” thus crafting sub-categories for Indian Country. The Fourteenth Amendment was part of the 1868 Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—which were an extension of rights unto a subset of people, except Indians. The Thirteenth Amendment quashed slavery and the Fifteenth Amendment extended voting rights to all citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment stated that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Due process was included so that no State shall “deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of the law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The Fifth Amendment, as part of the Bill of Rights, also carried due process language—“nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of the law”—and was focused on procedural functionality of judicial happenings. In 1870, the same year the treaty making process ended, the U.S. Senate’s Committee on the Judiciary concluded Indians did not qualify as citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. As Deloria and Wilkins point out, the question of application—“role and status”—was taken seriously by the United States and greatly studied, particularly the phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”3 The committee’s findings purported that treaties, the federal government’s acts and rulings, attachment to a tribal government, and mass popular opinion had continued to hold the Indian outside the confines of constitutional citizenship. The committee stretched the new amendment’s application to the portion of the Constitution that dealt with slavery and nothing more. The committee concluded: To maintain that the United States intended, by chance of its fundamental law, which was not ratified by these tribes, and to which they were neither requested nor permitted to assent, to annual treaties then existing . . . would be to charge upon the United States repudiation of national obligation, repudiation doubly infamous from the fact that the parties whose claims were thus annulled are too weak to enforce their just rights, and were enjoying the voluntarily assumed guardianship and protection of this Government.4 The committee clearly stated that Indians were primarily tribally attached and, without tribal consent, the Indians were excluded. The dissecting of sovereign governments was a practice for the young Republic. In 1833, the Supreme Court in Barron v. Baltimore,5 Marshall concluded that the first ten amendments—the Bill of Rights—applied only to the federal government, thus empowering state constitutions and forcing individuals to seek relief from state courts, creating two types of constitutional citizenship. In November of 1871, the essence of citizenship, by way of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, was dissected in Oregon. In McKay v. Campbell,6 the district court decided a case regarding William C. McKay and engaged in a winded opinion focused on linage, time, and place. William McKay sought
Citizenship and Sovereignty 103 to vote in the general election of 1870, but was refused. James A. Campbell, one of three East Dalles precinct judges, refused because William was Indian. The court traced the plaintiff’s lineage back to his Scottish paternal grandfather, Alexander McKay, and Indian grandmother, Margaret Bruce—“a woman having one fourth Indian blood”—noting their arrival to Oregon came about through Canada. William’s father, Thomas, was born in Canada. At about the age of thirteen, Thomas joined his father working for the Pacific Fur Company, then later, he joined the Northwest Fur Company (later the Honorable Hudson Bay Company), a company of Great Britain, operating out of Fort George. Thomas married a Chinook Indian, giving birth to William at Fort George in 1823 and was said to be “seven sixteenths white and nine sixteenths Indian blood.” Judge Matthew Deady continued to establish the alien status of the fathers, proving that their work within the British company and British fort proved their allegiance to the Crown and at the time of William’s birth, the territory was British. Per the court, nothing in the 1846 Oregon Treaty granted citizenship. William was not a citizen through his father. His mother, a Chinook Indian, was also addressed. Chief Justice Marshall’s Worecester v. Georgia7 ruling was applied—tribes “within the limits of the United States have always been held to be distinct and independent political communities, retaining the right of self-government”— by Judge Deady. The Chinook Nation was within the United States and Judge Deady expressed, “In legal contemplation, he is an American Indian, by virtue of his mother, or a British subject . . . by virtue of being the son of Thomas McKay, and his birth in the allegiance of the British crown.” He continued: Suppose that the plaintiff should be held to follow the condition of his mother, and is therefore a Chinook Indian; is he then a citizen of the United States under Article 14 of the Constitution? According to the doctrine that has been uniformly held in regard to the status of the Indian tribes in the United States he is not. Being born a member of “an independent political community”—the Chinook—he was not born subject to the jurisdiction of the United States—not born in its allegiance. . . . In neither case was he born a citizen of the United States, and can only become one by complying with the laws for the naturalization of aliens. True, as the law now stands, the plaintiff cannot be admitted to citizenship, because he is neither a “white alien” nor a person of “African nativity or descent.” But that is a matter within the exclusive cognizance of Congress. In April of 1880, Judge Deady in United States v. Osborn,8 continued his judicial reign by stating: But an Indian cannot make himself a citizen of the United States without consent and co-operation of the government. The fact that he has abandoned his nomadic life or tribal relations, and adopted the habits and manners of civilized people, may be a good reason why he should be made a
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Deron Marquez citizen of the United States, but does not make him one. To be a citizen of the United States is a political privilege, which no one not born to can assume without consent in some form.
Also, later that same year, in In re Camille,9 Judge Deady for the court stated that Frank Camille, half white and half Indian, could not become a citizen. Following McKay and Osborn, the court stated: Upon these authorities, and none other have come under my observation, the petitioner is not entitled to be considered a white man. As a matter of fact he is as much an Indian as a white person, and might be classed with the one race as properly as the other. Strictly speaking he belongs to neither. William McKay’s heritage was a complex legal citizenship question that included place and timing of birth, paternal emigration and extra-constitutional political identity. Frank Osborn’s self-proclamation required agreement from the government. Race, for Frank Camille, became a clear factor; purity was only for “white” heritage. Under this rubric, it was not a simple application of the constitutional amendments reserved for others; the court ruled American Indians were a unique subject, neither here nor there, regarding citizenship, full or not. The courts were more than capable of making subsets of the population full citizens, as the Supreme Court did in the later part of the nineteenth century. In the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases,10 the Supreme Court, in a 5–4 split decision, limited the Fourteenth Amendment’s first section Privileges or Immunities Clause and Justice Miller’s majority opinion iterated that the Civil War Amendments were for freed slaves and not to enhance the rights of whites. The dissenting opinion stated the new amendment was not only for the freed slaves, but the right to labor was for all citizens of the United States. Depriving a citizen of such a right without due process was a violation of the new amendment. The federal government has a history of separating out citizenship privileges, by limiting them to one group and excluding another. In 1884, the Supreme Court continued the McKay line of thought in Elk v. Wilkins11 and placed tribes as subjects and clearly stated that the original inhabitants were not citizens.12 The contradiction of citizenship for Indians was, given equal standing of law within the meaning, citizenship could be a sacred phenomenon, but the applications of the law by fellow citizens, created a sacred paradox. In Elk, the Supreme Court ruled that tribal births did not qualify for inclusion in the United States because Indian Country was deemed outside the jurisdiction of the federal government. Justice Gray, in Elk, penned the passage: The national legislation has tended more and more towards the education and civilization of the Indians, and fitting them to be citizens. But the question whether any Indian tribes, or any members thereof, have become
Citizenship and Sovereignty 105 so far advanced in civilization, that they should be let out of the state of pupilage, and admitted to the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship, is a question to be decided by the nation whose wards they are and whose citizens they seek to become, and not by each Indian for himself.13 As Justice Gray reiterated throughout his opinion, the qualifications of becoming a citizen rested on the ideals of the dominant political body. A pointed theme within the opinion—that of being civilized—was based on being “sufficiently intelligent” and possessing manners and “habits of civilized life.” In 1886, in In re Sah Quah,14 addressing an Indian-on-Indian slavery question, the court stated Alaska was not “Indian Country” and thus, federal laws applied and slavery was not permitted. Plus, the court stated that although Alaskan Natives were dependent on the central government, “they are not citizens in the full meaning of the term.” In 1887 Congress passed the General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act.15 For Indians, citizenship meant becoming human in the eyes of the United States; it was a subjective mechanical process, as the Dawes Act prescribed, that simply implied worthiness to become the lowest common denominator. Section 6 of the Dawes Act provided the mechanisms for becoming a citizen. Upon completion of allotments, those who received lands “shall have the benefit of, and be subject to the laws, both civil and criminal, of the State or Territory in which they may reside” and laws could not be passed to counter such privileges. The following portion crafted the path for citizenship: And every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States to whom allotments shall have been made under the provisions of this act, or under any law or treaty, and every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States who has voluntarily taken up, within said limits, his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indian therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared to be a citizen of the United States, and is entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of such citizens, whether said Indian has been born or not, by birth or otherwise, a member of any tribe of Indian within the territorial limits of the United States without in any manner impairing or otherwise affecting the right of any such Indian to tribal or other property. (Emphasis added) The General Allotment Act removed two-thirds of tribal lands away from tribal governments and into the hands of land prospectors. The act was a contradiction to the federal courts as well as the Senate Judiciary Committee, but the main goal of the act was not the granting of citizenship; it was the taking of lands. At the turn of the century, per the 1900 Census,16 the American Indian population, taxed and not taxed, was 266,760, the lowest recorded number and a decrease of 6,847 from the 1890 Census. Even with the fall from millions into the thousands, citizenship for Indian Country continued to be discussed.
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Turn of the Century: Re-Empowering In 1906, the United States Department of State submitted a report entitled Citizenship of the United States, Expatriation, and Protection Abroad.17 In April, a joint resolution was passed to “examine into the subjects of citizenship” by a commission, along with expatriation and protection abroad at the cost of $10,000.18 On June 6, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs suggested the Secretary of State should assemble “gentleman connected with the State Department” to “settle some of the embarrassing questions that arise in reference to citizenship.”19 The first inquiry into American Indians occurred under the section “Of inhabitants not aliens” and provided the complexity of the question as the American Indian’s “position seems to be entirely unique” and seems “out of harmony with the general law of this subject.”20 The commission examined the Constitution, the treaty process, Chief Justice Marshall’s Cherokee Nation and Worcester rulings and many court opinions, including those previously discussed, arriving at the place all too well known; “Congress exercises complete control over Indians and Indian affairs, and so may legislate in accordance with or opposition to the general accepted laws on the matter of citizenship.”21 For Indian Country, ascription of citizenship would not transpire until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.22 With the passage of the act, 125,000 Indigenous individuals who were born in U.S. territory were naturalized. What the act provided was a set of rights and duties that were attached to federal citizenship. However, the act did not grant complete suffrage, for each state required different inclusive qualifying mechanisms and thus not compatible with federal citizenship. Shortly after the citizenship act, Congress commissioned the Institute for Government Research to examine Indian Country. The 1928 report, known as the Meriam Report, illustrated the shortcomings and ill treatment of American Indians and served as the catalyst for re-empowering tribal governments. Citizenship was also part of the examination. The Merriam Report,23 named after lead researcher Lewis Meriam, produced 845 pages on the state of Indian Country titled The Problem of Indian Administration. The report stated, a fact Felix Cohen24 also concluded, that many Indians were already citizens before the passage of the Indians Citizenship Act, referring to the General Allotment Act (1887) and the 1906 Burke amendment,25 which granted citizenship after the fee patent was granted and not originally at the commencement of allotment. Also, in 1901, Indians in the Indian Territory—the Territory of Oklahoma—were made citizens.26 The report observed that the citizenship dichotomy was connected by a false distinction of “trust or in fee” property rights, which had “no intrinsic” relationship to citizenship. Citizenship was a “personal and political right” and title to land was a property right; the two were not the same. The report referred to United States v. Nice,27 a Supreme Court case that stated tribal existence, as understood, was compatible with citizenship and could be extended to Indians as it was “applied to white citizens.” The report does call into question the
Citizenship and Sovereignty 107 incompatibility of the 1924 Act with state constitutions, especially in the Western states where the Indian populations were significant and “race” denial of voting rights was a violation of the Fifth Amendment. The report’s final section on citizenship addressed the legal jurisdiction by stating: Making the Indians citizens of the United States automatically by virtue of the Fourteenth amendment makes them citizens of the state wherein they reside. Except where jurisdiction is conferred upon the United States courts of suits between “citizens of different states,” and where the states require citizenship as a qualification for office holding, or sharing in the advantages of the state institutions, such as schools or charities, this fact has but little significance.28 In Anglo-American polity civil rights have never been made dependent on political status. Congressman Snyder, sponsor of the 1924 bill, as Prucha points out, stated it was not the intent of the bill to encroach on such qualifiers and some states, like Arizona and New Mexico, would not extend suffrage until 1948.29 The Meriam Report exposed the ill policies regarding Indian Country and was the impetus for change, including the notions of citizenship and especially ending the General Allotment Act. Re-empowerment arrived via the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act.30 The act did not address citizenship, but it injected authority into the office of the Secretary of the Interior and reinvigorated tribal governments. The most empowering portion of the act was Section 16, which permitted tribal governments to adopted Secretary-approved constitutions and bylaws. This empowerment allowed tribes to set tribal citizenship requirements within their governmental framing. The act also clarified the term “Indian” to mean “all Indian descent who are members of any recognized Indian tribe . . . and all persons who are descendants of such members . . . residing within the present boundaries of any Indian reservation.” Congress was clear in establishing who was Indian for the purpose of the act and the authority of redirecting federal Indian policy. Congressional desire was firmly rooted in advancing the Indian, but the direction would once again switch almost twenty years later. The congressional re-empowering actions were reversed by a series of actions in the 1950s of terminating Indian status,31 diminishing federal responsibility to Indian Country32 and relocating reservation Indians to urban centers.33 These assimilation actions were about bringing Indians into to the majority’s comfortable sphere of citizenship. U.S. Sen. Arthur Vivian Watkins (R-Utah), in a 1957 article, proclaimed the goal was to assure the individual Indian “stands as one with us in the enjoyment and responsibilities of our national citizenship” and “possess all of the attributes of complete American citizenship.”34 He concluded the article by proclaiming “I see the following words emblazoned in letters of fire above the heads of the Indians—THESE PEOPLE SHALL BE FREE!”35 With Congress taking citizenshood steps by way of extinguishing trust responsibility, the executive branch joined the conversation.
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Secretary of the Interior, Fred A. Seaton, the following year rejected the termination policy in a radio address. 36 In his address, he recalled the words of Indian Commission Glen L. Emmons, who stated in 1953 the United States “wanted to give the Indians the same opportunities for advancement—the same freedom and responsibility for management of their properties—as have other American citizens.”37 He continued, stating the Indian communities could continue as “cultural islands,” with different languages and cultures and he believed “the majority of [the] Indian citizens are a desirous and capable of exercising all of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship as are the rest of [America], provided they have equal opportunities with their fellow citizens.”38 The citizenship discussion continued in 1961 and 1962 with Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall’s Task Force on Indian Affairs39 which sought, along with other tasks, equal citizenship.40 In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a special message promoting Indian rights, stated it “has been 44 years since the United States affirmed the Indian’s citizenship; the full political equality essential for human dignity in a democratic society,” treating the Indian as a “full citizen” and “pledge[d] to respect fully the dignity and the uniqueness of the Indian citizen.”41 The following month, Congress passed the Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA) of 1968.42 The Civil Rights Act of 196443 sought to end discriminatory practices of employment and public accommodations based on national origin, race, religion and gender. The 1968 act was more encompassing. It included sections on tribal courts, civil and criminal actions, offenses on reservations, acquiring legal counsel, and a final section simply titled “Materials Relating to Constitutional Rights of Indians,” which was the gathering of past treaties, executive orders, laws and regulations effecting Indian Country. The most interesting section was the inclusion of a quasi-Bill of Rights for Indians as protection from their governments. The ICRA stood more consistent with the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which established the baseline of all individuals born within the United States, “except Indians not taxed,” as citizens and provided equal rights across the country. The ICRA also included provisions that stated “No Indian tribe in exercising powers of self-government shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws or deprive any person of liberty or property without due process of the law.”44 The actions and steps taken by the executive branch, the courts and Congress, extending—or resisting—the nature of citizenship and the early refusal of some state governments to award and acknowledge the accompanying rights created a uniquely strained and confusing meaning of the term. The United States’ tripartite government’s expressions regarding American Indians and citizenship failed; pledging for fullness but delivering quasi status. What made the inquiry even more problematic was the political and legal status that tribal governments and tribal individuals occupy. Regardless, announced and proclaimed by the central government, citizenship arrived into Indian Country. Perhaps the complicating component of the “citizenship equation” for Indian Country was the most crucial aspect; the difference between emigrant race
Citizenship and Sovereignty 109 status45 and political-legal-cultural “domestic dependent” sovereign status— Indian Country. The moment the citizenship experiment commenced in 1887, the Indian tripartite sovereign fabric simply could not be disentangled. ICRA attempted to inject some rights for the individuals within Indian Country, but fullness was never reached.
