What is citizenship? How have theorists understood citizenship so far? How have lay people made sense of their experiences as subjects/citizens? What can be learned from Latina immigrants in San Francisco as they struggled for recognition as being worthy of human dignity and citizenship entitlements since the 1990s? Kathleen Coll's book tackles these long-standing questions about citizenship based on collaborative/participatory research from a cultural anthropological perspective. Ethnographically rich, Remaking Citizenship provides a counterargument to dominant liberal theories of citizenship by looking beyond the formalities of individualistic rights and duties and their enactment and enforcement by governmental authorities. By building on cultural and critical feminist studies of citizenship, Coll turns the focus of attention to informal practices of citizenship at the margins of society, where she finds that despite their status as noncitizens, immigrant women have organized and engaged in collective activities that have developed not only their sense of political power but also concrete, alternative ways of recreating the very meaning of citizenship.
In the book, Coll begins by sharing one of her first fieldwork experiences that set the tone of her study. Within the political context of immigration and welfare reforms in 1996, she attended a citizen naturalization ceremony where immigrants with different statuses and national backgrounds campaigned for voter registration. In analyzing why and how these immigrants were involved in such a campaign, the author was able to capture the veracity of the popular chant “Today we march, tomorrow we vote” (p. 25). Hers is not just a documentation of immigrants' contention but an analysis of how their activism as noncitizens has challenged the boundaries of citizenship and reformulated citizenship practice. Citizenship is not a “static bundle of rights and entitlements” (p. 8) but a contentious, dialogic, and intersubjective process of intimate—and gendered—motives (such as undocumented immigrants' sons and daughters fulfilling basic needs) and public demands (such as requesting assurance from school principals or hospital administrators that immigrant children are treated fairly). These motives become tightly linked, and Coll specifically looks into these private/public processes in Chapters 2 and 3, where she reveals how stories of motherhood and family are intrinsic to immigrants' citizenship struggles. Through these discussions, the author builds her argument that in order to better understand how citizenship is constantly recreated beyond the formal precepts of the state, attention ought to be paid to the experiences of citizenship praxis by individuals at the edge of society. Not only are they the ones staking claims to be fully recognized as subjects worthy of citizenship, but also—and here lies Coll's main, and most debatable, argument—they are the ones from whom the rest of US society, including policymakers, should be learning about innovative ways of participatory, active democracy.
In the rest of the book, Coll endeavors to show how and why scholars should be focusing on these more informal aspects of citizenship praxis. She weaves narratives of Latina immigrants who regularly attended the organization Mujeres Unidas y Activas, MUA (United and Active Women) with her theoretical discussion on cultural citizenship. Mainly, she builds on the works by Renato Rosaldo (“Cultural Citizenship in San José, California,” PoLAR: Politcal and Legal Anthropology Review 17 [no. 2, 1994]: 57—63), Aihwa Ong (“Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States [and Comments and Reply],” Current Anthropology 37 [no. 5, 1996]: 737–62), and Stuart Hall and David Held (“Citizens and Citizenship,” in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacque, eds., New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, 1989). Like these authors, Coll believes that citizenship is a “process defined not only by the culturally and historically constituted legal institutions of power politics and the state nor even by what has been traditionally recognized as political participation and civic engagement,” but mainly by the “daily struggles, collective analyses, and diverse expressions of resistance to inequality of subordinated citizen-subjects” (p. 8). In this vein, she focuses on the ways that Latina immigrants “challenged their political marginalization as low-income, non-English-speaking women and the dehumanization of terms such as illegal and alien. In doing so, they embodied claims against the legitimacy of cultural, administrative and legal obstacles that prevent full social and political participation of immigrants in U.S. life” (p. 8) and represented themselves “as legitimate, if not legal, claimants to the rights, privileges, and obligations of citizenship” (p. 9).
While Coll dedicates a significant amount of time to sharing experiences of personal empowerment, her research is not a reassertion that change that happens at the individual level may be politically valuable despite broader oppressive systems remaining intact. Instead, she shows how the processes by which Latina immigrants at MUA became self-confident and active were indeed collectivist and public (as opposed to individualistic and private). For example, in Chapters 4 and 5, she documents how Latina immigrants participated in a self-esteem program devoted to linking their personal stories with those of other immigrants, and encouraging them to become vocal in the organization and beyond. As a result of this program, Latina immigrants were able to express that they had gained the ability to reestimate their value as individuals and community members; they elaborated their traumatic experiences of migration, exploitation, and discrimination, and in some cases, domestic violence; they learned how to speak up at home and speak out in public; and they became active in helping peers in their communities, as well as in collaborating with the broader political campaigns of the organization. Since the process of Latina immigrants' personal empowerment had such community-oriented roots and consequences, Coll points to the value for mainstream American society of learning from these women's citizenship praxis, given the present “neoliberal” culture of individualism, political apathy, and economic competition (p. 112).
