Troubling Citizenship: Latino Immigrants and the Struggle for Participatory Belonging in the Midwest
This dissertation examines multiple, competing conceptualizations of community and the ways in which membership and communal solidarity differs in a shifting Midwestern social landscape. Most notably, the following chapters explore the efforts of Mexican residents in Central Indiana to participate and belong as recognized members of local, regional, national, and transnational communities. This study critically examines identity politics in the making and marking of community belonging in the United States. More specifically, the dissertation highlights a Mexican ethnic experience in relation to particular Hoosier social surroundings. I explore the ways in which communal solidarity formed in this Midwestern setting, and the intersection of ethnic, racial, linguistic, cultural, gendered, and religious factors that altered membership and belonging. By examining the construction of community on the ground, the following unpacks the lived experience of U.S. identity politics through multi-directional Latino and non-Latino accounts. In response to the social climate, the research focused on citizenship as a driving force in place making. However, the dissertation explores cultural citizenship as a theoretical framework in the analysis of Mexican residents that were actively, if subtly, insisting on new visions of community that valued their unique interventions in the U.S. landscape. An analysis of borders, transnationalism, and cultural citizenship is followed by a discourse and spatial analysis that together develop a provocative examination of community, belonging, and cultural citizenship in practice.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign