Citizenship and Undocumented Youth: An Analysis of the Rhetorics of Migrant-Rights Activism in Neoliberal Contexts
Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation
Authors Ribero, Ana Milena
Publisher The University of Arizona.
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CITIZENSHIP AND UNDOCUMENTED YOUTH: AN ANALYSIS OF THE RHETORICS OF MIGRANT-RIGHTS ACTIVISM IN NEOLIBERAL CONTEXTS
by
Ana Milena Ribero
------
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WITH A MAJOR IN RHETORIC, COMPOSITION, AND THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
2016
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THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE
As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Ana Milena Ribero, titled Citizenship and Undocumented Youth: An Analysis of the Rhetorics of Migrant-Rights Activism in Neoliberal Contexts and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
______Date: April 4, 2016 Adela C. Licona
______Date: April 4, 2016 Damián Baca
______Date: April 4, 2016 Maritza Cárdenas
______Date: April 4, 2016 Victor Villanueva
Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.
I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.
______Date: April 4, 2016 Dissertation Director: Adela C. Licona
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STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.
Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.
SIGNED: Ana Milena Ribero
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project would not have been possible without the strong mentorship I received throughout my graduate career. I’d like to give special thanks to Dr. Adela C. Licona whose guidance and mentorship made me a better thinker, a more critical scholar, and overall a stronger and more humane mujer. Thanks to you, I stand firmly and fiercely as a feminista, and I look ahead to influencing future mujeres scholars in the ways you have influenced me. I am continuously overwhelmed by your generosity, kindness, and intelligence. Mil y mil gracias.
I am grateful for the support, encouragement, and feedback I received from my dissertation committee. Drs. Maritza Cárdenas, Victor Villanueva, and Damián Baca provided the input I needed to make this project something I can be proud of. Thank you for never wavering in responding emails, meeting over Skype, or sharing a cafecito to discuss the many aspects of my project for which I reached out to you. You have set a model of the type of engaged, critical scholar I look forward to becoming.
I would also like to thank my RCTE cohort, especially José Cortez, Sonia Arellano, and Al Harahap whose supportive friendship saw me through the ups and downs of graduate life, and whose scholarship and intellectual rigor inspired me to be the best I can be. Keep doing you! I am grateful to my best friend, Dr. Kimberly Reinhardt, for all the Fridays we spent holed up in the Ed. North building typing away and for all the dinners and drinks that followed. Your encouragement and love are invaluable.
I am most thankful for the loving support of my family who helped me in innumerable ways through the last five years. To my parents, Jorge and Liliana Ribero, for believing in me and for being proud of me. You keep me grounded to my roots and remind me of where I came from. The pages in this dissertation reflect that brave decision that you made in 1991 when you packed up your three children and your dog in search for better opportunities. I am a testament to your courage and love. Los quiero mas de lo que puedo expresar con palabras. Su amor y fuerza me inspiran todos los días. To my siblings, Paola and Juan, for making me laugh (and sometimes cry), but always loving me unconditionally.
Finally, I owe my success during these last five years to my amazing husband Paul Goidich, who believed in me, supported me, and put up with my grouchy, stressed-out self without complaint. I could not have done this without your support and love. Your zest for life fuels my creativity and energizes me to take advantage of each wonderful moment. Thank you for always being proud of me. Te amo, mi amor and I cannot wait to share our beautiful life with our new son.
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DEDICATION
For my husband, partner, and best friend, Paul Goidich
For my son, Alexei Elías Goidich Ribero 6
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT …………………………………………...…………………………………. 8 CHAPTER ONE: UNDOCUMENTED MIGRANT PRECARITY: CITIZENSHIP, MIGRATION, AND ACTIVISM …………………………………………………...…… 9
1.1 The World in Which I Find Myself: Situating Myself Within My Research … 13 1.2 Failed Promises of Belonging: The DREAM Act and the DREAMers …...…. 17 1.3 Seduced by Neoliberalism: State Recognition and Regularization ………...… 21 1.4 Citizenship as an Exclusionary Framework of Belonging …………………… 24 1.5 Migration: Discursive Constructions and Alternative Analytics …………….. 27 1.6 Migration and Migrant-Rights Discourses through the Lens of Transnational Feminism ……………………………………………………………………... 33 1.7 Chapter Outlines ……………………………………………………………… 36
CHAPTER TWO: BORDERING CITIZENSHIP: A REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE ON MIGRATION AND THE RACIALIZED, SEXUALIZED, AND GENDERED POLICING OF CITIZENSHIP ……………………………………………. 42
2.1 Policing Citizenship Through Youth of Color Positionalities ………………... 45 2.2 The Racialized Borders of the National Imaginary ………………………...… 49 2.3 Gendered Bodies, Excluded Subjects ………………………………………… 60 2.4 Complicating the Borders of Citizenship …………………………………….. 71
CHAPTER THREE: PERFORMING THE CIVIC IMAGINARY: REDEFINING CITIZENSHIP IN THE “BRING THEM HOME” CAMPAIGN ……………………….. 74
3.1 Performance and the Performative Contradiction ……………………………. 76 3.2 Citizenship in DREAMer Demonstrations in the Southwest ………………… 80 3.3 The Dream 9 Demonstration as a Performance of Citizenship …………...….. 82 The DREAMers: Luís León and Lizbeth Mateo ….………………………….. 84 The Audience: Both Simultaneous and Participants ………….…………..….. 93 3.4 Performances of Citizenship in the Neoliberal Nation-State ……………….... 105
CHAPTER FOUR: PAPÁ, MAMÁ, I’M COMING HOME: A TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF HOME AND FAMILY IN THE “BRING THEM HOME” CAMPAIGN ……………………………………………………………………………… 108
4.1 The Neoliberal Nation as Defined through Conceptualizations of Home and Family ……………………………...……………………………………………... 112 Motherhood and the Nation-as-family in the Migrant Mothers’ Story ……… 114 Nation-as-family in the Story of Isabel and Sarai ……….…………………… 122 Nation-as-home in Ingrid’s Narrative ………………………………………... 128 4.2 Constructing the Heteropatriarchal Nation-State …………………………….. 137
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CHAPTER FIVE: THE POSSIBILITIES OF (NON)BELONGING ………..………….. 141
5.1 Limits and Possibilities in DREAMer Activism ……………………………… 144 5.2 Citizenship Seductions ………………………………………………………... 146 5.3 A Politics of (Non)Belonging ……………………………………………...…. 149
WORKS CITED ………………………………………………………………………….. 156
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ABSTRACT
This project explores the productive form and function of rhetorics that produce and are produced by the US crisis of migration. Occupying the disciplinary interstices of rhetorical theory, transnational feminist inquiry, ethnic studies, and critical analyses of race, this project presents an analysis of citizenship as defined by DREAMer activism. “DREAMer” is the popular label given to undocumented young activists who initially mobilized in support of the DREAM Act. I analyze multimodal texts from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance’s (NIYA) “Bring Them Home” campaign, a DREAMer-led set of actions advocating for migrant belonging, and argue that in addition to their radical possibilities, migrant-rights rhetorics also reify neoliberal discourses of gendered, sexualized, and racialized oppression that sustain the dehumanization of migrants of color in the US.
At a time when migration crises are gaining increasing global attention, this project challenges scholars and activists to imagine discourses and practices that avoid reproducing racialized, sexualized, and gendered oppressions. I analyze multimodal texts related to the Dream 9, Dream 30, and Dream 150 actions in which groups of DREAMers who had been deported or left the US on their own accord presented themselves at various US Ports of Entry and asked the US for asylum. Part of NIYA’s “Bring the Home” campaign, these unprecedented actions transformed traditional migrant-rights activism by asking for DREAMers to be allowed to “return home,” thus, crafting the nation-state as the home in which DREAMers belong. Employing rhetorical analysis, I argue that DREAMer activism helps to redefine the nation-state in ways that are more inclusive to migrants of color; yet, because they rely on the nation-state as the granter of belonging, these migrant rhetorics also reinforce neoliberal nationalist ideas of individualism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy that legitimize the continued exclusion of migrants of color from the national imaginary.
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CHAPTER ONE
UNDOCUMENTED MIGRANT PRECARITY:
CITIZENSHIP, MIGRATION, AND ACTIVISM
Martha llegó de niña y sueña con estudiar
Pero se le hace difícil sin los papeles
Se quedan con los laureles los que nacieron acá
Pero ella nunca deja de luchar
El hielo anda suelto por estas calles
Nunca se sabe cuando nos va a tocar
Lloran, los niños lloran a la salida
Lloran al ver que no llegará mamá
Uno se queda aquí
Otro se queda allá
Eso pasa por salir a trabajar
-- La Santa Cecilia, “Ice El Hielo”
The lyrics above are from the song “Ice El Hielo” by the East Los Angeles band La Santa
Cecilia as part of the album Treinta Días. The song describes the life of an undocumented young woman, Martha, who arrived in the United States as a child and dreams of studying. Without proper documentation, however, it is difficult for Martha to go to college, leaving the educational opportunities and accolades to the US-born. The second stanza cited above conveys the fear and sadness that children of undocumented migrants often experience when their mothers do not return from work due to raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “Uno se queda
10 aquí/ otro se queda allá/ eso pasa por salir a trabajar (One stays here/ the other stays there/ that’s what happens when you go out to work),” state the last lines of the song’s chorus, describing the family separation that results from deportation. Treinta Días won a Grammy for best Latin rock album in 2013 and La Santa Cecilia dedicated the award to the 11 million undocumented migrants living in the US.
The precarity1 experienced by undocumented migrants in the US has been described in songs, news articles, and documentaries,2 yet many US citizens and residents are still unaware
(or apathetic) about the consequences of the US’s conflicting immigration policies and practices that acknowledge a need for laborers yet refuse to give those filling that need a pathway to regularization. While the government-sanctioned dehumanization of those who are essentially stateless—not recognized in the US but unable to return to the countries of their births— continues unabated, scholars work to understand the causes and effects of such precarity, looking for ways to recognize the influence that this segment of the US population has on the nation’s democratic imaginings.
1 In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler evokes precarity by asking, “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And finally, what makes for a grievable life?” (20). I use precarity in this work to signal the condition experienced by undocumented migrants of not being considered valuable neither in life nor in death. Precarity, therefore, creates a state of uncertainty and dehumanization for the undocumented, as their lives are not worth protection in the eyes of the state and their deaths are not considered grievable.
2 See the PBS documentary Don’t Tell Anyone (No Le Digas a Nadie) for a poignant example.
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My dissertation project is part of academic efforts to interrogate the discourses of migration that create state-sanctioned precarity for undocumented populations. I draw on and contribute to theories of rhetoric by analyzing the rhetorical productions of undocumented youth in response to ambivalent governmental discourses of migration, a rich site of analysis often overlooked in rhetorical scholarship. In the chapters that follow, I analyze migrant-rights rhetorics in order to advance theorizations of national belonging in neoliberal3 contexts and to confront the possibilities for equitable societal structures for undocumented people of color. My dissertation is positioned at the disciplinary interstices of rhetorical theory, transnational feminist inquiry, ethnic studies, and critical analyses of race to present an interdisciplinary analysis of citizenship as constituted by undocumented young people in the US. I analyze multimodal texts from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance’s (NIYA) “Bring Them Home”4 campaign and argue
3 I find it necessary to make a distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism. While liberalism—an ideology based on the belief on liberty, equality, natural rights, individualism, and free market—is foundational to the US national imaginary, neoliberalism presents a market model based on the principles of liberalism and is primarily concerned with privatization, market deregulation, and freedom of the market. An economic model that gained strength globally in the
1970s and 80s, neoliberalism’s market model has permeated all aspects of US social life and taken on ideological predispositions so that it is currently the driving ideology in the US nation- state.
4 The “Bring Them Home” campaign is organized by NIYA, a network of grassroots organizations led by undocumented youth who believe that the migrant rights fight in the US is to be fought on the streets as well as in the halls of government. Committed to “achieving
12 that, in addition to their radical intentions and possibilities, youth migrant-rights rhetorics also reify neoliberal discourses of gendered, sexualized, and racialized marginalization that sustain the dehumanization of migrants of color in the US. In other words, I employ a both/and approach
(Anzaldúa; Licona; Chávez) to considerations of rhetorical enablement and constraint.
Through rhetorical analysis, the following chapters argue that the performances of citizenship of undocumented young people help to redefine the nation-state in ways that are more inclusive of migrants of color; yet, because they rely on the nation-state as the granter of recognition, these migrant rhetorics also reinforce neoliberal nationalist ideas of individualism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy. At a time when migration crises are gaining increasing global attention, my dissertation challenges scholars and activists to imagine discourses and practices that avoid reproducing racialized, sexualized, and gendered oppressions.
By exploring the seductions of citizenship and the nation-state that the rhetorical activism of undocumented youth illustrates, I contend that the model of the nation-state and of citizenship as privileged forms of belonging can never fulfill radical liberatory intentions. I argue that the
equality for all immigrant youth, regardless of their legal status” (“NIYA”), NIYA advocates for a grassroots effort based on civil disobedience that positions undocumented youth, “as the people most affected,” at the forefront of the migrant rights movement. Their most famous campaign to date has been the “Bring Them Home” campaign, which according to NIYA activist Mohammad
Abdollahi, aims to highlight the family separation resulting from federal deportation policies and state policies that encourage “self-deportation” such as Alabama’s House Bill 56 and Arizona’s
State Bill 1070 (Nevarez).
13 nation-state is always defined according to who is left outside its borders and propose that theorizations of the discursive construction of the nation must consider how citizenship is constituted by the non-citizen.
This introductory chapter outlines the different conversations that lead to the line of inquiry I follow throughout my dissertation. I begin by situating myself within my research, then introduce and discuss the DREAM Act, the DREAMers, and relevant theories of citizenship and migration that inform my analysis of youth migrant-rights activism.
1.1 The World in Which I Find Myself: Situating Myself Within My Research
In an interview published in Composition Forum, rhetoric and composition scholar Victor
Villanueva describes the study of rhetoric by stating that, “for [the study of] rhetoric, the text is the world in which we find ourselves” (n.p.). With this poignant statement, Villanueva suggests that for rhetoric scholars, the world, its people, and its events are primary subjects of analysis. I take this idea to heart as I think about how my own research exigencies are drawn from the world in which I find myself. Fittingly, I will start this dissertation by situating myself and my connection to the work of analyzing migrant5-rights rhetorics.
5 Eithne Luibhéid in Queer Migrations: Sexuality, US Citizenship, and Border Crossings uses the word “migrant” rather than “immigrant” to challenge the US’s ethnocentric perspective of always viewing human migration patterns from the host country’s perspective. When the US names migrating subjects only as immigrants, it denies their mobility, rejects histories of migration, and positions the US and its citizenship as a coveted characteristic that is always desired and can always provide salvation. Accordingly, I will use the term “migrant” rather than
“immigrant” in this dissertation unless I am quoting its use or discussing the politics of the term
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I was born in Bogotá, Colombia, where, thanks to the efforts of my family to never let us children realize we were living in a war zone, I had a beautiful childhood despite the harsh violence and insecurity going on around me. And so, I got used to the sounds of bombs around the city. I shrugged off the news reports of deadly firefights between army soldiers and guerrillas. I ignored the many times I heard of the nation’s leaders—themselves often deep in a web of corruption—being kidnapped or killed.
In August 1991, when I was eleven years old, my parents grew tired of living in the shadow of violence and economic instability, packed up our belongings, said goodbye to friends and family, and immigrated to the US. Although our journey was short—a three-hour flight from
Bogotá to Miami—my experience with migration affected every aspect of my life. Being a migrant gave me the opportunity to become bilingual and bicultural. It allowed me opportunities for cultural experiences that to this day enrich my understanding of the world. It also gave me the experience of feeling divided between two nations, neither of which makes me feel like I belong.
