ABSTRACT
In some instances, restructuring the powers of the national state has invigorated the local and global sites of citizenship contestations—such as in urban and transnational citizenship practices. The discourse of the "right to the city" has increasingly been used to mobilize direct action among disenfranchised and globally mobile citizens. In the ethnographic study of community change in the Midwestern town, the chapter witnesses the importance of informal politics and innovative everyday practices through which subordinate groups renegotiate their social and spatial relations. For immigrants in Beardstown, housing has not been the only means of claiming their right to the city and to making it a new home. Subordinate groups in highly restrained political environments, such as those investigated in Beardstown, make claim to the city and to a dignified life through channels and forms of action that bypass the inadequacy and elitism of the formal structures and institutions of urban citizenship.
