Making requests: Filipina/o and Latina/o immigrant claims-making and racialization

ABSTRACT

Advocacy organizations have reframed immigrants as deserving, and improved their access to services and support; yet, we know little about how low-income immigrants understand organizational frames to make individual requests in public institutions and programmes. Analyzing in-depth interviews and fieldwork over multiple years, we show how Filipina/o and Latina/o immigrants become empowered to make claims through an organization's frame of low-income residents as rightful community members in San Francisco – a self-declared “sanctuary” city where residents have formal access and protections regardless of immigrant or legal status. However, despite newfound confidence and rights awareness, Latina/o participants continually anticipate racialized treatment where others construct them as inferior and illegitimate, which depresses their claims-making. In contrast, Filipina/o participants felt othered in public programmes and institutions, but not blocked by feelings of mistreatment and illegitimacy. We push for attention to how racialization differentially operates for immigrant groups and affects the claims-making process.

KEYWORDS:

• Advocacy frames
• immigrant claims-making
• racialization
• community-based organizations
• anti-immigrant climate
• substantive citizenship

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Kim Ebert, Hyeyoung Kwon, the participants of an American Sociological Association Section on International Migration session, and the anonymous reviewers for providing helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We would also like to thank Valerie Feldman, Robin Savinar, and Willow Mata for their research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While scholars have also recognized that legal citizenship and policies providing protections and political rights do not necessarily confer social citizenship – or the rights and access to economic welfare and security, our findings illuminate substantive citizenship as a process of being recognized and treated as a community member.

2 We use pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of the organization, staff, and participants.

3 For follow-up interviews, we were unable to re-contact eight Latina/os and three Filipina/os from the first interview wave. Therefore, we interviewed a total of 30 participants in the second wave.

4 We did not directly ask about documentation, but spent considerable time volunteering at FMF before conducting interviews. Latina/o respondents often shared intimate details about their migration to the U.S., and most indicated that they did not have papers when they crossed the border.

5 One Latina mother did not want to be recorded. In this instance, the research assistant took and transcribed notes from the interview.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Center for Poverty Research at the University of California, Davis; West Coast Poverty Center at the University of Washington; and University of Louisville Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society.