You Have Dislodged a Boulder: Mothers and Prisoners in the Post Keynesian California Landscape

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Abstract
The unprecedented expansion of US prisons during the final quarter of the twentieth century has produced many contradictions. Prisoners' families, stifled by sclerotic legal channels, are organizing to demand political remedies to the growing use of prisons as catch‐all solutions for social problems. One such group, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, developed in the midst of crisis‐riven 1990s Los Angeles. The group has negotiated maternal, race, and class ideologies and practices — effectively tearing down the veil between reproductive and productive labor — in order to elaborate and pursue its political work. The project has not been easy: crisis is internally as well as externally central to the group's formation. In charting the group's development, the article examines, historically and ethnographically, the ways in which organizing is constrained by recognition. It concludes that non‐reified recognition is produced when critical renovations of subjectivity, via collective assessments of structures, methods, and purpose, emerge as action in the discursive‐material interstices of structure and agency.

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