William Sites is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. His fields of interest include urban studies, community organization, politics, movements and social theory.

Rebecca Vonderlack-Navarro is a PhD Candidate in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.

TITLE: “Tipping the Scale, Centering the City: Bi-National State Projects, Chicago’s Mexican Hometown Associations, and the 2006 Marches for U.S. Immigrant Rights”

ABSTRACT:

First-generation Mexican immigrant hometown associations (HTAs) in Chicago played a leadership role in the city’s 2006 marches for immigrant rights.  Employing a bi-national historical framework focused on the complex relationship between states and social movements, we have argued elsewhere (Sites and Vonderlack-Navarro, in process) that the recent involvement of these traditionally Mexico-focused HTAs in U.S.-oriented mobilization is best understood as the result of an evolving history of organizational responses to political projects undertaken by various state actors on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border.  Building on this work, this paper takes up questions of scale and urban politics, examining how the broad range of state projects relevant to an understanding of HTA-related mobilization (such as the Mexican government’s longstanding diaspora-reincorporation efforts, the U.S. national-policy debates over immigration reform, and the recent Illinois state-governmental programs that court Mexican HTAs as attractive voting blocs) might be understood in relation to processes of state rescaling and urban governance that have accompanied neoliberal restructurings in both Mexico and the United States.  Although, like many other observers, we recognize the pivotal role of the Sensenbrenner legislation (U.S. House of Representatives bill 4437) in spurring the 2006 marches, we argue that a longer-term conferral of political legitimacy upon the Chicago HTA federations by state projects at multiple scales enabled the threat posed by Sensenbrenner to become a catalyst (rather than a deterrent) to popular mobilization.  We also suggest that a major consequence of the 2006 marches – the accelerated U.S. political incorporation of Chicago’s Mexican emigrant/immigrant community – can be understood as a significant “tipping” of scale, one in which urban-centered coalition-building and U.S. state/local interest-group politics have become the organizations’ newly privileged field of engagement.