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.

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This essay participates in recent calls for more direct engagement with theory in research and teaching within History and Early American Studies. Over the last decade voices have gathered for a reconsideration of fundamental theoretical concepts in the historiography of culture. This essay reconsiders theory on semiotics, learning, and the body to reopen a conceptual problem in early American cultural historiography: the relationships between organized power and individual agency. I suggest an approach to power and agency specifically tuned to the conditions of early America colonization, which was more intimate and diverse while possessing fewer institutions and less communications-saturation than a focus on myth, ideology, or discursive formations might assume. Reconsidering semiotics as embodied allows a conception of the body as a learning entity creatively mediating discourses and social constructions and thereby generating new historical identities and relations of power. The argument draws on studies on gender/sexuality, Native Americans, and the enslaved and takes cues from the work of Gyatri Spivak, Ann Laura Stoler, Michel Foucault, Lev Vygotsky, and Charles Sanders Peirce.

The authors analyze the practices and internal dynamics of a living wage campaign (LWC) at a liberal arts university to evaluate its implications for low-wage workers' social and economic justice struggles. A vibrant coalition among faculty members, students, and staff members demonstrated the complexities of organizing across racial, class, and status differences when participants hold different stakes. The campaign's diverse membership was its greatest strength and challenge, as campaigners brought with them key resources but also divergent understandings of the LWC's meaning and ultimate goals. Although the LWC's efforts at engaging in participative decision making, building relationships, and developing compatible frameworks of meaning created a culture of solidarity that invigorated the movement despite multiple obstacles, they were not sustainable. The campaign's dissolution and ultimate reformation as a union with a very different culture and practice raises questions about the strengths and limitations of LWCs and their implications for a revitalized labor movement.