Familial Moralities: Moral (Re)source of Commitment in the Immigrant Rights Movement in El Paso,Texas

Personal Reflexive Statement

I am originally from Chihuahua City, Mexico, and lived most of my formative years in El Paso, Texas, in a middle-class household. I enjoyed the privilege of American citizenship and the ability to travel back-and-forth across the border to visit family and friends. But not until I became involved with activist circles in graduate school, did I really grapple with the hardships other immigrants face in the United States. I also noticed the significant amount of work involved in organizing communities for social change. Much of the work was in the form of care. This is how I became interested in care work and social movements and the important role care plays in sustained social change efforts by marginalized communities in this country.

Upon graduating from college, Alice spent a year in a refugee resettlement office in the Midwest before volunteering for a year at Casa Asuncion, a migrant shelter in El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border. As a live-in volunteer, Alice and the other volunteers “live where they work,” which shapes their interactions with migrants for the duration of their service. Ordinary and special moments—like birthday celebrations—take place in a domestic context where familial relationalities emerge. Alice finds these moments some of the most fulfilling of her experience helping migrants and asylum seekers:

I think when I remember my most positive times here at Casa Asuncion, I think it will be celebrating with the guests and just like having fun with them. It’s that really sweet moment of—bittersweet moment really of them being away from their family and that being challenging for them. But then being a part of this like other space where we are people who are coming together to celebrate something even though it’s not the same as being together with your family.

And I think that’s really special, bittersweet but very special. Even just like getting to—I don’t know—see guests in the house and say hi to them when I’m going up the stairs, trying to like wake the teens up in the morning and it being like this weird not like a parental figure but this sort of parental figure….

Alice provides an example of one of the “most positive times” at Casa Asuncion, yet she has to correct herself and redefine it as “bittersweet” because guests are not with their families. These “bittersweet” moments not only describe celebrations, but also domestic and intimate interactions, such as greeting one another in the shelter hallways or waking up teenage guests for school. Alice tries to come up with vocabulary to define her relationship to teenage residents and at the end of her answer the best she can do is “sort of parental figure.”

The familial ties Alice invokes form part of a morality that I encountered among various caregivers in El Paso, Texas, during my field work. In this paper I ask, how do social movement actors make sense of their commitments?

In 2017–2018, I conducted participant observation for 13 months as a volunteer in two nonprofit organizations working within the broad immigrant rights movement in the U.S. southwest, including interviews with over 50 attorneys, paralegals, and volunteers at two nonprofit organizations. I call these organizations Compromiso and Casa Asuncion. Compromiso provides legal immigration aid to migrants from the borderland region as well as to asylum seekers from around the world being detained in El Paso. Casa Asuncion is a shelter providing temporary hospitality to migrants passing through El Paso or those who have decided to make their living in the city.

During my time in the field, social change efforts like the one Alice is part of in El Paso, Texas, intensified as apprehensions of migrants at the border reached their highest point since 2012 (Bialik 2019). The immigration court backlog surpassed 1 million cases, and overwhelmed detention facilities systematically detained and removed asylum seekers and other noncitizens seeking relief. As a result, the workload of organizations advocating for migrants’ rights and providing services to them mounted, but their resources remained limited.

Against this backdrop, I found that movement participants make sense of their commitments through what I call familial moralities. I define familial moralities as commitments to social change efforts that draw on family bonds as moral imperatives to continue participation. In other words, the notion that families belong together and are central to one’s identity inform participants’ motivations to continue participation. These emerge from care work in the immigrant rights movement. Moreover, I find that familial moralities take on different forms depending on the different spaces and practices of care performed by participants. Participants engaged in care work at a migrant shelter begin to see volunteers and migrants “as family” while those doing more intellectual care work at a legal aid office express commitment “through family,” that is, by reflecting on their own family histories of migration and the principle of family unity. These working dynamics keep participants engaged because of the affective value family has for them.

Different social movement activities, such as protests, recruitment, resource mobilization, etc. give correspondingly different senses to participation. Commitment to social movements is shaped by these activities and by the meanings members attribute to these activities. Morality in particular has been studied as a framing mechanism that initiates participation and maintains engagement in social movements. I expand this literature on morality in social movements by showing how caring practices—that is, the everyday content of social movement participation—shape moral commitments. I find that contextually situated, reflexive, and regenerative practices of care shape a particular familial motif of commitment. My findings demonstrate the need to understand commitment from the point of view of movement participants, and to situate these points of view in their varied everyday material contexts.

Context

El Paso, Texas has been historically linked to migration due to its geographic location. In the early twentieth century, El Paso served as a depot for the labor needs of railroad and mining companies in the region and other industries elsewhere in the country. In 1910, more than 43,000 Mexican nationals were transported from El Paso alone to various locations across the Southwest and Midwest—about one fifth of the total Mexican population in the United States according to the 1910 census information (Sanchez 1995). Many Mexican migrants preferred staying close to the border, so many made El Paso their first home; by 1920 close to 40,000 Mexicans lived there (out of a population of 77,560) and those failing to find jobs moved elsewhere using the railroads networks meeting in the city (Sanchez 1995; Texas Almanac, n.d.).

