In the context of coloniality, immigrant people regain ontological security (OS) to rehumanize themselves. OS is a sense of trust immigrant people feel in the reliability of people and institutions (Vaquera et al., 2017). We consensus-coded interviews of 33 immigrant people in the Western United States. The analysis team was composed of bilingual coders from immigrant backgrounds. Immigrant people regain OS by using strategies at different ecological levels of analysis (Prilleltensky, 2008). They regain trust in themselves, their communities, and institutions, using resistant, social, linguistic, and navigational capital to actualize their hopes and dreams (Yosso, 2005). In a decolonial turn, we center relationality in our analysis, relying on the analysis team’s shared experiences of minoritization and thriving as members of the Latin American immigrant community. Our goal is to amplify immigrant people’s lived experiences of regaining OS along with our own, unveiling the research team’s entanglements with the immigrant community, and aiming to coconstruct research from our hearts.
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