Instead of growing up with two nations, I feel like I grew up without one, so I put little value on national belonging broadly construed.6 At the same time, I had the privilege of being a migrant
specifically. Similarly, I will use the word “migration” instead of “immigration” unless I am discussing laws and policies that address immigration into the US in particular and that generally disregard global patters of migration.
6 In Borderlands/La Frontera, Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa theorizes the “new mestiza consciousness” as a productive position resulting from non-belonging. She portrays the new consciousness as a rejection of binary perspectives—a flexible way of being. This flexibility, which Anzaldúa calls “the tolerance for ambiguity,” can allow not only for the transgression of
15 with legal documentation, first a visa, then a green card, and after ten years of residency, naturalized US citizenship. I have enjoyed the benefits—big and small—that legal status provides, from acquiring a driver’s license at the same time as all my US-born friends, to being able to access federal financial aid to attend college. US citizenship, although it has never meant much to me as the affective dimension that some scholars theorize (Allen, Anderson), has given me opportunities that I do not take for granted. Because of my experiences as a naturalized US citizen, I empathize with the desire for citizenship, even as I reflect on its limitations.
During the last five years I’ve watched as undocumented young migrants have voiced their desire for the benefits of US citizenship. No longer a tacit minority relegated to the sidelines of migrant-rights activism, undocumented young people have held demonstrations and protests with which they loudly and proudly demand more equitable structures that reflect their lived experiences within the US:
March 2010: The first “Coming Out of the Shadows” event is held in Chicago’s Federal Plaza, when groups of young people declare their undocumented status in front of the offices of the US
Citizenship and Immigration Services. (Daniels).
borders, but for the existence of new and hybrid perspectives. She writes, “The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended” (102). Anzaldúa’s new mestiza informs the “both/and” approach I take in this project, an analytic that rejects singular readings and instead looks for both the possibilities and the limitations that come from critiques of belonging.
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May 2010: Five young undocumented people dressed in graduation caps and gowns hold a sit-in in the Tucson, Arizona offices of Senator John McCain, demanding he sponsor the Development,
Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. The New York Times reports this as the
“first time students have directly risked deportation in an effort to prompt Congress to take up a bill that would benefit illegal immigrant youths” (Preston).
June 2011: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist José Antonio Vargas comes out as undocumented in the New York Times, raising awareness of the fight for the rights of undocumented youth by presenting mainstream US with an easily digestible undocumented immigrant narrative. In his article, Vargas comes out as the exceptional DREAMer with a prominent career, who “lived up to the qualities of a ‘citizen’: hard work, self-reliance, love of country” (Vargas).
June 2012: Vargas and 35 undocumented young people are featured on the cover of Time magazine with the headline “We are Americans, Just not Legally.”
July 2012: Undocumented youths Marcos Saavedra and Viridiana Martinez infiltrate the
Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, FL by purposefully getting detained by Border
Patrol officers at the Fort Lauderdale International Airport. Their goal is not only to see the conditions inside the migrant detention center, but also to see if the Obama administration has stopped deporting DREAM Act-eligible young people, as they had stipulated they would do when announcing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on 15 June 2012. (“DREAM
Activist”)
Due to such brave activism, usually engaged and circulated through mainstream contexts and media, the US can no longer ignore the voices of undocumented young people who have struggled quietly in the margins for so long. These young people who grew up in the US have in the last decade organized and demanded to be recognized as members of this nation. They want
17 the rights that come with the citizenship they feel they already possess. This is the world in which I find myself and the rhetorical context to which the current project responds.
1.2 Failed Promises of Belonging: The DREAM Act and the DREAMers
The undocumented young activists who helped make migrant rights a salient issue in the
US political consciousness gained the label of DREAMers in reference to their support of the
DREAM Act. The DREAM Act was introduced in the Senate on August 2001 as a way to provide legal relief for undocumented young people who were brought into the US by their parents as children. Although the DREAM Act has changed since its initial drafting, the primary elements include permanent resident status and, in the more wide-ranging versions, a pathway to citizenship for undocumented migrants who met the following conditions:
• entered the country before the age of 16
• lived continuously in the US for five years or more
• have “good moral character”
• graduated from a US high school or received a GED
• have been accepted to a 4-year university or completed 2 years of military service
(Development)
More than a decade later, this legislation is still an important part of the discussion over immigration reform. While none of its provisions have become law, the DREAM Act today symbolizes the hope of legal status for undocumented young people and unites many in the undocumented youth community under a common goal.
Although DREAMers initially mobilized in support of the DREAM Act, this moment was but a catalyst for their continued political mobilization under broader goals of migrant justice. Sociologist Walter Nicholls in The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth
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Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate in the United States, suggests that the
DREAMers’ goal was not only to argue for their own regularization, but also to fight for the rights of all undocumented migrants. Nicholls describes how DREAMers were able to argue for their inclusion in the US civic body through what he calls “niche openings,” “legal, economic, and moral ambiguities that question the extent to which all undocumented immigrants should be considered fully illegal” (10). Through creative and courageous actions previously unimaginable in migrant-rights activism, DREAMers changed the face of migrant-rights activism and helped to move the issue of regularization for undocumented youth to the forefront of national attention.
Even though the DREAM Act has not passed, DREAMers have successfully advocated for deferred deportations for DREAM Act-eligible youth and in-state tuition in state universities in at least 18 states. DREAMers are also active in condemning the US practice of detaining and deporting migrant families (Lemons).
Still, DREAMer activism is largely framed by their initial support for the DREAM Act, a proposal based on neoliberal US foundational tropes that limit the ways DREAMers have been represented (and have self-represented) in their activism. Consequently, the DREAM Act’s foundational tropes inform the ways I read and analyze DREAMer activism in this project.
Alluding to the “American Dream,” an individualistic utopia, the DREAM Act expounds the neoliberal merits of individualism and meritocracy. With its focus on individual achievement, the
DREAM Act grants rights only to those deemed “worthy” based on an individualist, meritocratic system in which young people must struggle to achieve individual capitalist success—measured by college acceptance or military service—before they can benefit. This focus on individual progress and capitalist success contributes to a bootstraps narrative of exceptionalism that ignores the structural inequalities felt by the undocumented migrant community in the US. As
19 sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues in his landmark text Racism Without Racists: Color-
Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, “Individualism today has been recast as a justification for opposing policies to ameliorate racial inequality because they are
‘group based’ rather than ‘case by case’” (35). Although immigration reform has the potential to incorporate “group based” policies, the DREAM Act’s stipulations grant rights only to those
“exceptional” undocumented young people who achieve merits in US neoliberal society. Thus, the DREAM Act benefits undocumented migrants in a case-by-case basis and deters group-based solutions to migrant dehumanization.
The DREAM Act also falls into what Chicana feminist Chela Sandoval describes as the
“equal rights” rhetorical form (55.6). The equal rights rhetorical form bases claims for civil rights on the idea that all humans are created equal and, therefore, deserve the same rights:
“Practitioners of this particular ideological tactic demand that their humanity be legitimated, recognized as the same under the law, and assimilated into the most favored form of the human- in-power” (55.6). Indeed, the DREAM Act positions DREAMers to be recognized as deserving of the civil rights given to US citizens. In fact, in their support of the DREAM Act, some
DREAMers have argued that they are in fact “American” in all senses of the word but one— legal documentation. Sandoval then explains why this rhetorical form fails to critique the dominant oppressive system: “Aesthetically, the equal-rights mode of consciousness seeks duplication; politically, it seeks integration; psychically, it seeks assimilation” (55.6). Although
“assimilation” has become an expletive among Latin@s,7 connoting a surrender of particularized
7 Following the trend in much contemporary Latin@ scholarship in rhetoric and composition
(Baca 2008; Medina 2014; Licona and Maldonado 2014), I use the @ throughout the text to
20 ethnic cultures and identities in exchange for the homogenized white US identity, it cannot be overlooked that the DREAM Act positions these young adults as wanting to assimilate or having already assimilated into the US way of life. The DREAM Act suggests that DREAMers deserve the rights of US citizens because they have already assimilated to mainstream ideas of US identity with their emphasis on capitalist production and the US as economic, political, and military world power.8 The equal rights frame, however, lacks a critique of the global race- and gender-based inequalities that plague this capitalist system. The DREAM Act provides a way for
DREAMers to fit into the US status quo, rather than question its basic premises.
signal the rejection of stable gendered and sexed subjects in the construction of identities. With this choice, I am not privileging the male (as Spanish is designed to do) or the female, or even the male/female gender binary. Furthermore, as Sandra Soto comments in Reading Chican@
Like a Queer, the @ calls our attention “with its blend of letters from the alphabet on the one hand and a curly symbol on the other hand, a rasquachismo that at first sight looks perhaps like a typo and seems unpronounceable” (2). The @ creates a visual impact that draws the reader’s attention to the purposeful rejection of gender and sex binaries.
8 I must note the pluralist sort of assimilation for which the DREAM Act and its supporters advocate. Whereas assimilation can be construed as a type of white-washing—the lack of difference, under neoliberal contexts, assimilation has a pluralist quality in which difference itself is incorporated and valued into mainstream society. DREAM Act advocates, then, should not be read as desiring whiteness, but instead as wanting for their differential positionings to also hold privilege in the neoliberal nation.
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Finally, the DREAM Act also splinters the migrant-rights movement by asking legislators to grant special rights to a limited population. By separating DREAMers from the rest of the undocumented population, the DREAM Act frames DREAMers as exceptional, making it easy for US citizens to maintain their disparaging stereotypes about the undocumented because they see DREAMers as the exception to the rule. This rhetorical frame allows the discriminatory binary thinking exemplified in some politically conservative discourse, such as in Rep. King’s
(IA) now infamous statement about the DREAMers: “[F]or every one that’s a valedictorian, there’s [sic] another 100 out there… hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert” (Richter).
Building on DREAMer exceptionalism, the DREAM Act reinforces the myth of cultural deficiency that posits that if DREAMers are able to succeed, go to college, and fit into US society, those other undocumented migrants who are not successful according to the stipulations of the DREAM Act (college acceptance or military service) are so because they are lazy or criminals or because something is wrong with them culturally (e.g., they do not value education, are contented with a life of poverty, are only interested in criminality). DREAMer activism often continues to correspond with the frames stipulated by the DREAM Act. As I discuss in this work, the radical potential of DREAMer activism is curbed by the neoliberal tropes of the
DREAM Act, which grant belonging only to the neoliberal subject.
1.3 Seduced by Neoliberalism: State Recognition and Regularization
My dissertation also presents a critique of the ubiquity of neoliberalism in citizenship discourses by analyzing neoliberal tropes present in migrant-rights rhetorics. Through discourses that delineate what is and is not the nation and who is and is not a citizen, US citizenship is constructed via neoliberal ideas that impinge every aspect of life in the nation-state. In Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, political theorist Wendy Brown defines
22 neoliberalism as “an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life” (30). According to Brown, neoliberal ideology “disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities—even where money is not at issue—and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus” (31). In this way, all aspects of life are shaped by a capitalist market model that values individualistic competition and maximized return on investments.
While a politics of neoliberalism affects all aspects of life in the US, from the family home to the university, dominant narratives about neoliberalism still portray this ideology as only pertaining to economic policies and practices. In this way, the ideology of neoliberalism can seem apolitical and innocuous, only affecting how capital is produced, bought, and sold.
American studies scholar Lisa Duggan, in The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural
Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, describes the slippery nature of neoliberal ideology that allows it to permeate all aspects of personal, social, and political life without ever seeming politically motivated. Duggan argues that “the most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture” (xiv). In other words, what makes neoliberalism—which Duggan briefly defines as “a vision of national and world order, a vision of competition, inequality, market ‘discipline,’ public austerity, and ‘law and order’” (x)—so successful and totalizing in its ideological dominance over all aspects of life is the assumption that the economic policies and practices that undergird it lack a political agenda. Duggan writes, “This rhetorical separation of the economic from the political and cultural arenas disguises the upwardly redistributing goals of neoliberalism—its
23 concerted efforts to concentrate power and resources in the hand of tiny elites” (xiv).
Neoliberalism works to maintain a sharp gap between the rich and the poor, yet does so while maintaining a guise of innocent neutrality with the excuse that it is the “invisible hand of the market” that unwittingly maintains global income inequalities. Moving beyond the liberal political economy, neoliberalism describes an ideology that is based on economic free market principles but that reaches all aspects of social and political life.
The vast expanse of neoliberal ideology has even reached activism that advocates to end income inequality and injustice. Seduced by the promises of neoliberalism, such activism forgoes radical possibilities in exchange for state recognition. Within activist movements, neoliberal ideology switched the focus from demanding radical change to winning individual legal battles and electoral politics. Think the Human Rights Campaign compared to Against Equality.9
Migrant-rights activism has not been immune to neoliberalism’s appeal. Within US neoliberal society, undocumented youth who would benefit from radical change are often limited to asking for regularization into the exclusionary neoliberal system of income inequality. This is the kind
9 As the largest LGBT organization in the US, the Human Rights Campaign has been at the forefront of many legal battles seeking legislative equality for LGBT US citizens, including marriage equality and the end of employment discrimination (HRC). Contrastingly, Against
Equality is a grass-roots group seeking to “reinvigorate the queer political imagination” (Against
Equality) through a critique of mainstream LGBT politics, including a critique of the heteropatriarchal values espoused in traditional marriage (and reproduced via the movement for
LGBT marriage equality) and the heteropatriarchal discourses of war and the nation-state in continuous military conflict (reified through the movement to allow “gays in the military”).
24 of move that I’m particularly attentive to in this project. Inasmuch as I advocate for an end to migrant dehumanization, I am highly skeptical that this end can be met through adhering to the neoliberal market model.
1.4 Citizenship as an Exclusionary Framework of Belonging
This project builds on theories of citizenship that challenge the idea of a monolithic status of belonging. In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, critical theorist Laurent Berlant defines citizenship as “a standing within the law… [and] at the same time… a relation among strangers who learn to feel it as a common identity based on shared historical, legal, or familial connection to a geopolitical space” (37). This complex condition of belonging has the power to create the nation-state because it helps to decide who is considered worthy of the rights and protections of the law. Such supposedly “inalienable rights,” including in the US the right to due process and the pursuit of happiness, are ascribed to particularly racialized, gendered, and sexualized populations through the mechanisms of citizenship. When the rights and protections of citizenship—the privileges of citizenship—are focused on one limited population, this population logically gains power over those not ascribed the same rights and protections. Berlant writes, “The historical conditions of legal and social belonging have been manipulated to serve the concentration of economic, racial, and sexual power in the society’s ruling blocks” (37). In the US, the privileges of citizenship have been traditionally ascribed to white, heterosexual, able- bodied males. While exceptions to this rule have taken place historically with for example women’s suffrage and the Voting Rights Act, these limited exceptions often only grant legal recognition and belonging in one aspect of society (e.g., the voting booth), rather than granting the full privileges of citizenship to populations holistically.
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However, as Berlant argues, the nation’s preoccupation with guarding citizenship and with preventing and policing its corruption only divulges the fragility of citizenship as a nation- making discourse. She writes, “The anxieties surrounding the process of making people into national subjects confirm that the hegemonic form of national culture is fragile and always in the process of being defined” (56). Despite the dynamic character of citizenship, the investment in its containment as a single, monolithic entity remains because, as Berlant writes, “when the modal form of the citizen is called into question, when it is no longer a straight, white, reproductively included heterosexual but rather might be anything, any jumble of things, the logic of the national future comes into crisis” (18). Ergo, the future of the nation as a singularly bordered spatio/temporal community depends on a reductive majoritarian, (narrowly) sexed, gendered, and raced citizenship—a monolithic construction that is all too fragile.