During World War II, El Paso again served as a hub for a labor market of braceros, Mexican agricultural workers recruited to fill in for American men fighting in the war. The agreement for this worker program between the U.S. and Mexico lasted until 1964. El Paso and Ciudad Juarez across the border became important recruitment centers during this period. They served as the recruitment network for braceros going to the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states (Mize and Swords 2010). In 1954, the El Paso Herald Post reported that more than 80,000 Mexican braceros passed through El Paso every year.

Another significant wave of migrants began their ascent north to the U.S.-Mexico border during the Central American Civil Wars and Revolution in Nicaragua (Garcia 2006). During the 1980s the population of Salvadorians, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans in the United States increased by more than 250 percent (Blanchard et al. 2011). Between 1983 and 1993, the number of apprehensions of migrants by Border Patrol in El Paso were the highest recorded for the city (U.S. Border Patrol, n.d.) with more than 200,000 apprehensions each year (except 1988–1989). Not even during the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, when millions of Mexicans were economically displaced, was this number so high in El Paso. During the first Central American refugee crisis, community organizations in El Paso provided shelter and legal assistance to Central American asylum seekers despite the unfavorable odds of acquiring legal relief from the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). One attorney at the time told a local newspaper that in all of her years handling thousands of Central American asylum cases, only one person had received asylum in El Paso (El Paso Times 1985).

The current economic, political, and environmental crises in Central America has again led many asylum seekers to cross the border through El Paso. Along with them, asylum seekers from Cuba, Brazil, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo also make their way to El Paso, albeit in much lower numbers. Apprehensions at the El Paso border have not reached the levels of the 1980s and 1990s and have been on a general downward trend since the early 2000s. However, since 2014 the proportion of family units and unaccompanied children apprehended at the southwest border increased from 29 percent in 2014 to 47 percent in 2018. In El Paso, these groups make up 50 and 56 percent of total border apprehensions in Fiscal Years 2017 and 2018, respectively (U.S. Customs and Border Protection 2018, 2019). Out of all inadmissible migrants attempting to enter the country through official ports of entry in El Paso, 24 percent claimed fear in FY2017 and 29 percent claimed fear in FY2018.

For those seeking asylum in El Paso, the odds are unfavorable. The average asylum denial rate in El Paso immigration courts was 93 percent between Fiscal Years 2013–2018 and only 14 percent of asylum claims have been granted between October 2000 and January 2019. Within the same timeframe, about half of asylum seekers have been represented by legal counsel in El Paso and about 75 percent of them were detained during the asylum process (TRAC Immigration 2020). The number of asylum decisions has markedly increased since FY 2014. Casa Asuncion in El Paso has hosted thousands of asylum seekers since 2014 due to a lack of space in family detention centers. Two new detention centers opened in El Paso in 2020 meant to address the lack of space.

Migrants and asylum seekers face various obstacles upon arriving in the United States. Asylum seekers usually enter the country through ports of entry (part of the “inadmissibles” group in CBP documents) or between ports of entry. This could be a few yards from an official port of entry or miles away in the desert. Depending on bed space at near-by detention centers, whether individuals are part of a family unit, and if they have potential sponsors in the United States, asylum seekers are either detained or released on their own recognizance. Organizations in El Paso provide assistance to asylum seekers in both situations, detained and non-detained. They provide legal assistance to those detained and shelter to those released who subsequently travel to other parts of the country to stay with sponsors while their asylum case is processed and adjudicated. At the same time, El Paso organizations are helping migrants under different circumstances who reside in or are passing through El Paso (e.g., seeking work permits, residency, shelter).

The Study

Both Compromiso and Casa Asuncion are part of the immigrant rights movement in the El Paso region. Staff in these organizations and government agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) coordinate with each other for various administrative and legal needs. Migrants going before immigration courts or applying for an immigration benefit are not afforded the right to an attorney, making nonprofit organizations such as Compromiso de facto public defenders. Casa Asuncion, on the other hand, provides hospitality for the hundreds of asylum seekers released from ICE custody on any given week due to a lack of space in detention centers. The dramatic need for help on both legal and hospitality fronts, along with the harrowing stories of migrants and asylum seekers, makes working in these spaces an intense experience. The scholarly work investigating the immigrant rights movement directly or indirectly reflects this emotional component of the care work conducted in these organizations (Coutin 1993; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2006; Lorentzen 1991; Nepstad 2004)

This article illustrates the role morality plays in strengthening the commitment to care work in the immigrant rights movement. Caregiver staff and volunteers at both Compromiso and Casa Asuncion encountered increasing workloads while I conducted participant observation. In the majority of cases, staff and volunteers experienced burnout. Nonetheless, few staff members and volunteers quit their caregiving roles, even while they participated in additional coalition and advocacy work outside their nonprofits. I found that morality, framed in familial terms, continually emerged as a motivating factor to continue engagement.

This project was conducted through an in-depth qualitative investigation, including six months of participant observation at Compromiso and in-depth interviews with over 20 staff members and volunteers; and seven months of participant observation at Casa Asuncion and in-depth interviews with over 20 staff members and volunteers. At both research sites, interview participants were asked to describe their experiences with volunteering, activist work, and working at each of the research sites, as well as their reasons for beginning to volunteer or work. Participant observation involved volunteering at each organization and spending time with volunteers working, participating in staff meetings, attending meetings with city-wide coalitions, conducting intakes at immigration detention centers, assisting with legal cases, and collaborating with activist groups, among other activities.

