Speaking up, rising above: Latina lived citizenship in the metropolitan US South

Abstract

Based on original ethnographic material, this piece explores the relationship between legally precarious Latina migrants and the co-ethnic activists serving as their advocates and mentors, treating this relationship as generative of a dynamic process of being and becoming political for migrant women and youth in the metropolitan US South. I adopt an intersectional and intergenerational feminist lens to analyze Latino educational and civic engagement programs in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, showing how migrant mothers, daughters, activists, and educators inside these programs became variously implicated in cultivating and performing new right claims to the local community. Overall, the piece contributes to theorizing the intertwined normative and subversive dimensions of lived citizenship, showing how intersubjective processes and radical acts of care are central to the ways racialized migrants re-imagine citizenship and belonging in hostile new destinations.