For Those Families Who Are Deported and Have No Place to Land

Chapter 3 intervenes in the larger scholarship on CASA (The Center for Autonomous Social Action), a national Chicano Movement organization based in Los Angeles, by being the first analysis of its San Diego chapter called CASA Justicia. It reveals CASA Justicia as a significant political space that introduced younger Chicano Movement activists to elder organizers who had struggled against the deportation regime in earlier decades. CASA’s offering of legal and social services to immigrants suffering the perils of undocumented legal status unleashed a wave of migrant agency – that infused Chicano Movement ideological narratives with – and influenced the mostly Mexican-American administrators of CASA to a point where their own identities shifted. Migrants infused their narratives about the way border enforcement policies were an intensely repressive presence in their day-to-day lives determining their ability to be present in their familial relationships, to provide sustenance and economic well-being, and to freely move about.