I chose these nonprofit organizations because they were at the frontlines of migrant care provision during my field work—and they continue to be. I was given access as a participant observer because these organizations needed volunteers, indicating that a lack of resources and mounting workloads factored in organizational dynamics. Further, choosing these organizations and working in them provided a range of experiences and practices, all toward the same goal: helping migrants at the border.

Both nonprofit organizations have been operating for more than 30 years, adapting to the changes in immigration laws and resource availability throughout their years of existence. Casa Asuncion is an emergency shelter founded in the late 1970s as a project of young Catholics wanting to put the gospel into action. With the help of the local archdiocese, the group was granted an old building in downtown El Paso, close to immigrant neighborhoods where the need for shelter and food among undocumented people became apparent. Casa Asuncion base their mission and work on filling a gap in services to noncitizens: shelter/hospitality. Casa Asuncion functions through donations and volunteer work as a way to avoid external control of its operations.

Compromiso is a nonprofit organization that provides accessible legal services to migrants in the area. The organization was founded in 1987 as a legal project of Casa Asuncion that eventually separated to become an independent nonprofit. Again, the need for low-cost legal services is a need that Compromiso fills.

The demands to helping migrants in the height of what has been the criminalization of migrants (Abrego et al. 2017) and the militarization of the border (Dunn 1995, 2009) were very high for both organizations. Compromiso had a high caseload and limited resources to expand services while I worked there. At Casa Asuncion, shifts, case work, house maintenance, and everyday interactions arising from living at the shelter took up most of the day for volunteers and myself. At both sites, changes in local enforcement practices and the aggressiveness of immigration enforcement increased workloads and created a high degree of uncertainty. At the same time, resource scarcity made work difficult, stretching workers’ and volunteers’ obligations. Immigration enforcement practices would determine how help was provided by these organizations.

Both organizations provided different services and required different organizational practices from staff and volunteers. Caregivers’ backgrounds in each organization were also different: Most staff members and volunteers at Compromiso were Mexican-American women while at Casa Asuncion most were white middle-class college graduates and retired men and women or clergy people. There is a preponderance of women working and volunteering at both organizations. Only in rare and short periods of time, such as particular summers, is the gender composition equal.

Staff members and volunteers first hear about Compromiso and Casa Asuncion through college professors, friends, acquaintances, volunteer programs, or because they know someone who received help. In fact, many staff members at both organizations begin as volunteers. They quickly learn about the challenge of staying on top of increasing amounts of cases of varying degrees of difficulty. The unpredictable number of volunteers and skills that organizations may receive also makes it difficult to establish a reliable system of supervision. Supervisors are often busy meeting with clients, at conferences or meetings, in court, or out sick. Additionally, the increasing use of negative discretion in immigration enforcement, government/bureaucratic mistakes, and an uncooperative attitude from some officials and judges, makes work uncertain and frustrating. Meanwhile, clients get anxious about their cases and call the office constantly or, in the other extreme, cooperate sparingly. Despite these challenges, caregivers continue working because of the intrinsic rewards of and altruistic motivations for care work along with the fear that stopping might impact care recipients negatively (England 2005).

Thus, people in both organizations work under pressure and with few resources in order to help migrants. However, the composition of staffs as well as the organizational practices are different. It follows, then, that the organizational spaces were categorically different as well. The shelter is mostly a domestic space while the legal aid office is organized as a professional setting.

In the next section, I will review relevant literature on social movements, commitment and morality to understand the role morality plays in movements, and to situate my research within the specific context of caregiving. Then, I will explain how the practice of caregiving leads to the creation of intimate spaces at work. Subsequently, I analyze interview data to develop the concept of “familial moralities,” which I argue emerge in these intimate spaces and contribute to the commitment of caregivers to the immigrant rights movement.

Literature Review

Moral commitments matter to contemporary social movements. Appeals to morality are essential in recruiting participants, maintaining engagement, and communicating claims. As a set of norms that may or may not conform with social reality, morality can spur people into action. For instance, Jasper’s notion of “moral shock” describes individuals’ vertiginous feeling upon coming across facts that offend their normative ideas about how the world should be. This shock then activates social change efforts. The role of movement leaders in mobilizing morality to sustain movement participation has been studied (Kanter 1972; Klandermans 2009). Movement leaders can recruit moral support from outsiders that grant legitimacy to movements (Edwards and McCarthy 2007). Leaders can also (re)frame movement strategies and goals to appeal to the life histories of individuals participating (Lio, Melzer, and Reese 2008; Nepstad and Bob 2006).

Morality also shapes the practices of social movements. Social movements adopt practices that reaffirm moral commitment and keep participants going. Eric Hirsch (1990) notes that conscious reflection on the suffering of others reinforced commitment among Columbia University students protesting the university’s investment policy in apartheid South Africa. Nepstad (2004) shows that participating in Christian rituals and reflecting on biblical stories rejuvenated the moral commitment of high-risk activists from a Catholic left peace movement.

Moral commitments can be at the collective or individual level. Nancy Whittier (2010) finds that the continued participation and collective identity of radical feminists was shaped by the adoption of certain moral principles, such as the Golden Rule. Paul Lichterman (1996) finds that middle class environmentalists demonstrate “personalized politics,” a style of moral commitment that stresses personal efficacy and conscious consumerism.

