Just Existing Is Political”: Transborder Organizing Pedagogies at a Community-Based Organization for Immigrant and Workers’ Rights

• In Event: Critical Ethnography to Interrogate, Organize and Imagine Justicia: Learning in, from, with, and amongst comunidad

Abstract

Scholarship has highlighted the uniquely generative space of community organizations for intergenerational organizing of immigrant communities for justice (Campano et al, 2016; de los Rios & Molina, 2020; Rusoja, 2022). Community spaces foster critical consciousness development to disrupt neoliberal inequalities (Baldbridge et al., 2017) and center diverse pedagogies and knowledges through political education (Choudry, 2015; Ginwright & Cammarota, 2007; Nafziger et al., 2023). Through participant observation, interviews, and focus groups with intergenerational organizers, this yearlong critical ethnography draws on an organizing pedagogies framework (Rogers et al., 2023) to examine the political education practices of a movement for immigrant and worker rights in New Jersey. This paper demonstrates the transborder knowledges and border pedagogies that are evident across distinct organizing spaces as primarily Latine youth and adult members with border-crossing histories organize for rights and protections, especially urgent in the current political context of heightened surveillance, criminalization, and violent exclusion of immigrants.

Author

• Chloe Bellows, Rutgers University