See Cristina Beltrán, "Going Public: Hannah Arendt, Immigrant Action, and the Space of Appearance," Political Theory37, no. 5 ( 2009): 617, n3.
2.
On April 23, 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law Senate Bill 1070, the harshest and most punitive legislation against illegal immigration ever enacted statewide. The statute empowers local law-enforcement agents to stop and check the immigration status of anybody they suspect of being in the country illegally. See Randal C. Archibold, "Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration," The New York Times, April 23, 2010.
3.
Patchen Markell , "The Rule of the People: Arendt, Arche, and Democracy," American Political Science Review100, no. 1 (2006): 10.
4.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 238-39. For a more developed discussion of Arendt’s notion of "beginnings," see Bonnie Honig’s "Between Decision and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory, American Political Science Review, Vol. 101, no. 1 (2007): 13, and Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 36.
5.
For more on Arendtian action as more than mere spontaneity, see Mary Dietz’s discussion of Charter 77 in Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002), 179-80.
6.
Here, my approach to immigrant action draws inspiration from Wolin’s "Fugitive Democracy," Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994): 17, 23-24. For more on "evanescent homogeneity" and what I refer to as "Fugitive Latinidad," see chapter 2 of my book The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
7.
A deeper engagement with homo faber would allow for a more developed analysis of Arendt and the question of instrumentalism. As James Knauer notes, Arendt displayed "no lack of awareness" of the more widely recognized aspects of political action-"politics as purposive action with motives and goals, politics motivated by socioeconomic interests, politics as the struggle for power. Nor did she try to purify politics by defining it to exclude these elements." See James T. Knauer, "Motive and Goal in Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Political Action." American Political Science Review 74, no. 3 (1980): 733. Yet as Mary Dietz rightly points out, "instrumentality is almost always formulated negatively" in Arendt’s writings (see Turning Operations, 240, n27.).
8.
Arlene Dávila, Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race ( New York: New York University Press, 2008), 72.