The development of these Latina immigrants' sense of belonging and collective political power was particularly strengthened by their participation at a summer-long workshop organized by MUA and the Chinese Progressive Association that was intended “to develop leadership skills of and facilitate exchange between Chinese and Latina women across significant divides, including language, immigration status, and educational backgrounds” (pp. 133–4). In Chapter 6, Coll highlights the potential of coalition building between minority groups, and poignantly shows the power not only of learning about shared histories of exclusion and social mobilization but also of such collaborative, cross-cultural, and grassroots contexts. In what I find to be the peak of the book, she explains that for many of these women, this first opportunity to think about how they might “write” themselves “into the national citizenship story” (p. 138) was a powerfully awakening experience.
Lastly, in Chapter 7, Coll goes over the various ways in which Latina immigrants “used creative protest and mobilized their cultural traditions and identities in support of their struggles for social justice and political recognition” (p. 174), while renovating the very meaning of citizenship from below. Similar to the way in which she opens the book, the author points to the broader relevance of her fieldwork of the mid-1990s by addressing Latina immigrants' activism post-2001 and during major immigration mobilizations from 2006 to 2008. These latter events allowed her to emphasize the transformative power that MUA had on its members in the long run, as well as the potential that this kind of grassroots organization has to push for policy change on a larger scale by unifying forces with other groups. By addressing the way in which MUA had to adapt organizationally to changing economic and political circumstances, as well as by contrasting how local, state, and federal politics affect individuals' lives, Coll points to the complexity of dealing with immigration policy on multiple levels. So while the book “presents one version of a particular story of how a group of immigrant women worked together in a contentious time” (p. 154), she continuously links this with larger issues, thus strengthening her position on the relevance of nontraditional spaces of citizenship (re)making.
Overall, the book is a valuable contribution to a debate usually dominated by theoretical accounts that lose sight of the informal processes through which citizenship is contested and rebuilt by lay individuals and civil society. Readers unfamiliar with anthropological writings or with critical feminist perspectives may find an overemphasis on women's testimonies (since Coll candidly follows Gloria Anzaldúa's claim that narratives are “intersubjective and multilayered social theories” [p. 11]), as articulated in “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness,” in Anzaldúa, ed., Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives, 1990). While in my view, this is not problematic, I found the book's main shortcoming to emerge from Coll's research methodology. Her efforts to relate with (and fully comprehend) Latina immigrants at MUA were at times compromised because of her position as an outsider. Although she tried to shrink the gap between researcher and research subjects by developing collaborative, participatory research, she continued to be perceived as an amiga del grupo (“a friend of the group,” p. 31) who did not seem to fully fit because of her different immigration, racial, ethnic, and class background.
This limitation, while perhaps inevitable, permeated her views. For example, she claims that the women's stories helped her “appreciate the complex, multifaceted, and highly personal ways that people experience social inequality” (p. 33), as if exclusionary processes were foreign to her, and she often seemed to be surprised by women's capacities to keep going despite all kinds of adversities. Likewise, some of her analyses did not fit with, or seemed to stray too far from, Latina immigrants' verbalizations, such as the section on “sexual citizenship” (p. 121) and her assessment of “theoretical interventions” and personal and political change (pp. 113–14). To her credit, Coll was aware of, and tried to address, such tensions, particularly in the Introduction, Chapter 1, and in the appendix, where she refers to the “warning about the false innocence of politically inspired social criticism and the ways in which it may reify the relationships and subject positions of the critic and the object of study” (p. 189), as articulated by Judith Butler (“Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Post-modernism’,” in Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political, 1992).
In sum, Coll's ability to keep a critical eye on the organization's programs despite her overall praising of MUA as a model for activism and progressive politics is worthy of recognition. Likewise, her inclusion of political and sociological theoretical literature from Latin America in her transnational analysis of Latina immigrants' activism in the United States is important for understanding how their civic and political culture may have originated elsewhere.
