Chicanxs Unidxs de Orange County (CU) is a community organisation in Southern California. Founded in 2006, CU is small, multigenerational and multi-ethnic. Its organising has focused predominantly on building community power by focusing on local politics, abusive policing and the gentrification of Chicanx neighbourhoods. This article presents an evidence-based narrative of several CU campaigns (primarily between 2008 and 2016). CU’s tactical aggressiveness and strategic pragmatism forced significant changes to ‘civil gang injunctions’ in California. For decades, California law enforcement has used such injunctions to suppress a generation of young people of colour as ‘gang members’. Minors and adults have been prohibited indefinitely from engaging in otherwise legal activities without due process. CU’s emphasis on the longevity of institutionalised and societal racism, rooted in the colonial conquest, resembles arguments associated with critical race theory (CRT) – though CU was not inspired by CRT. CU’s praxis resembles practices of critical pedagogy – though it was not directly modelled on it either. Rather, we argue that CU’s praxis is embedded in the members’ lived experience and study of the local history of racism, community and social movements. All five of this article’s authors were members of CU and were involved in the organising described in this article. The authors wrote this at the request of the CU membership, and it has been discussed and revised by the full membership.

Under what conditions do Latinx communities mobilize in response to threats of repressive policing? This article addresses this question by comparing three cases of community organizing against civil gang injunctions. Drawing on six years of ethnographic fieldwork, 20 semi-structured interviews, and analysis of news reports, my findings reveal that mobilization was achieved in low-income Latinx neighborhoods located within affluent White cities, where organizers drew upon strong ties to community insiders to combine analyses of the threat of citywide gang injunctions with critiques of White racism and political power. Conversely, mobilization did not occur when this strategy was used to organize a low-income Latinx neighborhood within a primarily working-class, Latinx city, where organizers confronted a more narrowly targeted gang injunction and had weaker ties to community insiders. I argue this lack of mobilization in the latter campaign cannot only be attributed to the insufficient threat posed by the gang injunction. Rather, local racial and ethnic dynamics, where Chicanx organizers struggled to develop grassroots leadership among community insiders, build solidarity with first-generation Latinx immigrants and link threats of repressive policing to anti-Latinx racism impeded mobilization. These findings highlight how popular mobilization against perceived threats of repressive policing is not race-neutral but instead depends upon racial and ethnic contexts where organizers can effectively link the issue to White racism.

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