Moral commitments are not, however, always in the interest of participants or social movements. For instance, moral dispositions can end up undermining social activists’ social mobility (Archer 2007). Paul Lichterman (2005) finds that organizing styles founded on the moral satisfaction of voicing truths, while not critically reflecting on them with new members, undermined the growth and survival of activist groups. Morality, then, is a double-edge sword, for it can strengthen commitment to the wellbeing of others, but it can also make moral subjects vulnerable to exploitation and a moralization of intervention that ultimately undermines movements’ growth.

I examine a social movement case—organizations in the immigrant rights movement in El Paso—wherein moral commitment strengthens and sustains participation. I find that this morality emerges out of the practices of the social movement—care work in this case. This demonstrates that just as moral commitments shape movement practices, practices can also shape the moral commitments of movements. The interaction between moral commitments and social movement practices is a dynamic one.

I also find that the moral commitment of the participants in these two organizations take on a particular form, familial. The moral force of family in social movements is generative, though understudied. This is most evident with care work. Historically, the morality of care work has been part of a powerful gender ideology in which domesticity, the family, and its reproduction are constituted as women’s work. Care workers in professional and informal settings have also drawn from this morality (Johnson 2015). In order to disassociate caring activities from naturalized conceptions of women’s work in private spaces, Herd and Meyer (2002) demonstrate the civic, that is, public, albeit devalued importance of care work (England 2005). In cases where social change and care work intersect, movements have drawn on the conflation of morality and femininity. Since the nineteenth century, women’s middle-class morality has been used as the ideological basis for moral reform movements, including abolition, anti-prostitution, temperance, and women’s rights (Ginzberg 1992; Tronto 1993; Young 2006). The Settlement Movement in the United States also drew from moral themes in its effort to reduce the social distance between classes. The most prominent leader of this movement, Jane Addams, held a pragmatic view of a democratic social ethic which she advanced, arguing for the “identification with the common lot” through the experience of working with marginalized peoples (Addams 1905:11). Elena Shih’s (2018) work illustrates the impacts of Western women’s morality taken to a global scale. She documents the “moral care work” of white women activists in the anti-trafficking movement in China and Thailand. Their approach to “saving” women from prostitution hinges on normative conceptions of family, one that activists attempt to restore.

As a motif, the family can provide content to moral commitments and sustain social movement participation. The association between family and morality have a politics of space that is important to consider. According to de Certeau (2011), “space is a practiced place.” How and with what intention places are practiced infuses meaning into space. Thus, spaces of resistance or of care are made so by the practices of the people working to create and/or to sustain them. For instance, while women’s morality has been historically constrained to the private, domestic space of family (Tronto 1993), it has also influenced social change efforts in public spaces.

Social movements have been credited with creating public spaces that contribute to political change (Tilly 1993). In other instances, social movements create spaces to shield communities from state and economic forces which allows communities autonomous rule (Hesketh 2013). For example, “Not in My Back Yard” (NIMBY) movements prevent physical changes to neighborhoods in order to control how people live within them (Gieryn 2000). Everyday practices also shape how social change develops in particular places. Urban spaces politicize communities in particular ways compared to rural spaces. Tilly (1976) illustrates this by showing lower engagement in counterrevolutionary behavior in the urbanizing areas of the Vendeé region in nineteenth century France. Oslender (2004) shows how everyday practices in the river basins along the Colombian Pacific coast shape how Afro-descendants organize politically and combat capitalist expansion. Gould shows that stable neighborly contact molded networks of trust that proved beneficial in the Paris Commune (1993). But beyond how spaces shape mobilization, research on how space shapes moral commitment remains scant.

In this article I begin filling this gap. I find that organizations helping migrant families provide shelter and legal assistance, creating intimate spaces. The practice of helping, that is, caring for families, infuses the mission of these organizations and the movement with a familial morality. Consequently, the content of commitment to social change in these organizations has a familial component. This is what I call familial morality. Additionally, familial moralities differ by caring practices in each space. At the shelter intimacy is created by domestic interactions, which result in caregivers viewing migrants and other volunteers “as family.” On the other hand, at the legal aid office, intimate spaces are created by discussing families’ cases of migration. As a result, caregivers’ moral commitment is shaped “through family,” that is, through reflections about their own families’ stories of migration.

Intimate Spaces

At both Compromiso and Casa Asuncion, staff members and volunteers highlight the atmosphere of camaraderie at the organization as a central motivation for caregiving. Individual motivations, friendships, stories, and personalities infuse these nonprofits with a sense of warmness and solidarity. Melissa, the director of Compromiso’s Crime Victims Program, shares the story of how she got her name. Her father named her after his babysitter, who had been a victim of domestic violence. The fact that Melissa works with domestic violence victims gives a special meaning to her work.

Rebecca, Compromiso’s director, always notes the joy of small victories and the energizing privilege of helping migrants. The myriad of clients’ photographs and cards on Rebecca’s office wall attests to this. She also keeps a worn-out stamp of Pope Francis taped on her desk, next to the keyboard, and an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe looking over the world on the wall of her office. Sister Constance, the detention center intake specialist, also invokes her faith while understanding migrants’ experiences; her quest is to see Jesus in the faces of vulnerable people. Younger staff members talk about their career aspirations—such as going to law or social work school—in light of the election of increasingly conservative politicians. They feel the need to “do something,” and get satisfaction from working in a team that gets along and is led by inspiring women.

