Challenges to Citizenship: Latino Immigrants and Political Organizing in the Los Angeles Area

Los Angeles County is home to over 700000 undocumented residents, largely from Mexico and Central America. They are largely poor and live in segregated neighborhoods. As they have entered the country illegally they have no citizenship rights. Yet the political system in the United States rests on the assumptions of democratic consent and citizen participation. When there is an increasing divergence between the population as a whole and an increasingly unrepresented politically active subgroup, the legitimacy of the political system itself is in jeopardy. In this paper, the political and economic organizing among undocumented Latino residents is examined, and questions are raised about the reformulation of the notion of citizenship.