Racialization, Resistance and the Migrant Rights Movement

Repression and deportation has been and continues to be a fact of life for Mexican and Latino migrants in the United States. In 2006 illegal migrants throughout the United States rose up to challenge the processes of dehumanization they face on a daily basis. This movement organized from local and national spaces and gained international prominence. The central question of this study is what compelled illegal migrants to organize resistance leading to the marches of 2006? Was this a response to a single external threat? Or was this act of resistance linked or informed by previous historical struggles of Mexicans and Latinos in the U.S.? In surveying the phenomenon of 2006 and in the service of advancing a conception of resistance within the Mexican and Latino community this study will attempt to link the processes of racialization and their socio-political construction of illegal subjects to the formation of migrant resistance. Focusing on historic-specific sites of resistance this examination will illustrate how racialization and their everyday socio-political construction of illegality are the mechanisms creating Mexican and Latino migrant resistance. This paper contends that the migrant rights movement of 2006 was not distinct from previous historical struggles of Mexicans and Latinos in the United States, rather resistance has been a constitutive feature of their everyday life in the face of Anglo-American repression