The Fulcrum for Immigrant Civic Engagement

Abstract

It is difficult to find the ideal term to refer to the complex process of establishing and asserting one's identity-as an individual or as part of a group. This process, referred to by some as constructing a social reality is, indeed, personal and self-initiated but, at the same time, it is dynamic, interactive, and in part, reactive. The mirror in which an immigrant sees his or her identity is, in part defined by the community in which he or she lives and, within that community, his or her social networks. Farmworker's ambivalence as to whether their identity can really be reduced to life as braceros, working machines, or, whether there is more to life than that is inevitable. Mexican immigrants' ambivalence expressed by as to whether they should be left out of the decennial census and remain statistically invisible because they don't belong, is equally predictable. However, effective engagement implies an identity-a perspective, hopes, dreams, ideals, and a personal style. One's personal identity, or one's social identity as a member of an informal or formal group is the fulcrum for social interaction and, thus, for participation.The process of defining and asserting one's identity is a lifelong one and it is fairly obvious that for most of us it is something of a struggle, a never-ending work in progress, punctuated with fitful starts, experiments, adjustments, and modulations. As Verba, Schlozman, and Brady point out, the process of developing skills is affected both by personal experience in informal settings and by learning experiences in formal educational settings. However, the Civic Voluntarism model tacitly assumes that the social context in which all of these learning experiences take place are the same one. This is not the case when it comes to immigrants. Because immigrants find themselves transitioning from one environment to another, the basic assumptions which govern our overall model of skills development do not hold true. Past experience, knowledge of processes, styles of communication,, and understanding of how civic systems work must be adjusted to a new reality and the inferences which govern this translation involve much more than just acquiring a new skills set; they involve creating a new personal identity, a new social identity (i.e. persona), and developing a new voice, that includes personal style and modes of communication.At the level of community life, this dynamic process of re-invention is not simply a personal one but, also, one which may engage an entire family, an entire social network, or, an entire ethnic group (since ethnicity, by definition, refers to self-identification and network relationships). We focus on two particular cases, each of which exemplifies a more general challenge relating of immigrants' adaptation to California society and development of activism.My analysis highlights the experiences and reflections of two quite different immigrant activists. One is Jorge San Juan, a young Mixteco construction worker who is also the volunteer coordinator of a Mixtec cultural group Se'e'Saavi, and a member of the Board of Directors of a community-based organization, the Centra Binacional para el Desarollo Indigena Oaxaqueno (CBDIO). Jorge's story is relevant not simply to his individual development but to the more general challenge of Mixteco immigrants' re-assertion of their cultural, social, and political identity in a transnational space now referred to by some researchers as Oaxacalifornia. The second of these community activists is Raquel Velasco, a middle-aged mother of two teenager daughters and a grown son, who was, for several years, the informal but charismatic unpaid leader of a group of immigrant activists seeking to secure affordable housing in Winters. Her story, too, transcends her personal struggle, to reflect on the challenges faced by Mexican women in negotiating new gender roles in the course of their life in California Through these two activists' accounts of their experiences and perspectives, we explore both the process through which individual immigrants' re-invent their identity in the brave new world of California life and the process through which groups of immigrants engage in the process of creating or strengthening bonding social capital and deploying it within the arena of local life. …