Interestingly, Berlant suggests that dominant narratives about migration contribute to the maintenance of this monolithic and idealized nation “not just because the immigrant is seen as without a nation or resources and thus as deserving of pity or contempt, but because the immigrant is defined as someone who desires America” (Queen of America 195). This idea is particularly relevant to my project because it highlights the complex relationship between citizenship and the non-citizen. The rhetorical figure of the non-citizen migrant represents the desire for the nation-state—she who will do anything, even risk her life, to establish herself in the US. The figure of the migrant, and I would argue of the undocumented migrant in particular, does not only help define the borders of the nation-state, but also paints those borders as exceptional—able to provide the quality of life that the home country does not. I refer to the
“figure of the migrant” to denote that it is not the actual migrants themselves who always ingeniously desire the nation or who necessarily possess a naïve belief in its promises. It is the
26 figure of the migrant as imagined in the national consciousness and reified by popular discourses of migration that possesses this US nationalist naiveté. This image becomes a rhetorical trope to be deployed in anything from political discourse to television programs.
The figure of the migrant also serves to define the borders of the nation because she stands, although perhaps within the actual boundaries of the nation-state, outside of the nation- state’s recognition. Gender theorist Judith Butler argues, in Who Sings the Nation State, that constituting the public—the sphere of social life shared by the civic body—depends on separating some populations to the private sphere. She asks, “Can that public ever be constituted as such without some population relegated to the private and hence, the pre-political, and isn’t this radically unacceptable for any radical democratic political vision?” (22). Here Butler hints at why citizenship as a condition of belonging negates the possibility for a radical democratic political vision. If citizenship is always built in opposition to the non-citizen, then its inherently exclusionary nation-building tendencies will never construct a nation-state that is other than discriminatory.
Responding to the inherently exclusionary underpinnings of citizenship, American and women studies scholar Amy L. Brandzel proposes that rather than retheorizing citizenship as a more inclusive and flexible formation, radical feminist scholars must recognize citizenship for the exclusionary construct that it is. In her forthcoming book Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative, Brandzel argues that “citizenship is not only the central structure for reifying the norms of whiteness, heterosexuality, consumerism, and settler colonialism within the US, but that these norms are brutally enforced against nonnormative bodies, practices, behaviors, and forms of affiliation” (n.p.). Not only does Brandzel take a stand against citizenship, she also proposes that a defense of citizenship often maintains anti-intersectional, anti-coalitional politics
27 that disempower minoritized populations including people of color, undocumented migrants, and queer folks. She offers a politics against citizenship as a “political coalitional present to dismantle the heteronormative, whitenormative, colonialnormative structures of US culture and politics” (n.p.). Throughout this dissertation, I take up Brandzel’s call by questioning how migrant-rights activism based on citizenship claims reinforces citizenship’s exclusionary tendencies and reifies the violence of citizenship against minoritized populations. A politics against citizenship guides this project as I read migrant-rights rhetorics for the ways they champion citizenship as well as for the possibilities these rhetorics present for different frameworks of belonging.
1.5 Migration: Discursive Constructions and Alternative Analytics
A third dimension of my line of inquiry builds on work that analyzes how migration and migrants are racialized, gendered, and sexualized, and that challenges notions of migration as the localized problem of underdeveloped nations. In her book Undoing Border Imperialism, Harsha
Walia, who is the activist founder of the Canadian migrant-rights activist group No One Is
Illegal, posits that patterns of migration are affected by border imperialism—a global structure of power based on neoliberal economic policies that maintains Western hegemony. Through capitalism, colonialist practices of empire-building, and racialized, sexualized, and gendered hierarchies of oppression, border imperialism structures global displacement and migration patterns that reinforce the hegemony that produces them (Walia 16). In other words, the migration patterns experienced globally in this contemporary moment are not isolated incidents of self-motivated mobilization, nor are they individualized responses to localized struggles of sovereign nation-states. Instead, global migration patterns, of which undocumented migration into the US is but a part, are power-effects of Western neoliberal empire-building.
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As a framework for analysis, border imperialism considers that a primary global engine of migration is the profit-making hegemony of Western nation-states. Walia writes, “Western governance and statehood is constituted through multiple modes, including the primacy of the border that delineates and reproduces territorial, political, economic, cultural, and social control… Western states thus are major arbiters in determining if and under what conditions people migrate” (45). Western hegemony affects patterns of migration that in turn maintain the current world order. Despite popular narratives that present migrants as fleeing their war-stricken countries into the arms of a liberating nation, border imperialism illustrates how the Global
North creates inhospitable life conditions for citizens of developing nations through capitalist practices including free trade agreements and media dominance, then depends on migrants as a cheap form of labor with which to uphold its economic prowess and define the borders of its nation-states. Walia writes, “Large-scale displacements and the precarious conditions into which migrants are cast are not coincidental but rather foundational to the structuring of border imperialism” (47). The displacement and discrimination of migrants, who Walia argues are primarily and globally indigenous peoples of color, is a purposeful Western practice designed and undertaken to maintain global economic and cultural dominance.
Such dogged displays of power are evident in the ways US immigration law constitutes and reproduces the figure of the “illegal immigrant.” Despite dominant narratives about migration that posit illegality is a result of unsanctioned border crossings, the category of
“illegal” is largely discursively produced by US immigration laws that create an underclass of perpetually criminalized subjects. Thus, the category of “illegal” is a discursive construction produced and reinforced by immigration law that ensures a cheap labor force for capitalist enterprise and convenes an Orwellian common enemy against whom to unite the nation.
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In her article “Perpetual Illegality: Results of Border Enforcement and Policies for
Mexican Undocumented Migrants in the United States,” sociologist Heidy Sarabia illustrates how immigration laws in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations “stretched the boundaries” (59, original emphasis) of illegality to serve US domestic and foreign interests.
Sarabia’s analysis of immigration legislation spanning three presidential administrations highlights that changes in policy, not migration numbers alone, have significantly increased the size of the US’s illegalized population in the last couple of decades. The growing number of undocumented migrants in the US does not exclusively reflect an increase of migrant populations who are allegedly skipping the line of legal entry and crossing the border with no regard to the rule of law. Instead, the growing undocumented population indicates the effect of a slew of legislation that constituted, reinforced, and increased the size of the category of “illegal immigrant.”
The discursivity of the category of “illegal immigrant” is best understood by examining how US immigration policies in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama eras work together to create, increase, and perpetuate the criminalization of undocumented migrants—hence, illegalizing them. President Bill Clinton’s 1994 decision to strengthen the border, which set a path for the increased policing of the border through an ever-growing Border Patrol force,10 not only multiplied the number of apprehensions of unsanctioned border crossers, but also forced
10 According to a report by US Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol agent staffing has increased by almost 100% in the last decade, from 10,717 agents in 2003 to 21,391 agents in
2013. A majority of those agents (18,611) are assigned to Southwest border sectors. (United
States Border Patrol)
30 migrants to take more dangerous paths across the border to avoid detection. With increased risks of death and apprehension, many migrants who used to cross the border regularly to work in the
US—constituting a temporary rather than a permanent undocumented worker population—opted to stay in the US continually. Thus, Clinton’s “Operation Gatekeeper” did not deter migrants from crossing the border into the US; instead, it kept migrants from returning to their home countries and contributed to a permanent undocumented—illegalized—population in the US.
(Sarabia 55)
Nearly a decade later, the heightened nationalist paranoia caused by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 prompted President George W. Bush to change the Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) to the much more ominous sounding (and acting) Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the new Department of Homeland Security (Sarabia 55). This rhetorical change also shifted the focus to the criminalization, apprehension, and deportation of the undocumented population that Clinton’s laws had helped to create (55). Bush-era approaches to immigration control, such as the “Secure Communities” initiative, not only authorized community raids and checkpoints, but also criminalized undocumented entry to the US (before this, it was a civil offense) and marked those who perpetrate unsanctioned entry as criminals to be apprehended. The status of the newly criminalized (and newly illegalized) migrant population created by “Secure Communities” not only increased profits for the privatized prison industry, but also helped define the “illegal immigrant” in the US in a way that would be cemented during the Obama administration.
After garnering a large portion of the Latin@ vote (67% in 2008 and 71% in 2012, according to the Pew Research Center), President Barack Obama felt compelled to soften his stance on immigration by claiming that his administration would only focus on apprehending and
31 deporting “criminal aliens,” deeming those without criminal histories “low priority” for deportation. However, as Sarabia states, thanks to immigration legislation passed by the Bush administration, a migrant who has been deported and then re-enters the country without proper documentation is considered a “criminal alien.” Sarabia states, “As a ‘criminal alien’ with a past conviction, undocumented presence in the United States is enough to serve jail time” (57) and risk deportation. Even though Obama’s claim of prioritizing the deportation of “criminal aliens” seems to target undocumented migrants who may have committed gang violence, aggravated theft, or drug-related crimes (themselves gendered and racialized constructs in the national consciousness), in actuality Obama’s policy prioritizes the detention and deportation of migrants who have re-entered the country after deportation. These newly illegalized migrants join the population of the perpetually illegal because their criminalization denies them the ability to adjust their legal status.11
To be clear, I read Sarabia’s analysis as demonstrating the discursive construction of
“illegality.” Cross border migration patterns are given value through immigration law; therefore, immigration law shapes migrants into “illegal immigrants” and mandates mechanisms of persecution, apprehension, detention, and deportation. Furthermore, Sarabia posits that rather than deterring unsanctioned migration these immigration laws serve various purposes for the state: “On the one hand, [immigration legislation] helps to discipline one segment of the labor
11 I offer a critique Obama’s immigration discourse in the article “Acceptable Heterogeneity:
Brownwashing Rhetoric in President Obama’s Address on Immigration,” in which I introduce the concept of “brownwashing” to confront the limitations of mainstream immigration policy and its rhetorics.
32 force (by making “illegal” workers vulnerable). On the other hand, illegality creates monolithic notions of national identity (by delineating who legitimately belongs and who does not)” (61).
Serving border imperialism, immigration legislation guards the borders of citizenship by stipulating and policing the boundaries of illegality and working as a neoliberal disciplinary mechanism for labor subordination through nationalist means.12
In this dissertation, I consider migration through the lens of border imperialism, which instead of placing responsibility on the migrant for her mobilization, points to the displacement, detention, incarceration, and discrimination of migrants as practices produced by and productive of Western global hegemony. Dominant media narratives often blame migration on the migrant; as Walia states, “By invoking the state itself as a victim, migrants themselves are cast as illegals and criminals who are committing an act of assault on the state” (60). My dissertation shows how much migrant-rights activism also approaches migration as a localized problem to be solved through various paths toward regularization. Border imperialism inverts the perspective of
12 In “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life,” Nicholas de Genova frames alienization and deportability in terms of the capitalist need for cheap labor. He argues that deportability works to maintain the abjectivity of undocumented illegalized migrants so that there is a constant source of exploitable labor for Western profiteering. Thus, de Genova portends to denaturalize “illegality,” “not merely as a fetish that commands debunking but rather as a determinant (or real) abstraction produced as an effect of the practical materiality of the law”
(424). Gesturing to border imperialism, de Genova considers undocumented migrations produced and shaped by global neoliberal policies and, therefore, implicit in the local workings of capitalist economies.
33 analysis to examine the global political economies that influence migration and argues that mechanisms of regularization (e.g., amnesty, work permits, and pathways to citizenship) do not dismantle the neoliberal structures that create migrant precarity.
1.6 Migration and Migrant-Rights Discourses through the Lens of Transnational Feminism
In “Global Feminism: Feminist Theory’s Cul de Sac,” transnational feminist scholar
Elora Haim Chowdhury argues that “at a time of militarized war and US empire building . . . it becomes ever more important to carefully examine the ways in which feminisms are deployed to further different political agendas as well as feminist complicity and dissent to those agendas”
(292). With this imperative in mind, I draw on transnational feminisms as a way to hold myself accountable for how feminism perpetuates and reinforces dominant discourses about so-called
Third World women. Therefore, I use transnational feminism as a theoretical framework for my analysis of discourses that use gendered identities to engage discourses of migrant rights.
Transnational feminism does not only necessitate a critical self-awareness of hegemonic complicity, but also provides an ethical approach with which to consider the subjectivities of people who cross borders.
Drawing on transnational feminist scholars, I outline the following tenets of transnational feminism that I use in this project:
Transnational feminism acknowledges the discursivity of racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities. A transnational feminist analysis rejects the idea that racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities have fixed, pre-discursive meanings. Instead the category of woman, which is always already racialized, gendered, and sexualized, is produced by hegemonic discourses that have social and historical contexts (“Under Western Eyes” 62), including
Western academic discourses about women’s oppression. In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s
34 landmark text “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” the author uses the sentence “white men are saving brown women from brown men” to illustrate how Western academic discourses constitute the oppressed (subaltern) Third-World woman subject—notice how she is a racialized, sexualized, and gendered subject—in order to save her. Spivak critiques Western intellectuals for ignoring the role they play in the discursive construction of the subaltern as a monolithic subject. For
Spivak, there is an “unrecognized contradiction within a position that valorizes the concrete experience of the oppressed, while being so uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual”
(69), not only in maintaining oppression through complicity in hegemonic power structures, but also in discursively constituting the oppressed as objects of analysis. As Spivak writes, “this benevolent first-world appropriation and reinscription of the Third World as an Other is the founding characteristic of much third-worldism in the US human sciences today” (84). My transnational feminist approach hopes to avoid such pitfalls by complicating women’s oppression as an effect of social and historical contexts.
Accordingly, transnational feminism takes into account global structures of neoliberalism and heteropatriarchy in analyzing the lives of women throughout the world. As Chowdhury argues in her analysis of acid attacks in South Asia, studies of gendered violence and oppression
“must pay attention to the confluence of political, socioeconomic and historical forces that make certain social groups more vulnerable to such extreme violence and suffering” (“Rethinking
Patriarchy” 99). Undergirding this methodological imperative is the belief that, as transnational feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes in Feminism Without Borders, “the interwoven processes of sexism, racism, misogyny, and heterosexism are an integral part of our social fabric, wherever in the world we happen to be” (3). Consequently, transnational feminism avoids positioning Western women as the normative referent with which to analyze the lives of
35 so-called Third World women (“Under Western Eyes” 65), but instead considers the conditions of possibility for specific discursive constructions of “women” as an identity category.
Transnational feminism takes into account the daily concerns and survival strategies of people as they navigate the material conditions of their lives. Ethnic studies scholar Yen Le
Espiritu argues that critical analysis must do more than critique; “it also needs to integrate sophisticated theoretical rigor with the daily concerns of real people as they navigate their social worlds” (Body Counts 13). Similarly, Mohanty contends that transnational feminism is “attentive to small as well as large struggles and processes that lead to radical change” (4). This means that my theoretical approach pays attention to larger organized social movements and practices, and also attends to small scale and often unintended actions that may lead to change or stagnation.
Transnational feminism posits a critique of neoliberalism. Using a transnational feminist approach to research entails problematizing the ways global capitalist practices and policies engender systems of power that oppress racialized, gendered, and sexualized Others. As
Mohanty argues, transnational feminism “entails an anti-imperialist understanding of feminist praxis, and a critique of the way global capitalism facilitates US- and Eurocentrism as well as nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment” (Feminism Without Borders 9). My analysis in this study, therefore, problematizes migrant-rights discourses in order to make visible the ubiquity of neoliberal ideology in the contemporary moment. Transnational feminism considers the ways neoliberal economic policies and practices are directly and purposefully implicated in the material life conditions of people around the globe and in the inequitable distribution of power and resources. Within a critique of neoliberalism, transnational feminism questions the legitimacy of national borders as they buttress Western hegemony globally and white heteropatriarchy locally.
