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4 Beyond Borders? Citizenship and Contemporary Latina/o and Immigrant Social Movements The paradigm of the border involves us in an ontological question: What kinds of world or worlds are we in? —José David Saldívar I stood in Copley Square in Boston on Saturday, July 10, 2010, on a stunningly bright summer morning. Lining the cement path that ran along the small, grassy park were a number of small folding tables featuring an assortment of buttons, books, pamphlets , and newspapers from various activist organizations. Meanwhile, a makeshift covered stage was assembled on the bed of a pickup truck parked at the front of the square in the shadows of the stone-faced, nineteenth-century Trinity Church. I could feel an energy crackling in the air as we congregated in the open green space in front of the platform. People bubbled up from subway tunnels and streamed around street corners, while organizers passed out placards and directed protestors to the center of the square. Most of us were assembling for an organized political protest against anti-immigrant legislation and anti-Latina/o sentiment. The protest was one of dozens of nationwide demonstrations throughout the summer of 2010, spurred on most directly by the anti-immigrant Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act), signed into law on April 28, 2010, by Arizona’s republican governor Jan Brewer. At this gathering, nearly three months after the passage of SB 1070, a coalition of student groups, labor unions, immigrant and Latina/o organizations from throughout New England and New York, and approximately a thousand demonstrators protested as Governor Brewer attended the National Governors ’ Association (NGA) meeting in Boston. Organizations as diverse as the Ser- 110 | Chapter 4 vice Employees International Union, the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), the International Socialist Organization (ISO), and local immigrant rights groups (Proyecto Hondureño and Unidad Latina en Acción) participated in the protest, and demonstrators came from Boston, New York, New Jersey, and throughout New England. I approached the protest in Boston with a strange mix of the scholar’s impassioned interest and the activist’s nervous excitement. This was my chance to study the immigrant movement in my own backyard. More important, I could stand in solidarity with protestors and lend my voice and body to the cause. Taking inspiration from what Dwight Conquergood identifies as the “affinities” between rhetoric, performance , and ethnography, I approached the protest as an opportunity to explore vernacular voices, to unsettle truths about Latina/os and immigrants, and to bear witness as protestors brought the margin to the center. As Conquergood writes, letting go of the scholar’s (supposed) objectivity and embracing the performative dimensions of ethnographic participation “alters the power relationship of the fieldwork and changes the hierarchy of observer and observed into more of a partnership.” The intersection of ethnographic participation with a rhetorical/performative perspective provides the opportunity to “locate counterpublics” in their enactment “and listen for and think about ‘voice over domination.’”1 Thus as the protestors milled around Copley Square in preparation for the demonstration, I struggled to find the appropriate balance between excitement and detachment—to participate in the evolution of the immigrant rights movement, to see Latina/o vernaculars take shape, and to join my voice with others. Though the protest was organized under a unified theme of opposition to restrictive and racist immigration legislation, the discourses of the protest—verbal, visual, and embodied—touched on a variety of topics including labor rights of the undocumented , neoliberal global economic policy, educational availability for immigrant youth, racism in law enforcement, and partisan criticisms of Republican politics. In spite of the eclecticism of the constituents and organizers, the protest was unified as a form of confrontational rhetoric against Arizona SB 1070.2 Moreover, the “raucous ” protest provided me a personal entry point into the ongoing contestation over borders, citizenship, and immigration, particularly by Latina/o groups.3 I was no longer merely an academic observer; the demonstration constituted me as part of the movement itself through my sign waving, chanting, and marching, and the nervous surveillance of police and anti-immigrant demonstrators, both of whom hovered around the protest and followed as it moved through downtown, interpellated us as part of a disorderly, unruly, and potentially un-American group that needed to be monitored and contained. This chapter extends the preceding analysis of immigrant mobilizations and dem- [3.142.173.227] Project MUSE (2024...

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