Valerie, a twentysomething volunteer from the Midwest, explained to me the kinds of practices that help her deal with the stress of being overworked in an office with few resources. She told me she liked to read, journal, and talk to her roommate, who was also volunteering with a legal office. She then added that the working environment at Compromiso was also conducive to reducing stress: “I also think our office environment is very open to checking in on each other and being friends, more than coworkers. Rebecca—I don’t think you guys were here yet, but she’s planned self-care days a couple times.” Similarly, Clarissa, a twentysomething Mexican American from El Paso working as a paralegal, described her learning process of the complexities of U.S. immigration law, as such:

Rebecca always helps me learn and grow. I mean I’ve grown so much since I’ve started there and I’ve learned so much than when I first started there. But I mean even with Marcy, when I was working under her, I would make a mistake, but they never made it like—made me feel like I was dumb, I guess. Or less, you know, because I made a mistake. If anything, they were very—I mean Rebecca is and Marcy was very good at explaining to me what is it I did wrong or what I needed to fix. Yeah. It’s been good learning opportunities.

Similarly, Victoria, a twentysomething white woman from the Northeast, explained how the environment at Compromiso was different than other law offices she had worked in.

I think I was happily surprised by working there and I’m interested in continuing to work there—maybe partially because of how it’s—compared to other contexts similar to that that I’ve been in, it’s very casual and maybe more emotionally driven than like—the other organization I worked for for legal aid was very like—it was very much a law office. And Compromiso is—yeah, like, you’ve been to our staff meetings.

Victoria gestures at me because we have both been to these meetings that feel less like serious organizational gatherings and more like informal discussions over casual lunches.

At Casa Asuncion, the commitment is more demanding due to the organization’s live-in requirement. Volunteers hail from all over the country, and most of them spend either a year or a summer at one of two houses operated by the organization. Some volunteers are interested in the transcendental nature of their help, such as finding meaning in their lives and putting faith into practice. Others have strong political convictions aligned with human rights, feminism, and communitarianism. They are inspired by other staff members who make sacrifices to live and work at the shelter for years; and they too participate in this lifestyle as they seek human connection with migrants. The shelter provides a less than perfect space to put these ideas in action because of the regimented nature of work there. Despite this, volunteers told me they simply enjoy the chaos of the work and knowing that they are at the forefront of a historic moment in U.S. history.

Sylvia, a white twentysomething volunteer from the South, told me that she felt she had made the right decision to volunteer when touring to the shelter for the first time: “This feels good…this feels right.” (emphasis hers). Located in downtown El Paso, Casa Asuncion provides hospitality in a triangular, red-brick building from the early twentieth century whose colorful, yet worn out interior gives it a charming quality. Sylvia added, “Everyone is eating together and everyone is hanging out…people are being nice to each other…it’s a really special place.” Another white volunteer in her twenties from the West Coast said that “there’s like an earthy spirituality of just like being here at Casa Asuncion and just like connecting human to human. In that sense, just like living within that space of like humanity.” Patricio, a middle-aged white man from the Northeast volunteering at Casa Asuncion explained to me that he is a solitary person and realized that living with other volunteers and migrants would be different but, he told me,

I found myself—although there were times that I went to my room and closed the door, I also found myself seeking out—like I found myself a great number of times going to the [shelter’s living room] and wanting to be out there just to see who was around and chatting with someone. I enjoyed that, so I knew that somewhere inside of me was a social being.

But the live-in requirement for volunteers at Casa Asuncion can also make this space suffocating. Alice, whose reflection on the memorable and “bittersweet” moments at Casa Asuncion opened this paper, complains about her first room in the shelter, the same one I use during field work, because the volunteer kitchen and the doorbell are right next to the room. “…it was just so much noise all the time. People on the phone in the volunteer kitchen and people on shift all hours of the day. And the doorbell ringing. It felt very overwhelming…I needed to have space for myself.” Significantly, in both positive and negative experiences, volunteers’ characterizations of the space of these organizations is an intimate one because of the types of relationships and feelings emerging from them.

This perception of a warm environment at Compromiso and Casa Asuncion is a result of, and sustained, by caregiving practices. The care work conducted in both organizations involves sharing space but mostly sharing intimate stories about migration, their families, life histories in general. Staff and volunteers initially work to create intimate links with migrants, and with each other. Clarissa tells me she decided to continue volunteering at Compromiso even after her 20 hour-internship ended because of a harrowing declaration during an asylum case:

I remember afterwards I cried because it was just so emotional. Like just reading through their declaration and just reading how much trauma these people have or that particular person went through, you know, I just kind of—I think part of that and like me crying—well, I’m an emotional person. But like me crying helped me want to continue there after I finished the 20 hours…it just seemed crazy to me that other people in the world experience this type of violence, and it made me feel like if I continue working there then I can continue doing more.

Clarissa frames her crying as a result of being an emotional person. But the crying appears to have signaled to her the severity of the case she was working on, convincing her to help with other such cases at Compromiso. The practice of translating intimate material led her to continue caring about asylum seekers and wanting to help them.

