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Eleven percent of households in the United States experience food insecurity at some point each year (Nord et. al. 2005). While this statistic is alarming, it does not capture the embodied consequences and lived experiences of being without food, the difficult choices that must be made in the face of material want, or the painful contradictions of having so little in a nation with so much. This statistic reveals little about the responses of the market, the state, or civil society to hunger, about who (if anyone) benefits from keeping more than a tenth of the population hungry, or about the social and health-related costs and stresses for families, communities, and the nation. This statistical representation conceals the reality that access to healthy and culturally relevant food is not equitably distributed across lines of race, class, ethnicity, and national origin. Instead, rates of food insecurity in the U.S. mirror and reinforce other patterns of inequality and disparities in food access are especially damaging to members of the working class and people of color. In fact, for Latino* households in the U.S, the prevalence of food insecurity is more than double that of the national average and compounds other social and health-related inequalities (Nord et. al. 2005). It is crucial that our understanding of food insecurity and hunger among marginalized communities in the U.S. goes beyond the realm of quantifiable data in order to demystify the sociocultural, political, and economic dynamics of our current food system. In response to these disparities in food access and the disproportionate suffering that results, my dissertation research will employ ethnographic methods, archival research, and discourse analysis to investigate the political economy of household food security and hunger among Latino immigrants in Seattle, Washington. Political economy as outlined here indicates a methodological approach integrating deep historical inquiry with an examination of how power plays out at the macro level and in everyday actions and experiences. This study has two core objectives: First, it will highlight and interrogate the contradictions arising from our nation’s heavy dependence upon immigrant labor and the simultaneous exploitation, intimidation, and denial of basic rights that keeps many of these same immigrant laborers underfed and malnourished. Second, it will explore if and how Latino immigrants are creating and occupying transformational spaces resulting from these contradictions where they might exercise their autonomy and agency over what and how they eat. If Latino immigrants are indeed exercising agency within these spaces, then I hypothesize that we will find innovative forms of cultural citizenship as they reclaim and reshape their own culturally embedded foodways. To operationalize these objectives and test this hypothesis, this study poses the following research questions: 1) How do state and civil society institutions respond to the food security needs of Latino immigrants through their policies, practices, and the discourses they articulate? 2) What networks, strategies, and resources do Latino immigrant households utilize to define and act upon their food security needs? 3) What do these strategies, practices, and policies and their underlying motivations tell us about the symbolic importance of food and the meanings that people attach to the food system? One strategy that I investigate and build from is the use of urban land for food cultivation and the various resources and networks that are mobilized in and through urban agriculture. This study is informed by two years of preliminary field research on food security and urban agriculture among the Spanish-speaking community in the Seattle area. This research demonstrates that urban agriculture is a vital practice through which many Latino families address their food needs, both through growing their own food in private and public spaces, and through consuming locally grown produce distributed through neighborhood food banks and pantries. While the benefits of urban agriculture have been empirically documented in numerous studies, the connections between Latino immigrant populations and urban agriculture have not been sufficiently studied in either agriculture and food studies or in studies of Latino immigration. This is especially noticeable and problematic in the wake of welfare reform and the current anti-immigrant climate, with dire consequences for these immigrants and their communities. My pilot research indicates that urban agricultural practices in Seattle are closely interconnected with many other components of the local food system, including child and adult nutrition education, emergency food programs, food banks and soup kitchens, farmers markets and community-supported agriculture projects, and more informal spaces of food redistribution including community events and bartering and exchange. It is the goal of this study to move outwards from the practices of urban agriculture in order to map and analyze these interconnected strategies, networks and resources, understand their cultural meanings, and locate them within a broader political-economic framework. Theoretically and politically, this project is informed by and challenges the current U.S. sociopolitical climate that endorses, legitimizes, and sustains structural violence toward immigrant populations. This violence is evident in the near complete elimination of social services available to immigrants resulting from neoliberal policies, ongoing conflicts around immigration and ethnic difference, and increasing border militarization. This study posits that a critical ethnographic understanding of the political economy of food security and hunger provides a unique and necessary lens for understanding how the relationships between people and their basic needs move from intimate embodied experiences, through household and social reproduction, and outwards towards the contradictions of and power inherent within the market, the state, and civil society. This research will shed new light on the survival strategies and the transformational uses of and claims over space and institutions that are being produced by one of the most vulnerable populations in the U.S. A better understanding of these creative strategies and uses of space that develop in society’s margins will provide us with better models for future food systems and innovative paths to enacting cultural citizenship. * I use the term “Latino” to refer to people with cultural, familial, or political ties to any region of Latin America.