Democracy's Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions

5. Multiple Immigrant Identities & Community Organizations

5 Multiple Immigrant Identities & Community Organizations Labor organizations and worker centers, advocacy organizations, social service organizations, ethnic voluntary organizations, and religious institutions are a key component helping to create the conditions under which immigrants will become involved in U.S. politics. These organizations do not necessarily have political mobilization as their primary motive, nor are they particularly in›uential within the larger political system. Yet whether through direct political mobilization or indirectly through broader measures of socialization, community organizations clearly constitute a component of immigrant political participation and should not be ignored. Immigrants’ characteristics in›uence the kinds of activities that these community organizations pursue. The members of ethnic and racial groups have multiple identities relating to nationality, gender, class, occupation , and even hometown. Immigrants experience the world not just as members of racial and ethnic groups but also as workers, residents, parents , women and men, and in a host of other ways. Even within groups, cleavages are apparent. Both the Chinese and Mexican immigrant communities have major internal divisions based on language, class, region of origin, length of residence, and religion. Although race or ethnicity is often an important starting point for mobilization, few community organizations mobilize solely around those identities. Instead, they choose to expand their constituencies through appeals to more than one identity. The multiple identities of an immigrant encompass ethnicity but are also ›uid and evolving. In responding to those identities, the concerns of one community organization can (and often do) intersect with concerns of other organizations, giving rise not to ethnic or racial isolation but to coalition building as part of the effort to address issues politically. Contrary to the claims that activities of organizations serving immigrant com119 munities reinforce ethnic balkanization and divisions in U.S. society, community organizations’ activities apparently can cross-cut immigrant identities in surprising and sometimes powerful ways. Whereas mainstream political parties appeal to voters only through the largest, most homogenizing of identities (Democrat or Republican), community organizations embrace and reinforce speci‹c identities and their accompanying orientations and concerns. Diversity within an ethnic group is an important factor in political mobilization because internal cleavages within a particular community provide a heightened number of dimensions around which an organization can choose to mobilize and build coalitions.1 Community organizations are thus well-positioned for issuebased mobilization. The internal diversity within an ethnic group constitutes an important factor in immigrants’ political mobilization. Further, the structures internal to speci‹c immigrant communities drive the ways that community organizations choose to mobilize diverse elements within those communities . Attention to the key dimensions that de‹ne internal cleavages within a particular ethnic community reveal these structures. The activities of community organizations re›ect the diversity of needs, resources, and identities of local immigrant communities and have led to new possibilities for immigrant political mobilization. Organizing around Ethnicity: A Threat to American Democracy? Do groups that organize around race or ethnicity threaten American democracy and civic culture? Some academics and journalists have voiced the opinion that the preservation and maintenance of ethnic ties threaten American civic culture, national identity, and social harmony (Skerry 1993; Geyer 1996; Connerly 2003). Samuel P. Huntington argues that since the 1960s, ideologies of multiculturalism and diversity have assailed “America’s core Anglo-Protestant culture and its political creed of liberty” (2004, 17) . He suggests that the presence of a large number of Spanishspeaking immigrants who maintain a Latino identity may bifurcate America along linguistic and cultural lines. Among Mexican immigrants, “the rise of group identities based on race, ethnicity, and gender over national identity” poses a serious challenge to national identity and threatens to “divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages ” (30, 32). Other scholars fear that organizational elites impose a 120 Democracy’s Promise “minority-group perspective” on rank-and-‹le immigrants, which is likely to create divisions in society as a whole (Schlesinger 1993; Skerry 1993). From this viewpoint, organizations based on ethnicity overemphasize minority racial status, work against Americanization, and lead to ethnic con›ict and competition. For example, Peter Skerry asserts that Mexican American community leaders are “tutoring Mexican Americans to de‹ne themselves as a victimized group that cannot advance without the help of racially assigned bene‹ts” (1993, 7). In response to the critics of identity groups, Amy Gutmann (2003) notes that such groups, in and of themselves, are neither bad nor good for America’s democratic...