Transplanting the organizing seed: Seasoned activists’ political habitus and the transnational social field

Abstract

This article examines the political habitus of “seasoned activists,” a group of individuals that capitalize on their long-standing activism and organizing experience gained in El Salvador to build community-based organizations in the Washington, DC metro area. Through in-depth and semi-structured interviews with 25 seasoned activists, I find that although they have transitioned to locally based community work, they have maintained an activist and committed political habitus, defined as the dispositions, thoughts, and actions that influence the political choices of an actor and come to underlie the political ethos that a change-agent uses. Nevertheless, the role of the Salvadoran government in expatriate communities and a changing DC context produce contentious conditions for seasoned activists to practice their organizing work. These findings add to the growing literature on Salvadoran transnational practices, both reaffirming some of the tensions embedded in the social field and elucidating how transnational actors challenge the very processes that subjugate them.