Moral or civic ties? Deservingness and engagement among undocumented Latinas in non-profit organisations

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-profit organisations
• civic engagement
• deservingness
• undocumented immigrants
• public services

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 2011). 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.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the West Coast Poverty Center at the University of Washington and the Center for Poverty Research at the University of California, Davis.