ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concepts of belonging and cultural citizenship to examine how people of Mexican descent who have lived in the US for multiple generations as well as more recent migrants make and sustain community. It focuses on how Mexicans and Mexican Americans conceive of and practice citizenship to create mutually constitutive experiences of belonging and home, especially when they are neither fully socially integrated in the United States or their countries of origin. The chapter shows that analysis of Mexican descent communities, and the concepts of comitatus, community, and citizenship will be central because collectively they provide contextual and analytical lenses to examine Mexicans' status as perpetual outsiders, their resilience against systemic violence, and their efforts to actively create and sustain community. Latinoization refers to the longstanding and increasing impact of Latinos on US culture, society, and demography. Within much of the scholarship on Latino cultural citizenship, membership in the nation-state is implicitly ambiguous because it is constantly evolving.
