Conflicts of Home-Making: Strategies of Survival and the Politics of Assimilation

Abstract

Latinx communities that shape the US cultural landscape and assimilationists who reject this influence each have a desire to feel at home in the US. Nevertheless, people hold conflicting intuitions about which group's home-making practices are morally justifiable. Some feel that those belonging to the cultural majority have the right to determine membership through the admission of only those outsiders who will not disrupt their way of life. Others sense that when assimilationists express the need to feel at home in their country, this seems to be, at the very least, tinged with a morally distasteful xenophobia. In this essay, I provide an account of each of these conflicting intuitions. Drawing from Mariana Ortega's notion of hometactics and from Tomás Ybarra-Frausto's discussions of rasquachismo, I propose that many immigrants and Latinxs’ home-making practices involve efforts to create a sense of familiarity and identity affirmation in a place where they are regularly reminded that they do not belong. Meanwhile, an examination of early and contemporary US nation-building practices demonstrates that assimilationists’ ability to feel at home also aims at identity affirmation, but it is intolerant of difference and requires the eradication, rather than the incorporation, of that which is foreign.

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