As immigrants and their allies confront the burgeoning culture of nativism in the United States, they face the problem of how to counter anti-immigrant hostility without re-entrenching the formations of state and capitalist power that have helped spawn antagonism against immigrants. Recent political theory suggests that activism in the mode of identity politics represents a particularly dangerous pitfall for immigrants, since politicized identity, according to these arguments, buttresses the authority of capitalism and the state. Wendy Brown, for instance, argues that the politicization of identity insulates from contestation the social forces generating the experiences of "injury" that today tend to form the basis of politicized identities, as well as legitimating the state in its supposedly impartial role providing compensation and retribution. In turn, William E. Connolly contends that failing to affirm the contingent character of identity, and denying its constitutive relation to difference, reinforces the essentialist assumptions of cultural unity perpetuating the inherited form of the nation-state, which, for Connolly, is unable to provide a democratic context for controlling global capitalism. In both these ways, a response to neo-nativism defining and celebrating specific identities for immigrants would seem likely to reinforce "hegemony," or the production of state and capitalist power through popular consent to authority generated by cultural identities and the everyday practices that give those identities vitality. Yet a sustained opposition to nativism would seem to demand challenging state policies that feed anti-immigrant sentiment, such as security operations that demonize "illegal aliens" and other "foreigners," as well as capital's efforts that exacerbate such resentments by weakening economic prospects for the US-born through de-industrialization and attacks on social welfare programs.Theories of the role played by politicized identity in the production of hegemony, however, may themselves be in need of critical re-thinking through more careful consideration of immigrants' experiences. This paper provides an inquiry specifically into the fructuous role that immigrants' personal life histories can play in bringing those experiences to light. Attending to these stories, I argue, makes it more possible not only to formulate a self-consistent, radically democratic response to the mounting hostility toward immigrants in US political culture, but also to refine the conceptions of hegemony and its sources in politicized identity that inform such a response. This paper, then, argues for a certain methodological approach to critical social theory in the present age of mass immigration, imperialist globalization, and a progressive politics geared largely toward the claims of identity. I draw on elements of Gramsci's thought regarding the crucial role played in the development of counterhegemonic projects by subaltern "common sense," or those conceptions of self and world that encode practically efficacious notions of how power works and contain at least an anticipatory sense of how to contest it. I also consult more recent theory regarding the politics of narrative. Hence, treating immigrants' life stories as a politically salient form of common sense, I outline a method of inquiry that would allow these stories to invigorate the critique of identity politics as a mode of hegemony today, and thus to sharpen an assessment of how certain strategies to counter neo-nativism might reproduce or genuinely challenge hegemony. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]