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1.7 Chapter Outlines
Throughout this dissertation, I draw on Damián Baca’s work in Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital
Migrations, and the Territories of Writing to define rhetoric as a world-wide practice of meaning-making13. The study of rhetoric, therefore, is the analysis of strategies employed by a speaker/writer to convey meaning to an audience. I am also informed by transnational feminist scholar Wendy Hesford’s definition of rhetoric as “a practice of making and remaking social and political relations and incorporating subjects into discursive formation and regimes of truth”
(12). Hesford’s definition of rhetoric provides a nuanced view of the power of rhetoric in the world. Through practices of meaning-making, rhetoric works to incorporate subjects into discursive formations that designate how subjects are imagined and embodied in the world. I use
Michel Foucault’s definition of discourse, as he defines it in Archaeology of Knowledge, as
“made up of a limited number of statements for which a group of conditions of existence can be
13 I must also note that Baca pushes against the use of the term “rhetoric” to refer to the meaning- making practices of people outside the Hellenocentric and Eurocentric Greco Latin context. In
“te-ixtli: The ‘Other Face’ of the Americas,” Baca writes, “The Pre-Columbian Americas cannot be conceived as having Athenian Rhetorike, yet conceptualizing the Americas as having lowercase ‘alternative rhetoric’ presents a colonial negation. This is the problem with the concept of Rhetorike once we move across cultural borders… In either case, Western categories work to predetermine and fossilize the terms of debate” (5). While Baca makes a guarded defense of the use of the term “rhetoric,” he emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the fraught colonial histories of the term and how these histories influence the subordination of the communicative practices of pre-Columbian populations.
37 defined” (117) and which constitute subjectivities and other material phenomena. Unlike the study of rhetoric, the study of discourse does not focus on specific strategies but on the holistic analysis of compilations of statements and their implications.
In the chapters that follow, I analyze migrant-rights activism to complicate theorizations of citizenship and migration. Chapter Two, which is titled “Bordering Citizenship: A Review of
Current Literature on Migration and the Racialized, Sexualized, and Gendered Policing of
Citizenship,” provides a review of scholarship addressing the relationship among citizenship, migration, and the physical and metaphorical borders of the nation-state to posit that the discursive criminalization and dehumanization of undocumented migrants leads to the policing of citizenship along racialized, gendered, and sexualized lines. Unpacking historical sociologist
Margaret Somers’s idea that citizenship can be a “cold instrument of exclusion,” this chapter draws on analyses of citizenship and migration from rhetoric studies, ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies, and sociology to understand how citizenship as a rights-bearing status of belonging is always already exclusionary. I evoke Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to argue that citizenship is performatively constituted, making its definition constantly changing.
Nevertheless, citizenship discourses and performances always rely on the nation-state as the most salient organizing structure of the current neoliberal world order and, therefore, reinforce troubling ideas of nationalism, individualism, and exceptionalism.
Chapter Two builds on the idea of racialization as developed by Critical Race Theory scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant in Racial Formation in the US from the 1960s to the
1980s. Omi and Winant argue for a view of race as sociohistorical. They contend that subjects do not inherently embody a particular race but instead are racialized through society’s ascription of racial ideology to particular sociohistorical formations. The authors argue that racial ideology is
38 a permanent feature of US culture that is present in all social relationships. Racialization is “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (Omi and Winant 64). As I review the literature in Chapter Two, I demonstrate how the undocumented migrant has been racialized in the US, and how this racialization has rationalized the dehumanization, discrimination, and detention of undocumented migrants.
In this project, I argue that performances are always rhetorical—purposeful and contributing to meaning-making. In Chapter Two as well as throughout the rest of this dissertation, I refer to rhetorical performances to underscore the relationship between rhetoric and performance, a relationship that communication scholar Phaedra Pezzullo describes as “a cycle, like the seasons, sometimes indiscernible or tentative in the transitions, but not collapsible into each other” (97). The rhetorical performances I discuss in Chapter Two help to rhetorically constitute citizenship and, thus, affect how the line between citizen and non-citizen is drawn.
Drawing again on Butler but with a focus on the notion of the “performative contradiction,” Chapter Three, which is titled “Performing the Civic Imaginary: Redefining
Citizenship in the ‘Bring Them Home’ Campaign,” looks at the Dream 9 action as a performance of dissent that constitutes citizenship through notions of individualized belonging. During the
Dream 9 action, 9 DREAMers who had previously been living in the US undocumented but were currently living in Mexico presented themselves at the US Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona and asked the US for asylum. This chapter argues that DREAMer rhetorical performances of citizenship help to redefine the nation-state in ways that are more inclusive of migrants of color; yet, because they rely on the nation-state as the granter of belonging, they also reinforce the neoliberal nationalist ideas of individualism, meritocracy, and exceptionalism that legitimize the exclusion of migrants of color from the national imaginary. This rhetorical ambivalence is
39 theorized through Butler’s performative contradiction—the idea that there is an inescapable contradiction in the citizenship performances of (non)citizen subjects that rely on the nation-state as the most salient structure of belonging. Through an analysis of DREAMer performances of dissent, this chapter further develops the idea that performances are rhetorical and help to understand how subjectivities are constituted through embodied action.
Chapter Three also argues that the neoliberal citizenship reinforced through the Dream 9 action maintains white heteronormative hegemony. In Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, Villanueva argues that rhetoric is “how ideologies are carried, how hegemonies are maintained” (Bootstraps 121). Drawing on Gramsci’s definition of hegemony, Villanueva describes hegemony as ideological domination by consent, which is constructed and maintained by institutions of civil society including family, religion, education, and the media (Bootstraps
125). Villanueva’s link between hegemony and rhetoric is particularly useful for my analysis in
Chapter Three as I explore how the migrant-rights rhetorics of the Dream 9 demonstration can reinforce neoliberal ideology and maintain the domination of white heteropatriarchal forces in the US.
My fourth chapter, titled “Papá, mamá, I’m Coming Home: A Transnational Feminist
Analysis of Home and Family in the ‘Bring Them Home’ Campaign,” continues this line of inquiry to analyze three multimodal texts in the “Bring Them Home” campaign and argue that these texts illustrate how the US is constituted as nation-as-home and nation-as-family so that migrants can make claims for their belonging. This chapter shows that when the nation is imagined as the safe familial home, migrants are framed as members of the heteropatriarchal family in arguments for their acceptance. The videos analyzed in Chapter Four illustrate that despite imaginings of unity that nation, home, and family may evoke, the nation is inherently
40 exclusionary so that claims for national belonging reinforce exclusions of particularly racialized, gendered, and sexualized others. The chapter draws heavily on transnational feminisms to analyze how citizen identities are reconfigured across borders through racialized, gendered, and sexualized subject formations. While NIYA provides new discursive formations that challenge the exclusion of migrants from the US civic imaginary, they also reproduce heteropatriarchal discourses.
Chapter Four explores how the heteronormative family works as the normativizing rhetorical trope in migrant claims for inclusion. When I refer to heteronormativity in this chapter and throughout this dissertation, I am evoking an ideology of compulsory heterosexuality that privileges patriarchal heterosexuality in all aspects of life and renders queer lives and experiences invisible or abhorrent. I draw on Adrienne Rich’s landmark work on the subject,
“Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in which she defines heteronormativity as
“a cluster of forces within which women have been convinced that marriage, and sexual orientation toward men, are inevitable, even if unsatisfying or oppressive components of their lives” (640). I contribute to Rich’s definition by adding that not only women but all subjects are convinced under heteronormative ideology that heterosexuality and patriarchy are inevitable and that homosexuality and queer ways of knowing are forever deviant. As Jane Ward and Beth
Schneider argue in “The Reaches of Heteronormativity: An Introduction,” “heterosexual bodies, subjects, norms, and practices are always articulated and naturalized in relation to nonnormative genders and sexualities and queer ‘ways of life’” (434). Thus, heteronormativity defines the ubiquitous ideology that normativizes heterosexuality and patriarchy in opposition to homosexuality and queerness.
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Finally, my conclusion, titled “Possibilities of (Non)belonging,” explores the productive possibilities of a politic of (non)belonging. I trace the important threads from the rest of the project to complicate citizenship in neoliberal contexts. I ask, is citizenship a useful identity construct for radical change in neoliberal contexts? If so, how? If not, what are other possibilities for radical social progress that might bring about the end of migrant precarity?
As I consider the analysis of migrants-rights rhetorics, I acknowledge the responsibility that I feel to the activists and activisms I discuss in this project. I am not dismissive of their egalitarian motivations, but instead I take those intentions seriously as I analyze the contradictions within them. Overall, I aim for this work to not only highlight migrant precarity and advocate for social justice for migrants in the US, but also to challenge activists and scholars to imagine and enact new possibilities of belonging that reject divisive and dehumanizing dominant narratives and move toward liberatory connections among people in shared spaces and places.
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CHAPTER TWO
BORDERING CITIZENSHIP: A REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE ON MIGRATION
AND THE RACIALIZED, SEXUALIZED, AND GENDERED POLICING OF CITIZENSHIP
On 14 September 2014, the satirical news program The Daily Show featured a segment titled “No Country for Little Kids,” in which correspondent Michael Che illustrates the disproportionate and often absurd fear-mongering that occurs when the borders of the nation are militarized against the undocumented migrant. In a sardonic interview of Jim Gilchrist, founder of the vigilante border-watch militia The Minuteman Project, Che reports on “Operation
Normandy,” The Minutemen Project’s response to the increasing number of unaccompanied minors crossing the US/Mexico border without proper documentation.14 “Operation Normandy,” a World War II allusion that Gilchrist hopes will connote the immensity and intensity of the demonstration and that Che suggests makes the US akin to the Nazi regime fighting against
Allied forces in the Battle of Normandy, capitalizes on public fears that the unaccompanied minors are, as Gilchrist tells Che, “a vanguard of a larger invasion which will lead to the demise of our nation as a global economic power” (“No Country”). Gilchrist is not alone in his fear.
14 The New York Times reports that 68,000 unaccompanied minors have been apprehended crossing the border in the past 12 months, doubling the last year’s number. President Obama called this an “urgent humanitarian situation” and on 8 July 2014 asked Congress for $3.7 billion to ameliorate various aspects of this issue. This issue had its peak of media and public attention in the summer of 2014 and has recently all but vanished from the public sphere. (“Children at the
Border”)
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During the summer of 2014, which was the peak of public paranoia about Central American undocumented unaccompanied minors, references to these children as “invaders” were popular in US legislative discourse, news outlets, and social media.15
With the proliferation of xenophobic discourses of invasion and war, it is not surprising that radical right-wing groups like The Minuteman Project would take extreme action to police the borders of the nation they feel is being threatened by these child “invaders.” For Gilchrist, he and The Minuteman volunteers are protecting the nation from what he terms “the Latinization of
America” which will bring about a bilingual nation where Latin@s exert influence in the daily running of society. It is clear that “Operation Normandy” is about more than stopping child migrants at the border; it is about policing the liminal boundaries of a national imaginary that desires racial, ethnic, and linguistic homogeneity.
“Operation Normandy” illustrates how the discursive emphasis on the dangers of undocumented migration leads to popular fears about the vulnerability of the nation. While The
Minuteman Project’s “Operation Normandy” is an extreme reaction, the discursive demonization of undocumented migrants also leads to the policing of national boundaries through other, less overt and, therefore, more insidious means. A review of scholarship that addresses the intersections of migration and the physical and metaphorical borders of the nation reveals how the discursive criminalization of undocumented migrants combines fear-mongering, and jingoism, and leads to the radical policing of citizenship along racialized, gendered, and
15 During a speech on the floor of the US House of Representatives on 11 July 2014, Rep. Louie
Gohmert (R-TX) compared the surge of unaccompanied migrant children to soldiers invading
France during World War II, “coming in, in massive invasive waves” (“General Speeches”).
44 sexualized lines. As historical sociologist Margaret Somers reminds us in her work on citizenship in neoliberal contexts, “A benign view of citizenship has purchase only from the perspective of the insiders. [Citizenship] is the cold instrument of exclusion to those outside its borders, both internal borders based on race and gender exclusion, as well as nation-state ones based on xenophobia and nationalism” (5). In this chapter, I explore discourses of citizenship from the posture of migrant policing and protest to illustrate the ways in which citizenship acts like this
“cold instrument of exclusion,” especially when presented with criminalizing and dehumanizing discourses about (non)citizens.
I draw on literature in rhetoric, ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies, and sociology, to explore how different disciplines approach the idea of citizenship and to set the stage for my own project in which I employ an interdisciplinary approach to study the rhetorics of citizenship of undocumented young migrants. My analysis of the literature pays special attention to how youth of color are positioned within the citizen/(non)citizen dialectic. As the
“Normandy Project” demonstrates, youth of color are often the cause of anxieties about the stability of the national-state. In the literature review that follows, I explore how the rhetorics and rhetorical performances of migrant youth play a particular role in constituting the racialized, sexualized, and gendered borders of the nation-state.
I base my analysis on the premise that current understandings of citizenship are influenced by global neoliberal market policies and practices that create patterns and dominant discourses of destitution, migration, and discrimination, and reinforce the dominance of the
Global North. This chapter contributes to conversations about migration and citizenship by positing that citizenship is (1) performatively constituted through citizen and (non)citizen performances that rely on the neoliberal nation-sate as the primary global organizing structure
45 and (2) policed along racialized, gendered, and sexualized lines. The purpose of this chapter is, therefore, not to signal a gap in the literature but to explicate how I arrived at the line of inquiry I pursue in this dissertation, which critiques how citizenship is constituted through migrant-rights discourses of the early 21st century. I take a wide-scope interdisciplinary approach not with the intent of being exhaustive but instead to hint at imbrications of disciplinary positionings that are more fully explored in my research.
2.1 Policing Citizenship Through Youth of Color Positionalities
The Minuteman Project’s “Operation Normandy” highlights how youth of color are often those who suffer from the racialized, gendered, and sexualized policing of national borders. The unaccompanied minors migrating from Central America to the US not only illustrate the patterns of migration caused by neoliberal market policies, but also exemplify the subjugation and criminalization of youth of color within the neoliberal civic imaginary. In this particular example, young children of color become the focus of national anxieties about the vulnerability of the US as global power. The rhetorical force and function of the nation’s preoccupation with the so-called “invasion” of unaccompanied minors from Central America during the summer of
2014 creates a discursive climate in which young brown bodies16 become enemies of the state simply by their very presence in the country. These children, who for the most part never broke any US immigration laws but instead turned themselves in at the US/Mexico border and asked for asylum, are presented as enemy invaders who threaten the nation’s well being.
16 My work is informed by scholarship that uses the phrase “brown bodies” as a way to invoke coalitional possibilities (Maldonado and Licona; Leonard).
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While US mass media culture fetishizes white youth to the point that seniors and the elderly across racialized lines are almost completely absent from popular culture representations,17 young people of color often appear in the national consciousness as predators whose very existence threatens the lives of white Americans. In Social Death: Racialized
Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, ethnic studies scholar Lisa Marie
Cacho argues that youth of color are criminalized by their status, whether or not they have committed a crime. She argues that “people subjected to laws based on their (il)legal status—
‘illegal aliens,’ ‘gang members,’ ‘terrorist suspects’—are unable to comply with the ‘rule of law’ because US law targets their being and their bodies, not their behavior” (6). Young people of color fall prey to the totalizing effects not only of laws but also of dominant discourses of criminality that position black and brown bodies as binary opposites to supposedly law-abiding whites.
Cacho describes the 2000 case of the Rancho Peñasquitos hate crimes in which a group of suburban white adolescents from southern California brutalized a group of senior Mexican migrant workers. Despite the recent passage of Proposition 21, also known as the “Juvenile
Crime and Gang Violence Initiative,” which stipulated that juvenile perpetrators of gang-related crime were to be tried as adults and face enhanced sentencing, the white youth were not understood by the law and the community as gang members and, therefore, did not face serious penalties for their heinous crimes. Cacho writes that because the young people were white and suburban, they did not fit the dominant discourse in which only young people of color could
17 See Lee et al.’s “Representations of Older Adults in Television Advertisements” for a study of underrepresentation and stereotyping of older adults in television ads.
47 commit crimes considered to be gang-related. Cacho asks, “What makes it difficult for the criminal justice system to recognize young white men as criminals and, for that matter, to recognize racially motivated anti-migrant violence as a crime deserving of criminal punishment?” (37). The criminalization of young bodies of color causes young people of color to always be read as criminals, regardless of their behavior. In opposition, white bodies are read as innocent.
