Autodeterminación: A Bay Area Case Study of Non-citizen Political Incorporation

• In Event: Local Organizations and Immigration Political Incorporation

Abstract

In 2021 seven Latina women in a small city in California’s Silicon Valley came to together to form a bilingual, multiracial, and cross-class mutual aid effort to financially support undocumented Latino migrants impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their unprecedented effort in supporting their community resulted in the local city government selecting the Fund to redistribute over $1 million of federal funds as direct aid to migrant families. In partnership with the Fund, I develop a community-based project using participant action research and extended case study methods to investigate the intersection of political incorporation of migrants and non-state provision of public goods. Through ongoing inductive theorization, I document the political incorporation of non-citizens as they advocate for community ownership of housing consistent with their organizational goal to demonstrate the their capacity for autodeterminación, or self-governance.

When do US cities engage in redistribution to non-citizens, and how might this be facilitated by their political incorporation? Through this study, I hope to elucidate the mechanisms by which immigrants interact with the state and how this shapes political incorporation and redistribution. The community elites I interview represent a mixed-race, mixed-status community in Silicon Valley, California, a multi-level policy environment with high state capacity at the national, state, and local levels.

My preliminary findings indicate that both city-run, multi-lingual civic engagement trainings and undocumented parents’ participation in public school governance serve as useful sites of political learning and incorporation. In contrast to the literature that finds that diversity undermines public goods provision, I find that welcoming policy environments can facilitate relationship building between migrant populations and state actors, ultimately resulting in public and private redistribution. This study of the impact of city interventions on local citizen and non-citizen engagement underscores the role of local institutions as models of democratic adaptation as US cities of all sizes incorporate increasingly diverse populations. The findings contribute to the literatures on non-state provision of public goods, redistribution in diverse settings, and political incorporation of migrants, with potential implications for local-level integration policy. I conclude with ideas for incorporating quantitative methods and further theorization on the implications for democratic reimagination.

Author

• Paige Hill, Stanford University