"You Gotta Keep Pushing": Immigrant People Regaining Ontological Security and Withstanding Coloniality

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. Public Significance Statement By analyzing interviews with 33 immigrant people, our study highlights how immigrant people regain trust and a sense of safety in the reliability of others (i.e., ontological security [OS]) using social capital. OS is achieved through resisting systemic discrimination, building interethnic communities with shared language/culture, and navigating institutional barriers to access jobs and higher education. Relationality was centered in our analysis as a decolonial turn into psychological research, as our research team shared experiences resisting discrimination and regaining OS, as part or in solidarity with the immigrant community. We presented our results back to immigrant people at a community event.