The role of language and the presence of previous immigration cohorts in immigrant political engagement: Ecuadorian collective action in New York City and Madrid

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on immigration has recently begun to examine the social process by which immigrants make collective demands. By focussing on the case of Ecuadorian immigrants in New York City and Madrid, this comparative analysis shows that in addition to differences in the political opportunity structures in these cities, there are at least two additional contextual differences shaping the ways in which participants in this study mobilize. Mobilization is shaped by the presence or absence of previous immigration cohorts and by linguistic differences. The findings reveal the value of undertaking comparative case analysis to shed light on immigrant collective political engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• collective action
• comparative research
• substantive citizenship
• political engagement
• language

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professors David FitzGerald and John Skrentny for their advice, and two anonymous reviewers for their help with this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Ecuador is geographically, ethnically and racially diverse. For space constraints reasons, I do not discuss diversity in this article.

2. Mestizo in this article refers to individuals with European and indigenous ancestry.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundación Mutua Madrileña, Madrid, Spain; Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, University of California, San Diego; US-Spain Fulbright Commission: [grant number 15072799]; Latino Initiative Fellowship, University of California, San Diego.