The Modern Courts, Santa Clara Pueblos, and Mrs. Martinez The Supreme Court in 1974 continued the political-legal-cultural tripartite paradigm with two cases. In March, the court upheld and acknowledged tribal fishing treaty rights in the Northwest in United States v. Washington.46 The political discussions between the various tribal governments and the United States was binding against the wishes of the State of Washington and other area tribes. In June of the same year, Morton v. Mancari47 was issued by the court. Non-Indian Bureau of Indian Affair employees challenged the Indian preference law established in 1934—Indian Reorganization Act—stating the law violated the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act.48 Overturning the New Mexico lower court, the Supreme Court upheld the unique legal status of Indians as not being equal to that of race-based policy. The opinion stated that on “numerous occasions” the “Court specifically has upheld legislation that singles out Indians for particular and special treatment.” Justice Blackmun wrote: Literally every piece of legislation dealing with Indian tribes and reservations, and certainly all legislation dealing with the BIA, single out for special treatment a constituency of tribal Indians living on or near reservations. If these laws, derived from historical relationships and explicitly designed to help only Indians, were deemed invidious racial discrimination, an entire Title of the United States Code (25 U. S. C.) would be effectively erased and the solemn commitment of the Government toward the Indians would be jeopardized. American Indians, as a tribal government and as individuals, were seen in their uniqueness by these two rulings. The federal government has continuously separated “race” from Indian, choosing to maintain the political-legal-cultural paradigm. Mancari clearly injected the individual Indian—a hyper-citizen— with established federal Indian law and the treaty case clearly stated the tribal government’s treaty rights; four years later, the two clashed. In 1978, there were two cases taken by the high court that adjudicated individual’s rights. Both were watershed moments and both continued to engage the special political-legal-cultural standing of American Indians, as a government and individual. The first case was United States v. Wheeler.49 The court ruled that the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment did not apply and the individual Indian could be prosecuted by both sovereigns. Unlike state
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and federal courts, tribal and federal courts were part of two separate sovereigns and not allowing tribes to exercise this portion of self-government against its own community, as the court stated, would have been a step backwards. Thus, the tribe’s power, the Navajo Nation in this case, retained sovereignty that was never diminished by Congress. The individual Indian was prosecutable under two sovereigns’ due process applications and provided tribal governments the ability to extend primary control over its communities. In May, the extension continued. In Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez,50 the Supreme Court, by a 7–1 ruling, upheld the right of a tribal government over an individual. The 1968 ICRA was initially aimed at habeas corpus on criminal acts, but lower courts applied the Act to civil aspects, injecting federal courts into powers of self-government practices such as elections, voting, holding office and the like in Indian Country. In Santa Clara, Mrs. Julia Martinez, a full-blood member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, sought to enroll her daughter, whose father was Navajo. The Santa Clara Pueblo Tribe passed an ordinance in 1939 that only permitted males who have children outside the Pueblo to enroll their children, which she believed was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Indian Civil Rights Act, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment. Santa Clara was not simply a question of tribal citizenship, or, more commonly titled, membership. The Court applied Talton v. Mayes,51 a previous ruling that stated the Fifth Amendment did not apply, because “tribes have historically been regarded as unconstrained by those constitutional provisions framed specifically as limitations on federal and state authority.” The ruling stated that the Act did not waive any rights to suit, for such a waiver cannot be implied against the tribe or its officers; the role of the courts was restrained especially regarding internal questions.52 The Supreme Court acknowledged that the Act sought to serve two masters, the individual Indian and the tribal government (“Congress also intended to promote the well-established federal ‘policy of furthering selfdetermination’ ”). These are both axioms, and as the Court stated: Creation of a federal cause of action for the enforcement of rights created in Title I, however useful it might be in securing compliance with §1302, plainly would be at odds with the congressional goal of protecting selfgovernment. Not only would it undermine the authority of tribal forums, see supra, at 59–60, but it would also impose serious financial burdens on already “financially disadvantaged” tribes. Moreover, contrary to the reasoning of the court below, implication of a federal remedy in addition to habeas corpus is not plainly required to give effect to Congress’ objective of extending constitutional norms to tribal self-government. Tribal forums are available to vindicate rights created by the ICRA, and 1302 has the substantial and intended effect of changing the law which these forums are obliged to apply. Tribal courts have repeatedly been recognized as appropriate forums for the exclusive adjudication of disputes affecting important personal and property interests
Citizenship and Sovereignty 111 of both Indians and non-Indians. . . . Nonjudicial tribal institutions have also been recognized as competent law-applying bodies. . . . Under these circumstances, we are reluctant to disturb the balance between the dual statutory objectives which Congress apparently struck in providing only for habeas corpus relief. The case polarized and disenfranchised individual Indians, believing as constitutional citizens that they could seek a proper review utilizing citizen civil rights. The court reiterated that Congress, holding firm to its plenary power, could tilt the scale regarding civil matters. Seeking a remedy in court, regardless of venue (federal or tribal), the tribe must waive its sovereign immunity. So, as a U.S. citizen, Mrs. Martinez was afforded the due process of the system, to the highest court in the land, and was informed that provisions seeking to protect the individual citizen did not extend to her because she was not just a citizen; she was a dual quasi citizen. Equal citizenship, as Spinner53 states, means being able to participate fully regardless of race, gender or racial group “membership.” But, we have established that Indians are not a “race” in the eyes of constitutional citizenship application. Santa Clara upheld the right of a tribe to decide who would be permitted to enroll and, once permitted, participate as a citizen of that community. Tribal people have come to terms with these pre-qualifications. But, what happens when such qualifications are changed years later and the individual is deemed a non-tribal citizen? Justice Byron White, in his lone dissent in Santa Clara, opened with the following: The declared purpose of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 (ICRA or Act), 25 U.S.C. 1301–1341, is “to insure that the American Indian is afforded the broad constitutional rights secured to other Americans” . . . The Court today, by denying a federal forum to Indians who allege that their rights under the ICRA have been denied by their tribes, substantially undermines the goal of the ICRA and in particular frustrates Title I’s purpose of “protect[ing] individual Indians from arbitrary and unjust actions of tribal governments.” Because I believe that implicit within Title I’s declaration of constitutional rights is the authorization for an individual Indian to bring a civil action in federal court against tribal officials for declaratory and injunctive relief to enforce those provisions. I dissent. The dissent reaches for the fullness of citizenship, a feat Justice White believed the ICRA accomplished. Those same words and desires were expressed by various government individuals for many years. The riddled path to constitutional citizenship has provided the chaotic clarity not imagined by those who sought citizenship for American Indians. The Indian Citizenship Act bestowed a naked title. Later, citizenship received some meaning. Under Wheeler, the American Indian received double due process attention from two sovereigns. Under Santa Clara, the individual Indian cannot find due process.
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Tribal governments retained inherent extra constitutional sovereign abilities and the individual cannot claim constitutional protection, for the individual was separated from constitutional citizenship due to the extra constitutional framing. Thus, citizenship, from the perspective of the constitution, was not equal; it did not exist.
Conclusion American Indians becoming citizens was a path only for American Indians. No other individuals encountered such a path.54 The political-legal-cultural landmarks for Indian Country separate the Indigenous from the population and Congress, either its unwillingness or inability, has yet to bestow upon the tribal people full constitutional citizenship. Federal programs attempted to engage tribal people into forfeiting the tripartite pillars of tribal community; that was the goal of federal policy and history has clearly illustrated that assimilation was not proper form or function. Congress attempted to make citizenship full in 1968, but the Supreme Court found that the language missed the fullness mark. For Indian Country, the citizenship contradiction continues. For full constitutional citizenship, an individual must be afforded systematic due process of the law. And within that process, the full magnitude of the Bill of Rights plays a role; all rights pertaining to the process are included, because they are full citizens of that jurisdiction. The same is not true in Indian Country, as discussed in this chapter. Justice White affirmed the full magnitude in his dissent by stating: [F]ederal district courts have jurisdiction over “any civil action authorized by law to be commenced by any person . . . [t]o recover damages or to secure equitable or other relief under any Act of Congress providing for the protection of civil rights, including the right to vote.” Because the ICRA is unquestionably a federal Act “providing for the protection of civil rights,” the necessary inquiry is whether the Act authorizes the commencement of a civil action for such relief—which he answered in the affirmative. The question that remains for Indian country is: Are we a sovereign people or are we subjects to the laws of the United States through our partial citizenship? The historical situation underlying this conflict is that even after surviving genocidal (cultural and physical) federal and state government policies, tribal governments and individual Indians were never defeated. As such, tribal governments have retained their sovereignty at great cost, and at the same time, individual Indians seek protection. The contradiction is that without sovereignty, the community cannot protect its Indigenous culture and ways of governing itself. On the other hand, without full constitutional citizenship rights, Indians cannot participate in the larger arenas where they can advance their own interests. The conflict, then, is reflected in the politics of using one
Citizenship and Sovereignty 113 against another while not fully granting either. In particular, the question for Indian activist is: how do we advance our sovereign communities and still look to the “Equal Protection Clause” and the “Citizen Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect both our communities and our individual members? What I have presented here is a tortuous historical glimpse of a people who have yet to gain a clear legal and social recognition of our communities in the larger political society. If citizenship confirms rights and entitlements that were legitimized based on inclusiveness, as Soysal55 points out, then what becomes of citizenship when it’s only partial?
Notes 1. In Indian Country, membership is the most operative term. The Bureau of Indian Affairs states: “As a general rule, an American Indian or Alaska Native person is someone who has blood degree from and is recognized as such by a federally recognized tribe or village (as an enrolled tribal member) and/or the United States. Of course, blood quantum (the degree of American Indian or Alaska Native blood from a federally recognized tribe or village that a person possesses) is not the only means by which a person is considered to be an American Indian or Alaska Native. Other factors, such as a person’s knowledge of his or her tribe’s culture, history, language, religion, familial kinships, and how strongly a person identifies himself or herself as American Indian or Alaska Native, are also important. In fact, there is no single federal or tribal criterion or standard that establishes a person’s identity as American Indian or Alaska Native.” (At: www.bia.gov/FAQs/). 2. David Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935. New York: New York Press, 2000, 232. 3. Vine Deloria Jr. and David Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, & Constitutional Tribulations. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999, 142. 4. Ibid., 143. 5. Barron v. Baltimore, 7 Pet. (32 U.S.) 243, 1833. Barron was affirmed in Hurtado v. California in 1884. 6. 16 Fed. Cas. -11, Case No. 8840, 1871. 7. 6 Pet. (31 U.S.) 515, 1832. 8. United States v. Osborn, District Court, D. Oregon, April 8, 1880. 9. In re Camille, 6 Sawy., 541, 1880. 10. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36, 1873. The case was about a Louisiana State law that required all butchering of animals in New Orleans to be conducted in a single facility, viewed as a violation of the new amendment. 11. Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, 1884. 12. Felix Cohen, Handbook on Federal Indian Law: With Reference Tables and Index. William S. Hein & Co., September, 1988. In 1859, Attorney General Caleb Cushing stated: “The fact, therefore, that Indians are born in the country does not make them citizens of the United States. The simple truth is plain, that the Indians are the subjects of the United States, and therefore are not, in mere right of home-birth, citizens of the United States.” 13. Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, 1884. 14. In re Sah Quah, 31 Fed. 327, 1886. 15. General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) of 1887, U.S. Statutes at Large, 24 Stat. 388, Ch. 119, 25 USCA 331. 16. United States Census Bureau. 1900 Overview. www.census.gov/history/www/through_ the_decades/overview/
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17. House of Representatives, 59th Congress, 2d Session, Document No. 326, “Citizenship of the United States, Expatriation, and Protection Abroad,” Letter From the Secretary of State, December 20, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1906. 18. Senate Resolution No. 30, 59th Congress, 1st Session, April 13, 1906. 19. Report No. 4784, 59th Congress, 1st Session, June 6, 1906. Committee Members were Mr. James B. Scott, Solicitor for the Department of State, Mr. David Jayne Hill, Minister of the United States to the Netherlands, and Mr. Gaillard Hunt, Chief of the Passport Bureau. 20. House of Representatives, 59th Congress, 2d Session, Document No. 326, “Citizenship of the United States, Expatriation, and Protection Abroad,” Letter From the Secretary of State, December 20, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1906, 52. 21. Ibid., 99. 22. Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, 31 Stat. L., 1447; H. Rept. 22.2, 68th Cong., 1st Session. 23. Lewis Meriam, Ray Brown, et al., The Problem of Indian Administration, Report of a Survey made at the request of Honorable Hubert Work, Secretary of the Interior, Institute for Government Research, Studies in Administration, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1928. Under the section titled Citizenship, there were four subsections: Citizenship Not Incompatible With Guardianship and Special Legislation, Citizenship and Control of Indian Property by Courts, Political Rights From Citizenship and Citizenship Does Not Affect Legal Jurisdiction, 752–757. 24. Felix Cohen, Handbook on Federal Indian Law: With Reference Tables and Index. William S. Hein & Co., September, 1988. Prior to the Indian Citizenship Act, as Felix Cohen points out, two-thirds of the American Indian population was deemed citizens by treaty or statute. 25. Burke Act of 1906, 34 Stat. L., 182. 26. Citizenship Accorded Indians in Indian Territory, March 3, 1901, 31 Stat., 1447, 56th Congress, 1st Session. The amendment stated: “Be it enacted, &c., That section six of chapter one hundred and nineteen of the United States Statutes at Large numbered twenty—four, page three hundred and ninety, is hereby amended as follows, to—wit: After the words ‘civilized life,’ in line thirteen of said section six, insert the words ‘and every Indian in Indian Territory.’ ” 27. United States v. Nice, 241 U.S. 598, 1916. The passage used in the report went as follows: “Citizenship is not incompatible with tribal existence or continued guardianship, and so may be conferred without completely emancipating the Indians or placing them beyond the reach of Congressional regulations adopted for their protection.” 28. Piper v. Big Pine School District, 226 Pac. 926, Cal., 1924. 29. Francis Prucha, The Great Father, the United States Government and the American Indian, Unabridged Volumes I and II. University of Nebraska Press, 1995. 30. Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) as currently amended and codified in Title 25, Chapter 14, Subchapter V, Sections 461 to 479. In April of 1934, Congress also enacted the Johnson-O’Malley Act, allowing the allowing the Secretary of the Interior to enter contracts with states and territories for medical, education, and social welfare programs for American Indians. Today, the IRA has come under Supreme Court scrutiny in Carcieri v. Salazar, 555 U.S. 379, 2009. 31. House Concurrent Resolution 108, 67 Stat. B122, August 1, 1953. 32. Public Law 83–280, August 15, 1953. 33. Indian Relocation Act of 1956, also known as Adult Vocational Training Program, Public Law 959, [S. 3416] 70 Stat. 986, August 3, 1956. 34. Francis Paul Prucha (ed.), Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd edition. University of Nebraska Press, 2000, 239–240. Annals of the American of Political and Social Science, 311, May 1957.
Citizenship and Sovereignty 115 35. Ibid., 240. 36. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father, the United States Government and the American Indians. University of Nebraska Press, 1984. 37. Francis Paul Prucha (ed.), Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd edition. University of Nebraska Press, 2000, 241. 38. Ibid., 241–242. 39. Ibid., 247. 40. Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1962. https://archive.org/stream/annual reportofse8253unit/annualreportofse8253unit_djvu.txt 41. Lyndon B. Johnson: Special Message to the Congress on the Problems of the American Indian: ‘The Forgotten American’, March 6, 1968. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=28709 42. Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, Public Law 90–284, April 11, 1968. 43. Civil Rights Act of 1964, Public Law 88–352, July 2, 1964. 44. Due process has morphed into two categories, substantive and procedural. Procedural aims towards fairness of the unfolding events. Substantive seeks to protect fundamental rights as prescribed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which are the sacredness of citizenship. 45. In the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Wong’s petition for citizenship based on the “Citizen Clause” in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Here the Supreme Court broadly interpreted the 14th Amendment to include birthright citizenship status to people born within the territory. In Wong, in other words, an individual need not be a citizen to give birth, provided they are on United States soil. Indians, on the other hand, were not seen as covered by the 14th Amendment. 46. United States v. State of Washington, 384 F. Supp. 312, 1974. This is an important Indian treaty fishing rights case. Federal District Judge George Hugo Boldt’s 1974 lower court opinion (“Boldt decision”) acknowledged the western Washington treaty tribes possessing a right to take fish from off-reservation waters. The U.S. Supreme Court later upheld Judge Boldt’s decision, stating Indian tribes have a right to gather, off reservation, 50 percent of the harvestable fish. 47. Morton v. Mancari, 417 U.S. 535, 1974. 48. Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, Public Law 92–261, March 24, 1972. 49. United States v. Wheeler, 435 U.S. 313, 1978. 50. Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49, 1978. 51. Talton v. Mayes, 163 U.S. 376, 1896. 52. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553, 565, 1903. 53. Jeff Spinner, The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in the Liberal State. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 54. See Tuaua v. United States, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, argued on February 9, 2015 and decided on June 5, 2015, No. 13–5272. Certiorari was denied by the Supreme Court on June 13, 2016. 55. Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship, Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Bibliography Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1962. https://archive.org/stream/annual reportofse8253unit/annualreportofse8253unit_djvu.txt. Barron v. Baltimore, 7 Pet. (32 U.S.) 243, 1833. Burke Act of 1906, 34 Stat. L., 182.
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Carcieri v. Salazar, 555 U.S. 379, 2009. Citizenship Accorded Indians in Indian Territory, March 3, 1901, 31 Stat., 1447, 56th Congress, 1st Session. Civil Rights Act of 1964, Public Law 88–352, July 2, 1964. Cohen, Felix. Handbook on Federal Indian Law: With Reference Tables and Index. William S. Hein & Co., September, 1988. Deloria, Vine Jr. and David Wilkins. Tribes, Treaties, & Constitutional Tribulations. University of Texas Press, 1999. Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, 1884. Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, Public Law 92–261, March 24, 1972. Forgacs, David, Ed. The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935. New York Press, 2000. General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) of 1887, U.S. Statutes at Large, 24 Stat. 388, Ch. 119, 25 USCA 331. House Concurrent Resolution 108, 67 Stat. B122, August 1, 1953. Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, Public Law 90–284, April 11, 1968. Indian Relocation Act of 1956, also known as Adult Vocational Training Program, Public Law 959, [S. 3416] 70 Stat. 986, August 3, 1956. Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) as currently amended and codified in Title 25, Chapter 14, Subchapter V, Sections 461 to 479. In re Sah Quah, 31 Fed. 327, 1886. Johnson, Lyndon B., Special Message to the Congress on the Problems of the American Indian: ‘The Forgotten American’, March 6, 1968. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=28709. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553, 565, 1903. McKay v. Campbell, 16 Fed. Cas. -11, Case No. 8840, 1871. Meriam, Lewis, Ray Brown, Henry Roe Cloud, Edward Everett Dale, Emma Duke, Herbert R. Edwards, Fayette Avery McKenzie, Mary Louise Mark, W. Carson Ryan, Jr. and William J. Spillman. “The Problem of Indian Administration.” Report of a Survey made at the request of Honorable Hubert Work, Secretary of the Interior, Institute for Government Research, Studies in Administration, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1928. Morton v. Mancari, 417 U.S. 535, 1974. Piper v. Big Pine School District, 226 Pac. 926, Cal., 1924. Prucha, Francis, Paul. The Great Father, the United States Government and the American Indians. University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Prucha, Francis, Paul. The Great Father, the United States Government and the American Indian. Unabridged Volumes I and II. University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Prucha Francis, Paul, Ed. Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd ed. University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Public Law 83–280, August 15, 1953. Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49, 1978. Scott, James B., David J. Hill, and Gaillard Hunt, “Citizenship of the United States, Expatriation, and Protection Abroad.” Letter From The Secretary of State, House of Representatives, 59th Congress, 2d Session, Document No. 326, December 20, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1906. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36, 1873. Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu. Limits of Citizenship, Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Citizenship and Sovereignty 117 Spinner, Jeff. The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in the Liberal State. John Hopkins University Press, 1995. Talton v. Mayes, 163 U.S. 376, 1896. Tuaua v. United States, No. 13–5272, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. United States v. Nice, 241 U.S. 598, 1916. United States v. Osborn, District Court, D. Oregon, 1880. United States v. Wheeler, 435 U.S. 313, 1978. United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 1898.
