What does it mean to be a good citizen? To be a citizen at all? Who gets to designate this status and what are its benefits?

In exploring the theme of “Newcomers & Perpetual Foreigners” through Prieto’s “The Stings of Social Hierarchies” I found myself most interested in exploring the letter Linda’s principal sent to her parents.

“Linda is the kind of person that is a good citizen because of her home training and because of her desire to be a good citizen” (Prieto, 2005, p 5).

The text connects this week’s discussion with last week’s by bringing into focus issues of behavior inside the home, outside of the home and inside of school. I find this discussion to be largely behavioral in addition to self-reflective because work of hegemony in creating a citizenship appears both in the bodies and minds of those who have been deemed citizens and those who have not. Prieto’s discussion of these issues reflects the multidisciplinarity of this social construct through autoethnographic analysis.

In looking for moments that “ruptured the dominance of English” (2005, p 4) for Prieto, I was interested to see the ways in which she was expected to conform to physical and verbal expectations set by the community around her. In re-telling her early memories of working in a vineyard Prieto highlights what her community around her expected her body to be doing. In re-living her experiences of not speaking English when entering school (and the theoretical frameworks she currently sees these experiences through) Prieto gives voice to the mental challenges of conformity and hegemony in service of citizenship.