Latino a cultural citizenship

cultural citizenship refers to the way a group would organize its values and beliefs so that they have a sense of belonging that comes from the culture instead of the nation. In other words when cultural traditions are used to safeguard one's rights and create one's identity than citizenship in its ordinary sense as members of a nation recede to the back while culture takes over. People then identify themselves more as a member of a certain ethnic group than as citizens of a country. This is what Latino community has also tried to accomplish in the United States. Their culture helps than "create space where people feel 'safe' and 'at home,' where they feel a sense of belonging and membership, " (Flores and Benmayor 1997, 15) and this is the most important condition for citizenship. A person needs to feel absolutely safe and secure in a country to consider himself its citizen, however that is not always a reality in a multicultural place like the U.S. And thus people divide themselves along racial and cultural lines. This helps in better protection of their rights.

Legal citizenship is something we are all familiar with. It is when you are legally the citizen of a country and that's what should give you a sense of belonging. However in the case of Latinos, it is their own culture which offers them a better and more secure sense of belonging than does their legal identity. Cultural citizenship thus describes "the claims of social, human, and cultural rights made by communities which do not hold state power and which are denied basic rights by those who do" (Inter-University Program, 1988: 2).

In the United States, the problem arises from people being divided into dominant and subordinate groups. While the white dominant culture tends to get all the protection, the subordinate groups are seen more as a nuisance and are treated as the others. This results in the creation of a sense of insecurity in people, which drives them to the comfort, and security of their cultural identities. Renato Rosaldo in his introductory essay to Latino Cultural Citizenship (Flores and Benmayor, 1997: 37) warns that "too often social thought anchors its research in the vantage point of the dominant social group and thus reproduces the dominant ideology by studying subordinated groups as a 'problem' rather than as people with agency -- with goals, perceptions, and purposes of their own."