“We Have Rights:” Low-Income Collective Identity and Immigrant Claims-Making in San Francisco

• In Event: 3549 - Immigrant Resistance: Collective Action and Everyday Contention

Abstract

Past research on advocacy organizations and immigrant deservingness often focuses on organizational leaders or college student activists. As a result, working-poor immigrants, especially those with children, tend to be left out of conversations about immigrant rights despite their large and growing presence in the U.S. We contribute to the literature on immigrant rights and deservingness by considering the role of a community advocacy organization in shaping how working-poor Filipina/o and Latina/o immigrants come to understand their deservingness and claims-making in local institutions and programs in San Francisco, California. Using interview and fieldwork data over several years, we show how these immigrant parents learn new language, ideas, and skills to make claims as low-income residents and to inspire awareness of their rights and access to services and support. We also discuss the limits and possibilities of advocacy organizations as the undocumented Latina/o immigrants negotiate claims-making experiences that are, at times, contested by authority figures and reflective of the broader anti-immigrant climate. We link our findings to the concept of substantive citizenship and argue that how immigrants come to understand and reframe their deservingness through organizational involvement depends on the extent to which they are treated as deserving and as legitimate community members by others, even while immigrants may have formal access and rights in a city like San Francisco.

Authors

• Melanie Jones Gast, University of Louisville

• Dina G. Okamoto, Indiana University

• Emerald Thai Han Nguyen, University of California Davis