9
Sovereigns or Citizens? The Paradox of Indigenous Self-Determination Rebecca Tsosie
Indigenous peoples worldwide have claimed self-determination as a moral, legal, and political right. In 2007, a majority of states within the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which recognizes that Indigenous peoples are in fact “peoples” with a right to self-determination.1 Pursuant to that right, they can assert their identity as distinctive cultural and political groups and negotiate an enduring political relationship with the nation-states that now encompass them. The right of selfdetermination is a right of the collective group. However, the Declaration also requires nation-states to respect the right of individual tribal members to equal citizenship within the nation-state, including rights to political access and public goods. These twin rights must be reconciled within each nation-state. Within the United States, the members of federally-recognized tribal governments hold three forms of citizenship.2 They are citizens of the United States, not by virtue of the 14th Amendment, but because Congress naturalized all American Indians to citizenship in 1924.3 They are citizens of the various state governments, not because the states granted this to them, but because the 14th Amendment and federal civil rights legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were interpreted to require this status. And they are citizens of their respective tribal governments, which possess the inherent right as sovereign governments to define the conditions for tribal membership. This complex layering of citizenship rights presents many complex legal and jurisprudential challenges. As U.S. citizens, tribal members purportedly hold “equal rights” to all other citizens, including the right to be protected from invidious forms of discrimination. The Indigenous Nation holds the right to define the social, political, and cultural dimensions of its identity. These two sets of rights clashed a few years ago when the Cherokee Nation “disenrolled” a group of Cherokee citizens known as the “Cherokee Freedmen,” who were descended from African American slaves held by Cherokee landowners prior to the Civil War. Was this an action of tribal sovereignty or a form of racial discrimination invoking the 13th Amendment? The issue is still being litigated in federal court. In another pending action, the Goldwater Institute in Arizona has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the federal Indian Child
Sovereigns or Citizens? 119 Welfare Act, which accords a tribal preference in adoptions and foster care placements of children who are eligible for tribal membership. The classaction lawsuit asserts that children with Native ancestry are being deprived of their right to equal protection of the law because they cannot be placed with a loving foster care or adoptive family under the “race neutral” state laws intended to serve the child’s “best interest.” This chapter examines the contemporary norm of Indigenous self-determination to see whether U.S. citizenship is in tension with the rights of Indigenous peoples to self-determination or whether the two concepts can work in tandem to provide an optimal level of rights to the citizens of Indigenous nations within the United States.4 Within the United States, federal law has shaped a unique relationship between the American Indian and Alaska Native Nations and the United States. That body of law, known as “federal Indian law,” is quite complex and it contains conflicting principles, rooted in the contentious politics that shaped the United States as a nation. The Native Hawaiian people are also technically “Native Americans,” because they are the Indigenous peoples of the Hawaiian Islands, which were annexed into the United States after the overthrow of the internationally recognized Kingdom of Hawaii, and which now constitute a separate “state” of the Union. However, the political status of Native Hawaiians remains ambiguous under federal law. As Professor Robert Porter has noted, federal law and policy has historically characterized Indian people in at least four different ways: “(1) treating Indians as citizens of separate nations, (2) treating Indians as wards of the federal government, (3) treating Indians as American citizens, and (4) treating Indians as a racial minority group.”5 When the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the defining moment came as Indigenous peoples were recognized as “peoples” with a right of “self-determination” under international human rights law. Thus, the contemporary question is whether the United States will actualize Indigenous self-determination as part of its federal law, making yet a fifth category of federal law and policy relevant. If it does, will this entail a return to the idea that Indians are primarily “citizens of separate nations,” or will the tropes of “citizenship” and “racial minority” continue to control the domestic political rights of Indians who are still considered to be “domestic dependent nations” (which is the modern and preferred terminology for their status as “wards” of the U.S. government). These issues are alive and well in the state of Hawaii, where the state has recently enacted a state law acknowledging the right of the Indigenous Kanaka Maoli people to self-determination, although Congress has not yet formally extended federal recognition.6 This chapter will first outline the four historical frames that have been used to describe Native citizenship since the formation of the United States and illustrate the differing views on Native rights that have arisen under each frame. It is worth noting that all of these frames currently operate to some degree, which causes a great deal of confusion, but also offers a unique opportunity
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to evaluate the meaning of “citizenship” for Native peoples in the context of the discussion on self-determination, which is a topic that I address in the final section of this chapter, as the “fifth frame” of Indigenous citizenship.
Frame I: Indians as Citizens of Separate Nations Federal Indian law is founded upon the notion that Indian nations are separate political sovereigns with their own territorial boundaries.7 The treaties signed by Great Britain and then by the United States recognized Indian nations as separate governments with internal self-governing powers, as well as the ability to declare relations of war and peace with external sovereigns. The treaties also acknowledged the property rights of Indian nations, first soliciting land cessions from them, and then reserving smaller portions of those lands for their exclusive use and occupancy. This treaty relationship became the cornerstone for Chief Justice John Marshall’s conception of Indian nations as “domestic dependent nations” in the famous trilogy of nineteenth century Supreme Court cases known as the “Marshall Trilogy.”8 In relationship to the Cherokee Nation’s petition to vindicate its federal treaty against violations by the state of Georgia, Marshall found that Indian tribes had the political status of “nations,” but were not “foreign” nations for purposes of Article III of the U.S. Constitution because they were within the territorial boundaries of the United States and because they had placed themselves under the “sole protection” of the United States by treaty.9 Marshall designated the Cherokees as a “domestic, dependent nation,” which is a category that came to describe all Indian nations who maintained a political relationship with the United States. However, Marshall subsequently found that the Indian nations were not incorporated into the federal union, and thus the states had no ability to govern the Indian nations or enter their lands, except with the consent of the federal government or the Indian nations themselves.10 Federal law, in fact, governed the intercourse of American states and their citizens with the Indian nations. Because Indian tribes and their members were not incorporated into the United States, they were not “subject to its jurisdiction” as Constitutional citizens. Rather, the relations of the United States and Indian nations reflected the discourse of international law and were regulated by treaty and by federal laws, such as the Trade and Intercourse Acts, which implemented the treaty provisions.11 In fact, the text of the Constitution, as originally drafted, entirely excluded Indians from being counted for purposes of apportionment and representation in Congress. Article I, sec. 2[3] states that “Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed . . .” The 1790 Naturalization Act permitted only “free white persons” to naturalize to citizenship, which required Congress in the latter part of the nineteenth century to selectively enact further laws permitting some Indians to
Sovereigns or Citizens? 121 naturalize to U.S. citizenship, such as Indian women who married white men or, in some cases, Indians who relinquished their lands and renounced their tribal relations.12 In fact, Justice Roger Taney acknowledged this structure in the Dred Scott case, when he distinguished those of the “Indian race” from African Americans, finding that Indians were “a free and independent people, associated together in nations or tribes, and governed by their own laws.”13 “These Indian governments,” Taney wrote, “were regarded and treated as foreign Governments, as much so as if an ocean had separated the red man from the white; and their freedom has constantly been acknowledged” through the treaties that “have been negotiated with them.” Furthermore, Taney wrote, individual Indians may, without doubt, like the subjects of any other foreign Government, be naturalized by the authority of Congress, and become citizens of a State, and of the United States; and if an individual should leave his nation or tribe and take up his abode among the white population, he would be entitled to all the rights and privileges which would belong to an emigrant from any other foreign people. The premise that Indians were “free” was not without controversy, as the legendary Ponca Chief Standing Bear discovered in 1879, when he brought a petition for habeas corpus to federal district court, challenging his detention by U.S. authorities in the Indian Territory, following his attempt to take a small band of Ponca Indians back to their ancestral territory in what is now the states of Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota.14 The District Court found that the Poncas had always been at peace with the United States and had signed two treaties with the United States reserving their rights to live on their ancestral lands in Nebraska. In 1868, the United States signed another treaty with the Sioux Nation, which dissolved the Ponca reservation, without the knowledge or consent of the Ponca people. In 1876, Congress enacted legislation authorizing removal of the Ponca people to the Indian Territory in what is now the state of Oklahoma. Although this removal was initially envisioned to be with the “consent” of the Poncas, by 1878 when the money was actually appropriated, the federal government removed the Poncas without their consent. Chief Standing Bear testified that 581 Ponca Indians were removed from their reservation to the Indian Territory, and he also testified that 158 Poncas died the first year and many more became ill and disabled. Chief Standing Bear said that he had no choice but to take his immediate band of twenty-five Indians, dissolve his ties with the other Poncas who chose to remain in the Indian Territory, and return to their ancestral lands. He testified that the political leaders of the Omaha Nation in what is now Nebraska agreed to let the band reside on their reservation. The U.S. military instead arrested Chief Standing Bear and all of the members of his band and held them in custody pending a forced return to the Indian Territory, thus inspiring Standing Bear to petition the Court for a writ of habeas corpus.
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The court in the Standing Bear case held that the remedy of habeas corpus is not limited to American citizens, but applies to all “persons” in federal custody. Using the dictionary definition of “person” which includes any “individual of the human race” and any “living soul,” whether “man, woman, or child,” the court found that this term included “Indians” as a part of “mankind” in addition to “the more favored white race.” The court also held that the United States had legally recognized the “God-Given right of expatriation as belonging to all people,” including Indians. This meant that Standing Bear was legally entitled to renounce his ties to the other Ponca Indians. However, the court also held that the federal government had the power to regulate entry onto the Omaha Reservation, and because the U.S. military had not given permission to the Poncas to reside on the Omaha reservation, they were to “be treated as any other person who is unlawfully on an Indian reservation and needs to be removed.” Moreover, because the Poncas were not at war with the United States, they could not be detained as prisoners of war by the U.S. military. The court ordered Standing Bear and the other Poncas in his band to be discharged from military custody, thus marking the end of the legal case. The factual case, however, continued to unfold. As non-citizens, these Poncas were not eligible to purchase or settle land, as were non-Indians under the Homestead Act. They were “stateless” persons, without any legal right to reside on any lands within “the United States,” including their aboriginal homelands. This story confounds many people, who wonder why the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, could not have been read to encompass Standing Bear and the other Poncas as “natural born citizens” entitled to equal rights and privileges, along with black and white citizens.15 The answer to that question resides in another Supreme Court case, Elk v. Wilkins.16 John Elk, the petitioner, is identified as an “Indian born under tribal authority who had severed his tribal relations and moved to Omaha Nebraska,” where he lived as a city resident. Elk sought to register as a voter in the city of Omaha’s elections for city council and the registrar, Charles Wilkins, refused to do so on the grounds that Elk was an Indian. Elk sued Wilkins in federal district court, seeking $6,000 in damages for the violation of his constitutional right to vote. The Supreme Court held that Elk could not invoke the 15th Amendment’s protection against racial discrimination in voting because that provision only protected “citizens” and Elk remained a non-citizen even after the adoption of the 14th Amendment. Elk argued that because he had completely severed his tribal relations and had surrendered himself to the jurisdiction of the United States, he was a citizen within the meaning of the 14th Amendment which provides that “[all] persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The Supreme Court disagreed with Elk’s position and found that the original text of the Constitution had excluded “Indians not taxed” from the population base for apportioning seats in the House of Representatives, and that this language was preserved in Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, which provides
Sovereigns or Citizens? 123 “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.” The Court found that the term “Indians not taxed” describes Indians living on tribal lands as “distinct political communities,” owing “immediate allegiance to their several tribes” and not constituting “part of the people of the United States.” Although Indians could naturalize to citizenship, this could be accomplished only with the consent of the federal government and not by the unilateral act of an individual Indian, like Elk, who chose to separate himself from his tribe. Thus, the Court held that Elk, “not being a citizen of the United States under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, has been deprived of no right secured by the 15th Amendment.”17 Compare the status of Native Hawaiian people, who at this time were citizens of the Kingdom of Hawaii, which was an internationally recognized nation that signed treaties of peace and commerce with many European and Asian countries, as well as the United States, and was not treated as an “Indian tribe” under U.S. diplomacy in the nineteenth century. In fact, the U.S. Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, expressly stated that the Doctrine of Discovery, which had been applied to American Indian nations in Johnson v. McIntosh to deny their full title to their lands, was not applicable to the Hawaiian Kingdom.18 In 1893, a group of American insurgents, backed by the U.S. Marines, coerced the involuntary “surrender” of Queen Lili’uokalani and imprisoned her in Iolani Palace in an overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. The insurgents self-organized as the “Republic of Hawaii” and formed a provisional government. The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom was illegal under U.S. law and arguably violated international law as well, because the U.S. was in a relationship of diplomacy with the Kingdom of Hawaii, a friendly nation. The subsequent annexation of the Republic of Hawaii into the United States was also a political aberration because it was accomplished by a Joint Resolution of Congress in 1898, rather than a bona fide annexation petition that could command the two-thirds vote necessary to effectuate treaty ratification by the Senate. The Native Hawaiian people were steadfastly in opposition to annexation, but the Joint Resolution ultimately resulted in the creation of the Territory of Hawaii and the admission of the Native Hawaiian people as “citizens of the United States and of the Territory of Hawaii.” Thus, Native Hawaiians were considered U.S. citizens as of 1898, unlike American Indians. Today, that unilateral action of the United States has worked against their claims for continuing status as a separate nation or “people.” In Rice v. Cayetano, the Supreme Court described the “multicultural citizenry” of the State of Hawaii and rejected the state’s attempt to restrict elections for trustees for the Office of Native Hawaiian Affairs to Native Hawaiians as a “preference” based on “ancestry” in violation of the 15th Amendment.19 As Professor Carole Goldberg notes, the Supreme Court’s holding in Rice v. Cayetano aligns with the “concerns underlying opposition to affirmative action,” namely that the Constitution protects individual, rather than group,
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rights, and that group rights are divisive and undermine a unitary civil society.20 The Supreme Court’s language confirms that view: When the culture and way of life of a people are all but engulfed by a history beyond their control, their sense of loss may extend down through generations; and their dismay may be shared by many members of the larger community. As the State of Hawaii attempts to address these realities, it must, as always seek the political consensus that begins with a sense of shared purpose. One of the necessary beginning points is this principle: The Constitution of the United States, too, has become the heritage of all citizens of Hawaii.21 In this respect, American Indians are unique. They operated as foreign nations initially, but were incorporated into the United States as “pre-Constitutional” and “extra-Constitutional” entities. Their very identity as non-citizens of the United States preserved their continuing political status as separate nations.
