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This article uses a comparative analysis of immigrant rights movements in Mississippi and Alabama to examine racial formation as a cultural consequence of mobilization. Drawing on archival, media, and interview data, we demonstrate that the Mississippi movement fueled shifts in public racial discourse beyond the movement itself; however, the Alabama movement engendered no such changes, despite its efforts. These outcomes emerged despite the movements’ common origins and the states’ similar political and racial contexts. We trace these outcomes to the guiding racial orientations of each movement. While Mississippi organizers embraced an interracialist organizing approach, Alabama organizers grounded their work in an assimilationist approach. These orientations led the movements to develop different racial framings and different networks, creating pathways of broader cultural influence for the Mississippi movement and closing off pathways in Alabama. These findings speak to enduring questions about movements’ cultural impacts and about the mechanisms driving racial formation. 

In this article, we investigate the role that pro-immigrant organizations play in immigrant racialization. Drawing on a critical case study from the longest standing immigrant rights organization in North Carolina, we demonstrate how immigrant rights organizations can racialize new Latinx arrivals even as they advocate for them. We interrogate the organization’s multi-year, state-wide campaign to counteract mounting public characterizations of Latinx immigrants as drunk drivers. Analyzing a critical juncture in this campaign, we demonstrate how El Pueblo, in their effort to contest the mainstream racialization of Latinxs, unintentionally doubled down on that same racialization, buying into respectability politics and reinforcing derogatory stereotypes of Latinxs. We outline three central maneuvers that grounded this particular respectability politics campaign and demonstrate the utility of respectability politics as a framework for understanding organizational racialization processes. These findings suggest the need to shift focus toward community organizations as key sites of immigrant racialization and highlight the need for inquiry into the racialized assumptions of pro-immigrant forces. 

After Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast in 2005, thousands of Latinx immigrants arrived in the region to work in reconstruction, one case of the growing and global phenomenon of disaster migration. Drawing on newspaper content analysis, in-depth interviews with immigrant service providers, and archival materials from Mississippi for the years surrounding Hurricane Katrina (2003-2009), we ask what reception these disaster migrants encountered upon arrival and how that reception changed as they settled permanently in the state. We find that public discourse about immigrants became markedly more positive when disaster migrants arrived en masse, with the media and public characterizing immigrants as valuable, hard workers. Negative characterizations shifted to portray immigrants as drains on public resources. However, these changes were temporary. By 2009, public debate about immigrants reverted to pre-disaster trends with only one exception. Across our study period, we find a steady rise in claims that immigrants faced racism and discrimination. Our findings suggest that disasters may briefly transform the social and cultural bases of material inequalities but are unlikely to produce lasting change.