Passage to citizenship and the nuances of agency: Latina Battered immigrants

SynopsisAgency has traditionally been equated with resistance and assumed to be universal. More recently, black and postcolonial feminist theories have emphasized contextualizing and differentiating agency with the end goal of uncovering the complex dynamics of oppression and subordination, particularly in matters related to violence against women. In this vein, I share the cases of fifteen Latina immigrant survivors of domestic violence in their search for nonviolence, autonomy, and citizenship at a US legal nonprofit organization in Texas. I show how both legislation and nonprofit organizations created to assist battered immigrants formally and informally frame survivors' agency, which is not only structurally and situationally constrained, but often compliant and unintended. By looking at the nuances of agency in this context, I reveal the ways in which some women are able to negotiate these constraints and complete their citizenship application process successfully, while others, often the most destitute ones, tend to be weeded out of this process.