Frame II: Indians as “Wards” of the U.S. Government What were the rights of American Indians as non-citizens of the United States when they operated as separate political communities? Chief Justice John Marshall’s conception of Indian nations as “domestic dependent nations” confirmed the sovereign identity of the tribal governments, including their ability to govern themselves autonomously through their own laws and institutions. The Court’s later opinions in Ex Parte Crow Dog and Talton v. Mayes22 acknowledged that the Indian nations were not bound by the Constitution or by general federal laws, except to the extent that Congress imposed such restrictions. The tribal governments were “pre-Constitutional,” because their political identity preceded that of the United States, and they were also “extra-Constitutional” because they were not parties to the Constitution and therefore, existed outside the Constitutional structure that governed the allocation of power between the federal government and the states.23 A competing line of cases emerged in the nineteenth century that challenged the notion of tribal political autonomy. In cases such as United States v. Kagama and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, the Court took the position that Indian tribes were uncivilized “wards” in need of the paternalistic oversight of the federal government. The Supreme Court in Kagama upheld the constitutionality of the federal Major Crimes Act, which, for the first time, subjected intraIndian offenses to federal jurisdiction, not because this was justified by any of Congress’s enumerated powers, but because the federal government had a “duty” to protect the Indian tribes, who were described as “a race once powerful, now weak and diminished in numbers.”24 This decision paved the way for a virtually unlimited notion of federal plenary power to govern Indians. In fact, that notion of plenary power exists in only two places in federal Constitutional law: Congress’s power to regulate Indian affairs and Congress’s power
Sovereigns or Citizens? 125 to regulate immigration, on the theory that both involve “political questions” that are beyond the authority of the federal courts.25 The political question doctrine was specifically addressed in a subsequent case. In Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, the Kiowa, Comanche and Apache (KCA) tribes in Oklahoma tried to resist the allotment of their Treaty-guaranteed reservation and subsequent opening of tribal lands to non-Indian settlement on the grounds that the Treaty of Medicine Lodge required a three-fourths vote of all adult males in the affected tribes before further land cessions could take place.26 The Supreme Court deemed treaty abrogation to be a unilateral power of Congress, and found that “the status of the contracting Indians and the relation of dependency they bore and continue to bear towards the government of the United States” meant that Congress’s unilateral decision to allot the reservation was essentially a political question beyond the capacity of the federal courts to adjudicate. The Tribes’ only recourse was to petition the very Congress that had passed the law dispossessing them of their land and transferring the title to eager land speculators. Needless to say, the KCA tribes lost most of the lands that had been guaranteed to them by the Treaty of Medicine Lodge. As “wards” of the U.S. government, members of Indian tribes were deprived of many civil rights which other Americans take for granted, including rights to decide how to raise their children and how to exercise their religious freedom.27 Native peoples’ rights to their ancestral lands were dependent upon the willingness of the federal government to honor its promises, because the concept of “aboriginal title” or the “right of occupancy” is not given the same status as a fee simple absolute under American property law.28 As the Standing Bear case indicates, there was little recourse for tribes who protested the actions of the federal government to take their treaty-guaranteed lands and substitute others, often in distant locations. The federal government’s nineteenth century land policies, including the removal policy and the allotment policy, resulted in a massive displacement and dispossession of Native peoples from their traditional lands. The federal government’s nineteenth century “civilization” policies caused further trauma to Native peoples, who were struggling to maintain both their lands and traditional economies against the influx of white settlers. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which is the federal agency that regulates Indian affairs, started off in the Department of War and then was moved to the Department of Interior when that department was created in the mid-nineteenth century. The BIA instituted the boarding school policy, which forcibly removed Indian children from their families and sent them to distant boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their language or practice their customs, and where parents were precluded from even visiting their children for extensive periods of time. Many Indian children died in these military-style boarding schools, such as Carlisle Institute. Although some were returned to their families at death, others were buried on site, often in unmarked graves. Today, many scholars in the United States and Canada have questioned the operation of government-sponsored boarding schools for Indigenous youth, citing
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suspicious circumstances surrounding the deaths at those institutions as well as instances of physical abuse perpetrated by some boarding school staff. This history has never been formally acknowledged or redressed in the United States. The United States government’s civilization policy also entailed assigning Christian missionaries to act as “federal agents” in charge of the reservations, as well as the enactment of the Code of Indian Offenses in the nineteenth century, which criminally banned many cultural practices, including traditional plural marriages and religious ceremonies, such as the Sun Dance. These laws were not understood to violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause because the federal government was engaged in a “civilization mission” which involved assigning reservations to many different Christian denominations, and because policymakers believed that a “Christian” set of values would “improve” Indians as human beings. In the words of Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Institute, the prototype for the military-style Indian boarding school: “[A]ll the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”29 The Bureau of Indian Affairs established Courts of Indian Offenses on the reservation to adjudicate cases involving violations of the “Code of Indian Offenses.” Although individual Indians were detained in jails and punished for violating the Code, they were not entitled to basic due process rights. In United States v. Clapox, a federal district court held that such protections were not required in these courts because the “courts of Indian offenses are not constitutional courts provided for in section I, art. 3 of the Constitution, but rather were mere educational and disciplinary instrumentalities, by which the government of the United States is endeavoring to improve and elevate the condition of these dependent tribes to whom it sustains the relation of guardian.”30 The court further found that “the reservation itself is in the nature of a school, and the Indians are gathered there, under the charge of an agent for purposes of acquiring the habits, ideas, and aspirations which distinguish the civilized from the uncivilized man.” The status of a dependent “ward” meant that any and all rights for Native people were dependent upon the willingness of the United States to vindicate these rights. As non-citizens, Native peoples were not directly represented in the U.S. Congress that controlled all of their affairs through the fiction of “plenary power” that emerged from the constitutional language that Congress has the authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations, among the several states and with the Indian tribes.31 Nor did Native people sit as judges on the federal courts that dictated their rights in the formative years of federal Indian law. Although some Indians served in the executive branch of government, such as Ely S. Parker, a Seneca Indian who served as an officer in the U.S. military and then was assigned to a post as a Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Indian Affairs reflected the policies of the United States and not the aspirations of Native peoples. During World War I, many American Indian men served in the U.S. military, but returned home as non-citizens with few rights to the civil liberties enjoyed
Sovereigns or Citizens? 127 by all other Americans. This led to the passage of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, which represents the third Frame of citizenship.
Frame III: Indians as “Citizens of the United States and the States Where They Reside” In the late nineteenth century, Congress used the allotment policy, represented by the Dawes Allotment Act and the Burke Act, as a tool of civilization, offering individual tribal members a share of tribal lands, for their own individual use and management, and opening the “surplus” lands for settlement by nonIndians. The allotment statutes generally conferred U.S. citizenship on Indians who agreed to the division of tribal lands, or who chose to leave the reservation and cut their ties to the tribe altogether.32 However, the result of this selective conferral of citizenship was that some Indians were U.S. citizens and many more were not. As a means to equalize this system and validate the rights of the Indian men who had served honorably in the U.S. military, Congress enacted the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which unconditionally conferred U.S. citizenship on all Indians born within the United States.33 The effect of this statute was to naturalize all Indians who were previously non-citizens and also guarantee that all Indians subsequently born in the United States would be treated as “natural born citizens.” Thus, Indians are citizens by federal statute and not by Constitutional right, although the effect may seem to be identical because the protections of the 14th and 15th Amendments were finally applicable to Indian people. The 1924 Act also expressly stated that Indian treaty rights and the rights enjoyed by tribal members under federal law were not impaired in any way by the grant of citizenship. Thus, tribal members became dual citizens, both of their Indian nation under the protection of U.S. law (the trust status) and of the United States, and presumably of the state where they resided. This peculiar structure raised two fundamental problems for the norm of equal citizenship: First, the concept of the “ward” had to be harmonized with the concept of “citizenship.” Under all other doctrines, the conferral of citizenship is by consent. The person naturalized consents to citizenship in the United States, and the United States consents to admit the individual to citizenship. In the case of American Indians, many individuals received citizenship without their consent. For example, Professor Robert Porter describes how this bill was vehemently opposed by members of the Iroquois Confederacy, such as the Seneca Nation, which did not seek to incorporate into the United States, but rather sought to maintain its international and separate identity as a sovereign nation residing on lands that are now part of the United States and Canada.34 In Professor Porter’s view, the Seneca Nation existed long before the U.S. or Canada, and the 1924 Act is not only of dubious constitutionality, but also impaired the sovereignty of the Seneca Nation and other Indigenous nations. The second problem was that, while Indians were considered citizens of the state where they reside after passage of the 1924 Act, reservation lands are
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technically not part of the state.35 In fact, under the Worcester decision, the state may not extend its laws into Indian Country even to regulate non-Indians. That is the sole and exclusive province of federal law and of the tribal governments themselves. The state may not tax Indians living in Indian Country and it may not regulate the activities of tribal governments on their own lands. So, it was unclear whether Indians on the reservation actually “reside” within the state. Did the states have to recognize their “equal citizenship” and entitlement to the benefits of state citizenship although they could not tax or regulate tribal members living on the reservation? Many states took the position that the 1924 Act could not and did not expressly grant state citizenship. The federal government may have had the right to grant American Indians U.S. citizenship, but the states argued that they did not have to admit Indians living on the reservation to state citizenship. In 1936, the attorney general of Colorado issued an opinion that Indians had no right to vote in state elections because they were not citizens of the state.36 The 1947 report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights noted that American Indians were denied the right to vote in a number of states, including the Southwest, although many Indian men had served in World War II. Essentially, the grant of U.S. citizenship opened a Pandora’s box that is still unsettled. What is clear is that Native Americans hold a “differentiated citizenship” that is not necessarily “equal” to the citizenship of other state citizens, but rather is comprised of rights that derive both from U.S. citizenship and from the political relationship of Indian nations with the United States. I will look at two areas by way of illustration: (1) voting rights and (2) the benefits of state citizenship in the area of education. A. Voting Rights The Voting Rights Act of 1965 legislatively implements the 15th Amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote shall not be abridged or denied on account of race or color. It prohibits discriminatory conduct, and also provides federal oversight to ensure that state laws cannot deny or dilute the vote of minority communities.37 The VRA requires the Attorney General to approve changes in voting arrangements when a jurisdiction has demonstrated problematic practices in the past.38 The VRA was amended in 1975 to protect members of language minorities as well, including Native Americans. The enforceability of the VRA’s antidiscrimination provisions has been compromised by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which held the statutory formula for determining whether a state is subject to preclearance unconstitutional, although that requirement is still effective as a matter of law.39 There has been a long history of discrimination against all minorities in many states, and this was true in Arizona and New Mexico, which both achieved statehood in 1912, long after most of the Indian reservations were confirmed under federal law. The states used different rationales and mechanisms to deny Indians the right to vote. Some were “neutral,” like the literacy test, and were
Sovereigns or Citizens? 129 applied to all voters, but disproportionately disenfranchised minority voters. Some were premised on the “different” status of Indian people. In New Mexico, for example, the state focused on the “Indians not taxed language” to hold that because Indians living on the reservation did not pay local or state property taxes, they were not eligible to vote. In a 1948 case, Trujillo v. Garley, the federal courts finally overturned this state doctrine as unconstitutional under the 14th and 15th Amendments. In Arizona, the state courts focused on the status of Indians as “wards,” finding that because Indians were under a legal “guardianship” they lacked the competence to vote as a matter of state Constitutional law.40 The Arizona Attorney General subsequently issued an opinion finding that Indians living off the reservation also lacked the “competence” to vote, given their status as wards. This disqualified all of the American Indian war veterans from voting. The Arizona Supreme Court ultimately overturned this doctrine, based on state Constitutional law, in the 1948 case of Harrison v. Laveen.41 These cases effectively refuted the notion that the “ward” status of Indians was a disqualification to state citizenship. However, they did not protect Indian people from discriminatory practices designed to exclude all minorities from voting. The VRA was intended to invalidate the practices that states developed after the passage of the 15th Amendment to keep African Americans, Latinos and Indians off the rolls of qualified voters. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (42 U.S.C. 1973) responded to these state practices in two ways. First, the statute prohibits states or their political subdivisions from imposing any “voting qualification,” practice or procedure that would deny or abridge the right of a citizen to vote on account of the citizen’s race or color. Second, the statute prohibits the states from adopting structures that would dilute a minority or racial group’s voting strength. The latter issue, which involves the constitutionality of state redistricting plans, is complicated to prove. Dilution occurs when a politically cohesive minority group is dispersed into several different districts where they have no power to outvote the prevailing group. It also occurs when districts are drawn to concentrate the minority group in one district, where they have no effective way to counter the vote in numerous other districts. A 1986 case establishes a test to see whether dilution has occurred, but it is quite fact specific.42 The provision regarding discriminatory screening devices emerged through a 1975 VRA amendment that permanently banned the use of literacy tests and similar devices used to exclude minority voters. In the original 1965 Act, Congress suspended literacy tests for five years in jurisdictions with depressed levels of political participation by minority voters, allowing jurisdictions to “bail out” from the Act’s coverage only if they could show that for the preceding five years, their test had been administered without discriminatory purpose or effect. Arizona sought to bail out from the Act, and although a group of Navajo voters tried to intervene to show the state’s discriminatory conduct, a threejudge panel entered an order permitting the counties to bail out.43 The court
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described Arizona’s use of the literacy test as “bona fide,” and found that the Arizona test had been adopted when Indians were non-citizens, demonstrating the state’s permissible purpose. The court acknowledged that there was documented evidence of inadequate facilities for voting and registering on the reservation, but found that the state was trying to remedy those problems. The vice-chairman of the Navajo Nation in fact sought to use the 1965 Act to persuade the federal government to send a registrar to the Navajo Nation, which was unsuccessful.44 In 1970, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to extend the suspension of literacy tests for another five years and impose the ban nationwide. Arizona refused to abandon its test, leading the United States to sue Arizona, as well as certain other states.45 Ultimately Congress acted in 1975 to permanently ban the use of literacy tests and similar devices. The redistricting and voter dilution issues continue to emerge, given the requirement of the VRA that every ten years, the census is used to determine whether there is a need to draw new lines for congressional districts. This recently occurred in all states in the Southwest, including Arizona. Pursuant to this process, leaders from several Arizona tribal governments testified in front of the Independent Redistricting Commission.46 Leonard Gorman, speaking for the Navajo Nation, stated that the Commission is required to create a new Congressional district that represents the population. The Navajo and Hopi Tribes united in their proposal to create a majority Native American district in Arizona. Hopi Chairman Leroy Shingoitewa stated that “We have been here a long time and we want you to understand we are citizens of the state of Arizona.” Both tribes believe that a unified voice would be more effective when dealing with the federal government. Because of Arizona’s history of discrimination against Latinos, the final map must be submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice for approval. B. Access to Public Education Voting rights are pivotal to the exercise of civil rights. Education provides the foundation for understanding the tenets of American Democracy and the role of the citizen. The states have historically taken the responsibility for public education. The federal government, however, had the earliest responsibility for Indian education. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the United States promised to provide a suitable education for American Indian peoples.47 This guarantee was implemented through various Indian treaties, as well as statutory and regulatory provisions. Over 110 treaties provided that the federal government would provide an education to members of the signatory tribes, generally by provisions that required the building of schools on the reservation and provision of teachers. Until the 1870s, the United States contracted its responsibilities out to Christian missionaries. In the late nineteenth century, federal policy shifted to favor off-reservation boarding schools, which facilitated the civilization mission. This practice
Sovereigns or Citizens? 131 continued until the 1930s, when the famous Meriam Report documented the harms to Indian children and their families caused by this practice. The New Deal reformers believed that the better alternative would be to promote the integration of Indian children into public school systems. This became the BIA’s educational policy from the 1930s to the 1970s. The Johnson-O’Malley Act of 1934 authorized the Secretary of the Interior to contract with “any state, university, college or with any appropriate state or private corporation, agency, or institution for the education of Indians in such state or territory.” While the states were eager to accept JOM funding for the Indian students, they were in most cases unwilling to make appropriate accommodations to enable Indian students to succeed. So, while thousands of Indian children entered the public school system, they were not able to access the benefits of “equal educational opportunity.” Federal policymakers ultimately concluded that the JOM program had not resulted in the intended educational benefit to Indian children. In the 1970s, the federal government developed a new policy envisioning American Indian education as a shared responsibility of federal, state, and tribal governments. This policy has also been difficult to implement for many reasons. Given that the majority of Indian children are in public schools, it would seem necessary to have tribal input into the requirements for curriculum, language, and teaching instruction. This has not occurred in many cases, although there are federal funds allocated for Native students within the state educational systems. There is very little Native American representation within most state educational systems. States like Arizona that tend to promote English Only and restrict use of bilingual programs have clashed with tribes like the Navajo Nation that are committed to promoting the teaching of Navajo language at all levels of education. State school funding formulas that rely on property taxes impose tremendous inequalities in areas where there is not a property tax base, such as reservation communities. In fact, access to “equal” educational opportunity continues to be quite problematic for many American Indians. In addition, Native people in many border towns, such as Gallup, Farmington and Flagstaff, continue to assert that there is active racism toward Native students and Native instructors,48 which raises the fourth “frame” of Indian citizenship.
Frame IV: Indians as Racial Minorities The United States Civil Rights Commission and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice have documented pervasive inequities that affect American Indians as a population.49 Most minority groups also suffer from disparities, but American Indians generally suffer the greatest social and economic disparities when measured against other racial groups. Because of this, there is a tendency to view American Indians as disadvantaged racial minorities, and racism in border towns confirms the vulnerability of American Indians and Alaska Natives and their marginalized status.
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In 1846, the Supreme Court indicated that the term “Indian” constitutes a racial classification when it decided the case of United States v. Rogers, which dealt with the murder of a non-Indian member of the Cherokee Nation by another non-Indian member of the Cherokee Nation.50 Under the logic of Ex Parte Crow Dog and the Cherokee Nation’s treaty, the Cherokee Nation would have had exclusive jurisdiction over a crime committed by one tribal member against another. In this case, the non-Indian men had been naturalized to Cherokee citizenship by their respective marriages to Cherokee women and the Tribe’s consent to their membership. However, the Court held that the status of being “Indian” was defined by race and not by nationality. The Cherokee Nation was not the type of government that could naturalize citizens of any race, the Court held, and thus, the defendant was not an “Indian” for purposes of the statute that exempted crimes between Indians from federal jurisdiction. State laws banning miscegenation between whites and members of other races also operated to preclude white/Indian marriages, and in some of the Southern states, Indians were subject to the same restrictions on property ownership and contractual rights that applied to black slaves. Discrimination was the norm in U.S. society until the modern Civil Rights Era. By the 1960s and 1970s, the federal civil rights statutes were enacted banning discrimination in federal and state employment. A group of non-Indian employees within the Bureau of Indian Affairs challenged a regulation that accorded an Indian preference to promotions within the BIA, extending the Indian Reorganization Act’s statutory provision giving Indian preference in employment within the Bureau. In the 1974 case of Morton v. Mancari, the Supreme Court held that the statutory preference had not been explicitly repealed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, and further held that the preference was not a “racial classification” for Constitutional purposes, which would have required the Court to apply strict scrutiny.51 The preference was instead a “political” classification based on the trust relationship between federally recognized tribes and the federal government and served by the BIA, which required the employment of the tribal members who would effectively discharge that role. The Court upheld the preference using a rational basis standard, and the ruling indicated that all federal laws governing federally recognized tribes would be entitled to similar deference. For this reason, the prevailing principle under U.S. law is that American Indian and Alaska Native nations are not racial groups, but are political groups. Individual Native Americans often face discrimination in housing, employment, and voting rights, so, as a population, they are still a protected group for purposes of U.S. civil rights law. In this sense, American Indians and Alaska Natives are both “racial minorities” for purposes of U.S. civil rights law and “sovereign governments” for purposes of U.S. federal Indian law. This dual status often causes conflicts when courts must decide whether individual Indians should be treated as equal citizens for purposes of antidiscrimination law, or as differential citizens, given their tribal status. Are tribal preferences another form of racial preference?
