Cultural Citizenship

The notion of cultural citizenship initially developed in the 1980s, in part to bring greater multicultural emphasis to discourses of race in the United States that stressed black and white dichotomies. It is both a theoretical perspective and methodological approach with which to examine the socio-cultural identity, political will, and cultural creation of primarily Latino populations in the United States. Theoretically, the notion acknowledges the cultural resiliency, social reproduction (the class, cultural, and linguistic knowledge and skills that establish the cultural capital of social groups), and rights-claiming agency of ethnic communities and other marginalized groups as viable and worthy outcomes of social injustice and alienation. Methodologically, cultural citizenship requires that social scientists approach their studies from the perspective of subordinate groups in order to understand the latter's goals, perceptions, and purposes. The term appears to have been coined by the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, who first used it in the late 1980s to make a case for the democratization of institutions of higher education through diversity in the classroom, curricula, decision making, and society at large; a call not unlike that made by Chicano civil rights leaders of a generation before. In the 1980s and 1990s a Latino cohort of social scientists, among them Rosaldo, used the concept to examine Latino civic participation in the voicing, claiming, and negotiating of cultural space. Importantly, these studies speak to cultural phenomena as the aesthetic and force behind the empowerment of groups to civic action. As such, cultural citizenship examines the colloquial meanings of alienation and belonging as they apply to marginalized groups with respect to the national community. In this context, claims to rights made against the state by subordinate communities arise as a consequence of degradation and exclusion in their daily environments but may also result from acts of self-definition, representation, affirmation, sensibility, and aesthetics. Specifically, these may be expressed as desires and aspirations for equality, respect, and dignity. In the early years of the twenty-first century, cultural citizenship has been applied to modernizing efforts in an international context.