Warwick Law School News

During term one, Dr Carolina Alonso Bejarano will be a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Reflexive Globalisation at Humboldt University, working on her manuscript project, Legal Roots, Colonial Routes: Genealogies of the Un/Citizen in Hometown, USA.

Based on archival data from across New Jersey, USA, news articles, town hall records and interviews with local residents, this manuscript traces a genealogy of the legal construction of the un/citizen in “Hometown,” a small town in New Jersey and the field site of Carolina’s first book, Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (Duke University Press, 2019).

Legal Roots, Colonial Routes elucidates the relationship between immigrants’ rights organizing and the local production of immigrant illegality in the US explored in Decolonizing Ethnography within the larger context of the histories of state violence against Black Americans and Native Americans: How do different colonial systems of illegalization legitimize themselves through racialized and gendered distinctions between “citizens” and “non-citizens,” which are concomitantly mapped onto social space and sedimented through time?

The book addresses this question by critically juxtaposing the history of Hometown’s colonial legal legacy with the story of a contemporary campaign, a “magical coalition” that empowered racialized US citizens and undocumented Latin American residents to organize together against discriminatory local legislation. In considering the potential for a coalitional politics capable of countering intersecting colonial technologies of domination, the project responds to this era of intensified white supremacist logics enforced in the US at the national and local levels.

Image Credit: Latin American men wait for work in Hometown in front of a No Loitering sign. 2012. Art by Peter Quach.