Insurgent Bureaucrats: Governmental Struggles over Immigrant Belonging in Long Beach, California

Keywords: Immigration, bureaucrats, urban social movements
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 30

Abstract

This paper examines how city bureaucrats mobilize to change the categories used to govern immigrant residents. It does so by performing a case study on insurgent bureaucrats in Long Beach, California. Long Beach had long been a bastion of politically conservative politics. However, in 2017 the city established an Office of the Equity, and bureaucrats within the Office launched an effort to make Long Beach a more inclusive city. The first director of the Office worked with colleagues, allies on the city council, and community organizations to adopt a Language Access Program, a Sanctuary City policy, a Justice Fund, and a racial reconciliation program. Insurgent bureaucrats helped change how many city employees thought about the boundaries of urban citizenship (i.e., who deserved rights and services and who didn’t) and prompted many to devise more inclusive governing categories. The paper addresses two central questions: What was at stake for these insurgent bureaucrats? And how did they partially succeed in their struggle? To address the first question, we turn to Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the state and symbolic power, arguing that government battles are “classification struggles” over how government administrators translate symbolic boundaries into institutional categories of inclusion and exclusion. To address the second question, we turn to insights from the social movement literature and suggest that insurgent bureaucrats adopt the tactics and strategies of more classical movements. Thus, we argue that bureaucrats can become insurgents in struggles over the categories of urban belonging.