Young bodies of color are criminalized so that crime cannot be understood neither popularly nor legislatively without the body of color. As Cacho proposes, “Certain bodies and behaviors are made transparently criminal while privileged bodies and their brutal crimes are rendered unrecognizable as criminal or even as violent” (37). The white perpetrators of the
Rancho Peñasquitos crimes were not understood as criminals but instead as confused and immature young people, and their crimes were not understood as brutal hate crimes but as understandable, albeit reprehensible, responses to changing demographics. The legislative categories of gang-related crime and gang membership function rhetorically to disproportionately criminalize young people of color and deny them the ability to ever be read as innocent.
Similarly, the legislative category of undocumented or “illegal” migrant criminalizes young bodies of color so that their very presence in the country makes them criminals, regardless of their behavior. DREAMers, who are always already racialized as youth of color, have become the focus of national anxiety about US changing demographics, so much so that the DREAM Act has been in Congress for more than a decade and has had at times bipartisan support, yet still has not been made into law. The recurrent failure of the DREAM Act in Congress illustrates that the
48 continued demonization and criminalization of youth of color in the US contributes to their exclusion from the civic imaginary.
Indeed, the discursive figure of the young person of color has played the role of outsider opposite the white insider or citizen since the late 19th century. In Uncivil Youth: Race, Activism, and Affirmative Governmentality, Asian American Studies scholar Soo Ah Kwon historicizes and critiques the ways that youth of color have been rhetorically constructed as “at risk” and
“dangerous” through the discourses of youth organizing. Kwon argues that youth of color were conceptualized as needing special attention and disciplining to help them avoid street life and become good citizens. Youth organizing, which conflates youth empowerment (shaping youth into democratic actors who exercise agency) and youth development (shaping youth into good citizens in a democracy), serves as the site for disciplining and criminalizing youth of color while simultaneously aiming to empower them. Kwon proposes that “current youth organizing and activists programs are the latest permutation of youth improvement techniques that represent linked strategies of social control to empower and to criminalize” (28). Kwon’s critique unveils how interpellation and criminalization occur concurrently in discourses of youth organizing.
Furthermore, Kwon argues that the criminalization of young people of color has historically been linked to migration patterns, a phenomenon that resembles the criminalization of young brown Latin@s—unaccompanied minors, DREAMers, urban dwelling adolescents—in the present legislative economy.
In a period of increased immigration (thirteen million new European immigrants
arrived between 1886 and 1925), Asian exclusion laws, and legal challenges to
race-based citizenship, social reformers ameliorated social anxieties about race
and racial and class inequality by targeting their efforts at rescuing a selected
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group of European immigrants—still-developing children and youth—deemed
worthy of rescue. (Kwon 29)
Youth social programs including settlement houses and boy’s clubs, predecessors of current youth organizing groups, grew in an effort to control the newly arrived migrants from Southern,
Eastern, and Central Europe who were racialized as youth of color—not considered white enough to fit into normative society. Programs like Jane Adam’s famous Hull House settlement aimed to “protect” at-risk ethnic youth from the perils of street life and the supposed incompetency of their migrant parents.
However, concurrent to the understanding of youth of color as a special group to be protected, came the criminalization of youth of color and the creation of the youth carceral system. Kwon writes, “In 1899. . . the first US juvenile court was created in Illinois, across the street from the Hull House in Chicago and in close connection with its reformers” (31). Thus, the rhetorical construction of youth of color as subjects to be known and protected came with the desire to institutionalize them and contain them, a demonstration of Foucauldian power/knowledge that continues to affect how youth of color are always already objects of study, fear, and containment in the US.
2.2 The Racialized Borders of the National Imaginary
As a “cold instrument of exclusion,” US citizenship is defined along racial borders that are subjected to physical patrolling and legislative policing to maintain the nation’s presumed whiteness. In “Challenges at the Periphery of US Citizenship,” sociologist Carol Schmid illustrates the racialized exclusionary characteristics of citizenship through her analysis of legal challenges to birthright citizenship and to Congressional attempts to pass the DREAM Act.
Drawing on Somers’ definition of citizenship as “a mechanism for inclusion and exclusion and
50 thus a means of establishing or prohibiting membership” (qtd in 48), Schmid shows how through legislative challenges, citizenship functions rhetorically to reinforce the presumed whiteness of the US body politic. She begins by looking at challenges to jus soli birthright citizenship as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. The principle of jus soli confers citizenship to those born on US soil, whether or not they are born of US citizen parents, and is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Because it was designed to address the citizenship of the children of former slaves, the broad statement about citizenship in the 14th
Amendment that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” (US
Const. emphasis added), was challenged as it pertains to US-born children of foreign parents as early as 1898 (Schmid 49).
More recent challenges to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of jus soli arose in the 1990s and are still prominent today, particularly due to the popularization of the “anchor baby” metaphor in discourses about Latin@ migrants. The anchor baby metaphor refers to the alleged practice of undocumented Latin@ families to give birth on US soil so that their children are granted US citizenship through the principle of jus soli and can petition for the legal residence of the family through laws that privilege family reunification. Through its definition of normal
(read: white) and deviant (read: Latin@) fertilities, the anchor baby metaphor works to police the racialized boundaries of citizenship, deeming which of the babies born on US soil are deserving of jus soli citizenship and which are ploys for unfettered migration from Latin America.
Restrictionists argue that limiting birthright citizenship would eliminate the anchor baby problem that supposedly encourages unsanctioned migration to the US from South of the border.
However, as Schmid points out, “the exclusion of children of undocumented children born on US
51 soil from citizenship would also set in motion a class lacking citizenship [or legalized status] for generations to come” (53) and would, therefore, increase the size of the undocumented population. Thus, rather than shrinking the size of the US’s undocumented population, the rhetoric of the rule of law by which restrictionists challenge birthright citizenship conceals a racially motivated desire to safeguard the boundaries of US citizenship from being “diluted” by children born of (non)citizen parents of color. In fact, as Schmid indicates, the terms “illegal” and “undocumented” “are primarily racial/ethnic designations. They were not used for immigrants without legal documentation for the large immigration from Ireland and Eastern and
Southern Europe who were predominantly white” (51). Although restrictionists claim that their interest lies in championing adherence to the rule of law, their preoccupation with the children of
“illegal” migrants claiming US citizenship reveals their racialized and racist intentions.
More recently, the racialized boundaries of citizenship have been newly patrolled by the passage of Arizona’s “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” also known as SB1070.18 Passed in 2010, SB1070 requires US (non)citizens to carry documentation proving
18 Passed in 2010, Arizona State Bill 1070 was written with the intent to “make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona” (State of
Arizona). Seeking to encourage self-deportation and deterrence of undocumented border crossings, SB1070 sought to make the daily lives of undocumented migrants difficult by compelling law enforcement officers to assess a person’s immigration status during “any lawful contact” when “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States” (State of Arizona). With this law, any police contact, even for minor traffic infractions, brought the possibility of detention and deportation for undocumented migrants.
52 their legal presence in the US and makes a violation of this requirement a state and federal misdemeanor (before SB1070, such a violation was only considered a federal misdemeanor), forcing state law enforcement to act as immigration officials and thereby enforce federal immigration laws (“SB1070”). In The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity, communications scholar Josue David Cisneros explores how SB1070 not only forced people of color to constantly rationalize their citizenship through performances— embodied and discursive habits—but also gave the responsibility to police officers to become
“critics of behaviors and demeanors, judging who performed citizenship . . . and whose performance communicated an affect of ‘alienness’” (112). Thus, Cisneros shows how SB1070 created a framework with clear racialized characteristics for the performance of citizenship and the policing of those performances.
Cisneros argues that because SB1070 was enacted in a geopolitical location of the
US/Mexico border and within a discursive economy that sees the undocumented migrant as always already Mexican, 19 SB1070 marks the affect of (non)belonging as decidedly and
19 In their analysis of integration in US Midwest communities with increasing numbers of
Latin@ migrants, sociologist Marta Maria Maldonado and rhetoric scholar Adela C. Licona argue that diversity and micro dynamics within migrant communities greatly affect host communities. The authors found that differences in national origin, length of US and community residency, education, age at time of arrival, legal status, and racialization, among other factors, created significant differences within migrant communities that influenced migrant views on integration. Consequently, Maldonado and Licona argue that migrant communities must be
53 stereotypically Mexican. It is interesting to note that the racialized aspect of the performance of citizenship implies that it is not only the undocumented or the migrant that must perform citizenship correctly, but that all racialized brown bodies must do so. (Non)belonging is conflated with Mexicanidad, which is itself conflated with Latinidad. Thus, all racialized brown bodies are suspect. However, the racialization of citizenship is also nuanced. Light-skinned
Latin@s or those of higher socio-economic status may be able to perform citizenship correctly and are, therefore, not so highly policed, whereas darker-skinned Latin@s and other people of color find their belonging recurrently questioned.20 Consequently, as Cisneros writes, “the undocumented immigrant [and, I add, other bodies of color and low socioeconomic status]
[have] become responsible for [their] own alienization not only because of [their assumed]
‘illegal act’ of border crossing but also because [they fail] to adequately give the impression that
[they] belong” (118). SB1070 made it so that the actual border crossing does not terminally mark
recognized as heterogeneous despite popular representations of migrant communities as homogenous.
20 In “Puerto Rico: A Neoliberal Crucible,” rhetoric scholar Victor Villanueva exposes how
Puerto Ricans living in the US also are homogenized as noncitizens and excluded from mainstream political and social participation accordingly. Villanueva writes, “Once racialized, complete assimilation becomes unattainable. The result is that once colored as Black, Latino, or ethnic, Puerto Ricans by and large hold on to the island” (10). Although Puerto Ricans are legally US citizens, they are subject to the same racialization, criminalization, and marginalization as other brown-skinned Latin@s. Their US citizenship and belonging is forever questioned.
54 the undocumented as (non)belonging; it is the inability to perform citizenship correctly as defined by racialized characteristics that ultimately stigmatizes, or as Cisneros puts it “alienizes,” the subject.
However, Cisneros argues that alienized people of color do not sit powerless on the margins as they are excluded from citizenship and other forms of belonging. Instead, alienized people of color demonstrate that the boundaries of citizenship are constantly redrawn.
Citizenship is discursive and performative; its meaning is subject to power and, its corollary, resistance. Specifically, Cisneros explores how protests and demonstrations provide Latin@s with the opportunity to perform citizenship, whether or not the person is legally eligible for citizenship. Cisneros argues that “performances of citizenship can create provisional belonging for otherwise alienized subjects” (117), providing opportunities for undocumented migrants to enter public discourse albeit temporarily. Because the right to peacefully assemble is one of the basic rights of US citizens and because democratic engagement is one of the ways that citizenship is traditionally defined in the US, taking part in protests and demonstrations may become a performance of citizenship for those who are not granted citizenship through legislative means.
It must be noted, however, that this provisional belonging is a precarious position for undocumented migrants. Although civic engagement through demonstration may be considered a traditional dimension of US citizenship, when it is enacted by those who are excluded from the rights of citizenship it is a performance that is doubly scrutinized.21 As Cisneros point out, not
21 Much has been said in recent years about how protests by people of color are perceived in light of the 2014 demonstrations responding to the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown and
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the Grand Jury decision to deny the indictment of his killer, Ferguson Police Department Officer
Darren Wilson. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, African American Studies scholar
Carol Anderson argues that while acts of rage by people of color are portrayed in the media as
“savage” and “mob-like,” acts of white rage are governmentally sanctioned and portrayed as reasonable and “civil.” Anderson contends that despite the overwhelming media coverage of the rioting and looting that took place when demonstrations escalated, the more insidious emotion driving the conflict in Ferguson, MO is white rage. According to Anderson, white rage, unlike black rage, is invisibilized because it “carries an aura of respectability and has access to courts, police, legislatures and governors, who cast its efforts as noble” (Anderson). Activist and author
Sally Kohn presents a similar argument on the opinion pages of CNN.com when she compares the media portrayal of violent white demonstrations to that of the Ferguson protests with their primarily black participation. Kohn writes, “The protesters in Ferguson were airing legitimate grievances through mostly peaceful means and yet were denigrated [by the media], while the
[white] rioters in Keene [a New England town where rioting broke out at the annual Pumpkin
Festival] were merely part of a party that “spun out of control”—Never mind that those in Keene were reportedly drunk and dangerous and disproportionately violent” (Kohn). As Anderson and
Kohn posit, while unruly bodies of color are quickly ascribed the labels of “savage” and “mob” and used to represent the value system of an entire community, white bodies are seldom generalized in such ways and their behavior is often rationalized as examples of boys being boys.
This critical look at the racialized portrayal of protest highlights that although blacks may have rights to US citizenship, their bodies are read as Other—as de facto (non)citizens—making their protests unintelligible within dominant discourses of citizenship.
56 only are these demonstrations examined through the normative state policing of dissenting ideas, but they are also closely policed with the standards of dominant nationalist discourses of citizenship, with the presence of elements that denote other national and ethnic allegiances (such as flags from other countries or languages other than English) largely condemned for failing to perform US citizenship successfully (131). Consequently, in his article “(Re)Bordering the Civic
Imaginary: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha,” Cisneros invites scholars to see (non)citizen protests not as fully “alien” nor as solely “American,” but instead as performances of hybrid citizenship that “problematize contemporary understandings of citizenship and elucidate immigrant’s agency within US democracy” (26). Cisneros argues that these hybrid performances, such as the use of signs and slogans in English and Spanish, demonstrate that the borders of citizenship are flexible and impermanent, defined and redefined through embodied demonstrations rather than inherently possessed characteristics.
Thus, Cisneros argues that citizenship should be understood as a performance in order to
“shift focus from the category of citizen (and the attributes or qualities that define it) to the individual and situated articulation of citizenship” (30). Viewing citizenship as performance,
Cisneros argues, “means that even those individuals like migrants, who are excluded from formal dimensions of citizenship can enact national belonging and challenge the borders of the civic imaginary” (32). It follows that the exclusionary tendencies of citizenship are based on the subject’s ability to perform citizenship successfully, according to certain discursive standards, and on whether those performances are intelligible within dominant discourses of citizenship.22
22 I draw here on Butler’s theory of performativity, which claims that subjects do not exist outside of the discourses that invoke and constitute them. (Gender Trouble)
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Relevant here is the concept of audience. Judith Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself writes that “no account [of oneself] takes place outside the structure of address, even if the addressee remains implicit and unnamed, anonymous and unspecified” (36). In other words, there is an audience for every performance. According to Cisneros, in La Gran Marcha, migrants illustrate the embodied dimensions of citizenship through a “rowdy and racialized ‘coming out’” of the shadows to demand “recognition of the specifically Latina/o immigrant citizen” (Cisneros 39). It is significant, however, to note that the practices of embodied citizenship of people of color in protest have audiences that do not often perceived these as demonstrations of citizenship because bodies of color are always already understood as too divergent from normatively conceived citizen bodies. Butler writes, “The regime of truth offers a framework for the scene of recognition, delineating who will qualify as a subject of recognition and offering available norms for the art of recognition” (22). The discursive construction of US citizenship as white and heteronormative makes it so that bodies of color may always remain outside dominant discourses of citizenship, regardless of how well they can perform it.
The racialized dimensions of US citizenship, themselves created discursively and performatively as effects of legislative power and the pervasively xenophobic national imaginary, contribute to the global hegemony of Western nation-states that depend on a racialized and dehumanized labor force for the production of capital and the reproduction of dominant power. The undocumented migrant as a racialized dehumanized body is a vehicle for the reproduction of this power;23 the “illegal alien” becomes the signifier for “persons
23 In fact, undocumented migration has proved to be quite integral to some sectors of the US economy. On 28 October 2014, National Public Radio reported that a new migrant family
58 fundamentally unentitled to rights, and it refers to a category of nonpersoonhood that institutes discrimination” (Cacho 113). While, many undocumented migrants have fought against their dehumanization and paralyzation through acts of resistance that re-define citizenship outside the confines of what is advantageous for Western hegemony, citizenship as rhetorically performative can never be removed from its embodied positionality. Undocumented migrants who are always already racialized as brown are positioned outside dominant (white, heteronormative) discourses of citizenship and are, therefore, perpetually excluded from the civic imaginary.
