Relational Legal Consciousness of U.S. Citizenship: Privilege, Responsibility, Guilt, and Love in Latino Mixed-Status Families

Abstract

Based on interviews with 100 members of mixed‐status families in Los Angeles, California, this article analyzes how U.S. citizen children practice and understand citizenship in the context of punitive laws targeting their loved ones. Participants' narratives of citizenship as privilege, responsibility, and guilt reveal that despite normative conceptions of citizenship as a universally equal status, citizenship intersects with key social markers to determine the contours and inequalities of substantive citizenship. Specifically, U.S. citizens in mixed‐status families make sense of their juridical category when they navigate unrealistic aspirations from relatives, maintain silence about undocumented family members' legal status, manage their fear of family separation through deportation, and take on financial and logistical responsibilities prematurely to help relatives. In each of these ways, family proves to be a key site for the social and relational production of citizenship.

Latinos’ deportation fears by citizenship and legal status, 2007 to 2018

“…Uncertainty since the 2016 presidential election with respect to deportation policy and practice, including rare but nascent efforts at denaturalization, may have reversed this optimism (57-59). Among U.S.-born citizens, who are about half as likely as naturalized citizens to live in households with Latino noncitizens, a growing national salience of deportation policy and practice under a vocally-hostile presidential administration may matter (16). Their privileged birthright citizenship may have buffered against deportation fears prior to the 2016 presidential election, but virulent rhetoric targeting Latinos-regardless of citizenship or legal status-may underlie their heightened fears (13).…”

“…26.6 million Latino U.S. citizen adults live with 4.8 million noncitizens; 17.3 million Latino U.S. citizen children live with 7.7 million noncitizens. † Ethnographies of these mixed-citizenship families reveal that U.S. citizens internalize fears their family members may be deported (16,17). Even in households where all Latino members are U.S. citizens, worries of being misrecognized as deportable in an U.S. immigration regime racialized in its enforcement may contribute to deportation fears (13,18,19).…”

‘Not falling for that’: law's detraction and legal consciousness in the lives of Brazilian anti-torture activists

“…Second, it calls for attempts to track the institutional production of legal detractors. Of what social locale – considering issues of gender, race, class, immigrant status, relational ties (Chua and Engel, 2019; Abrego, 2019) and others – do those come from? What is their experience with government institutions?…”

“I Was Born at the Border, Like the ‘Wrong’ Side of It”: Undocumented Latinx Youth Experiences of Racialization in the U.S. South

“…When looking at the racial categorization of undocumented Latinx immigrants specifically, it is also important to look at how the concept of race is closely connected to modern conceptions of nation and citizenship, especially racialized citizenship (Abrego 2019; Carrillo and Rodriguez 2016). Relatedly, Weitz (2003) argues, “While racial distinctions have most often been based on phenotype, race is not essentially about skin color but about the assignment of indelible traits to particular groups.…”