In distinct ways, Social Scientists, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies scholars writing in the era of the post-9/11 securitization hysteria and neoliberal state withdrawal have interrogated the liberal assumption of continuity between legal citizenship, rights, and state protection. They have also demonstrated how in its very facilitation of the nation-state’s legitimacy and its attendant naturalization of border and deportation regimes, the immigrant’s pursuit of citizenship is ultimately a conservative investment as much as it is a seemingly inescapable one. And yet there is a latent presumption -- expressed in scholarship about US-based immigrant justice organizing and liberal political discourse more broadly – that the outermost limits of immigrant liberatory aspirations find their beginning and end in the expansion of citizenship rather than its demise. The result has been a stifling of dominant imaginative horizons of immigrant justice work into a narrow negotiation over how to pursue citizenship as “cleanly” as possible – that is, how to get citizenship for the greatest number of people in exchange for the least number of deportations. In this talk, I demonstrate that this narrowing engages activists in a false negotiation with the state and that said activists experience it as such. Moreover, through ethnography with undocumented Asian American activists across the US who frame citizenship as a conduit of harm rather than liberation, I explore abolitionist experiments in enacting citizenship-less immigrant justice and the temporal, political, and material indeterminacies that attend to this work.

Elizabeth Hanna Rubio is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is an ethnographer of social movements, immigrant life, and the internal dynamics of leftist organizing spaces. After receiving her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine in 2021, she served as a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton. Elizabeth is completing a monograph titled Dreams Beyond Recognition: Asian American Immigrant Justice Work and Alternatives to Liberalism’s False Promises.  Based on seven years of ethnographic research with undocumented Asian American activists in Southern California, Washington D.C., and Chicago, the book argues that dominant liberal logics focused entirely on state recognition both constrain and obscure the already-existing diversity of undocumented freedom dreams. Her work has appeared in publications such as Amerasia Journal; The Journal for the Anthropology of North America; Frontiers: A Women’s Studies Journal; The LA Review of Books, and other mediums.

Co-hosted by the UCR Departments of Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, and Gender & Sexuality Studies. Free.