Conflicts of Home-Making: Strategies of Survival and the Politics of Assimilation

ABSTRACT

Latinx communities that shape the US cultural landscape and assimilationists who reject this influence each have a desire to feel at home in the US. Nevertheless, people hold conflicting intuitions about which group's home-making practices are morally justifiable. Some feel that those belonging to the cultural majority have the right to determine membership through the admission of only those outsiders who will not disrupt their way of life. Others sense that when assimilationists express the need to feel at home in their country, this seems to be, at the very least, tinged with a morally distasteful xenophobia. In this essay, I provide an account of each of these conflicting intuitions. Drawing from Mariana Ortega's notion of hometactics and from Tomás Ybarra-Frausto's discussions of rasquachismo, I propose that many immigrants and Latinxs’ home-making practices involve efforts to create a sense of familiarity and identity affirmation in a place where they are regularly reminded that they do not belong. Meanwhile, an examination of early and contemporary US nation-building practices demonstrates that assimilationists’ ability to feel at home also aims at identity affirmation, but it is intolerant of difference and requires the eradication, rather than the incorporation, of that which is foreign.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration studies
• assimilation
• home
• belonging
• Latinx identity
• settler colonialism
• mixedness

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the American Philosophical Association (APA) Committee on Native American and Indigenous Philosophers for allowing me to present an early version of this paper in the committee session they arranged at the 2018 APA Pacific Division Meeting. I am also grateful to audience members at that session for their generative engagement with this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lori Gallegos is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University. Her research interests include moral psychology, Latin American and US Latinx philosophy, and critical philosophy of race. Her publications appear in Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and Topoi: An International Journal on Philosophy. She is currently co-editor of the APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy.

Notes

1. Not all people experience or establish a sense of home in the same way, but I argue that we can still conceive of the sense of having a home as a deep and widely shared need. People with nomadic lifestyles, for instance, do not depend on remaining in a fixed physical location. It is worth noting, however, that many nomadic tribes nevertheless have very significant relationships with particular lands or territories, even if they do not settle in a single place within those territories or hold property in legally recognised ways (Gilbert 2007). Psychologists have found that place tends to be an object of strong attachments (Lewicka 2011). They have also suggested that it may be useful to think of place as consisting in social and not merely spatial or physical dimensions (Hidalgo and Hernández 2001). These considerations suggest the need to adopt a flexible notion of home, while still acknowledging its relation to important psychological needs.

2. For an in-depth treatment of the question of home and being-at-home, especially in relation to racialised bodies, See Chapter Three of Helen Ngo’s (2017) The Habits of Racism. With regard to the necessity of the home, Ngo writes, ‘We need the home because it allows us to function, to go about our daily projects unimpeded by an objectifying—and ultimately inhibiting—gaze, and indeed because habits themselves, insofar as they are understood as a bodily habituation or orientation, supply the ground or launching pad for action and creativity’ (120). For other, critical, stances on the notion of home, see Maria Lugones (2003). Lugones identifies home for some not as a place of comfort and ease, but rather a place that contains violence that is on a continuum with the violence on the street and elsewhere. Also, Celia T Bardwell-Jones (2017) worries that for many displaced people the ‘recovery of home may be seen as a lost cause that leads to a romanticising nostalgia that inevitably essentialises one's cultural homelands’ (152), though she ultimately argues for a notion of home-making as a positive process within a transnational context.

3. For the purposes of this paper, I am not able to take up these particular complexities in detail. However, it would be worthwhile in future work to consider relevant question of how our guiding conceptions of home shape the ways in which we dwell within our environments and how we treat those with whom we co-habitate.

4. There may be cases in which the claim that an immigrant ought to learn English is motivated by something other than xenophobia. For instance, if one sees that the child of an immigrant is being overburdened as a translator or that an immigrant has a particular goal that requires interaction with a broad public, the claim that the immigrant should learn English may not be a form of assimilationism. This benevolence can easily slip into assimilationism, however, if it is supported by the overall attitude that what is best for the immigrant is, generally, to comply with dominant norms.

5. The point of making this comparison between Spanish and US colonialism is not to suggest that one approach to conquest was preferable, or less devastating to those people who were affected by these practices and who continue to be impacted by the legacy of colonialism. Rather, this comparison demonstrates that colonisation has been carried out through various means, and my aim is to highlight the distinctive commitment to cultural purity that characterised US colonialism.

6. I thank Emma Velez for her help in fleshing out this insight.

7. This point should not be conflated with the mistaken view that anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, or cultural nativism do not exist in Latin America.

8. Whereas I have argued that a feature of assimilationism is the eradication of the foreign, Ngo (2017) argues that white being-at-home (or being-at-ease) is, rather, predicated on racialised not-being-at-home and creates the conditions for racialised uncanniness. In her words, ‘Whiteness gets installed as the normative centre by virtue of this pushing out of racialised bodies to the margins; the canniness of white bodies is predicated on the uncanniness of racialised ones’ (125). In other words, whereas I have argued that assimilationists desire or prefer cultural homogeneity, Ngo contends that what is peculiar about white homeliness seems that it is based on, not merely the need to feel at home, but the need for others to be not-at-home.

9. See, for example, the work of Lawrence and Dua (2005) and of Sharma and Wright (2009), which debates the question of whether differently positioned people of colour are settlers. Also see the notion of ‘arrivants’ in the work of Jodi Byrd (2011), which describes those who are implicated in settler colonialism without being the same as white settlers.

10. See the Nation's video: <http://www.tonation-nsn.gov/nowall/>.

11. For a discussion of the ethics of assimilation that focuses on evaluating the actions of the one who assimilates in light of the possible harms of assimilation, see Ortega (2008). Responding to Callan (2005), Ortega argues that given the relational, contradictory, ambiguous nature of subjectivity, it may be very difficult, if not impossible, to make blanket determinations about whether one ought to assimilate or, for that matter, how much agency a person actually has to determine the extent to which they assimilate. One normative implication of this view, I take it, is that imposing blanket expectations of assimilation may be unfair (if not harmful for the reason that I have described).