In “The Social Production of Latin@ Visibilities and Invisibilities: Geographies of Power in Small Town America,” Licona and Maldonado analyze how under an anti-migrant climate that reproduces discourses of migrant illegality, brown Latin@s and other racialized subjects are subjected to a power regime in which they are always read as threatening and threatened. Licona and Maldonado focus on how the visibility and invisibility of brown Latin@s are coded through the lens of anti-migrant discourses.
Within dominant populations, visibility is often experienced as positively coded.
To be visible in community spaces means to be included, to have a voice that gets
detention center touted as “the largest immigration facility in the country” will bring 600 new jobs and increase sales and property tax revenue for the small town of Dilley, Texas. The detention center will be run by Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private corrections company in the US. CCA also runs an immigrant detention center in Eloy, Arizona, where they are the largest employer. The new facility in South Texas will create $438,000 in revenue for Eloy, who will act as the middleman between CCA and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. (“Small Town”)
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heard, to have access to institutions and resources. By contrast, in the present
context of entrenched anti-immigrant hostility and heightened immigration
enforcement, for Latin@s (immigrants and non-immigrants), visibility is often
negatively coded: it often entails standing out as an “unbelonging” presence,
being the subject of surveillance and policeability, of criminalizing,
pathologizing, and otherwise alienating discourses and practices. (Licona and
Maldonado 4)
Latin@s, thus, become hypervisible as their negatively coded visible bodies mark them as
(non)belonging and rationalize their criminalization.
Young people of color are particularly affected by the sphere of negatively coded hypervisibility. In their case study of the small Midwestern town of Perry, Licona and
Maldonado find that anti-migrant regimes of deportability, in which the criminalization of bodies of color occurs with little regard for the person’s actual criminal behavior, mark young Latin@s as threatening by their mere presence in a public space (7). Adult Latin@s and non-Latin@s in
Perry notice the increasing visibility of young people of color and become fearful of possible gang activity, regardless of the actuality of any criminal activity. Interestingly, however, the increased visibility of Latin@ youth in Perry is caused by the lack of extra-curricular activities for these young people of color. Invisible as recipients of community outreach and programming,
Latin@ youth become hypervisible—criminalized and policed—when they seek their own entertainment on the streets.
The presumed policeability of bodies of color and of other deviant bodies (e.g., black youth, queer folks) further contributes to racialized policing of the nation-state. In his article
“The Managed Violences of the Borderlands: Treacherous Geographies, Policeability, and the
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Politics of Race,” Gilberto Rosas explores how “policeability” contributes to the differential inclusion of undocumented border crossers and other people of color into the neoliberal framework of the US national imaginary. In addition, Rosas argues that the increased policing of the border and the policeability of bodies of color are “inextricably linked to the white supremacist underpinnings of American empire” (402). People of color, and Rosas looks specifically at young Mexicans crossing the US/Mexico border without proper documentation, are conceived and rhetorically positioned as policeable and in this way are incorporated into mainstream conceptualizations of the nation-state as alienized Others.
As Rosas describes, “Policeability captures those forms of power that deem historically subordinated populations worth of scrutiny, occasional exercise of state violence, and other articulations of power” (413). As a bordering practice, policeability is not only based on geopolitical claims to the US/Mexico border, but is also, and perhaps more noticeably so, based on racialized notions of belonging; “the concept operationalizes… a distinct system of racialized management in a context where migrants [and other people of color] are left not only to die but are subject to official and extra-official surveillance and vigilance as well as forms of state- mandated policing” (404). Policeability also has a disciplining function: it characterizes subjects’ outward performances of belonging and penalizes their failure to perform. Undocumented migrants are the quintessentially policeable subjects (although other communities of color are also deemed policeable, as the cases of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, John Crawford
III, Tanisha Anderson, Freddie Gray and many others clearly demonstrate) based on the dominant narratives of what are and are not normative performances of citizenship (e.g., language use, clothing, race). Policeability, therefore, is understood through the racialized dimensions of citizenship and its performance.
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2.3 Gendered Bodies, Excluded Subjects
In “Notes Toward a Queer History of Naturalization,” Gender and Women’s Studies scholar Siobhan Somerville critiques the rhetorical trope of the migrant who desires America to argue that “for all its inadequacy, the myth of America as the migrant’s beloved is a powerful one, shaping not only popular cultural representations . . . but also. . . legislation and policy- making in the US” (659). Somerville takes a historicist approach to demonstrate how the figure of the migrant desiring America has driven citizenship naturalization laws that are inherently exclusionary. She asks, “To what extent, for instance, does the construction of a desiring immigrant obscure the ways that the state itself, through immigration and naturalization policy, sets the terms of this imagined love, actively distinguishing between which immigrants’ desire will be returned and which will be left unrequited?” (661). In other words, the state dictates whom it will accept and produce as citizens, and whom it will ignore and exclude.
Somerville argues that even in its inception, US naturalization law was created to exclude non-normative bodies from US citizenry. Referring specifically to the Naturalization Act of
1790, Somerville indicates the explicit exclusion in how the new nation-state defined citizenship.
She writes, “This law clearly and quite self-consciously restricted naturalization to ‘free white persons,’ thus racializing naturalized American citizenship at the very moment in which it was codified as a legal status. In fact, the [Naturalization Act of 1790] was the first federally enacted law that referred to race explicitly” (667). In addition to excluding people of color and other migrants not fully considered white, the Naturalization Act also assumed that US citizenship would be gendered and sexualized in heteropatriarchal ways. Somerville proposes that the
Naturalization Act conflates the political and the natural worlds by making naturalized citizenship, which in essence is a legislative designation, a matter of generationality and
62 biological reproduction; “this earliest juridical statement on naturalization presumed that the prospective citizen would be not only white and free but also a (potential) parent” (667). Thus, the borders of citizenship, as drawn in the very birth of the US as a nation-state, exclude particularly racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects to reinforce notions of a white heteronormative and patriarchal civic imaginary.
Such racialized, gendered, and sexualized exclusions are present in how US citizenship is defined today, with non-normative bodies (e.g., people of color, queer folks, youth of color) continuing to be unintelligible as citizens within normative and dominant conceptions of the construct. Sociologists Olivia Salcido and Cecilia Menjívar in “Gendered Paths to Legal
Citizenship: The Case of Latin-American Immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona” outline the gendered nature of immigration law and migrant legalization processes as they currently stand. Through case studies of migrants seeking legalization, the authors argue that “women have a harder time meeting immigration requirements for themselves or other family members on their own” (339) because of immigration laws tacitly based on stereotypes about gender that reinforce heteropatriarchy.
Salcido and Menjívar’s analysis of the family reunification clause of immigration legislation is particularly poignant. Family reunification is supposed to help families stay together by allowing family members with legal status to petition for the legal entry of other family members. Salcido and Menjívar illustrate how this seemingly gender neutral clause is based on heteronormative and patriarchal notions of family that disadvantage women. They argue, “Gender ideologies embedded in immigration law dictate that women are largely assumed to be part of a family unit, as mothers, wives, daughters, or sisters, while men are assumed to be the breadwinners and heads of households” (351). Furthermore, as the authors point out, because
63 of gender ideologies in the law, vectors of oppression maintain one another. Immigration law does not value women’s unpaid domestic labor when gauging who is “deserving” of legal entry.
Therefore, women cannot apply on their own accord to live and work in the US because these permissions are often depended on demonstrated financial stability. Consequently, women can only gain legal entry when the family patriarch asks for the permit and petitions for the woman’s entry via the claim of family reunification. The head of the household, always assumed to be the patriarch, gains permission to work while the woman is relegated to unpaid domestic labor.
Furthermore, the patriarch can hold the women’s legal status over her as a form of control, thus completing women’s cycle of patriarchal dependence.
Employment-based visas also contribute to the cycle of patriarchal dependence and further reveal the intersectionality of gender, race, and class biases in immigration law. People who want to immigrate to the US using a work permit visa must have their employers petition the US government for their entry. Even for seasonal worker visas (e.g., H-2A and H-2B), prospective employers must go through a lengthy and complicated petition process to “sponsor” foreign workers in the US. Women who perform unskilled or domestic work do not often have employers that are able or willing to file these petitions. As Salcido and Menjívar suggest,
“[women’s] possibilities for legalization [within this framework] are nonexistent because jobs that are considered unskilled and expendable—in part due to their domestic connotations—are not deemed valuable enough to warrant an employment visa” (358). Thus, women are prohibited from the system of legalized entry based on the gendered nature of unskilled and domestic work.
However, women and unskilled workers are indeed included in the neoliberal political economy of migration through non-sanctioned frameworks of inclusion like the informal but very present demand for unskilled workers in manufacturing, agriculture, domestic work, sex
64 work, and the service industry. Women and unskilled workers perform work that is often shunned by US citizens and yet is crucial to the US economy; however, because of the classed and gendered borders of the US national imaginary, these workers are never given the opportunity to legalize their immigration status and are forced into a state of perpetual
(non)belonging.24 Meanwhile, skilled workers and those with professional degrees who have more education and higher socioeconomic status are given opportunities for legal entry and employment. Global structures of capitalist hegemony that privilege white males in education and employment mean that in its bias toward high-skill employment, immigration law also biases gender, class, and race.
As anthropologist Leo Chavez suggests in The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants,
Citizens, and the Nation, Latin@ gender and sexuality become tropes with which to position
Latin@s as unassimilable to the nation. More specifically, two stereotypes about Latin@ women work to discursively frame Latin@s as (non)belonging; “the hypersexuality of the hot Latina combines with the abundant fertility and uncontrolled reproduction of the Mariana mother to
24 Rhetoric scholar Susan Zaeske and historian Linda Kerber have written about women’s precarious relationship with citizenship in the US. Even though white women were able to become naturalized US citizens, they did not always have equal access as men did to the rights and obligations that supposedly accompany citizenship (Kerber 95). Historically women in the
US were kept out of activities considered part of the rights and obligations of citizenship, including suffrage and active military service. Women, then, had to find ways to enact their citizenship within the limits of sexist legislation, such as by using anti-slavery petitions to bypass their ineligibility to vote in US elections and make their voices heard in Congress (Zaeske 148).
65 produce the ‘Latina threat’” (75). This nationalist narrative advances that the US as we know it
(read: as a supposedly racially and ethnically homogenous global economic power) cannot coexist with unfettered Latin@ reproduction and migration. In other words, the stability and prosperity of the nation depend on a homogenous citizenry, which itself relies on white social and biological reproduction. The Latin@ migrant supposedly poses a double threat through migration and reproduction and is, therefore, the enemy scapegoat for what ails the nation-state.
Chavez writes, “Indeed, anti-immigrant sentiment during the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century focused specifically on the biological and social reproductive capacities of Mexican immigrant and Mexican-origin (U.S.-born) women”
(71). Consequently, the belief that Mexican reproduction through fertility and migration is a threat to the US leads to the increased policing of Latin@ youth who either through being born or giving birth pose a threat to the status quo.
For this particular rhetorical framing to work, Latin@ sexuality and reproduction as objects of discourse must be positioned as deviant opposites to the white normative. Dominant narratives about the sexuality and fertility of Latin@ women produce “a limited range of meanings often focusing on their supposedly excessive reproduction, seemingly abundant or limitless fertility, and hypersexuality, all of which are seen as ‘out of control’ in relation to the supposed social norm” (Chavez 72). Building Latin@ sexuality as the binary opposite to the sexuality and fertility of white women creates what Chavez calls “stratified reproduction,” the phenomenon where “women’s reproduction in some groups is characterized positively, while that of other women is ‘disempowered’” (73). For example, the reproduction of migrants and women of color becomes suspect, while the US celebrates white motherhood in media and popular culture.
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Furthermore, through the rhetorical figures of the anchor baby and the less popular terror baby, dominant discourses of Latin@ sexuality and fertility not only stratify reproduction but also gender unsanctioned migration and terrorism. In “‘Anchor/Terror Babies’ and Latina
Bodies: Immigration Rhetoric in the 21st Century and the Feminization of Terrorism,” sociologists Carmen Lugo-Lugo and Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo insist that in post 9/11 rhetoric, anchor babies and terror babies have become salient rhetorical figures that posit migrant women of color as threats to the safety of the nation-state and its white, neoliberal way of life. While anchor babies supposedly threaten the US by forwarding the Latinization of the nation, terror babies, believed to have been born in the US from women sent to the country by terrorist organizations, purportedly pose a violent threat to the nation because of their terrorist connections and the ease of cross-border migration allotted by their jus soli US citizenship. The authors argue that politicians and pundits utilize the rhetorical figures of anchor and terror babies to posit that “immigrant women are weaponizing reproduction, such that their babies become the equivalent of bombs being ‘dropped’ in hospitals to be deployed at a later time against the
American public” (Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo 16). Through these two prevalent rhetorical figures in dominant discourses of migration, bodies of color become newly dangerous because they not only portend national demographic changes but also embody threats to the safety of the nation. Bodies of color are feared from birth, constituted as the deviant and dangerous other opposite of the white normative citizen. Women of color, as mothers, become the origin of these threats.
The policing of sexuality also plays a role in the rhetorical construction of the normative citizen and the deviant outsider, and can be at least partially understood as constituted through heteropatriarchal investment in the family’s generationality as well as through the patrolling of
67 sexual preference and identity. In her introduction to Queer Migrations: Sexuality, US
Citizenship, and Border Crossings, Eithne Luibhéid echoes Salcido and Menjívar’s argument by proposing that immigration policies and practices discriminate against queer people even though specific discriminatory language has been taken out of immigration laws.25 She writes, “a preference for nuclear, heteropatriarchal families increasingly [structures] US immigration law” and has led to family reunification laws that “serve the neoliberal desire of the state to create
‘responsible’ immigrant families” (xvi). Again, family reunification serves as an example of queer-phobic immigration policies and practices working under the guise of benign national policies.
Furthermore, Luibhéid contends that the discrimination of queer folks from legal migration systems is part of a larger system of exclusion aimed to control and homogenize US citizenry. She writes, “Lesbian and gay exclusion never functioned as an isolated system, but instead was part of a broader federal immigration control regime that sought to ensure a ‘proper’
25 Discrimination against LGBTQ migrants was until recently explicitly stipulated in immigration law. LGBTQ migrants were prohibited from legally entering the US until the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990. Legal scholar Robert Foss in “The Demise of the
Homosexual Exclusion: New Possibilities for Gay and Lesbian Migration” links these restrictions initially to Cold War America’s connection of homosexuality and communism.
Furthermore, migrants who tested HIV positive were also disallowed from entering the US through legal channels until January 2010 when the Department of Health and Human Services removed HIV from the list of diseases that would make migrants inadmissible to the US
(“HIV”).
68 sexual and gender order, reproduction of white racial privilege, and exploitation of the poor”
(xiv). Thus, Luibhéid points to the intersectionality of oppression and control in immigration law; she understands immigration control as a state project of exclusion based on not only gender and sexual preference, but also on race, nationality, ethnicity, and class.
For Luibhéid as for many scholars of migration, the intersectionality of oppression is key to the analysis of migration discourses. I quote Luibhéid at length to illustrate her conclusion about how migration in general, and queer migration specifically, gets narrativized in mainstream discourse as a singularly purposed, individualized, logical phenomenon, without regard to the many struggles of queer migrants:
Accounts of queer migration tend to remain organized around a narrative of
movement from repression to freedom, or a heroic journey undertaken in search
of liberation . . . [However,] when the search for “freedom” and new possibilities
become the only elements of queer migration that are addressed . . . complex
migration processes become reduced to oversimplified dynamics that reinscribe
dominant nationalist myths of the United States as a land of freedom and
democracy and erase the struggle . . . experienced by subordinated groups. (xxv)
This dominant narrative about migration disregards the varied ways migrants endure oppression and ignores the possibility that even those who may seem “deserving” of “liberation” may still be denied full citizenship benefits because of their sexual orientation, class, and race, and thus remain subjugated under immigration law.