When caregivers cannot provide assistance to migrants due to lack of organizational resources, they reduce the amount of intimate details they hear from migrants and asylum seekers. Victoria described to me how she tried to maintain a distance from parents separated from their children because she did not want them to think Compromiso was representing them. Regardless of how many times she told them that Compromiso was not going to represent them, the intimate space created in interaction with migrants can be a powerful pull to want to help them, as I experienced myself while conducting intake interviews to asylum seekers. In this case, Victoria was gathering general information about parents’ cases that would be helpful in organizing future responses and resources. She explains that it was a difficult dynamic: “how much should I actually let them share? ‘Cause like, the more they share, the more they feel like we’re probably somehow being accountable for their situation when we’re actually not.” Caregivers have to be careful in building emotional attachments with clients or cases, as Victoria explained to me, in order to not “not feel everything these people express because it’s just not great for anybody, I don’t think, and it doesn’t help me, really. Like, I wouldn’t be able to do this work if I felt all those things all the time.” Caregivers at Compromiso, then, have to manage the intimate spaces created with migrants.

Caregiving at Compromiso demands intimate information, often leading to intimate reactions as well, which again, contributes to the creation an intimate space. Here Clarissa explained how the practice of filling out forms with clients can lead to sharing more than mere facts about a particular immigration case.

And there have been like some people come in expecting to just—us to fix their life or something. But yeah, I mean we try, I guess. Anything that we can help fix immigration related, yeah. But I mean it happens where like I’m doing like filing petition and then the husband comes in because he’s like “I don’t want to deal with the process,” so we just kind of yeah, we cut like they—it’s like they vent to us, you know, about their whole stories and process, just what they’ve been through. It’s like we’re a source of, I don’t know, therapy or something for them sometimes.

Clarissa’s experience illustrates that migrants might not have the avenues to vent or express themselves emotionally while undergoing stressful immigration processes. Compromiso affords a space where clients can, and do, vent.

At Casa Asuncion, the production of intimacy is different because the sharing of information is not for the purposes of a legal case, but rather for purposes of hospitality, travel arrangements, and casual conversations taking place in a domestic space. As Marcos, the founder and director of the shelter explained, when migrants meet volunteers and staff at the shelter they see us as the “bosses” but eventually “the longer you’re there, then elements of friendship, elements of trust begin to grow and develop.” Living for extended or even short periods of time within a house leads to attachments. The intimacy shared, in the form of eating, doing house shores, and playing together, creates an intimate space.

While there are many reasons caregivers decide to work for Compromiso or Casa Asuncion, such as finding meaning in life or living out political convictions, the communal struggle of and reflections about caregiving creates a warm space for volunteers, staff and migrants. Commitment requires more than warm environments or sociability, though. Moral (re)sources help materialize social change struggles in the long haul. The pull from attachments to migrants or care work is such, that caregivers have to limit the amount of information shared and extracted from migrants in order to not become overwhelmed by negative emotions and to manage migrants’ expectations about their cases. I have also found that the intimacy generated and managed in these spaces is accompanied with moralities keeping these organizations operational. In the next section I develop the concept of familial moralities in order to link the practices in these intimate spaces to a morality that makes sense of caregivers’ efforts and keeps movement members attached to social change activities.

Familial Moralities

Caregivers usually begin their work at Casa Asuncion or Compromiso with the hope and energy to build relationships with and help migrants in concrete ways. Yet, obstacles with state agencies, their own organizations, and migrants themselves prevent the realization of expectations. The previous section illustrated what caregivers say about their interest in helping migrants along with my description of the spaces they create in order to care. A deeper analysis reveals that family is a “moral source” (Lowe 2002) that shapes the commitment to help migrants. These moralities frame understandings of the caregiving work, proving to be anchors for stressful working conditions.

During the orientation at Casa Asuncion, we were told that the work involved continuous inconvenience and that we should prepare. This inconvenience amounts to making sure the shelter is running efficiently and that all guests are safe at all times. While I was living at Casa Asuncion, the tasks felt never-ending. Sandra explained to me how her attachment to the work and migrants changed with time:

Ever since I’ve stayed here, I’ve become more about individual guests. When I first got here I was all hands on deck, really physically need me as a body, a person who can communicate in Spanish, like, I feel like they were like, “Here, hold this box” and handed me a huge box metaphorically and maybe literally…I feel at first there was a lot of need and now I feel it’s more, if I thought about leaving early: “Oh, I couldn’t leave the teens.” Yeah, it was all I need to like yeah, if I just like leave all of a sudden it would be really shitty for Ernie. I felt like that with Santiago when he was in the house. Yeah, I think that has made me stay out a year, almost now, even when I’m like I don’t know if I want to stay…. I feel accountable just like individual people, the people I was visiting at the detention center and the teens and the guests has been—I don’t know if it’s switched but it’s been added to my reasons for being here, I guess. But the teens especially we’re kind of their parents.

Sandra expresses the need for her physical presence in order to help migrants. Holding a literal or metaphorical “box” is an apt way to describe the mundane tasks of working in a shelter. Yet, Sandra does not want to finish her commitment “early” because she is concerned the teenage guests at the shelter would have a hard time without her. Her emotional attachment becomes directed at individuals, specifically, the prospect of leaving them behind because caregivers are “kind of their parents.”

Isabel, a white twentysomething coordinator for one of Casa Asuncion’s houses and who had volunteered for more than six years while I was there, uses a similar metaphor to explain her commitment to work. She explains that she prefers text-messages over phone calls because they allow her to screen non-urgent requests for help from other volunteers:

But I like to be available ‘cause, like I said, it’s like my husband. It’s like the house is my spouse…I want to be there for the organization ‘cause that’s what my life is at this point…when I have my days off every week, I’ll be around the house sometimes just chilling. I like to be able to say, “No.”

