Multilingual Mobilization in the Global City: How Immigrant Organizers in New York City Built Coalitions across Language Lines

• In Event: 333 - Section on International Migration Paper Session. Political Integration of Immigrants and Their Adult U.S. Citizen Children: Mechanisms of Inclusion and Exclusion

Abstract

A social movement advocating for a more multilingual New York City has gained momentum in the new millennium and offers a window into some of the paradoxes of globalization from a hyper-local lens. This paper examines the unique intra-ethnic coalition- building capacities of the global city through the recent emergence of New York City’s language access movement, which ignited in response to threats to immigrant access to welfare benefits posed by the 1996 national welfare reform. I argue that the ethnic and neighborhood-level diversity of immigrant groups facing similar communication challenges creates a far-reaching and robust network of social movement actors that played an essential role in solidifying New York's language access movement. While the diversity of languages spoken in New York could easily become an insurmountable obstacle, I suggest that it was this very diversity that enabled the far-reaching coalition of actors advocating for language. Immigrant leaders articulated language barriers as a challenge that united immigrants across ethnic lines, and they leveraged this diversity as a source of political clout.

This work speaks to prior research on immigrant adaptation by taking a specific mode of incorporation — language access policy in an urban setting — as its unit of analysis. It explores the ways in which immigrants and their children functioned as political actors in the creation of that policy. The implications of this case for understanding ethnic politics in global cities such as New York are discussed.

Author

• Elizabeth Jacobs, University of Pennsylvania