ABSTRACT
As alternatives to mainstream institutions, local non-profit organisations (NPOs) are important sites for immigrant civic engagement; yet, there is little research on how immigrants negotiate the benefits of NPOs. We use ethnographic fieldwork and multiple in-depth interviews with 39 NPO staff and Latina immigrants in San Francisco, California. We offer new insights about how undocumented, low-income, Latina mothers – a group constrained by multiple barriers – negotiate direct assistance and civic engagement in NPOs. Although NPOs provide both direct services and civic engagement opportunities, we find that moral judgments within the broader anti-immigrant and anti-welfare climate impact how Latinas feel the need to ‘give back’ or ‘ration’ services in NPOs. Additionally, the expectation that direct services are an entrée for civic engagement has consequences for how Latinas negotiate deservingness and work to preserve their self-worth. For some, these expectations depress further engagement or drive intergroup divisions.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Erin Hamilton, Cecilia Menjívar, 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 authors.
ORCID
Melanie Jones Gast http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8529-2078
Dina G. Okamoto http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9331-6693
Notes
1. In 1992, in response to the state of California's threats to withhold state funding for an anti-drug program, the city amended the ordinance to exempt non-citizens who had been convicted of a felony from protection.
2. For follow-up interviews, we lacked updated contact information for two respondents and we were unable to re-contact another five respondents from the first interview wave. Therefore, we interviewed 21 mothers in the second wave.
3. The exception was for one with a mother who did not want to be recorded. We took copious notes during the interview.
4. Some of the families lived in single-room occupancy apartments.
5. In 2011, the federal poverty line was $14,710 for a family of two and $22,350 for a family of four (US Department of Health and Human Services Citation2011). A few mothers had also been homeless in San Francisco at one time or another.
6. The NPO staff gathered the names of parents and children, phone numbers, and children's ages and schools for the publicly-funded housing and bus pass assistance, but never asked for citizenship or documentation status.