citizenship rules, creating a citizenist perspective and hierarchy. “Citizenism,” Anita Tijerina Revilla writes, occurs when anti-immigrant “state- and federally sanctioned classification results in a system of unearned advantages for citizens and unwarranted discrimination of noncitizens, such as the denial of basic human rights” (Tijerina Revilla 2011, 7-8, n2). To describe and explain how challenges to traditional notions of citizenship materialize in and around the bridges, checkpoints, rivers, fences, and asymmetry that mark the frontiers where the United States and Mexico meet, the state’s derived ability, or the citizenship regime, which creates and control citizens must be conceptualized. According to Jane Jenson and Martin Papillon (2000), “A citizenship regime can be defined as the institutional arrangements, and understandings that guide and shape concurrent policy decisions and expenditures of states, problem definitions by states and citizens, and claims making by citizens” (246). Citizenship regimes thus generally have four dimensions: 1) they establish the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion of a political community; 2) set the political rules of the game for a polity and define state institutions, political participation, and claims making; 3) contribute to the definition of nation in the sense that formal, cultural, and historical positions define the political community; and 4) establish and legitimize the geographical borders of the political community as nation (Jenson and Papillon 2000, 246). For these reasons, the citizenship regime is an institution deeply entrenched with the nation-state and, as such, many assume citizenship as the primary political identity within political boundaries (see Sassen 2003).
indigenous languages of Mexico, a deep connection to the land, and a political, social, and historical displacement (2002, 224). The Chicana/o homeland, Aztlán, becomes a unifying concept and base for Chicana/o presence in the United States. Ramirez suggests that saying the word “Aztlán” also becomes a basis of commitment toward acknowledging and claiming indigenous concepts as part of the Chicana/o reality (2002, 224-225). However, the point that Ramirez makes is that this “imagined” Chicano nation “served to subjugate, define, and control Chicanas, revealing a contradiction between ideology and praxis” (2002, 225). While nation-imagining implies homogeny, many have been uncritical of the official discourses of a solely Chicano nationalist movement—many except for Chicana feminists. The term “Chicana feminist perspective,” writes Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano “implies certain similarities with and differences from either an exclusively ‘feminist’ or ‘Chicano’ perspective” (2007, 364). Perspectives on Chicana thought are numerous, and are more so, necessary. Indeed, a Chicana feminist critique is a useful starting point for rethinking citizenship, borderlands and Ethnic Studies away from the binary opposition between “us” and “them,” to questions of difference, power, and knowledge (Aldama and Quiñonez 2002; see also, Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Anzaldúa 1987; Alarcón 1997; Trujillo 1998). In my classroom, starting with the Chicana feminist critique in my “Introduction to Chicana/o Studies” courses is as purposeful as it is useful. My very own introduction to Chicana/o Studies was through the lens of Chicana feminism and not through the oft-taught starting point of Chicano nationalism. In the process of challenging existing paradigms, Chicana feminists introduce new