Enterprising citizenship: Mexican immigrant empowerment and public-private partnerships in Santa Ana, California

UnrestrictedHow does the neoliberal transformation of the local state and changes to citizenship impact the empowerment of Mexican immigrants? Do these changes produce Mexican immigrant political subjects that promote or challenge neoliberal policies? These questions are examined through an extended case study of Mexican immigrant empowerment in the context of public-private partnerships in Santa Ana, California, one of the country's poorest cities. During the second half of the 1990s, influenced by the federal Welfare Reform Act of 1996, the City of Santa Ana developed a set of empowerment-oriented public-private partnerships designed to address urban hardship by preparing people to become "enterprising citizens," that is, individuals who are economically self-sufficient (uses the labor market for income) and socially self-reliant (does not rely on government for social support, but instead turns to family, neighbors, and the voluntary sector). Urban regime leaders used this concept of the enterprising citizen to legitimize the neoliberal restructuring of the local state, favoring rentier and business interests. In Santa Ana, it appears that empowerment processes associated with these public-private partnerships produced a type of immigrant political subject that ultimately supported a neoliberal project. These political subjects did not tend to engage the local state through the electoral arena or direct demand-making (for example, through livable wage campaigns or protests for rent-control). Even when immigrants mobilized to make direct demands on local government, these efforts are actively incorporated into the urban regime's empowerment efforts promoting economic growth