The important thing for Isabel is being “available” because the shelter is like her “spouse.” This illustrates a familial morality that makes sense of her attachment. When I asked the shelter director, Marcos, if it was difficult to establish caring relationships with guests only to encourage them to leave and be self-sufficient, he told me:

Well, I think, Alejandro, that it’s—you know, there’s subjective pull with that. You know? I think every parent finds it real hard when their kid moves out, and yet every parent intrinsically knows: That’s what I want for my kid to be able to go stand on their own two feet and live in the world, and function in the world, and take care of themselves. So, yeah, I think there’s an element of that.

Marcos frames relationships with guests as a parental one, in which you support them in order for them to “stand on their own two feet.” Marcos has not only held this viewpoint, but materialized it when he helped a group of siblings whose parents had been killed in the Salvadorian civil war in the 1980s come to the United States, later becoming their legal guardian. The idea of Marcos as a father figure looms large in the view of teenage and younger guests who sometimes joked while I was a volunteer that all the volunteers were Marcos’s children.

Nonetheless, there are some attachments that are perceived as unhelpful in keeping the shelter running. Alice told me in an interview that Isabel had warned her about spending too much time with male guests. She explained to me that volunteer-guest relationships are “odd,” which I understood as complex. She added,

I feel like I felt more comfortable with that relationship when I first got here and like my first five months. But then I remember that I felt like I had really been bonding with the teens. And Isabel sat down with me and she’s like “You can’t be spending one on one time with the teens or with men in the house. You need to be more intentional with how you’re spending time with guests.”

Isabel was afraid that friendships between Alice and guests could be misinterpreted or that Alice or guests might develop romantic feelings for each other. In the past, volunteers have developed crushes, romantic feelings or have had relationships with guests after moving out of the shelter. All volunteers are warned about the possibilities of these attachments during our orientation. The “Volunteer Guidelines” packet we received in orientation says that it is “not unnatural or uncommon to develop feelings for people with whom you live and work.” Yet, it categorically forbids these relationships because they are “unethical and immoral.”

The relationships that form in Casa Asuncion are structured by the intimate space and domestic practices of the shelter. I find that the practiced space of the shelter draws out familial bonds, treating migrants and the shelter itself as family. Ultimately, caregivers’ familial bonds with migrants and the shelter become the reasons why caregivers remain committed to their work.

At Compromiso, the legal nature of caregiving does not allow for the kind of domestic intimacy seen at Casa Asuncion. Nonetheless, familial moralities inform caregivers’ relationships with clients. Valerie, the legal assistant, describes the support she provides asylum seekers, most of whom do not have a support network while they are detained in El Paso,

So, I also realize that with a lot of asylum clients, they don’t have a cheerleader. So, that’s different from our like dock clients or our family petitions because they have a support system here, for the most part. But for a lot of asylum clients, they’ve left everything. You know, sometimes they’ve left their kids and their families back in their home country.

I’m not sure if I cross lines with giving people hugs instead of handshakes but for some clients, I know that just getting up in the morning is a task. So, I tried to be very considerate of especially asylum clients, of like giving them flexibility when they need it. Especially if it requires writing declarations and things like that that are harder. I’m going to miss the clients. I’m going to really miss them. I also learned through this job that I need to work with people…. Like days when I’m just sitting at my desk without any client interaction or anything, I don’t get as much fulfillment out of it because I love to see people and interact with people.

Valerie juggles between being close to and distant from clients. The boundary that Valerie establishes is because of her concern over clients’ social contexts: their separation from families and their inability to meet all of her demands, such as writing difficult declarations. She is aware of the absence of family in asylum seekers’ lives and her reflexive stance feeds her motivation to continue helping.

Kamila described her motivations to work at Compromiso as getting to know her mother’s and family’s history in South America. Kamila’s mother migrated to the United States when she was 27, but Kamila does not know the reasons why her mother moved to the United States, “…most of my life has been, as annoying as it sounds, has been trying to learn about my mom.” Kamila’s mom does not share much about her past and Kamila wants to gather as much information as possible because she realizes a lot can be lost in the process of migrating,

There’s shit that is gone that I’ll never know. It just seems like everything else seems fucking meaningless. Being able to connect and connect my work is in some way in conversation with that is pretty motivating to me. And it’s like hard to find a lot of motivation because everything is so bad.

The connections Kamila draws between her family and work motivate her in the adverse context of the border, where she sees little hope. Kamila’s efforts to feel more connected to her mother are creative: “…I think negative emotions can be very inspiring or motivating. This work is too fucking tragic, so there is some inspiration that is not like exploitative. It’s more reparative or something. It feels inspiring because…I don’t know why it feels creative….” The creative element that Kamila describes is difficult to grasp, but the work of connecting her family’s past with that of recent migrants to the United States is in part reflexive, intellectual, and productive.

For caregivers who are from the border themselves, familial moralities are implicit in the motivations to help migrants and asylum seekers. Kamila has incorporated her interest in her mother’s and other women’s stories of migration into work at Compromiso. Rebecca’s interest in becoming an immigration attorney also stemmed from her family’s immigration experience. Her aunt and cousins were clients of Compromiso when Rebecca was in high school in El Paso. Her mother passed away around that time and Rebecca took over a lot of her responsibilities, such as helping her aunt fill out immigration papers and giving her rides to Compromiso. The power that the immigration attorney had in her aunt’s case caught her attention,

Whether she was available, whether she could give them an appointment, whether she could just explain to them that the process was taking a long time and that it was normal. She had such—this power and I thought, you know, I wanted to be that person. I wanted to have that. I can’t explain why, but that was the first time I ever had the desire to be an attorney.

