Discipline and Punish: The Cultural Contradictions of Citizenship and Belonging among the Children of Latin American Immigrants

Leo Chavez - University of California, Irvine  

Abstract: This paper examines issues of citizenship/subject making in relation to governmental processes that stigmatize and punish certain categories of immigrants and their children, public discourses of “othering,” “threat,” and “danger” to the nation in relation to practices of citizenship and feelings of belonging, and social science discourse that promotes representations of foreignness (e.g., “second generation immigrants”).  U.S. Latino children of immigrants will be the subjects in question and the targets of the above citizen-subject making technologies and processes, following Foucault’s notions about the “analytics of power.”  More specifically, this paper builds upon Aiwha Ong’s work with Cambodian refugees in that it attempts to understand the development of attitudes, aspirations, and behaviors among, and in relation to, Latino children of immigrants who are in the process of becoming members of a modern liberal society.  What citizenship and belonging means to them, and to the larger society, is what this paper hopes to discover.  Data for the paper will include public policy debates on education for children with undocumented parents, recent publications raising an alarm about Mexican immigrants and their children (e.g., Samuel Huntington), and interviews with adult children of Latin American immigrants.

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