Sovereigns or Citizens? 133 As Professor Carole Goldberg notes, preferences for American Indians predate American affirmative action policies for racial minorities, and yet they are increasingly the target of protests that use the rhetoric of “equal rights” to attack tribal treaty rights and other unique rights, such as the right to conduct gaming on the reservation.52 Proponents of the “equality” approach argue that any government preference extended to a specific group constitutes a “racial” preference that must be justified under strict scrutiny. The standard response is that federally-recognized tribes are an “exception” to the rule because they are “political” and not “racial” groups. However, to the extent that the trust responsibility is restricted to federally-recognized Indian tribes and their enrolled members, this may entail the view that Congress is prohibited from extending legal protections more broadly to protect Indigenous rights. Professor Eugene Volokh writes, for example: “[c]lassifications based only on being an Indian . . . are racial; discrimination against or preference for nontribal Indians—or even for Indians if the justification is their race and not their tribal status—would thus violate [antiaffirmative action and nondiscrimination laws].”53 Significantly, many Indian tribes in California lack federal recognition due to historical circumstances beyond their control. Although federal officials negotiated treaties with many California tribes during the nineteenth century, they were never ratified due to the genocidal gold rush years and political pressures to open California lands for settlement. Although the state and federal governments in some cases have extended healthcare or educational benefits to Indians from these tribes, such actions would be foreclosed by narrowly limiting rights to those tribes which are federally recognized. Another issue is what constitutes “tribal” versus “nontribal” Indians. The litigation filed by the Goldwater Institute challenges the authority of Congress to regulate the rights of American Indian children who reside off the reservation and do not have significant tribal contacts. The lawsuit contends that the ICWA is unconstitutional as applied to such children because it denies them “equal protection in foster care placements and adoptions,” under the race-neutral standards applicable to all other children, and promotes tribal supremacy rather than the children’s best interest.54 The U.S. Constitutional structure accommodates the rights of American Indians and Alaska Natives in part because of the explicit mention of Indian tribes in the Commerce Clause. Native Hawaiians have not been formally acknowledged as a political entity by the United States, although there are many federal laws that extend to them. They are clearly Indigenous peoples and they also had a preexisting sovereign identity as an independent nation. However, without formal recognition by the United States, they are vulnerable to claims that any “special treatment” by the state is based on their racial status. This became an issue in Rice v. Cayetano, where the Office of Hawaiian Affairs promoted a special election for the trustees that would administer the one-fifth ceded lands trust that Congress had reserved for the use and benefit of Native Hawaiians.55 Only Native Hawaiians could vote in the election, and the state used the rationale of Morton v. Mancari as a justification. The Supreme Court held that the
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classification, which depended upon descendancy from the Indigenous peoples of Hawaii as of the date of contact was a classification based on “ancestry,” which operated as a proxy for race, and not a political classification. The Court found that this violated the 15th Amendment because the OHA election was a state election and not a “tribal” election. The Kingdom of Hawaii was a political sovereign that naturalized non-Natives to citizenship. However, after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, all of these individuals became “U.S. citizens.” The Court construed Hawaiian sovereignty claims as related only to those who are alleging “Indigenous status” on the basis “race or ancestry” and finds that these individuals now comprise a “multiracial group” sharing only a core political identity as “U.S. citizens.” In an interesting twist on the notion of multicultural citizenship, the Cherokee Nation recently became the target of attention in the wake of its decision to disenroll the descendants of the “Cherokee Freedmen” from tribal membership. The Cherokee Nation allowed its members to own African American slaves prior to the Civil War and sided with the Southern states during that war.56 After the Civil War, the Cherokee Nation signed a treaty with the United States requiring the tribe to accept the slaves as members of their society. The 1866 treaty specifically provided that the Freedmen and their descendants “shall have all the rights of native Cherokees.” Consistent with U.S. social norms, however, the racial divide persisted. When the Dawes Allotment Act was passed, the Cherokee Freedmen were listed separately from “blood” Cherokees on the membership rolls. In 2007, the Cherokee Nation amended its Constitution to limit tribal membership to blood Cherokees. In 2009, the Cherokee Nation sued the U.S. Department of Interior, seeking to remove freedman descendants from its roster of citizens.57 The Department of Interior responded with a counterclaim, seeking a declaratory judgment that relief was barred by the 1866 treaty and asking the federal court to deny the Cherokee Nation’s petition. In related tribal court actions, the Cherokee Nation’s courts reached opposite conclusions. The Cherokee Nation District Court ruled that the constitutional amendment was invalid because it operated in violation of the treaty of 1866. The Cherokee Nation Supreme Court reversed and vacated this holding on the grounds that the tribe has the sovereign power to define its membership (or redefine it), and that the Tribe enjoys immunity from any action protesting such a change in policy. The Cherokee Freedmen have filed their claims in federal court, claiming that the Cherokee Nation’s actions violate federal law, and after a series of procedural rulings, the consolidated cases are currently docketed in the District of Columbia District Court.58 Following these developments, the Black Caucus of Congress called for Congress to terminate the Cherokee Nation’s trust status if the tribal government’s allegedly “racist” policy was upheld. Some Congressmen expressed concern that the United States could be held to be in violation of the United Nations Convention for Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) if it tolerated an act of “racism” by the Cherokee Nation.59 The question of citizenship
Sovereigns or Citizens? 135 is complicated by the fact that the case is the product of historical and modern reactions to “racial” discrimination. Can the Cherokee Nation limit their membership to “blood” Cherokees, in accordance with the federal blood quantum policies that have influenced tribal enrollment policies, or is this case a departure from that norm, requiring analysis of “racial discrimination” by the Cherokee Nation? In effect, who are the Cherokee as a “people” and what norms are used to determine their rights as “citizens”?
Frame V: Indians as “Peoples” The Cherokee Freedman case raises the paradox of Indigenous selfdetermination: Indigenous peoples hold equal rights within a participatory democracy because they are now U.S. citizens, and they hold the right of self-determination because they have always existed as separate peoples. The Black Caucus in Congress is holding the Cherokee Nation to the norm of racial equality under U.S. Constitutional law and threatening to terminate the Cherokee Nation’s political status as a “federally recognized Indian tribe” if it refuses to honor the “right” of the Freedmen descendants to tribal membership. The “rights” of the Freedmen of course, initially derived from a federal treaty, initiated in the wake of the American Civil War, to force a new Constitutional norm of “inclusion” upon an entity, the Cherokee Nation, which was not even a member of the Constitutional structure of the United States (necessitating a “treaty” as a political mode of consent between nations). However, over time, the Freedmen claim that they intermarried with tribal members and were integrated into the social fabric of the community in a way that now makes their disenrollment unjust. Today, the Cherokee Nation claims that the right of self-determination includes the right to determine its own membership, and the federal cases on tribal “sovereignty” are in accord.60 Under contemporary human rights law, is the norm of nondiscrimination in tension with the norm of self-determination? If so, how should these principles be reconciled? Bethany Berger maintains that throughout history, efforts to grant U.S. citizenship to American Indians were “repeatedly linked to efforts to deny them self-determination.”61 In apparent agreement with Robert Porter, Berger asserts that “State citizenship was the triumph of assimilation and the opposite of indigeneity.”62 According to Berger, “this anomaly derives from a deeper legal and conceptual failing, one that takes individual citizen and national state as fundamental legal categories and fails to recognize nonstate self-governance rights.”63 In the contemporary era, the category of “Indigenous rights” straddles a difficult line between the rights of ethnic minorities to exist as separate cultural groups within a nation-state and the political right of governments that were unjustly subordinated under colonial rule to achieve “self-determination.” There is a clear tension between the politics of “multiculturalism” and the politics of “self-determination,” as indicated by the Supreme Court’s analysis in Rice v. Cayetano.
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Importantly, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples expressly maintains a commitment to the norms of self-determination and equal citizenship (nondiscrimination), and refers to both individual and collective rights. For example, Articles 1 and 2 incorporate by reference the central human rights identified under international law and make these equally applicable to Indigenous peoples. These provisions require an ethic of non-discrimination and the inclusion of Indigenous peoples as “equal citizens.” In comparison, Articles 3 and 4 expressly include Indigenous peoples within the category of “peoples” entitled to exercise self-determination. These articles require states to recognize the separate political status of Indigenous peoples and their right to self-determination. The central requirement for the nation-state is to recognize the unique nature of Indigenous peoples in relationship to their traditional territories, including the cultural, environmental, and political dimensions of these relationships over time. The Declaration acknowledges that many Indigenous peoples have been divided by international borders, but still ought to have the right to access their sacred sites and maintain their relationships with their members across the border, as well as other Indigenous peoples.64 Similarly, Indigenous peoples’ treaties and constitutive agreements should be honored by the nation-states that now govern their territories.65 The Declaration also references the “spiritual rights” of Indigenous peoples, including their right to “maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard.”66 How will recognition of “spiritual rights,” transborder rights, historic treaty rights, and territorial rights impact the construction of Indigenous “citizenship” into the future? This is a provocative question and it deserves attention. The construction of Indigenous citizenship within the Borderlands of the American Southwest is particularly important, given that the border between the United States and Mexico cuts across the traditional territories of several Indigenous peoples, including the Apache, Yaqui, and Tohono O’odham, and yet, the current political talk is concerned with constructing a wall along the border and increasing the military regulation of these lands. Many Indigenous epistemologies hold that the people belong to the land, rather than the inverse premise that the land belongs to people.67 Under this view, many of the people deemed to be “illegal immigrants” are in fact Indigenous peoples who are blamed for being on the “wrong side” of an international border. In North America, the traditional lands of Indigenous nations are today described as “belonging” to the United States, Canada and Mexico, even though none of those nation-states even existed when the Creator placed Indigenous peoples on these lands. Moreover, the lands in the Western states had absolutely no affiliation to the United States when it claimed “independence” from Great Britain in 1776. The U.S.–Mexico border is a relatively recent creation, and the Tohono O’odham reservation actually straddles the border of
Sovereigns or Citizens? 137 Arizona and Mexico. It is far from clear that the United States can construct a “fence” separating the Tohono O’odham families that have been on these lands since time immemorial, particularly because Congress has authorized the Tohono O’odham Nation to provide some services to its members on the reservation, regardless of whether they are U.S. citizens or Mexican citizens.68 The principle of self-determination implies that the status of Indigenous peoples is inherent and not created by the modern nation-state. The rights of federally-recognized tribes under U.S. law are constructed by the United States, which determines what tribes should receive “federal recognition” and what that status means under domestic law. The human rights of Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, are both political and cultural. We must acknowledge the inherent cultural sovereignty of all Indigenous peoples, including their right to exist as separate peoples within the nation-states that encompass them. This should not detract from the political rights that have been negotiated and validated for particular groups, such as federally-recognized tribal governments. In fact, what is required is a more nuanced account of the fundamental human rights of the Indigenous peoples that belong to the lands that are now under the political control of nation-states. In my view, the ethic of Indigenous self-determination evokes a movement toward “multinationalism,” which Professor Duane Champagne describes as “the construction of a new consensual political order in which indigenous peoples are included as sovereign governments and treated with equal respect.”69 The United States, like all modern nation-states, has a duty to respect and protect the human rights of the Indigenous peoples within and across its national borders.
Notes 1. G.A. Res. 6/295, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, September 13, 2007. 2. Rebecca Tsosie, “The Challenge of Differentiated Citizenship: Can State Constitutions Protect Tribal Rights?” 64 Montana Law Review 199 (2003). 3. Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Pub. L. No. 68–175, 43 Stat. 253 (1924). 4. This chapter was originally published as part of a longer article on Indigenous citizenship in the Borderlands and it is republished with the permission of the UCLA Law Review. See Rebecca Tsosie, “The Politics of Inclusion: Indigenous Peoples and U.S. Citizenship,” 63 UCLA Law Review 1692, 1705–1734 (2016). 5. Robert Porter, “The Demise of the Ongwehoweh and the Rise of the Native Americans: Redressing the Genocidal Act of Forcing American Citizenship Upon Indigenous Peoples,” 15 Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal 107, 128 (1999). 6. SB 1520, 26th Leg. (Haw. 2011). 7. The general historical framework that I describe here is summarized in Wallace Coffey and Rebecca Tsosie, “Rethinking the Tribal Sovereignty Doctrine: Cultural Sovereignty and the Collective Future of Indian Nations,” 12(2) Stanford Law & Policy Review 191, 192–194 (2001). 8. See Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1 (1831); Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832); Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823). 9. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. 10. Worcester v. Georgia.
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11. See Porter, supra at 111. 12. See Bethany R. Berger, “The Anomaly of Citizenship for Indigenous Rights,” in Human Rights in the United States: Beyond Exceptionalism, edited by Shareen Hertel and Kathryn Libal: Cambridge University Press 2011, 217–233. 13. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 403 (1857). 14. United States ex rel. Standing Bear v. Crook, 25 F. Cas. 695 (C.C.D. Neb. 1879); see Walter Echo-Hawk’s account of this case in his book, In the Courts of the Conqueror: The Ten Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided. Fulcrum Publishing, 2010,116–17. 15. According to Bethany Berger, some members of Congress opposed the 14th Amendment precisely because they believed it would confer citizenship on the Indians and they advocated for language specifically excluding tribal Indians from the citizenship clause. See Bethany R. Berger, The Anomaly of Citizenship for Indigenous Rights, supra note 12 at 221. 16. Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884). 17. Ibid., 109. 18. Robert N. Clinton, Carole E. Goldberg and Rebecca Tsosie, American Indian Law: Native Nations and the Federal System, 5th edition. Lexis Nexis, 2007. 19. Rice v. Cayetano, 528 U.S. 495 (2000). 20. Carole Goldberg, “American Indians and Preferential Treatment,” 49 UCLA Law Review 943, 952 (2002). 21. Rice v. Cayetano, 528 U.S. at 522. 22. Ex Parte Crow Dog, 109 U.S. 556 (1883); Talton v. Mayes, 163 US 376 (1896). 23. See generally Wallace Coffey and Rebecca Tsosie, Rethinking the Tribal Sovereignty Doctrine. 24. United States v. Kagama, 118 U.S. 375 (1886). 25. Sarah H. Cleveland, “Powers Inherent in Sovereignty: Indians, Aliens, Territories, and the Nineteenth Century Originals of Plenary Power over Foreign Affairs,” 81 Texas Law Review 1, 33 (2002). 26. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553 (1903). 27. See generally Rebecca Tsosie, “Reclaiming Native Stories: An Essay on Cultural Appropriation and Cultural Rights,” 34 Arizona State Law Journal 299 (2002). 28. See Tee Hit Ton Indians v. United States, 348 U.S. 272 (1955) (holding the Fifth Amendment takings clause does not apply to governmental appropriation of tribal aboriginal title because “Indian occupation of land without government recognition of ownership creates no rights against taking or extinction by the United States protected by the Fifth Amendment or any other principle of law”). 29. Bethany Berger, “Red: Racism and the American Indian,” 56 UCLA Law Review 591, 629 and n. 230 (2009). 30. United States v. Clapox, 35 F. 575 (D.C. Or. 1888). 31. U.S. Constitution. Art. 1, Sec. 8. 32. Pamela S. Karlan, “Lightning in the Hand: Indians and Voting Rights,” 120 Yale Law Journal 1420, 1427 (2011). 33. Pub. L. No. 68–175, ch. 233, 43 Stat. 253 (codified as amended at 8 U.S.C. 1401[b]). 34. Porter, Robert B. “Strengthening Sovereignty Through Peacemaking—The Seneca Nation’s Experience.” Daybreak, vol. 1, no. 5 (1995): 14-16. 35. Carole Goldberg, “Not so Simple: Voting Rights for American Indians in State Elections,” 7 Election Law Journal 355 (2008). 36. Byron G. Rogers, Biennial Report of the Attorney General of the State of Colorado, 1935–36; see also Susan M. Olson, Daniel McCool and Jennifer L. Robinson, Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote 9 (2007).
Sovereigns or Citizens? 139 37. Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. No. 89–110, sec. 3, 79 Stat. 437, 438 (current version at 52 U.S.C. 10301 (2012). 38. Ibid., sec. 5. 39. Shelby County v. Holder, 133 S.Ct. 2612 (2013) (holding coverage formula of section 4[b] unconstitutional because it was outdated and constituted an impermissible burden upon states’ rights). 40. Porter v. Hall, 271 P. 411, 419 (Ariz. 1928). 41. 196 P. 2d 456 (Ariz. 1948). 42. Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30, 46 (1986). 43. Apache County v. United States, 256 F. Supp. 903, 913 (D.D.C. 1966). 44. Karlan, Lightning in the Hand at 1428 n. 35. 45. See Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112, 117 n.1 (1970). 46. Laurel Morales, Navajo and Hopi Tribes Reconcile to Send a Voice to Washington, Fronteras, October 5, 2011. http://perma.cc/GMH2-E37P 47. Rebecca Tsosie, “The Challenge of Differentiated Citizenship: Can State Constitutions Protect Tribal Rights?” 64 Montana Law Review 199, 222–23 (2003). 48. See generally U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Discrimination against Native Americans in Border Towns, 2015. 49. See, e.g., U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, A Quiet Crisis: Federal Funding and Unmet Needs in Indian Country, ix (2003) (documenting disparities and concluding that “Native Americans continue to rank at or near the bottom of nearly every social, health, and economic indicator,” as compared to other groups). 50. United States v. Rogers, 45 U.S. (4 How.) 567 (1846). 51. Morton v. Mancari, 417 U.S. 535 (1974). 52. Carole Goldberg, American Indians and Preferential Treatment, supra note __ at 952–60. 53. Eugene Volokh, “The California Civil Rights Initiative: An Interpretive Guide,” 44 UCLA Law Review 1335, 1359 (1997). 54. See Mary Jo Pitzl, “Lawsuit Challenges Native American Adoption Law,” Ariz. Republic, July 7, 2015. 55. 528 U.S. 495 (2000). 56. See Jeremiah Chin, “Red Law, White Supremacy, Cherokee Freedmen, Tribal Sovereignty, and the Colonial Feedback Loop,” 47 Marshall Law Review 1227, 1231–1235 (2014). 57. See Cherokee Nation v. Nash, 724 F. Supp.2d 1199 (N.D. Okla. 2010). 58. See Court Docket, Cherokee Nation v. Nash, No. 1:13-cv-01313 (D.D.C. Aug. 28, 2013). 59. See H.R. 2824, 110th Cong. Sec. 2 (2007) (bill introduced by Rep. Diane Watson [D-Calif.] to sever the trust relationship with the Cherokee Nation unless it restored citizenship to the Cherokee Freedmen). 60. Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 (1978) (holding that tribal government had sole authority over its membership requirements and plaintiff’s challenge to the membership ordinance could only be litigated in the tribal forums). 61. Berger, the Anomaly of Citizenship for Indigenous Rights, supra note ___ at 217. 62. Ibid., 231. 63. Ibid. 64. See, e.g., UN Declaration, on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Article 36, providing that: Indigenous peoples, in particular those divided by international borders, have the right to maintain and develop contacts, relations and cooperation, including activities for spiritual, cultural, political, economic and social purposes, with their own members as well as other peoples across borders.
