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Localized globalism: Compliance with and resistance to immigrant marginalization by Latino community-based organizations in a gateway city

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Abstract

Utilizing semi-structured field interview data, this article analyzes and compares two leading Latino community-based organizations (CBOs) in a small, old, civically active immigrant-based city in the Boston metropolitan area. Within contemporary global and national devolutionary contexts, the CBOs under study, one a service dispensing organization and the other a social action organization, are analyzed. Utilizing a Gramscian theoretical perspective, the dilemmas arising from their “nested” dialectical resistance to, and compliance with, “glocal” hegemonic forces marginalizing Latino immigrants are traced with respect to their organizational–structural features and functioning in the urban context. Thus, the service organization, in a largely successful effort to achieve financial and social autonomy, has developed bureaucratic structural features producing communication gaps and strains among its employees, as well as a work ethic threatening to “other” its clients. The more “horizontal” activist organization, while largely resistant to and combative with Latino immigrant marginalization, faces the dilemmas of its members’ multiple roles as activists, political figures and office holders, as well as those stemming from its embrace of the social capital idea. It is concluded that the current economic-financial crisis threatening the very existence of these CBOs offers them paradoxical advantages of critical awareness.

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Notes

  1. These include 14,014 “Other Hispanics or Latino,” followed by 4948 Puerto Ricans and 1698 Mexicans. Central Americans (El Salvadoreans, Guatemalans and Hondurans) most likely constitute a large share of the first category, not to mention the fact that undocumented people are not mentioned at all.

  2. A 2005 report by the Philanthropy and Environmental Justice Research Project at Northeastern University indicates that Chelsea is Massachusetts’ third most “environmentally over-burdened city” (Faber and Krieg, 2005, 50).

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  1. University of Massachusetts Boston, MA

    Glen Jacobs

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Jacobs, G. Localized globalism: Compliance with and resistance to immigrant marginalization by Latino community-based organizations in a gateway city. Lat Stud 11, 501–526 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2013.30

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