PUEBLO OVER PROFIT: Negotiating Identity Politics in the Battle for El Paso.

Identity politics has garnered much criticism and debate over its efficacy as a tool for political organizing and mobilization amongst marginalized communities. A central critique of identity politics cautions that its essentializing tendencies can reify or reduce constructions of identity as an individualized category (Gimenez 2006, Carroll 2017, McGowan 2020). Marie Moran has similarly remarked on the ways in which neoliberalism has undermined identity in such a way that it, "has exaggerated the personal sense of identity over the social to such an extent that we have now reached a point in time where identity operates primarily to facilitate consumption on a global scale" (2018, 40). In doing so, identity as a politic is oftentimes limiting and not necessarily utilized in ways that echo shared histories amongst a group of people but instead connotes a false sense of representation and individual consumption under larger capitalist logics. This article ultimately finds itself negotiating the question of identity politics and grappling with both its efficacy for political mobilizations as well as centering debates inherent to it. Thinking about this conundrum within contemporary political organizing prompts turning to Cathy Cohen's question, "When and how are stable collective identities necessary for social action and social change?" (Cohen 1997, 439). I direct this inquiry towards the collective advocacy of Justicia Fronteriza, an El Paso, Texas based, progressive, political action committee. I argue that the group's utility of identity politics in their organizing work is emblematic of the ways in which marginalized communities, specifically, racialized communities along the US-México border, both make use of and continue to challenge limitations inherent within identity politics as a tool for political mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]