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65. Ibid., Article 37. 66. Ibid., Article 25. 67. See generally Laurie Anne Whitt, Mere Roberts, Waerete Norman, and Vicki Grieves, “Belonging to the Land: Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Natural World,” 26 Oklahoma City University Law Review vol. 26, no. 2, Summer 2001, 701–743. 68. See Eileen M. Luna-Firebaugh, “The Border Crossed Us: Border Crossing Issues of the Indigenous People of the Americas,” 17 Wicazo Sa Review 159 (2002). 69. Duane Champagne, “Rethinking Native Relations With Contemporary NationStates,” in Indigenous Peoples and the Modern State, edited by Duane Champagne, Karen Jo Torjesen and Susan Steiner. Alta Mira Press, 2005, 3–23.
10 Asian Americans The Challenge of Citizenship Status and Building Community Kim Geron and Danvy Le
Introduction American citizenship is a birthright automatically given to those who are “natural born” in this nation and is accompanied by the rights and privileges extended by the U.S. Constitution. A second path to American citizenship is afforded to those who are not natural born but undergo a process to become a “naturalized citizen.” The process includes legalization through residency, then a longer process that includes fees, tests, and then a period of waiting. Beyond that there are visas, which include student visas, work visas, and then the undocumented presence of entire communities practicing citizenship in the sense that they shape their local environs as they work and live in the United States. Historically, being granted citizenship has not guaranteed the rights that accompany the status. This is especially true for a group that, despite a substantial proportion who have the legal citizenship status, continues to be perceived and treated as both a perpetual foreigner and a model minority. Throughout history, Asian Americans have upheld American ideals and embraced the status of citizens that they have earned and received. Despite this, they are constantly being called upon to prove their loyalty to the United States. We seek to explore the ways in which Asian Americans have negotiated a hostile environment to assert their citizenship. We posit that Asian Americans have used community to construct a cultural citizenship in order to remain politically relevant amid discriminatory policies, societal ostracization, and denial of basic rights. Community, in this context, is used as both an identity and a physical space. In terms of identity, Asian Americans have recognized that society has lumped the different Asian ethnicities into one category. Asian Americans have been racialized—that is, the race label is something that is assigned to them by society. Racialization is a strategy that has been used to drive minority communities apart and create a hierarchy of races who compete for resources (Omi and Winant 1994). Racialization has also been used to drive Asian Americans apart from one another. Within the Asian American community, policies have resulted in Asians differentiating themselves from other Asians in order to have access to greater resources. Despite this, Asian Americans have managed to
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form a collective, pan-ethnic identity. Asian Americans have used this racial lumping to their advantage by coming together pan-ethnically and claiming their citizenship rights. Thus, the pan-ethnic identification formed by Asian Americans has been used as self-preservation of culture and as an assertion of their place in society. Community in terms of physical space refers to undesirable areas that Asian immigrants were forced to live as a result of U.S. policies. Asian Americans have managed to transform these undesirable areas into a social space where they have been able to thrive and practice citizenship. Thus, identity and physical space have taken the Asian community beyond a citizenship that is guaranteed by the Constitution and is reinterpreted as an assertion of rights through community practice. This has been referred to as “cultural citizenship” (). Broadly speaking, cultural citizenship refers to the negotiation and contestation between immigrant communities and institutions in which citizenship is exercised. It is through interaction with society that marginalized communities create a space and find “empowerment through constructing, establishing and asserting human, social and cultural rights” (Flores and Benmayor 1997, 11–12). Another scholar states, “Cultural citizenship refers to the ways people organize their values, their beliefs about their rights, and their practices based on their sense of cultural belonging rather than on their formal status as citizens of a nation.” (Silvestrini 1997, 44). This notion of being marginalized with a perpetual outsider status has created countless actions by Asian origin ethnic groups as well as pan-ethnic efforts to create small and large acts of community solidarity based on cultural rather than formal U.S. citizenship requirements. Kang’s work on Seattle’s International District is illustrative of the importance of looking at cultural citizenship and how it manifests in a pan-ethnic Asian American community identity. This study explores the efforts of multi-ethnic Asian immigrants to forge a sustainable community with both pan-ethnic and ethnic specific characteristics (Kang 2010). We will explore cultural citizenship by examining other historical situations when Asian Americans have built community solidarity. In the United States, Asian Americans have been portrayed in a contradictory manner: they were viewed and treated as perpetual foreigners upon arrival in the 1850s and this view continues to persist; beginning in the 1960s Asian Americans were cast as the “model minority” who have achieved the American dream. The duality of this image allows Asian Americans to be treated as an Other, and therefore they cannot be assimilated into U.S. society, but at the same time holds the group to a high standard that other minority groups are encouraged to emulate. Thus, Asians are distanced from the white population because of the perpetual foreigner image and distanced from other minority groups because of the model minority image (Kim 1999). It is within this juxtaposition that we approach cultural citizenship. We argue that Asian Americans have found creative ways to negotiate around discriminatory policies that sought to marginalize the group and in the process have constructed a cultural citizenship to assert their social, economic, and political rights.
Challenge of Citizenship and Community 143 This essay traces key historical experiences of Asian Americans in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to present day.1 We explore the challenges Asian Americans have faced from society and how they have navigated these obstacles to assert their citizenship. We use examples from the Asian American experience to show how communities are used to claim citizenship rights. Through these struggles, Asian Americans have redefined citizenship from being one of passive acceptance to one of active assertion. The first section outlines the effects of racialization of the Asian population: 1. Racialization initially resulted in members of each group relying on their ethnic identity to ensure their own survival; 2. The continued racialization in the twentieth century invoked a collective identity that unified the disparate groups and enabled them to claim their rights. This is followed by a section that discusses how U.S. policies encouraged the formation of ethnic enclaves where Asian Americans have managed to preserve their culture while remaining economically and politically relevant.
Collective Identity to Assert Citizenship As previously mentioned, Asian Americans have been racialized; thus, immigrants who came from different Asian countries in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century “did not think of themselves as ‘Asian’ ” (Espiritu, 1993, 19). They came from different provinces and different nations and identified as people from Toisan in Guandong Province in China or Hiroshima or another prefecture in Japan (Espiritu 1992, 19). Each of the original immigrant groups did not find common cause with other Asian immigrants; they were often pitted against one another at work sites, and lived in separate work camps on plantations in Hawaii and the west coast. While Asian immigrants did not view themselves as a common group of people, the white population viewed them as having similar characteristics as evidenced by the numerous discriminatory laws, exclusion acts and quotas that “relied upon racialist constructions of Asians as homogeneous” (Lowe 1991, 28) to limit Asian immigration to the United States. While Chinese were initially welcomed when they arrived in the late 1840s to work on the railroads and mines, this welcome turned to hostility when white workers felt threatened by the new workforce that was being used to undercut prevailing wages. Anti-Chinese groups formed and were encouraged by political leaders who portrayed Chinese workers as uncouth and uncivilized compared to the culture and values of white Americans. When a long-term economic downturn occurred in the 1860s and 1870s, a number of anti-Asian laws were passed and violent actions were taken against Chinese immigrants including lynchings, mob violence, and racist attacks. This culminated with the first and only ban on an immigrant population in the U.S. history: the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 which banned the migration of additional Chinese workers into the United States.
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With Chinese labor banned, U.S. companies in Hawaii and the continental United States turned to Japanese immigrants to fill the labor need. This new labor force was not initially targeted with anti-Japanese actions and was opposed by only some in organized labor in the San Francisco area. When the issue of reauthorization of the Chinese Exclusion Act came up in the early 1900s, some leaders of the first generation Japanese immigrants sought to distinguish themselves from Chinese immigrants (Daniels 1962, 23) and argued they were different than the Chinese immigrants. However, the growth of the Japanese population led to calls to also exclude them; and in 1908, the U.S. and Japanese governments reached an agreement to stop the flow of Japanese immigration allowing only family members of current Japanese immigrants to immigrate. This was followed by other anti-Asian laws which had the effect of limiting migration and excluded Japanese immigrants from owning land and property. While new Asian immigrants did not coalesce together nor view themselves as one community, those outside the Asian communities continued to build anti-Asian organizations which had existed since the 1870s. So while Japanese immigrants attempted to disidentify themselves from Chinese to avoid a similar fate of being excluded, those forces who lumped all Asians together as being unassimilable continued to press for Asian exclusion. Their efforts culminated with the passage of several laws including the 1924 Immigration Act which effectively halted Japanese and all Asian immigration not already halted (Espiritu 1992, 22). In addition to Chinese and Japanese migration, a third group began to come to the United States in the twentieth century. After the United States defeated Spain in 1898, the Philippines became a U.S. colony, resulting in the migration of Filipino students and, later, large numbers of laborers. Their colonial status spared Filipino migrants from being classified as “aliens” as previous Asian groups had been labeled. However, in the late 1920s and 1930s, during the Great Depression, Filipinos were singled out for violent attacks (De Witt 1979) and due to mounting pressure in 1934, the United States passed the TydingsMcDuffie Act which created the Philippines as a commonwealth with a path towards independence. A provision of the Act called for Filipinos in the United States to be reclassified as “aliens” preventing any further migration of Filipinos to the United States. Furthermore, as aliens they were barred from owning land and property like other Asians. Smaller numbers of South Indians, primarily Sikhs, and South Koreans also migrated in the early twentieth century to work but were also soon limited by laws that restricted new immigration. These five distinct ethnic Asian immigrant groups sometimes lived and worked together on plantations and farm labor camps in rural areas, but at other times worked in separate crews. When not toiling in the fields, they lived in their own rural enclaves; and in cities, they lived in ethnic enclaves that were usually not integrated together. Distinct Chinatowns, Japantowns, and Manilatowns were created and catered to their ethnic brethren. There was limited communication and cooperation among
Challenge of Citizenship and Community 145 these immigrant communities in the pre-World War II period; however, each of these groups created community in limited and distorted ways that reflected their lived experiences and the impact of international and homeland politics. Each group was left to fend for itself and devised its own means for preservation and survival. One effort was the creation of “paper sons” by the Chinese immigrant community. While the Chinese Exclusion acts prevented Chinese laborers from immigrating, a series of courts cases culminated in foreign-born children of U.S.-born Chinese Americans being entitled to American citizenship. In other words, children born abroad to Chinese Americans were considered U.S. citizens. This ruling created an opening where Chinese Americans could travel to China to visit their wives who were prevented from coming to the United States and sell the legal paperwork to the highest bidder for “paper sons” that allowed a young person, usually not part of the immediate family, to migrate to the United States. This practice went on for several decades and tens of thousands of foreign-born Chinese entered during this period, many entering as paper sons (Yu 1992, 21–22). In 1906 San Francisco suffered a devastating earthquake that razed City Hall and destroyed all the records contained within, including immigration records. Chinese Americans saw this as an opportunity to reunite immediate and extended family by way of creating paper families as an entryway into the US (Lau 2009). The experience of a disenfranchised community of people who used extra-legal means to thwart the racist anti-Chinese exclusion acts enabled them to create an extended and sustained community, that may not have survived otherwise, based on their cultural identity, is evidence of a distorted yet functional community citizenship. Japanese Americans were restricted by the same anti-Asian laws that denied entry for other new Asian immigrants. Due to the U.S. government wanting to build ties with a rising Japan, Japanese immigrants were allowed to bring their wives and immediate family from Japan. However, first generation immigrants were denied the rights to citizenship, land ownership, and property. As Japan’s military aggression heated up in the 1930s, including occupying parts of China and invading parts of Asia, many Japanese Americans became concerned they would be singled out if the United States and Japan became engulfed in military conflict. These fears were realized in 1941 after Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, a U.S. military base in the Hawaiian territory, that soon led to Executive Order 9066 that allowed for the mass incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese living on the west coast of the mainland, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens by birth. As the United States entered into WWII, the distinction between citizen-born and non-citizen immigrants was obliterated quickly and anyone of Japanese descent was rounded up, although non-citizen male community leaders were isolated together and treated even more harshly. On the west coast, Japanese American civil rights were denied—they were evicted from their homes, their businesses were taken away, and they were interned in rural prisons.2 Although the Asian ethnic groups in the United States shared similar history of immigration and racial subjugation, other Asians feared being lumped together and becoming the targets of anti-Japanese
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violence (Espiritu 1992, 23). Thus, rather than showing racial solidarity there was ethnic disidentification by Chinese, Filipino, and other Asians from Japanese Americans. Internally within the Japanese community, while there was the common experience of being uprooted from homes, schools, and businesses and placed in concentration camps, there also existed divisions based on loyalties to Japan and the United States. Despite these divisions, Japanese Americans were forced to build community based on their cultural identity in order to resist the harsh reality of incarceration and challenge the denial of their human and civil rights. This type of cultural community was extremely fragile and had many cracks, but the Japanese American community was not broken by the WWII experience. Instead, they emerged fragmented yet still tied together by the common experiences they survived, and many returned to their ethnic enclaves after the war and restarted their lives. While many tried to forget the negative experience, others continued to expose what happened to them and challenged the illegality of the denial of their civil rights in the courts. These legal challenges, along with a mass movement of Japanese Americans in the 1970s and 1980s and efforts by Japanese American legislators, eventually won monetary reparations and an apology by the government in 1988. These efforts revitalized the community identity that had been attacked by government and societal actions. Hawaii differed from the mainland because Asian immigrants and Native Hawaiians were the majority population and did not compete with a large white workers movement. However, laborers in Hawaii had established organizations based on their ethnicity including Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, and Japanese. These ethnically based labor organizations were separated and pitted against each other by the white plantation owners, but groups managed to join together to form the Hawaii Laborers’ Association to stand up to the white plantation owners (Takaki 1989). This laid the foundation for multi-ethnic unions which served as new forms of pan-ethnic culturally based community formed labor unions. This is unique in some ways to the Hawaiian experience, but other workers of color have used unions to build ethnic solidarity where they are heavily concentrated in them (Greer 2013). Labor-based pan-Asian form of cultural community in Hawaii is a precursor to later pan-ethnic organizing based on cultural identity. In the aftermath of WWII, The United States was declaring itself to be a democratic nation that all other nations should emulate. To serve as an example of a premier democracy, the U.S. government loosened immigration laws and opened its borders. By this time, Congress had already repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 and granted Chinese Americans naturalization rights. However, as the U.S. entered the Cold War and a second “Red Scare” took effect, these rights and privileges came under threat. The Confession Program of 1956 was an attempt to root out those who came to the United States fraudulently over the past decades as paper sons, a supposed entryway for spies. This Confession program sent fear and loathing in the Chinese community as thousands were served mass subpoenas and forced to sign confessions under
Challenge of Citizenship and Community 147 threat of criminal prosecution. However, the Chinese Americans “resisted the state’s efforts to criminalize the entire community” (Ngai 2004, 223). Community organizations such as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association offered legal counsel and community support; however, prominent members of the community were forced to reveal their status. Moreover, the results were devastating as family members were forced to testify against one another. These efforts continued the belief that “racialized Chinese as unalterably foreign and unassimilable remained unchallenged” (Ngai 2004, 23). As an effort to assert loyalty to the US, the Chinese American community sought to differentiate themselves from the Chinese government (Brooks 2015; I-Fen 2014). Chinese American political/economic leaders declared allegiance to the Taiwan Nationalist government (an American ally against the People’s Republic of China) and organized anti-Communist rallies (Brooks 2015; Hsu 2015). Additionally, Chinese American newspapers published stories that highlighted Chinese American loyalties, including reports showing a large portion of Asian Americans are born in the United States and have similar lifestyle and habits as Anglo Americans (I-Fen 2015). Accusations of Asian espionage continued even after the Cold War ended. In 1996, Chinese American business leaders who had contributed to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign were accused of undermining the American electoral system. Investigation by the media found that a portion of the funds were raised from Asian foreign nationals and equated all Asians as spies with subversive intentions. The media treatment of Asians called into question the political gains made by Asian Americans (Wang 2007; Lee 2000), regardless of ethnicity. By this time, Asian Americans were making gains in elected offices and were making their way towards limited political incorporation. However, the media coverage of the campaign finance controversy had the effect of pushing the group towards social and political exclusion. In response, Asian American political activists and elites came together as one voice and spoke out against perpetuating Asian American stereotypes and asserted the inclusion of Asian Americans as part of the American citizenry. Citing unfair media treatment and the subsequent investigations of Asian American donors prompted Asian American leaders and organizations to file a formal complaint with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Lee 2003). A key event that brought Asian Americans together in the face of racialization was the economic downturn of the 1970s. In particular, Japanese were blamed for the failing auto industry and there was a national movement to “buy American.” In 1982 Vincent Chin, a young Chinese American man, was celebrating his upcoming nuptials when he was targeted by white auto workers who had recently been laid off. As they were beating him, they called him a “Jap” and told him to go home. As a result of his injuries, Mr. Chin died a few days later. His assailants were given a minimum fine and served no jail time (Choy and Tejima-Pena 1990). Mr. Chin was targeted due to his race and highlights the perception that the “yellow peril” was taking away American jobs. This event called attention to the way in which broader society lumped all
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Asians together and, as a result, a pan-ethnic Asian American movement began. Asian American organizations joined together to speak out against the injustice of the sentences and express Chin’s citizenship. Asian Americans demanded a guarantee of civil rights to all Asian Americans (Wu 2010). Although court battles were won, in the end the two men served little jail time and never paid the court-ordered fines to the Chin family (Choy and Tejima-Pena 1990). In summary, while Asian Americans have de jure citizenship, the practice of extending that citizenship and the rights that go along with it are not extended de facto. Asian Americans can be in the United States for generations, however continue to be viewed as “other” and a perpetual foreigner. The loyalty of Asian Americans has been called into question historically and continues today in a post-9/11 society. Indian Americans and Muslim Americans have been racially profiled because they look un-American. Asian Americans continue to remain united and use their voice to remind society about their own racialized experiences to ensure the rights of all American citizens remain intact. When Asian Americans suffer and are denied the basic tenets that every citizen should enjoy, the Asian American community uses their collective identity to empower themselves and assert their citizenship status.
