Constructing Patriotic Grandmotherhood: Anti-Immigration Militancy and Aging Women in New Nativist America

• In Event: 594 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 15. Narrative and Political Identity

Abstract

Since 2005, militant groups in the U.S. have opposed immigration by arming vigilante patrols that police the U.S.-Mexico border under the moniker “Minutemen” (Chavez 2008; Doty 2009; Shapira 2013; Vina et. al. 2007). Focusing on a demographic rendered invisible in most scholarship on this movement, this paper documents how aging white women with virtually no prior experience as political activists and very limited visions of themselves as citizens develop a political identity as patriotic grandmothers through long-term Minuteman involvement. Although scholars have studied how U.S. women in different historical periods claim political agency through their status as mothers (Brennan 2008; Jetter, Orleck and Taylor 1997; Kerber 1980; Koven and Michel 1993; Morgan 2005; Nickerson 2012), few have asked how grandmotherhood operates for similar purposes and under what conditions. Grounded in extensive ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews conducted between 2010 and 2013 with Minutewomen at a border camp and in their hometowns, this study elucidates an example of how militant nativist spaces encourage socially conservative women to use their gendered and generationally-specific experiences of aging as raw materials for doing political identity work. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of further research on patriotic grandmotherhood as political identity as America’s unusually large and disproportionately white baby boomer generation ages and younger generations replacing it consist increasingly of immigrants of color (MacArthur Foundation 2009; Werner 2011).

Author

• Jennifer Lynn Johnson, Kenyon College