Based on archival data from across New Jersey, USA, news articles, town hall records and interviews with local residents, this lecture traces a genealogy of the legal construction of the un/citizen in “Hometown,” a small town in New Jersey and the field site of my first book Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science. I

t elucidates the relationship between immigrants’ rights organizing and the local production of immigrant illegality in the US within the larger context of the histories of state violence against Black Americans and Native Americans. How do different colonial systems of illegalization legitimize themselves through racialized distinctions between “citizens” and “non-citizens,” which are concomitantly mapped onto social space and sedimented through time?