Creating a Safe Space to Express Citizenship Community as a physical space comes about due to the exclusionary policies and housing segregation that pushes unwelcome immigrants to live in areas that are deemed undesirable by mainstream society (Nee and Sanders 1987). These undesirable areas provide affordable housing and land for ostracized groups and are eventually transformed into an ethnic enclave (Massey and Denton 1992). The residential segregation creates an environment where residents face common adversities and form a bonded solidarity where they become reliant on one another for support and survival (Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993, 1324–25). The ethnic enclaves provide employment and access to resources and services to the community; it is through the strength of the community that ensures the survival of the community. These enclaves provided the Asian American community an environment where they could organize and assert themselves in the political system to overcome societal discrimination (Liu and Geron 2008). The legal exclusion and the anti-Chinese violence of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries drove Chinese immigrants, primarily male laborers, who were in the United States to find safety amongst each other. They were driven to ghettos in the urban center where they formed ethnic enclaves. Because the predominance of male migrants, these ethnic enclaves are, often referred to as bachelor societies (Nee and Nee 1973). These men had left their families in hopes of coming home; they were poor, uneducated, and spoke little English. However, in the confines of their community they were able to speak their own language, eat their own food, and share common experiences (Zhou 2001). The bachelor societies provided the men with protection from
Challenge of Citizenship and Community 149 the hostile society and a space where they could practice their culture without fear of persecution. Expedited by the formation of paper families, the onset of WWII and repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the bachelor societies eventually transformed into Chinatowns although men continued to outnumber women (Zhou and Lin 2005; Daniels 2011). Faced with a labor market that prohibited the men from working in mines and a scarcity of women to fulfill undesirable work (such as laundry and cooking), Chinese Americans found an opportunity to create businesses to fill the needed services. These businesses catered to the ethnic group and the concentration of Chinese meant that there was a demand for goods and services as well as a supply of low-wage workers (Zhou 1995; Lin 1998; Daniels 2011). The growth of these businesses allowed Chinese to prosper while staying within the enclave protected from outside society. The success of Chinatowns and concentration of the Chinese community encouraged the growth of community organizations, primarily founded by second generation Chinese. Discriminatory policies that resulted in the geographic concentration of a disenfranchised group contributed to the success of the community organizations. Community organizers saw the ethnic enclave as an opportunity to easily target and mobilize a disenfranchised group. This strategy enabled them to elect co-ethnics to represent the interests of the community (Lin 1998). By transforming what were seen as ghettos into thriving neighborhoods that catered to co-ethnics, Chinese Americans have been able to maintain their culture and gain a political voice despite the discrimination lobbied against them. The Filipino/a community also faced discrimination and established their own ethnic enclave, called Manilatowns or Little Manila, where they could express their cultural citizenship. Similar to the Chinese, Filipinos were encouraged to come to the United States to provide labor. Since Filipino labor was viewed as seasonal, laborers needed to find temporary housing. Racial covenants restricted where Filipinos could rent and workers often found themselves housed close to Chinatowns where they were allowed to rent and the rentals affordable (Allen 1997; Mabalan 2013). Contributing to the labor pool were students who came to the United States to pursue an American education only to discover they could not afford it3 and instead stayed in the United States to earn money (Habal 2007). Soon, Filipino Americans were viewed as a threat not only to the labor market but also to societal morals culminating in a series of riots across California (De Witt 1979). Filipino students were driven away from college campuses to the urban centers where they found refuge in the established Filipino community near the Chinatown. Manilatown provided a place for Filipinos to express their culture and created a solidarity in the community. The solidarity has been used to assert the rights of the community when Manilatown has come under threat. An example of this solidarity is the protests surrounding the destruction of the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Manliatown. The I-Hotel was a place where Asian bachelors resided after coming to the United States. In 1968 as San Francisco began to develop its
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infrastructure, there were plans to demolish the I-Hotel and replace it with a parking lot. The residents were handed eviction notices and were not offered compensation or another residence. When the eviction notices were posted, the community came together in protest and delayed the project for ten years. On the day of eviction, there was a peaceful protest that ended in police officers carrying out protesters, many of them elderly residents, one by one (see Habal 2007 for history of I-Hotel). Another example of community solidarity occurred in Stockton, CA when that Little Manila was under threat of being replaced by a freeway. The Filipino American community in Stockton built a coalition of politicians, local organizations, and old and new community members to propose the construction of a Filipino/a Center that provided low income housing and preserve the Filipino culture in lieu of the freeway. As a unified voice, the coalition was able to overcome bureaucratic obstacles and discriminatory policies to save their home and build a center that allowed the community to stay intact (see Mabalon 2013 for thorough treatment of Filipino Americans in Stockton, CA). Filipino Americans who have had a conflicted relationship with the United States managed to create a space that allowed them to find safety among one another. When their enclaves were threatened by redevelopment projects, the community came together and exercised their political voice to fight for their culture and small piece of home. In contrast to the exclusionary policies discussed thus far, the U.S. refugee policies were attempts to be inclusionary by providing humanitarian aid to those who seek refuge from the atrocities of their homeland. The 1952 McCarranWalter Act allowed the U.S. Attorney General to grant entry into the United States to any alien for “emergent reasons or for reasons deemed strictly in the public interest” (Hing 1993). The parole authority allowed the attorney general to overlook the restrictive immigration policies and allow entry to immigrants who serve the public interest, as defined by the attorney general. During this time, the United States was trying to contain Communism and it served public interest to give preference to migrants fleeing Communist countries. This parole authority granted entry into the United States to over 15,000 Chinese who fled mainland China after the 1949 takeover (Schwarz 1968) and over 400,000 refugees from Southeast Asia from 1975–1980 (Gordon 1987). By 1965, Congress created a seventh category for the preference of refugees, particularly for those fleeing Communist-dominated areas or the Middle East (Hing 1993). This policy was in place with few objections from the public or the Congress until 1975 when military withdrawal from Vietnam opened U.S. borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees. In particular, the number of Southeast Asian refugees increased exponentially: 20,400 in 1978 and 166,700 by 1980 (Gordon 1987: 155). The issue then became what to do with the sudden influx of Southeast Asian refugees. To address the influx, a temporary task force was created to resettle the new arrivals. The task force recommended strategies that eventually became the Immigration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975 and the
Challenge of Citizenship and Community 151 Refugee Act of 1980. Among the provisions in these policies was the sponsorship requirement in order to leave refugee processing camps. However, after leaving camps, sponsorships deteriorated quickly, leaving refugees to fend for themselves and giving employers opportunities to exploit refugee labor (Liu et al 1979: 162–63). Additionally, sponsorship of refugees required a large financial contribution and few sponsors could host an entire extended family resulting in families being torn apart. This was made especially difficult because of another provision in the refugee policies that dictated refugees be geographically dispersed. Geographic dispersal was aimed at speeding assimilation and lessen the economic and cultural impact on host communities. (Gordon 1987; Miyares 1997). Dispersal also had the effect of preventing the ethnic community from forming alliances and organizing, and diffuse any potential for solidarity and mobilizing (Hing 1993) as happened in previously mentioned ethnic enclaves. Despite efforts of dispersal, leaders in the refugee communities were able to coordinate efforts to spur a secondary migration that resulted in the formation of ethnic enclaves. Although these new ethnic enclaves were voluntary, they served the same purpose as the enclaves that were a result of discrimination: The ethnic enclaves served as a safe place where refugees could express themselves culturally and find support amongst one another to face a foreign, hostile environment. Accustomed to a tropical climate, Southeast Asians sought out a warm climate and ended up concentrated in areas of California, Texas, and Louisiana (Gordon 1987). The newcomers were met with hostility in these new communities and accused of bringing on housing shortages, job competition, and high welfare dependency (Hing 1993). Still, refugees found ways to negotiate this hostile environment to preserve their culture and claim their rights. Vietnamese ethnic enclaves are one example of this negotiation. Vietnamese refugees settled in areas that were deemed undesirable to live and slowly built these areas into thriving economic centers despite petitions to deny business licenses to Vietnamese business owners (Vo 2008; Hung 2002). These Vietnamese-owned businesses hired co-ethnics giving support to those who would otherwise face unemployment, particularly to later immigrants. Moreover, identifying a niche that needed to be filled, Vietnamese Americans pooled their resources and established schools of cosmetology to train co-ethnics in the art of manicures and pedicures. This initial investment has given rise to the foothold the community has in the nail industry (Eckstein and Nguyen 2011). Further claiming their space in broader society, Vietnamese Americans have successfully elected co-ethnics to political office ensuring community interests are represented and becoming politically incorporated (Collet 2008; Uhlaner and Le 2015). In sum, although the US government attempted to limit solidarity and dilute the immigrant voice, Vietnamese refugees managed to form a community, establish a self-sufficient enclave economy, and find a strong political voice to demand resources.
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Another group that has been affected by U.S. refugee policies is the Hmong community. Hmong are an ethnic group originating from Southeast Asia, particularly Laos.4 During the Vietnam War, the Hmong fought alongside the U.S. military. When U.S. troops withdrew, Hmong were systematically targeted to be killed and forced to leave their home country (Keown-Bomar 2004). Many chose to resettle in the United States because of the relationship that was established during the war (Keown-Bomar 2004; Vang 2008). Similar to Vietnamese refugees, Hmong refugees undertook secondary migration to resettle closer to one another in defiance of dispersal policies. The cultural importance of clan and kinship brought Hmong to resettle in a community comprised of other Hmong to preserve their culture (Miyares 1997; Keown-Bomar 2004). These enclaves were primarily in cities located in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin (Lor et al. 2009). Miyares (1997) describes a Hmong enclave formed in Fresno, CA, the selfdesignated Hmong capital of the United States. The enclave is referred to as “Ban Vinai” and is essentially a large apartment complex.5 Bureaucratic rules and limited space has made it difficult for Hmong to partake in the agriculture that is central to their culture and identity. However, Miyares (1997) asserts the Hmong in Fresno have been able to creatively use window boxes, find plots of land, and engage in truck farming to grow produce. The produce is then sold at the Fresno Flea Market and provides a source of income for the Hmong community. Additionally, the flea market provides a space for the Hmong to engage in bartering among Hmong salespeople which is similar to an experience they might have in their home country. Also important to Hmong culture is the tradition of a clan: a Hmong person belongs to a family, that family belongs to a clan, and the clan belongs to the Hmong people (Duffy 2004). The clan system provides support for the community (Dunnigan 1982) and serves as a basis for solidarity. Second generation Hmong Americans have used solidarity created by the clan system to mobilize the community to elect local and state representatives (Yoshikawa 2006; Lor 2009). Thus, while American culture and society clashed with Hmong culture, the community was able to establish a space in which they were able to express their culture and eventually use this culture in order to gain a political voice to address issues that pertain to the community. Traditional ethnic enclaves such as the Chinatowns and Manilatowns were a creation due to discriminatory policies and housing segregation. In contrast, new enclaves such as the ones created by the Vietnamese and Hmong communities were formed due to a need of emotional and cultural support (Liu and Geron 2008). Whether driven to the enclave by discriminatory policies or creating an enclave in order to find emotional support, Asian Americans have been able to negotiate these spaces and create a center where they can safely express their culture. These enclaves have been built to provide the economic opportunities that were denied by the greater society and allowed Asian Americans to prosper while maintaining their culture. Furthermore, coethnic candidates turn to the
Challenge of Citizenship and Community 153 solidarity that is created within these enclaves to mobilize the community and obtain office in order to address the issues that are important to the community. In sum, ethnic enclaves created a safe space where Asian Americans have been able to assert their place in society despite being marginalized.
Conclusion Asian Americans have been the target of discriminatory policies that threatened their citizenship status. Although U.S. policies sought to create a wedge within Asian Americans, societal discrimination of the diverse group brought them together. This treatment enabled Asian Americans to recognize that American society lumped them together and spurred them to form pan-ethnic coalitions to demand their rights. Discriminatory policies have also pushed Asian Americans into ghettoized areas separate from mainstream society. It is within these enclaves that Asian Americans were able to sustain their culture and seek out economic opportunities that allowed their communities to prosper. In the face of discrimination and absence of government protection, Asian Americans have turned to their communities and created a cultural citizenship to claim a space in American society. If citizenship were an individualistic endeavor, it could be argued that Asian Americans would have failed in making substantive progress towards attainment of rights. However, community citizenship has allowed Asian Americans to assert their place in the United States. Through grit and creativity, Asian Americans have managed to surpass the treatment that sought to divide them— not only from mainstream society, but also from one another—to seize their social, economic, and political rights. In a hostile environment, Asian Americans have managed to hold onto their culture, seek out entrepreneurial opportunities, and elect Asian Americans to political office. Citizenship can be given and rights can be taken away; it is within the community that Asian Americans have seized citizenship and the rights that go with it in order to become a part of the American kaleidoscope.6
Notes 1. This chapter focuses on Asian American immigration and refugee resettlement challenges. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders’ experiences are beyond the scope of this limited project; however, both in Hawaii and on the continental United States there are similar efforts to build cultural citizenship by those groups. 2. In Hawaii, the Japanese population was so numerous that the roundup of the entire Japanese population would have devastated the Hawaiian economy. As a result, only Japanese community leaders were incarcerated. 3. The 1903 Pensionado Act granted subsidized American education to elite Filipino families. Once these students returned to the Philippines, they encouraged other young Filipinos to pursue an American education. However, these new students were expected to pay their own way (Habal 2007).
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4. Hmong are a nomadic population and do not have an established homeland but come primarily from areas in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. 5. Due to the low rates of literacy and limited English proficiency, Hmong are likely to be low income and tend to live in affordable housing units. 6. This is in reference to Lawrence Fuch (1990) book with the same title.
Bibliography Allen, James P. and Eugene Turner. The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California, 1997. The Center for Geographical Studies, Cal State Northridge, 1st edition, 1997. Bonus, Rick. Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space. Vol. 171. Temple University Press, 2000. Choy, Christine and Renee Tajima-Pena. Who Killed Vincent Chin? Filmmakers Library, 1990. Christian, Jenna, Pa Sia Low Moua and Ingolf Vogeler. “The Cultural Landscape of the Hmong in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.” Wisconsin Geographer 23 (2008): 3–19. Collet, Christian. “Minority Candidates, Alternative Media, and Multiethnic America: Deracialization or Toggling?” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 4 (2008): 707–728. Daniels, Roger. The Politics of Prejudice. University of California Press, 1962. Daniels, Roger. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850. University of Washington Press, 2011. De Witt, Howard A. “The Watsonville Anti-Filipino riot of 1930: A Case Study of the Great Depression and Ethnic Conflict in California.” Southern California Quarterly 61, no. 3 (1979): 291–302. Doherty, Steven. “Political Behavior and Candidate Emergence in the Hmong-American Community.” Hmong Studies Journal 8 (2007): 1. Duffy, John. The Hmong: An Introduction to Their History and Culture. Edited by Donald Adam Ranard. Center for Applied Linguistics, Cultural Orientation Resource Center, 2004. Dunnigan, Timothy. “Segmentary Kinship in an Urban Society: The Hmong of St. PaulMinneapolis.” Anthropological Quarterly 55 (1982): 126–134. Eckstein, Susan and Thanh-Nghi Nguyen. “The Making and Transnationalization of an Ethnic Niche: Vietnamese Manicurists.” International Migration Review 45, no. 3 (2011): 639–674. Espiritu, Yen Le. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. Temple University Press, 1993. Flores, William V. and Rina Benmayor. Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights. Beacon Press, 1997. Fuchs, Lawrence H. The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture. Wesleyan University Press, 1990. Gordon, Linda W. “7: Southeast Asian Refugee Migration to the United States.” Center for Migration Studies Special Issues 5, no. 3 (1987): 153–173. Greer, Christina M. Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream. Oxford University Press, 2013. Habal, Estella. San Francisco’s International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-eviction Movement. Temple University Press, 2007. Hing, Bill Ong. Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy: 1850–1990. Stanford University Press, 1993.
Challenge of Citizenship and Community 155 Kim, Clare Jean. “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.” Politics and Society (1999), First published March 1. www.journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003232 9299027001005 Lau, Estelle T. Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion. Duke University Press, 2007. Lee, Taeku. “The Backdoor and the Backlash: Campaign Finance and the Politicization of Chinese Americans.” Asian American Policy Review 9 (2000): 30–55. Lin, Jan. Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclaves and Global Change. Vol. 2. U of Minnesota Press, 1998. Liu, Michael and Kim Geron. “Changing Neighborhood: Ethnic Enclaves and the Struggle for Social Justice.” Social Justice 35, no. 2 (2008): 18–35. Liu, William Thomas, Mary Ann Lamanna and Alice K. Murata. Transition to Nowhere: Vietnamese Refugees in America. Nashville: Charter House, 1979. Lor, Yang. “Hmong Political Involvement in St. Paul, Minnesota and Fresno, California.” Hmong Studies Journal 10 (2009): 1. Lowe, Lydia. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1 (1991): 24–44. Mabalon, Dawn Bohulano. Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California. Duke University Press, 2013. Miyares, Ines M. “Changing Perceptions of Space and Place as Measures of Hmong Acculturation.” The Professional Geographer 49, no. 2 (1997): 214–224. Nee, Victor and Brett de Bary Nee. Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown. Stanford University Press, 1973. Nee, Victor and Jimy Sanders. “On Testing the. Enclave-Economy Hypothesis.” American Sociological Review 52 (1987):771–73. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, 2004. Omi, Michael and Howard Wynant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. Psychology Press, 1994. Portes, Alejandro and Julia Sensenbrenner. “Embeddedness and Immigration: Notes on the Social Determinants of Economic Action.” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 6 (1993): 1320–1350. Silvestrini, Blanca G. “The World We Enter When Claiming Rights: Latinos and Their Quest for Culture.” In Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights. Edited by Flores William V. and Rina Benmayor. Beacon Press, 1997. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Temple, 1992. Uhlaner, Carole Jean and Danvy Le. “The Role of Coethnic Political Mobilization in Electoral Incorporation: Evidence From Orange County, California.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 5, no. 2 (2015): 1–35. Vang, Nengher. “Political Transmigrants: Rethinking Hmong Political Activism in America.” Hmong Studies Journal 12 (2011): 1–46. Wang, L. Ling-chi. “Race, Class, Citizenship, and Extraterritoriality: Asian Americans and the 1996 Campaign Finance Scandal.” Amerasia Journal 33, no. 1 (2007): 167–188. Wu, Frank H. “Embracing Mistaken Identity: How the Vincent Chin Case Unified Asian Americans.” Asian American Policy Review 19 (2010): 17–23. Yoshikawa, Taeko. “From a Refugee Camp to the Minnesota State Senate: A Case Study of a Hmong American Woman’s Challenge.” Hmong Studies Journal 7 (2006): 1.
