Cultural Citizenship

It is clear from the literature on cultural citizenship that cultural phenomena and issues of identity are privileged over theoretical considerations having to do with membership in the polity, except for its emphasis on the group. Unlike traditional concepts of citizenship in which the individual is the rights holder, the agents and subjects of cultural citizenship are undeniably the group. In concert with the literature on cultural pluralism, cultural citizenship too presents rights claiming as the prerogative of the group and, as such, calls attention to an ongoing broader debate between cultural pluralism and universal citizenship in the nation-state.

For much of the studies on Latino cultural citizenship, membership in the nation-state is implicitly ambiguous as if yet to be determined or in the process of becoming, as must be the case for illegal immigrant populations in the nation-state. Others describe a kind of citizenship practiced by Latino communities before the nation-state as "social citizenship," specifically using T. H. Marshal's meaning of social as entitlement to benefits deriving from the largesse of the welfare state. Similarly, social rights to citizenship have been used to describe a "citizenship without consent" practiced by communities of Mexican illegal immigrants in a postnational context inclusive of as well as beyond the nation-state.

Group-differentiated citizenship has been criticized on several counts, among them its reverting to premodern ways of using religious, ethnic, or class membership to determine the political status of people; its discouraging the integration of ethnoracial groups into mainstream society; and its undermining of a greater fraternity between all Americans and a common sense of purpose. The historian David Hollinger argues that group-differentiated citizenship is provincial and given to insularity when the need is for cosmopolitanism and "freedom of affiliation" embodied by the exceptional growth (compared with other nations) of mixed-raced people in the United States.

In response, cultural pluralists point out that citizenship rights as originally conceived by the nation's founding fathers are oblivious to the needs and differences of multicultural groups. Indeed, the philosopher Iris M. Young argues, the American liberal concept of equal citizenship plays no part in the notion of universal citizenship, nor is it meant to, since the latter assumes and upholds a homogeneous collective community at the expense and suppression of group difference. For this reason, Juan Gómez-Quiñones believes, Chicano/Latino cultural identity is vital to membership in a political community precisely because citizenship rights and responsibilities do not encompass multicultural rights. "Though there has been a great stress on voting qua voting as a measure of political achievement and influence," he writes, "the act of voting does not promise the achievement of full equities, much less direct and full democracy" (p. 211).

Defenders of differentiated group representation believe that citizenship should recognize and accommodate sociocultural difference to compensate for past injustices. For Young, any conception of equal citizenship must include historically excluded groups in the political community both as individuals and as members of the group. Young questions an ideal that in practice reinforces the power of the privileged in "this unified public" (of universal citizenship) while marginalizing others. An alternative approach to membership in the polity is "differentiated citizenship," which allows for group-based claims or distinct group rights for what Young calls "social-cultural" groups but which the philosopher Will Kymlicka distinguishes as national and ethnic minorities and underrepresented groups. According to Kymlicka, some form of differentiated group rights for the latter comprise part of citizenship rights in most, if not all, modern democracies.