Men wait for work in Hometown in front of a No Loitering sign.
Based on historical data from archives across the Garden State, the manuscript in progress “Native” Roots, Colonial Routes: Freehold Tenure and Anti-Immigration Ordinances in New Jersey argues that we can neither understand the rise of local anti-immigration legislation in New Jersey, nor the immigrant-led grassroots actions that have emerged in response, without considering the historical tradition of using local legislation to control the movement of indigenous peoples. The piece analyzes the mobilization of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government to dispossess Native Americans in the US, paying particular attention to the European settlement of Hometown (the field site of Decolonizing Ethnography) in Lenapehoking, and the concurrent importation of the common-law figure of the “freeholder”—the freest possible type of landowner under English law. It examines how the racialization and dehumanization of native peoples laid the foundation for the emergence of US Liberalism, which produces the citizen as a political subject vested with “natural rights” to the land. Since “immigrant illegality” entails the negation of this putative right, we must address the legal dispossession of Native Americans’ ancestral lands in order to understand the socio-historical processes that have resulted in the categorization of certain immigrants as “illegal” in the state.