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11 Conclusion Rodolfo Rosales
What has been presented in this volume is not the finished story of American Democracy. Indeed, we have only provided a peek at this incredible story of communities confronting their exclusion from the story of American Democracy. But it is not a pessimistic story. The analyses, stories, and narratives depict in detail the struggles of communities to define who they are in American society. What have we learned from these analyses? We begin this volume with Rodolfo Rosales addressing the relationship between citizenship and community. The point made in this chapter is that access to the democratic process has always been and continues to be a community process. While this is not a unique observation, it takes on greater importance when we consider that historically it is communities that have not only been the basis for inclusion but it is communities that have been excluded. Today, the major issues facing citizen participation are money and corporate influence not only at the national and state level but also at the local urban level. At the national level we have Citizens United, an awesome and powerful front of corporations and their intense efforts to set policy in their interest. As a consequence, organizations have emerged across the nation from the various communities that are addressed by the chapters and other progressive organizations to counter these efforts. The point made by Rosales is that while communities can’t compete with these national forces, they busy themselves addressing the local elite forces that represent wealth and political power in the making of the city and its neighborhoods. Along that same line, Louis Mendoza takes a very unique approach to the question of immigrant communities. Prior to this volume, he took a year-long sabbatical to travel by bicycle from Latino community to Latino community across the nation from the Midwest to the East Coast through the South into the Southwest to the West coast through the Plains states back to the Midwest. From this wealth of knowledge gathered in his, what could be called a pilgrimage, he published two books on his observations.1 In our particular chapter, he provides a picture of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants establishing a community base to bring order and predictability to lives. Through his pilgrimages, he witnessed how these excluded communities created their space despite the national fervor against immigrants.
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Carol Yoder and Christina Verzijl take what seems a radical turn from the discussions presented in this volume and discuss, from a psychological perspective, the material basis of community itself. They present a very coherent argument about how citizens act out their agency in the context of relations with others. That is to say, from a psychological perspective, political participation, as an individual act, is in the context of their comfort zone—community. Their psychological discussion, whether intended or not, shows how the market economy is the material basis for an individualism that then works against community. A question they did not ask, which I have asked in other places, is: can community thrive in the market? Joy A. James’ focus on African American women brings home the question of exclusion in a most profound manner. From an African American perspective she brings out the illusion of inclusion as she points out how African American women have, in the last forty years, built up a powerful national presence beginning with Barbara Jordan and especially Shirley Chisholm. Focusing on Chisholm’s uncompromising approach to social justice, she uses the national elections to show how her views have had an impact on at least the rhetoric of national leaders who claim that role. Her discussion gives us an excellent view on the limits of progressive politics today. She called it “dishonored citizenry” to capture the suppression and insensitivity to those who are most fragile and vulnerable to even those whose politics is about justice. She eloquently depicts the condition of the majority of working class African American women and other communities. James’ conclusion is a call for explicit campaigns to redress the status of dishonored citizens, to empower communities through full and unabridged citizen rights as the hallmark of civic virtue and political struggle. Devon Peña’s chapter goes beyond simply participating in electoral politics in his analysis of how Mesoamerican immigrants have taken their own cultural and historical experiences and established themselves in their own created social and cultural space. From a decolonial politics the Triqui and Mixtec peoples, some who did not know how to speak Spanish, much less English, stated to the world: “Sin Tierra. Sin Papeles. Sin Miedo” (“Without Land, Without Papers, Without Fear”). Using this as their motto, they formed their community that was at the same time a union of the workers in the field and the cultural basis for survival of the community. They took on those who exploited their labor with little in return, i.e., the owners of the fields and their local political officials, successfully establishing their rights as a subaltern community whose legacy was as North American as anyone else. His description of their defiance of their “illegality” brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s concept of “responsibility”: “Hannah Arendt defined responsibility in terms of political presence, not in legal or moral terms.”2 It is worth restating Peña’s conceptualization of their actions: By insisting that the Indigenous peoples of North America are not immigrants, these subaltern voices assert a native right to political agency, regardless of legal status as determined under extant settler colonial regimes. This
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is a refusal of the refusal; a negation of the negation; and a major challenge to state-sponsored violence as the means for defining and policing citizenship to defend the boundaries of sovereign national territory. Marisol Cortez taking the same framework of decoloniality in a different but similar direction conceptualizes the status of urban poor and working class, citizen and non-citizen, in their right to live in their space, rented or bought, as “residentship.” In confronting the economic development of the city of San Antonio the residents struggled against their eviction in the name of economic development, in the name of growing a city that would attract the creative classes in the market. The most important point that Cortez makes is that the right of a family to its members’ residency takes precedence over the commodification of the land under them and around them. While ultimately losing their political struggle against the city and its developers, her work is part of an ongoing struggle by various working class communities in the face of a helterskelter development scheme to profit off the land where residents have made their life. Taking “residentship” a step further, she conceptualizes the right to live a good life as “Buen vivir,” an Indigenous cultural concept organic to the Americas. Using this concept, Cortez concludes as an activist in solidarity: As a vision of wellbeing whose demand embodies and prefigures a polity of inhabitance—human and other-than-human—buen vivir in this respect does not need to be imported, nor does it have to be created. It is alwaysalready practiced here, in this place, by those who live here and insist on a right to remain: I have only written it down. In addressing the conflict, perhaps eternal, between citizenship and sovereignty for Native Americans, Deron Marquez weaves his analysis in and out of both sides of the conflict. The question ultimately is how does a tribe maintain its dignity as a community, a nation, and a tribe, and still deal with the outside world with all its obligations and most important rights? He spells out different scenarios where the claims to sovereignty can then deny their rights as individual citizens of the United States. But more important his analysis is of the history of indigeneity and how it has been addressed by Congress and the Courts to create a morass when it comes to their place in American society. As a critique he concludes: What I have presented here is a tortuous historical glimpse of a people who have yet to gain a clear legal and social recognition of our communities in the larger political society. If citizenship confirms rights and entitlements that were legitimized based on inclusiveness, as Soysal3 points out, then what becomes of citizenship when it’s only partial? He leaves us with no clear answer except to maintain their sovereignty in the face of an insensitive national government and fifty different state jurisdictions.
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Rebecca Tsosie complicates the picture of sovereignty by layering the citizenship of the United States, the citizenship of the individual states where the tribe is located, and citizenship of the tribal government. Each layer implies sovereignty and as such can come into conflict as to obligations, rights, and governance. Further complicating the picture she brings the Indigenous rights in international law governing indigeneity. Tsosie takes us through a journey similar to Marquez’ journey, but with a different approach to the eternal conflict between citizen and sovereignty. The conflicts and contradictions are all too familiar when addressing it from the federal level, where Native Americans were at one point treated as wards then as citizens of different nations, then after 1924 as U.S. citizens, and finally as a racial minority. Each brought about different consequences to the question of sovereignty. A final frame is indigeneity as “peoples.” This last frame is the point of departure for Tsosie from the conflict that Indigenous people face. Cultural rights and land are important to Indigenous people and is the crux of Tsosie’s argument. That is to say as a people Indigenous people have a right to their ways and as to land, their cultural understanding is that they belong to the land not the land belongs to them. The conclusion Tsosie comes to is that the connection to the land leads to a multinationalism where Indigenous peoples and their government are respected “within and across national borders.” Kim Geron and Danvy Le present a very interesting cultural analysis of how the Asian community gained access to the democratic process even as they are still, in a sense, kept at bay. That is to say, the entry into the democratic process has been and continues to be tenuous at best. Their historical account begins with the need for Chinese labor in the mid-nineteenth century. Beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Chinese have continuously been excluded from first citizenship itself to suppression of their ability to access the political process. Moving quickly to contemporary times, Geron and Le point out that either Asians are seen as super students or as foreigners. This new stereotype was part of “the continued racialization in the 20th century (which) invoked a collective identity that unified disparate groups and enabled them to claim their rights.” But it has not simply been stereotypes, rather in a more profound manner, U.S. policies have been directly responsible for the so-called enclaves that represented, instead of a clannish attitude to the outside, a cultural and political power base. They conclude that without community, individual Asians would not have been able to succeed politically and economically. What we have in this volume is not one voice, one argument, or one theory of citizenship and community. One goal in this volume was to bring out the intimate relationship between citizenship and community by focusing on the various distinct excluded communities in our society. What I call the dialectics between citizenship and community is a tenuous relationship that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Communities do not automatically create an active citizenship. Examining how it comes about has been the goal of this volume.
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A second goal is to develop a critique of our political democracy—the unfinished story. Why is political participation so low in the United States? While we don’t address that question directly, our focus on community locates the methodology, so to speak, of a system that belies its own claim to openness. One only has to look at the urban landscape to see that methodology at work. The urban market economy without conscience places value on those who have the resources to build their protected communities from those who do not have resources. A third goal is to depict the diversity that exists in our political democracy that creates communities that are distinct from each other culturally, economically, and socially. Further, this depiction is on top of the race, class, gender, and sexuality hierarchies that have been normalized through a history of an intense consolidation of political power by the most organized community in the nation: corporations. This diversity, however, is the key to political change and that is the final, if unstated, goal in our volume. As chaotic as diversity may be, witness the spontaneous politics pouring into the streets across this nation as people express a democratic impulse that only occurs in jumps and spurts as the politics warrants.4 While protests and demonstrations do not make policy, they shake the soul of those who “dishonor the voter,” to use James’ revealing concept. Lastly, the diversity existing from community to community is but a promise until communities establish their distinct cultural and political identity by which they can express their citizenship and their solidarity.
Notes 1. Louis, Mendoza, A Journey Around Our America: A Memoir on Cycling, Immigration. University of Texas Press, 2012. Louis, Mendoza, The Latinoization of the U.S., Conversations across Our America: Talking about Immigration and the Latinoization of the U.S. University of Texas Press, 2012. 2. Annabel Herzog, Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Responsibility. www.sussex.ac.uk 3. Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship, Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. University of Chicago Press, 1995. 4. Antonio Gramsci, in a different context, talked about a spontaneous politics emerging from the subaltern communities that from time to time exploded in Italian politics. He referred to this hard to capture politics as state consciousness. In our context that would be community consciousness. Antonio Gramsci. Selections From the Prison Notebooks. Editors, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. International Publishers, 1971.
Index
aboriginal title or the right of occupancy 125; inhabitance 78, 90, 92, 95, 159; residentship 5, 159 Act of 1878 22 agency 2, 4, 9, 15, 36–7, 44, 51–2, 64–6, 68–70, 92, 94, 125, 131, 158 agroecological 62, 69 Aqui estamos y nos vamos (we are here and we are not leaving) 64 archetype 2, 5, 43–4 autogestion, or self-determination 91 bachelor societies 148–9 “Ban Vinai” 152 Barron v. Baltimore 102, 113, 131 biopolitical 63, 66–8, 71 Black Congressional Caucus 52, 134–5 “buen vivir” 79, 93–5, 98–9 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) 113, 125, 132 Center City Housing Incentive Program (CCHIP) 83 Cherokee Freedmen 118 Chinatowns, Japantowns, and Manilatowns 144, 149, 152 Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association 147 Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 143 Chisholm, Shirley 51, 52–4, 59, 158 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 56, 157 Civil Rights Act of 1866 108 Civil Rights Act of 1964 108 civitas 7, 11, 12 Code of Indian Offenses 126 commitatus 20–3, 32 commodity 14, 79, 90 communitarian 36
communities of interest 1, 3, 13–14, 37, 79, 151, 157 community as a physical space 142, 148 community citizenship 8, 35, 51, 54, 69, 90, 101, 143, 145, 153 comprehensive immigration reforms 31 Confession Program of 1956 146 constituted political subjectivity 65, 67 cultural citizenship 20, 25, 35, 142 Decade of Downtown 82, 85–6 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 136 decolonial political subjectivity 66 demographic change 21, 23–4, 26, 29, 31–2, 81 demokratia 61, 62 derechos de la madre tierra 79 de-subjectivation 68 dialectical 3, 90 dishonored citizenry 50–9, 158 dispositif (apparatus) 63 diversity 1, 3, 9, 25, 31, 33, 88, 155, 161 Doctrine of Discovery 123 domestic dependent nations 120, 124 Dream Act 28, 66, 73–5 Dred Scott case 121 Elk v. Wilkins 104, 113, 117, 122 Emmons, Glen L. 108 ethnobotanical knowledge 69 Executive Order 9066 of 1941 145 Ex Parte Crow Dog 124, 132 extra-constitutional 124 General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act 105, 127 gentrification 62, 76, 78, 80, 85–6, 90, 96–9
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global 3–6, 11, 16, 19, 26, 33, 43–6, 67, 69–70, 75–6, 79, 85–9, 93–8, 155 Gramsci, Antonio 15, 101, 161 grassroots community 13–14, 18–19, 30, 86
neoliberal 26, 61–70, 72–3, 75–6, 79, 85–91, 99 No Humans Involved (NIH) 55 Northwest Ordinance of 1787 130 NWPC 51
Harrison v. Laveen 129 Hart-Cellar Immigration and Reform Bill of 1965 23 hegemonic 78, 88–9, 99
pan-Latino identity 21, 25, 31, 34; Latino cultural citizenship 26 “paper sons” 145–6 permanent state of exception 67 PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources) 80 President’s Committee on Civil Rights 128
Immigration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975 150 Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 23 Indian Child Welfare Act 118 Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 106 Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA) of 1968 108 Indian Country 101–11, 139 Indian Reorganization Act 109 “Indians not taxed” 102, 105, 108, 120, 122, 123, 129 In re Camille 104 In re Sah Quah 105 Johnson-O’Malley Act of 1934 131 Johnson v. McIntosh 123 Jornada del muerto 63 juridico-political meta-narrative 2, 8 liberal-democratic/Westphalian (LDW) model 88 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock 124 Marshall Trilogy 120 McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 150 McKay v. Campbell 102, 104 Meriam Report 106 Mesoamerican civilizations 62, 64, 66–71, 158 Mexicanx and Chicanx 77 Minuteman project 22 Mission Reach 87 Mission Trails 77 Morton v. Mancari 109 multiculturalism 26 multinationalism 137 multiplex subjectivity 68 nandereko (harmonious living): sumak kawsay 93; suma qamana 93 nativism 21 Naturalization Act of 1790 120
Queen Lili’uokalani 123 racialization 81, 141, 143, 154, 160 re-empowering of tribal governments 101–2, 106–7 Refugee Act of 1980 151 Republic of Hawaii 123 residence 18, 78, 90, 105, 150 Rice v. Cayetano 123 right to the city 3, 6, 13, 61, 69, 71, 78–9, 86, 88–92, 94–5, 97–9, 115, 122, 125, 145–6, 149, 154–5, 159 rule-oriented 41 SA2020 76 sanctuary 28, 63 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez 101 schemas 37, 42, 45 Seaton, Fred A. 108 Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall’s Task Force on Indian Affairs 108 Shelby County v. Holder 56 “Sin Tierra. Sin Papeles. Sin Miedo” 5, 61, 66, 158 Slaughterhouse Cases 104 social contract 11, 18, 35, 88, 91, 114 sovereign exception 6, 63, 67, 73, 75 sovereignty 4–6, 19, 26, 67, 74–5, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109–13, 115, 117–18, 127, 134–5 Standing Bear, Ponca chief 121 state of exception 4, 6, 61–73, 75, 86 structural, structuration 15, 64, 69 structure 8, 14–15, 69, 122 subaltern communities 15, 50–1, 66, 69–70, 158, 161 subjectivity 2–3, 37, 61, 64–9, 71–3, 89, 94 suma qamana position 95 sustainability 62
Index Talton v. Mayes 110 Taylorism or scientific management 70 telluric partisan 62, 64, 66, 68, 72–3 Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco 62 thanatopolitics 63 Trade and Intercourse Acts 120 traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) 65 transborder 61, 63–6, 69, 72, 74, 136 Treaty of Medicine Lodge 125 Triqui and Mixtec peoples 66, 70–1, 158 Trujillo v. Garley 129 Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 144 UNESCO’S 2015 Designation World Heritage 77, 79 United States v. Clapox 126 United States v. Kagama 124
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United States v. Nice 106 United States v. Osborn 103 United States v. Rogers 132 United States v. Washington SC 109 United States v. Wheeler 109 universalization of citizenship 1, 12–13, 25; value-oriented citizenship 41, 46, 48 use value and exchange value of places 68, 90–2 value 1–2, 31, 35–7, 43–4, 50, 57–8, 69, 81, 87, 96, 126, 142–3 Voting Rights Act of 1965 128 Watkins, Arthur V. 107 Worcester decision 128 Worcester v. Georgia 103