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8 Becoming “American” Remaking American National Identity through Environmental Justice Activism This story of second-generation Laotians in Asian Youth Advocates, a youth leadership development program, focuses on how new immigrants and their children engage with environmental and social justice activism, conceive of citizenship , and create new spaces of citizenship both materially and symbolically at multiple spatial scales. The book shows that immigration is a generative site for shaping what it means to be “American.” The unprecedented and massive mobilization of immigrants protesting immigration legislation in spring 2006 highlighted the ongoing struggle for legalization, participation, and citizenship among immigrant groups and their children (Pantoja et al. 2008). These events also drew attention to the politics of belonging, the maintenance and reproduction of boundaries of the community of belonging by dominant political powers, as well as to their contestation and challenge by those considered outside the community of belonging. This case study of second-generation young Laotian women and the spring 2006 protests testify to the continuing debates about the nature of citizenship and national identity in the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While political mobilization among immigrants has revealed the contradiction between the liberal ideology of universal citizenship and the collective boundaries of race, nationality, gender, and class that defines substantive citizenship , or a sense of belonging, participation, and equal access to rights and opportunities , for the most part scholarly research on the new second generation has remained within an assimilationist paradigm. Researchers have argued that it is important to understand the prospects for socioeconomic integration for the new second generation because, in the next fifty years, the culture and quality of life in America will be shaped by the experiences of today’s children of immigrants . Echoing this concern, Portes and Rumbaut (2001:xvii) assert: “Whether this new ethnic mosaic reinvigorates the nation or catalyzes a quantum leap in its 154 Chapter 8 social problems depends on the forms of social and economic adaptation experienced by this still young population.” However, what this concern fails to capture is that even when new immigrants and their children achieve socioeconomic mobility, social citizenship continues to elude them. A strict focus on socioeconomic adaptation in which “race” is simply a matter of color or ethnic differences , and racism is seen as merely the consequence of individual prejudices, ignores the question of the potential for symbolic belonging in the nation for new immigrants and their children. The main argument I make in this book is that there is another story to be told—what the experiences of adaptation and incorporation among the new second generation reveal about contemporary understandings of national identity and membership in the nation, and how these play a role in the incorporation of immigrants and their children and in the formulation of their claims for citizenship and belonging. Such a focus illuminates the distinction between formal and substantive citizenship (Glenn 2004). I find that the racial positioning of new immigrants in the United States, as well as laws, policies, and programs implemented in a range of institutional and public arenas such as schools, social service providers, local and state agencies, employers, and churches, influences their economic, social, and cultural incorporation. Through such daily encounters they undergo a process of sociopolitical incorporation, becoming subjects of dominant rules, norms, values, and systems. This ethnographic case study of second -generation Laotian girls participating in Asian Youth Advocates focuses attention on the role that actors such as social justice organizations play in the dynamic of immigrant sociopolitical incorporation. It considers how interactions structured through a social justice organization help to form their political and social identities and shape their ideas about what it means to be an “American ,” as well as what resources they acquire to make claims at local, state, and national levels. I discover that in order to successfully empower and mobilize Laotians against the environmental and social injustices prevalent in their community , APEN had to first focus on political socialization and the lack of political efficacy within the Laotian community in Contra Costa County. In other words, the struggle for ecological justice, environmental rights, and beneficial corporatecommunity relations had to go hand in hand with developing autonomy and self-determination, along with social movement building, some of the key components enshrined in the Principles of Environmental Justice adopted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, held in October 1991 (Taylor 2000). This was a new immigrant community that lacked structures to...

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