Gender and Cultural Citizenship in San Francisco : Subjectivity and « Self-Esteem » in Immigrant Latina Community Organizing
This article reconfigures cultural citizenship in feminist terms by analyzing how a group of immigrant Latina activists’ in turn-of-the-21st century California come to make claims for political, social, and personal rights. Concepts associated with neoliberal agendas, such as autoestima (« self-esteem »), played a significant role in women’s highly politicized analyses of U.S. society, immigration and welfare policies. Women’s creative redeployment of such terms demands an understanding of the subversive as well as self-conserving dynamic of democratic political practice and discourse in contemporary immigrant rights movements, and the roots of current activism in long standing efforts that transform political subjectivity.