¡Somos Resistencia!: Reimagining the Practice of Citizenship Through Community Organizing

Abstract

This thesis takes up the question of what it means to practice citizenship within an ever-evolving landscape of daily violence and resistance. It examines how organizers and members of Resistencia en Acción NJ, a grassroots immigrant and worker’s rights organization in Princeton, engage in informal practices of citizenship through community organizing and empowerment. I approach the study of citizenship as a practice and process rather than a static, bounded relationship between the individual and the state. This thesis contributes to the scholarship on citizenship by framing community organizing as a creative and imaginative practice of citizenship. Drawing from over a month of engaged ethnographic research with Resistencia, I consider how members and organizers, many of whom are excluded from the status of formal legal citizenship, influence local politics and establish their own independent networks of mutual aid and empowerment. I argue that Resistencia members and organizers are engaged in unfinished practices of horizontal noncitizen citizenship, contesting and reimagining what it means to be a part of a political community.