Initial iterations of the DREAMer movement illustrate how intersectionality is negated in order to create a singular narrative about migration. As Nicholls suggests, migrant rights organizers advocating for passage of the DREAM Act initially worked to frame undocumented
69 youth as able to assimilate into normative notions of citizenship. Reflecting on their rhetorical appeals and performances, Nicholls argues, “Their messages, talking points, and emotional stories stress the most strategic qualities of the group, silencing those other aspects that may distort their central message. These representations help transform a diverse array of individuals.
. . into a coherent and deserving ‘group’” (12). When DREAMers began appearing on television and other news media, their message was centered on a master rhetorical frame that functioned to portray undocumented young people as innocent (being in the US through no fault of their own), the best and brightest of their generation (having attained educational or career success), and quintessentially American (believing in the fundamental US values of individualism and enterprise) (Nicholls 51). By performing normative citizenship and de-emphasizing intersectionality, DREAMers asked to be recognized as belonging in the US civic imaginary.
However, as the DREAM Act continued to elude passage, many DREAMers began to realize that despite their efforts to “pass” into dominant discourses of citizenship, their bodies of color still marked them as outsiders. Nicholls describes how critical discourse inside the group created a dissenting contingency that challenged the dominant DREAMer narrative (97). Groups of undocumented youth started basing their advocacy for migrant rights on the intersectionality of oppression, with messages such as “Undocumented and Unafraid” and “I Am Undocuqueer” highlighting young people’s refusal (and inability) to assimilate to white heteronormative definitions of citizenship.
In Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, rhetoric scholar Karma Chávez contends that the youth migrant rights movements rallying behind slogans including “Undocumented and Unafraid” and “I Am Undocuqueer” illustrate how coalitional rhetorical strategies of resistance can more aptly reject the neoliberal master rhetorical narrative
70 about DREAMers. Chávez argues that the rhetoric of rights found in mainstream social movements, including the DREAMer’s master rhetorical frame and the mainstream marriage equality movement, is inherently exclusionary because it relies on conservative discourses of belonging. The mainstream DREAMer movement centered on the passage of the DREAM Act, for example, is invested on the idea that DREAMers deserve US belonging in the form of citizenship. However, as Chávez insists, “many of the characteristics aligned with US citizenship of all kinds tend to reinscribe norms of urbanity, whiteness, heterosexuality, malesness, ability and, middle-classness” (13). In asking for inclusion into the dominant framework of citizenship, the master DREAMer narrative is reinforcing such exclusionary norms.
Chávez argues that radical rhetorical strategies based on coalition and intersectionality can help make arguments that remain critical to the all-encompassing power of dominant discourses of citizenship in the nation-state. The author describes such strategies of resistance as the rhetoric of radical interactionality: “a form of rhetorical confrontation that begins critique from the roots of a problem or crisis and methodically reveals how systems of power and oppression interact with one another in ways that produce subjects, institutions, and ideologies and that enable and constrain political response” (51). The rhetoric of radical interactionality does not assume that resistance can ever avoid reproducing dominant discourses; instead it maintains a critical eye on how dominant discourses shape resistance and vice versa. Radical efforts such as activist Julio Salgado’s “I Am Undocuqueer” posters26 utilize the rhetoric of
26 Chávez provides a detailed description of Salgado’s “I Am Undocuqueer” project in Chapter
Three of Queer Migration Politics.
71 interactionality by highlighting the intersectionality of oppression and forming coalitions among oppressed groups to work toward heterogeneous equality.
Nevertheless, these radical moves are not immune to dominant discourses of citizenship and, therefore, often use tactics that reinforce the citizenship discourses of the nation-state. In
“Documenting the Undocumented: Toward a Queer Politics of No Borders,” women and gender studies scholar Melissa Autumn White argues that the undocuqueer movement, which highlights the intersectionality of oppression for undocumented and queer young people under the slogan “I
Am Undocuqueer,” employs visibility tactics that sometimes inadvertently reproduce the individualizing and normativizing representational politics of the nation-state. Protest strategies that aim at making subjugated bodies visible, White proposes, “enact a performative contradiction in that they risk reinforcing as much as disrupting normative scripts around deserving (morally upstanding, ‘accidental’ migrants) and undeserving migrants (criminals, intentionally law-breaking migrants)” (990). Consequently, despite the radical aims of youth social movements around intersectionality and coalition, their rhetorical strategies demonstrate that they are often still invested in or at least affected by the model of rights-bearing citizenship that is always already exclusionary.
2.4 Complicating the Borders of Citizenship
Undocumented migrants in the US are alienized and criminalized through discourses and practices that aim to position them not necessarily outside of the national imaginary but instead as the disenfranchised binary Other to the privileged citizen. The decision of who gets to claim normative belonging and the right to the pursuit of happiness that belonging allegedly entails is made along racialized, sexualized, and gendered lines that aim to create a supposedly homogenous US citizenry. The literature in this chapter illustrates how citizenship is defined
72 through discourses of (non)belonging that maintain Western hegemony globally and white heteropatriarchy locally by controlling Othered populations in the service of neoliberalism.
Laws that encourage racial profiling, such as SB1070 in Arizona or “Stand Your Ground” laws in Florida, are both causes and effects of the perpetual exclusion of bodies of color from US citizenship. These laws and the practices that they engender highlight the performativity of citizenship; citizenship becomes an outwardly legible characteristic and, therefore, effected through performance by an “actor” and reception by an “audience.” In other words, if belonging is evidenced on one’s body, then it is evoked and understood through its repeated performance.
Importantly, within exclusionary discourses of citizenship, bodies of color are always marked as
(non)belonging. Regardless of the actual citizenship status of bodies of color, they are often not understood as normative citizens within the national imaginary. Thus, their performances of citizenship often are not read as such by their audience.
When bodies of color are unintelligible as anything other than Other, the exclusionary borders of citizenship are redrawn for their exclusion and for the support of the hegemony of whiteness both locally and globally. As the literature suggests, citizenship with its exclusionary borders serves to buttress nationalist discourses of fear and jingoism that enforce the nation- state—the organizing structure for the current world order in which people of color living in destitution are prompted to migrate to nations that criminalize and discriminate them while taking advantage of their cheap labor. The dominance of the Global North depends on the nation- state with its boundaries that are paradoxically heavily enforced and highly porous. The migration of peoples from developing nations is juxtaposed with the supposed insulation of developed nations to reinforce the global domination of so-called Western civilization.
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Rhetorical performances of citizenship not only stand a chance of not being recognized but also risk that, when recognized, they reinforce the rights-bearing model of citizenship that undergirds exploitative global migration patterns. DREAMers and other migrant rights movements can support dominant discourses of citizenship, even as they call for radical change to the ways migrants are perceived and treated globally. It is this ambivalent position of migrant- rights advocates and their rhetorical productions that I aim to complicate in the chapters that follow.
However, as Luibhéid reminds us, “Immigration and citizenship controls function in a double sense: as the means to delimit the nation, citizenry and citizenship and, conversely, as the loci for contesting and reworking these limits” (xi). The alienization of the undocumented migrant is the product of and produces the relationship between citizen and (non)citizen. While alienization frames undocumented migrants and other people of color as unassimilable to the nation-state, it also underscores the dialectic relationship between those who will always already be excluded from the citizenry and those who normatively fit within it. The civic imaginary, must take into account both the insider and the outsider, the citizen and the noncitizen in drawing its borders. There is no nation, and, therefore, there is no citizen without the noncitizen body to define in opposition.
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CHAPTER THREE
PERFORMING THE CIVIC IMAGINARY:
REDEFINING CITIZENSHIP IN THE “BRING THEM HOME” CAMPAIGN
“For Latina/os, citizenship is negotiated within a transnational sphere where feelings of
belonging (and/or of not belonging) have to deal with [at least] two forms of “official” national
affect . . ., as well as making room for an emerging and ever-evolving one.”
-- Laura G. Gutiérrez, Performing Mexicanidad:
Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage
On 22 July 2013, nine undocumented young Latin@s who had lived in the United States most of their lives but had recently been living in Mexico, the country of their births, presented themselves at the US Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona and asked the US government for asylum. The nine DREAMers,27 as they are popularly known because of their initial support for the DREAM Act, were not only asking for their own paths toward legalization in the US; their actions were also meant to condemn the Obama administration skyrocketing deportation rate28 and the family separation that results from it.
27 As addressed in Chapter One, the creation of the DREAMers as a cohesive political activist group in support of the DREAM Act is documented in Walter Nicholls’ The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate.
28 The Pew Research Center reports that deportations reached a record high in 2013, with a majority of those being deported having no previous criminal convictions.
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Rhetorically, the nine DREAMers did much more than ask for asylum. Their actions— which could be read as part protest, part petition of redress of grievances—call out conventional understandings of US citizenship that often fail to account for undocumented youth within the
US body politic. While neoliberal free market policies encourage the cross-border flow of capital, resources, and labor, inflexible notions of the nation-state refuse to account for the global migration resulting from neoliberal Western hegemony. Prohibited from traditional conceptualizations of citizenship, DREAMers are marginalized within the civic imaginary of the
US, living in what Espiritu refers to as “differential inclusion”—included in the framework of the nation but only in subordinate and vulnerable positions.
This chapter explores how the Dream 9 demonstration echoes Gutiérrez words in the epigraph of this chapter in that for racialized ethnic groups such as Latin@s, citizenship is always a negotiation of belongings and (non)belongings. I take a careful look at the rhetorical implications of how DREAMer performances of dissent work to create a message of belonging that redefines traditional notions of citizenship by positioning undocumented young people at the forefront of political engagement and within the civic imaginary of the nation-state. I contend that in such performed demonstrations of dissent, DREAMers challenge their differential inclusion and create new definitions of citizenship that account for their material realities.
DREAMer demonstrations illustrate that citizenship, construed as a right-bearing state of being, is unsuitable for the contemporary moment. However, such performances of belonging do not entirely trouble citizenship as an organizing structure of belonging. On the contrary, I argue,
DREAMers in protest demonstrate that they are also invested in models of belonging that privilege the exceptional citizen subject and contribute to the global oppression of racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects. Through creative border crossings such as those of the Dream
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9, DREAMers negotiate their belonging in the nation-state—an exclusionary community with discriminatory underpinnings. Their performances of dissent both trouble normative definitions of citizenship and also reinforce the need for this problematic identity construct.
This chapter analyzes how DREAMers both trouble and reconstitute traditional definitions of citizenship via a rhetoric of dissenting performance. I take as a case study the
Dream 9 demonstration—part of NIYA’s “Bring Them Home” campaign where groups of undocumented youth attempted to cross back from Mexico into the US by seeking political asylum.29 I read these border transgressions as embodied creative performances that challenge normative definitions of citizenship by performatively exposing undocumented young people of color as citizen subjects. Reading bodies as meaning-making and rhetorical, I understand the
DREAMers as reconstituting citizenship to position themselves within the body politic and
29 It is important to note that at least initially, the “Bring Them Home Campaign” involved only
Mexican nationals in its asylum-seeking activism. While the campaign’s later actions (the
DREAM 30 and DREAM 150) incorporated more diverse migrant populations, NIYA’s initial omission of non-Mexican Latin@s underscores the ways that non-Mexican Latin@s are often excluded from mainstream conversations, policies, and activism about undocumented migrants.
This project does not use Mexican migrants as the normative referent with which to analyze all
Latin@ migrant populations. The fact that many of my case studies feature Mexican nationals signals the trend in migrant-rights activism to emanate from this segment of the undocumented population. Although it is currently beyond the scope of this project, future research may interrogate how migrant-rights activism can homogenize Latin@ populations and problematize how access to activist rhetorics can depend on cultural capital.
77 challenge ideas about citizenship and nation. Nevertheless, their performances of belonging also divulge DREAMers’ investment in the structure of the nation-state, itself an exclusionary and violent construct. Thus, I draw on gender theorist Judith Butler’s notion of the performative contradiction to complicate DREAMer performances of citizenship and look for gestures of alternative (non)belongings.
3.1 Performance and the Performative Contradiction
Performance and critical rhetoric studies scholar Bernadette Marie Calafell reminds us of the importance of performance to the study of rhetoric; she argues that performance “offers us a critical interpretive tool and lens. It is not an ornamentation or accessory to rhetoric. It embodies and drives a sustained critique of discourse. Rhetoric needs performance to keep it critical and accountable” (116). I base my analysis of DREAMer performances of dissent on the premise that performance is rhetorical and that looking at the rhetoricity of performances of dissent can lead to more complex theories of how marginalized Others claim positionalities that are intelligible within neoliberal frames of social privilege.30
In her landmark work, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, feminist performance studies scholar Diana Taylor posits that the analysis of performance is important to the study of subjectivities. Taylor advocates for a critical look at performances as “vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated… behavior” (2). Performances, whether story-telling staged
30 Several scholars make connections between rhetoric and performance. For further examples of how performance can inform rhetorical analysis, see the collection, Readings on Rhetoric and
Performance, edited by Stephen Olbrys Gencarella and Phaedra C. Pezzullo.
78 dramatically in a theater, dissent acted out on the street, or any other variation, divulge histories and positionalities through choreographies that, rather than denoting completely fictional scenarios, are “coterminous with the real” (Taylor 4). Through choreography—planned and purposeful rhetorical action—performances not only relate information but also construct knowledge through embodied signification. Furthermore, as Taylor argues, the performance
“forces us to situate ourselves in relationship to it; as participants, spectators, or witnesses, we need to ‘be there,’ part of the act of transfer. Thus, the scenario precludes a certain kind of distancing” (32). In performance there is no outside observer or innocent bystander—rational, objective, exterior to meaning-making, simply reading and deciphering a priori meaning.31
While Taylor emphasizes how analyzing performance can lead to more complex theories of meaning-making, Butler’s notion of the performative contradiction provides the framework with which I analyze the “Bring Them Home” campaign. In Bodies that Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of “Sex,” Butler posits that there is a performative contradiction that occurs when subjects, engendered by power, resist the norms of that power.32 She writes, “The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power” (Bodies 15).
31 See Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s work on audience for a critical look at the ways the role of audience in meaning-making has been theorized in composition studies.
32 For other discussions about rhetorical embodiment, see Jay Dolmage, Debra Hawhee, and
Marissa Juarez.
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Resistance is inherent to constitutive power and, therefore, dissent reiterates and reinforces the discursive power that it seeks to resist. This performative contradiction is evident in the
DREAMers’ performances of dissent. Even though they aim to resist the power effected through
US immigration laws, their resistance at times still adheres to and, therefore, reinforces problematic neoliberal concepts of the nation-state, such as citizenship and the citizen as a rights- deserving subject.
In her dialogue with critical theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published in Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging, Butler argues that there is always a performative contradiction in performances of citizenship from (non)sanctioned, (non)citizen subjects because such performances rely on the nation-state as the building block of the current world order. Butler contends that the nation-state signifies not only the desired object of belonging but also, concurrently and definitively, the source of non-belonging. Eschewing heterogeneity, the nation-state is based on exclusion. Butler writes, “To produce the nation that serves as the basis for the nation-state, that nation must be purified of its heterogeneity except in those cases where a certain pluralism allows for the reproduction of homogeneity on another basis” (Butler and Spivak 32). Therefore, as Butler argues, there are times when pluralism and inclusion are necessary gestures for the perpetuation of the nation-state and the reproduction of its homogeneity. My analysis heeds Butler’s call to be especially wary of such moments.
In migrant-rights demonstrations including that of the Dream 9, DREAMers are asking for the heterogeneity of the nation to be recognized, and in their actions of dissent they are actively enforcing and embodying that nation’s heterogeneity. Like the Latin@ migrants who sing the US anthem in Spanish in Butler’s and Spivak’s Who Sings the Nation-State?, the Dream
9 are performing a citizenship that challenges homogenous nationalist belongings. Nevertheless,
80 their performances of citizenship demonstrate their investment in this very concept and, thus, legitimate and reproduce the nation-state status quo, which, according to Butler, dictates that “to have the nation-state is to have statelessness” (Butler and Spivak 54).