When I ask Rebecca if she knew she wanted to be an immigration lawyer when she went to law school, she replies, “ever since I knew that [my family] had an attorney, I wanted to be that person to another family.” This desire to have some control over immigration cases affecting immigrant families like her own illustrates the significant imprint of Rebecca’s family on her work. One of her office walls is covered with letters of appreciation to her. During ice-breakers involving answering why one was involved with Compromiso, she would always mention clients’ gratitude and how she didn’t feel like she deserved it.

The familial morality shaping caregivers’ commitment at Compromiso occurs through family stories. Commitment does not hinge on the results of immigration cases, but rather on the relationship between care work and immigrant family histories. It is this intimate understanding of immigration as a family issue that reaffirms the moral commitment to helping migrants.

Discussion and Conclusion

Discussions of morality as a form of commitment in social movement or social change literature are limited. Morality has mostly been lumped together with the normative or life history explanations of commitment (Kanter 1968; Klandermans 2009; Nepstad 2004). When considered by itself, morality has been limited to “moral shocks” and how it undermines the material wellbeing of movement members and even care receivers. Much of the focus of this literature has been on the role of social movement leaders in mobilizing morality.

I argue that moralities also emerge from the practice of caregiving, or whatever actions social movements are undertaking. In the case of Compromiso and Casa Asuncion, caregivers create intimate spaces through their work in helping migrants and asylum seekers. At Compromiso, caregivers create a supportive environment with other caregivers in order to be able to provide legal services. Most importantly, they draw intimate information from clients which leads to an emotional attachment to migrants and the work. In this sense, intimacy becomes a vehicle for commitment. Similarly, at Casa Asuncion volunteers are living and working with migrants, leading to continuous interactions in a domestic, intimate space. The “earthy spirituality” generated in this space creates attachment and commitment to migrants and caregiving.

The emergent morality in these intimate spaces is familial. However, Compromiso and Casa Asuncion differ in how familial moralities play out. At Compromiso, caregivers draw from their own family histories or normative conceptualizations of family to make sense of the experiences of migrants and of their own involvement with migrant communities. This inspires them to learn more about the immigrant experience, as with Kamila, or to provide emotional support to families, as with Rebecca. Valerie, who is not Latina or from El Paso, is nonetheless aware of the lack of familial support that asylum seekers undergo, which informs her interactions with them. If we think of attachment as a spectrum that combines intellectual and emotional aspects, then the familial morality that Compromiso members deploy is on the intellectual end of the spectrum.

In the case of Casa Asuncion, morality emerges from the relationships in the “new family” created at the shelter. Staff and volunteers describe their commitments in terms of “parental” or “spousal” obligations. These descriptions do not reflect back on their own familial histories, but rather, frame the new relationships they build at the shelter. This is mostly explained by the lack of recent immigration histories among the mostly white and non-local volunteer community at Casa Asuncion, as well as the kind of domestic and intimate space that is created every day through the activities of eating, playing, cleaning, and talking. As a result, the familial morality of Casa Asuncion members is on the more emotional end of the intellectual-emotional spectrum.

Social movement scholars have written about the role of morality in either joining or persisting in movements. They frame morality as a set of normative values that come into contrast with real events (Jasper DATE) or as something that needs to be rejuvenated to lengthen participation (Klandermans 2009; Nepstad 2004). In both instances the role the leadership in framing these social problems is crucial. For instance, Nepstad (2004) argues that the cultural practices of movements must rejuvenate the normative values of members instilled in them through socialization. I agree with this contention. However, I find that rejuvenation of moral commitments also takes place through the practices of movements themselves.

In this article I show how moral commitments to social movement participation emerge from the work conducted within the social movement. In the case of the immigrant rights movement in El Paso, which mostly provides assistance to migrants in the form of legal aid and shelter needs, caregiving is the content of the movement. For caregivers, familial moralities become important moral sources that make sense of relationships with migrants and with care work in general. Movement leaders need not implement practices that highlight the centrality of families as moral institutions. These associations happen because of the type of care happening within organizational spaces.

Caregiving is a nurturing practice (Duffy 2010) that leads care workers in my study to continue participation in the immigrant rights movement despite the strenuous work involved. I find that the type of familial moralities emerging in each organization, Compromiso and Casa Asuncion, differ. At the legal aid office, caregivers reflect on their or others’ immigrant family histories in order to create a more intellectual attachment to the work. At the shelter, caregivers draw on new familial roles with migrants and the shelter that creates a more emotional attachment to the work. Both types of familial moralities nonetheless generate continued commitment to movement participation.

Future research should consider how movement practices shape spaces and moralities. The concrete, physical place and the lived, everyday work of movement participation varies and so will the affect of the spaces and the content of the morality that they engender. This research can shed light on the nature of political commitment, as well as on dimensions of ideology beyond formal politics. Additionally, this research stream can expand our understanding of how movement discourses—such as family reunification at the border—emerge and are popularized, and to what effect.