Men wait for work in Hometown in front of a No Loitering sign.

Legal Roots, Colonial Routes: Genealogies of the Un/Citizen in “Hometown” USA

Based on legal and decolonial feminist theories, archival data from across New Jersey, USA, news articles, and interviews with local residents, this project traces a genealogy of the legal construction of the un/citizen in Freehold, 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. It 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 project was selected by the Center for Advanced Studies in Reflexive Globalisation at the University of Humboldt in Berlin, where Carolina is currently working as a Senior Fellow until December 2025, and it consists of two article-length essays:

First, “Legal Roots, Colonial Routes: ‘Olde Freehold’ and Immigrant Illegalization in Hometown, USA” is an examination of the colonial history of Freehold, the place where singer Bruce Springsteen is from and the inspiration for his acclaimed song “My Hometown,” reminiscent of many little towns across the US. The history of dispossession of Lenape land and peoples, as well as the enslavement of African people and their descendants in this so-called “All-American” town are explored vis à vis the legal history of freehold tenure (the common law figure) as it was mobilized to advance the English colonial project in what is today New Jersey. This historical framework reveals the 21st century processes of illegalization of Latin American undocumented immigrants in Freehold as rooted in localized technologies of exclusion and oppression used against Native Americans and Black Americans from the early colonial era.

Building on this history, the second essay, “‘Together We are Invisible’: Magical Coalition in a New Jersey Town” (winner of the Andrés Torres Paper Series Award, granted by the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development & Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts-Boston) tells the story of a contemporary campaign, a “magical coalition” that empowered racialized US citizens and undocumented Latin American residents of Freehold to organize together against discriminatory local legislation. In an era of intensified white supremacist logics enforced in the US at the national and local levels, this project considers the potential for a coalitional politics capable of countering intersecting colonial technologies of domination.