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 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.

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 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 an era of intensified white supremacist logics enforced at the national and local levels, this project considers the potential for a coalitional politics capable of countering intersecting colonial technologies of domination.