“Showing up for our community and giving love”: Building communality in people From immigrant backgrounds

People build communality to resist oppressive conditions, serving their communities to collectively thrive. Sense of community (SOC) often implies group membership, creating a SOC-diversity dialectic that may promote out-group exclusion. Based on Indigenous perspectives from Latin America, communality expands on SOC to include resisting oppression and promoting liberation, surpassing group membership borders. Communality builds collective power through service grounded in a deep responsibility for collective well-being. Our study analyzed 58 semi-structured interviews with Latinx people with ties to immigrant communities in California, exploring how they foster communality. We utilized relational consensus analysis and reflexive thematic analysis. Results highlight how participants build communality by serving their communities. Immigrant people organize to enact change in work and school settings, nurturing allyship and intersectional solidarity across identity borders and levels of fundamental risk. Their pursuit of collective thriving involved advocating to counter systemic prejudice and promoting life-affirming practices. Participants were committed to show up for the overall community, including those who may still exert power to harm. Amid increasing polarization and systemic hatred, interviewees nurtured solidarity entanglements to pursue justice and co-create conditions of thriving for all.