Can DREAMers move beyond this performative contradiction? Butler and Spivak find that the performative contradiction can mobilize social change because it points to the paradox of the nation-state and of citizenship as a form of belonging. Butler argues, “Once we reject the view that claims that no political position can rest on performative contradiction . . . then we can actually entertain the opposite thesis, namely that there can be no radical politics of change without performative contradiction” (Butler and Spivak 66). The Dream 9 demonstration highlights that the nation-state is the object of desire for DREAMers but also the cause for their exclusion. In making visible this performative contradiction, DREAMer dissent unveils the paradox of the nation-state in neoliberal contexts and provides a critical lens with which to read claims of belonging based on its borders.
3.2 Citizenship in DREAMer Demonstrations in the Southwest
Even though DREAMers and other migrant-rights activists and organizations are active throughout the US, I will be analyzing DREAMer demonstrations in the Southwest not only because of my geographical proximity to the location of events but also because the Southwest represents the front line of the immigration controversy in the US imaginary. While there is a large breadth of scholarship analyzing the effects of sanctioned and unsanctioned migration throughout the US,33 popular discourses about migration still focus primarily on the US
Southwest as the most greatly affected area. Consequently, the Southwest becomes the apex of
33 See for example Licona and Maldonado; Coll; De Genova; King and Punti.
81 fear of the (non)citizen Other in the US national consciousness and the focus of increased militarization, surveillance, and carceral practices.
In his book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, conservative political scientist Samuel Huntington illustrates the fear that dominant discourses about migration instill on the American public by presenting the US Southwest as a doomsday scenario of unabated Latin American immigration. Huntington fears that “new” migration patterns that have brought migrants primarily from Latin America (as opposed to the “old” migration patterns in which migrants arrived to the US largely from Europe) could “change America into a culturally bifurcated Anglo-Hispanic society with two national languages” (221). The US
Southwest, Huntington posits, is an example of that culturally bifurcated nation. In addition, television shows that focus on the US/Mexico border, including National Geographic’s Border
Wars, Animal Planet’s Law on the Border, FX’s The Bridge, and the very popular Breaking Bad on AMC, portray the US Southwest as a war zone in which the US fights drug trafficking, illegal immigration, and cartel-style violence.
Such portrayal is echoed in popular political discourse that reinforces the perception of the US Southwest as a place characterized by lawlessness and the need for ever increasing surveillance, securitization, and militarization. Despite Obama’s momentous declaration of deferred deportation programs for many undocumented migrants, he in the same breath contributes to discourses of fear of the Other in the US Southwest. In his controversial address on immigration delivered on 20 Nov. 2014, the same address in which he announces an
82 expansion of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA),34 Obama emphasizes his priority to secure the US Southwest with “more agents and technology deployed to secure our southern border than at any time in our history” (Obama). The increased militarization and securitization of the US Southwest border and the growth of the private prison industrial complex in Southwest states including Arizona, California, and Texas35 reinforce the fear of the racialized Other as prescribed by dominant discourses of migration.
34 The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program allows some DREAMers to apply for work authorization and deferred deportation if they fit the following criteria: “(1) were under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012; (2) came to the United States before reaching [their]
16th birthday; (3) have continuously resided in the United States since June 15, 2007, up to the present time; (4) were physically present in the United States on June 15, 2012, and at the time of making [their] request for consideration of deferred action with USCIS; (5) had no lawful status on June 15, 2012; (6) are currently in school, have graduated or obtained a certificate of completion from high school, have obtained a general education development (GED) certificate, or are an honorably discharged veteran of the Coast Guard or Armed Forces of the United States; and (7) have not been convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor, or three or more other misdemeanors, and do not otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety”
(“Consideration of DACA”).
35 The growth of the private prison industrial complex has disproportionate consequences for people of color in the US. Although people of color are overrepresented in the public prison system, the overrepresentation of people of color in private prisons in the US Southwest is much higher. See African American studies scholar Christopher Petrella’s “The Color of Corporate
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In the midst of fear-mongering migration discourses, undocumented young people in the
Southwest have developed strong coalitions to challenge said discourses and demand an end to dehumanizing policies and practices. Thus, I situate my analysis in the US Southwest, the space of convergence for militarization, surveillance, incarceration, and resistance produced by dominant discourses of migration.
3.3 The Dream 9 Demonstration as a Performance of Citizenship
The Dream 9 demonstration that I describe in the opening pages of this chapter and that I examine closely in the pages that follow is part of a larger organized effort to challenge existing immigration laws called the “Bring Them Home” campaign. During the Dream 9 demonstration, nine DREAMers crossed the border into the US from Mexico at the US Port of Entry in Nogales,
Arizona and asked for asylum. According to reports, six of the nine undocumented youth had been living in Mexico for at least one year at the time of the protest (some had been deported and some had left the US on their own accord) and three of the nine crossed the border into Mexico specifically to join the others in the demonstration (Newcomb). After asking for asylum, the
Dream 9 were held in the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona for two weeks; eventually, seven out of nine received asylum and are living in the US.
Using video and audio recordings posted online, I analyze how the Dream 9 performance both challenges and reinforces dominant narratives of citizenship. I base my analysis on multiple representations of the demonstration to aim for a multifaceted analysis of the events. I first
Corrections, Part II: Contractual Exemptions and the Overrepresentation of People of Color in
Private Prisons” for statistical comparisons of private and public prisons in Arizona, Texas, and
California.
84 analyze the demonstration from the perspective of two of the primary participants: Luís León and
Lizbeth Mateo, who crossed the border as part of the Dream 9. 36 I weave León’s and Mateo’s words with my analysis to illustrate how their narratives can be read as constituting definitions of
US citizenship that, while exploring cultural ways of belonging, still reinforce neoliberal organizing structures of global imperialism through their emphasis on the individualized citizen subject.
I then analyze the Dream 9 events from the perspective of one of the groups that witnessed the event: activists on the US side of the border.37 Significantly, I consider Taylor’s claim that documents in the archive, such as the video and audio recordings I use to analyze the
36 After living in the US for most of his life, León leaves the US for Mexico one year before
Obama rolls out the DACA program. He recalls being apprehended and deported four times in his attempts to cross the border back into the US before joining NIYA and the Dream 9. On 14
November 2013, León tells his story to a group of students at the University of Portland, Oregon.
I use a video recording of his talk to analyze his experience of the Dream 9 demonstration.
Unlike León, Mateo is one of the DREAMer activists who crosses the border into Mexico specifically for the Dream 9 demonstration. Mateo was born in Oaxaca, Mexico and raised in
Los Angeles, California. On 8 October 2013, Mateo tells her story to reporters at Sonic Trace, the migrant story program from Los Angeles’ independent radio station KCRW. I use an audio recording of the episode of Sonic Trace to analyze Mateo’s narration of the Dream 9 demonstration.
37 Although the day’s demonstrations included activists on both sides of the border, I focus here on activists on the US side of the border.
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Dream 9 demonstration, cannot be understood as representing the repertoire accurately. Taylor argues that “a video of a performance, even though it comes to stand in for the performance, never captures the full meaning of the performance” (20). While I do not intend to fully capture the meaning of the “Bring Them Home” demonstrations from various videos and oral accounts, I take into consideration that all performances are mediated, whether recorded or experienced first hand. Thus, I acknowledge the mediated nature of the sequence of events I discuss in this chapter, as the events I outline have not only been filtered through the eyes of the person telling the story or recording the video, but also through my eyes as I describe events in which I did not participate.
The DREAMers: Luís León and Lizbeth Mateo
On the day they are to cross the border back into the US, Mateo remembers waking up before dawn and calling her family in the US to tell them she was getting ready to cross the border. When she tears up on the phone, her family asks if she is scared or sad about the events.
“No,” she remembers saying. “I’m really happy that I’m coming home.”
León recalls meeting with the rest of the Dream 9 activists, the nine DREAMers
(including Mateo) who would be crossing the border and NIYA leaders, at a restaurant in
Nogales, Sonora to eat what he describes as potentially their last real meal for a long while if they are detained during the demonstration. The nine DREAMers wear graduation regalia in
86 black, blue, green, and white that has been given to them by NIYA organizers during their training for the demonstration.38
León and Mateo show us that for the DREAMers, citizenship transcends traditional notions of US national belonging as provided by law, which are limited to birthright citizenship or naturalization. Calling to mind the work on cultural citizenship by the “Latino Cultural
Studies Working Group,” these DREAMer performances constitute transnational belonging that challenges dominant notions of citizenship and complicates citizenship as the building block of the nation-state. According to William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor in Latino Cultural
Citizenship, “Cultural citizenship names a range of social practices which, taken together, claim and establish a distinct social space for Latinos in this country” (1). The variety of symbolic practices performed during the Dream 9 protest evidence the DREAMers’ efforts to claim a space for Latin@s in the US.
To begin, in their protest the Dream 9 physically and symbolically occupy terrain that is often denied to them as liminal Others. Not only do they occupy the physical space of the
US/Mexico border, but also they take up previously denied positions within the public sphere of civic engagement. Both of these spaces are built to keep (non)citizens out—the space of the
US/Mexico border and of the US body politic are constituted on the exclusion of the undocumented Other. Nevertheless, the Dream 9 elbow their way in to occupy these spaces through their citizenship performances of dissent.
38 DREAMer activism is highly organized and meticulously planned. See Eileen Truax’s
Dreamers: La Lucha de una Generación por su Sueño Americano for a detailed description of what planning and training for these demonstrations entails.
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Both León and Mateo describe that after their meal, the group of nine undocumented young people of color link arms and walk around Nogales, Sonora. León states that this was “the first march for undocumented students that grew up in the US and were going to protest from the
Mexican side, asking to come home.” Mateo describes the march around Nogales, Sonora as
“overwhelming.” Wearing graduation caps and gowns and with their arms linked together, León,
Mateo, and the other Dream 9 are joined by community members as they walk around the border city chanting slogans of support.
The march around Nogales, Sonora highlights the DREAMers’ precarious liminality. In the US, the legal structure does not recognize them as citizens; in Mexico, the culture allegedly sees them as alien and the economy negates their survival. Although Nogales, Sonora could be read as a space of belonging for them as Mexican nationals, their march around this border city is a move to not only garner the support of those on the Mexican side of the border, but also to highlight their liminality—they belong neither here nor there. As they walk around Nogales, arms linked, DREAMers are constituting the border city as the place to leave behind, the impetus for their desire of the US. They constitute this space only as a platform for their movement.
There are no tears at leaving Nogales, Sonora, only the desire to “come home” to the US.
Once their march around Nogales, Sonora is over, the Dream 9 venture to occupy a space that not only is denied to them, but that actually poses a threat to their freedom and safety—the
US Port of Entry. León reports that from the Port of Entry he could see over 100 people on the
US side of the border with posters and banners, chanting slogans of support for the Dream 9’s return. León remembers hearing supporters across the border “banging on the wall, asking for us to come home.” He walks into the office and faces the waiting officer. “Never in my life had I seen a border patrol officer so scared and so nervous,” León tells the students of the University
88 of Portland. “Mam, I need to come home,” he remembers saying to the female officer. “She just laughed.” When Mateo walks into the Port of Entry office, she presents the border agent her
Mexican passport and a letter asking Obama for humanitarian parole. The agent asks for other paperwork—a visa, a green card, a US passport. “No. This is all I have,” Mateo remembers saying. Both León and Mateo recall being handcuffed by border agents, put in a white Customs and Border Protection (CBP) van, and driven the two hours north to the Eloy Detention Center39 in Eloy, Arizona.
Asking to be let in at the US Port of Entry, the DREAMers make themselves visible in a space that was built to invisibilize them. The laws regulating documented US entry not only try to ensure that the undocumented are kept out of the US but also that they never ask for entry through this highly surveilled space. US immigration law limits access to the US Port of Entry only to those who have the required documentation. Having an undocumented person openly occupy the space of the Port of Entry and ask to be let in is not only unexpected but also
39 The Eloy Detention Center is a 1596-bed migrant detention facility owned by Corrections
Corporation of America. The center houses male and female migrants who are being detained for immigration violations (“Eloy”). The Eloy Detention Center has long been the site of allegations of inhumane treatment and negligence of its inmates. As of 17 June 2015, approximately 200 of those being held at Eloy were participating in a hunger strike to protest inhumane and abusive conditions, including inadequate mental and medical care, lack of access to legal resources, and the exploitation of detainee’s work. The hunger strike was sparked by the mysterious deaths of
Jose de Jesus Deniz-Sahagun and another inmate whose identity remains unknown while being held in Eloy. (Taracena)
89 unintelligible under dominant narratives of hemispheric migration. Here, DREAMers subvert the dominant narrative of the undocumented as always illegally sneaking across the border. The
Dream 9 renounce their perceived illegality. They deny the identity of “illegals” that has been put upon them through dominant narratives of migration. They are not transgressing any laws.
They are openly asking for asylum.
This demonstration also allows DREAMers to occupy the space of civic engagement in the public sphere. Through protest they speak directly to the government in ways that are not only traditionally prohibited to the (non)citizen but also not common for the citizen whose engagement with the government is usually limited to the relatively infrequent sphere of the voting booth. In this demonstration, DREAMers become political subjects and perform “cultural citizenship” (Flores and Benmayor 11), speaking directly to governmental power. Furthermore, the demonstration illustrates the importance of activism to the concept of cultural citizenship as it
“reflects the active role of Latinos and other groups in claiming rights” (Flores and Benmayor
13). Indeed, the cultural citizenship performed and constituted through the Dream 9 demonstrations shows that citizenship for people of color is defined by constant struggle for recognition. It is a dynamic practice that for people of color, even those already legally recognized as citizens, “is tied to the struggle to obtain rights and change society” (Flores and
Benmayor 256). Thus, the cultural citizenship in the Dream 9 action is the performed etching of space for people of color—the disruption of the social order to allow for their inclusion.
As practices of cultural citizenship, the actions of the Dream 9 create new political subjects out of the DREAMers. As Flores and Benmayor argue, cultural citizenship results in an
“emergence of Mexican undocumented and legally resident immigrants as political subjects,
‘new citizens’ demanding ‘new rights’” (Flores and Benmayor 265). León, for example, was not
90 an activist until he joined the Dream 9 and acquired his activist persona. León’s activist persona is a political subject that is concerned with the progress of society, can speak directly to government power, and is invested in government recognition. His new subjectivity as a cultural citizen empowers him with the motivation to demand the rights of a traditionally conceived US citizen.
It is important to recognize, however, the performative contradiction present in
DREAMer performances of dissent. While DREAMers may embody cultural citizenship, their claims to belonging rely on the nation-state as global organizing structure and on the individualized citizen subject as the building block of the nation-state. Their desire for the nation-state is evidenced by their need to cross national boundaries to “return home.” Nation- states, however, are always already exclusionary based on gendered, racialized, and sexualized exclusions. As Taylor argues, “While citizens may envision the horizontal, fraternal community described by Benedict Anderson, identification is predicated on the internalization of a rigid hierarchy along the lines of gender, class, and race” (257). In the Dream 9 performances, we can see the lines that draw the nation-state. While the Dream 9 demonstration admittedly attempts to draw a different, more tolerant space, they inevitably cannot escape the fact that nations are built on exclusion of racialized, sexualized, and gendered Others.
Indeed, as Berlant argues in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on
Sex and Citizenship, “The process of identifying with an ‘American way of life’ increasingly involves moral pressure to identify with a small cluster of privatized normal[ized] identities”
(192). These identities, as Berlant suggests, are for the most part white, patriarchal, and heteronormative, and serve neoliberal policies and practices that maintain the social, political, and economic hegemony of the West. Indeed, the citizenship being performed by the
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DREAMers as exemplified in León’s and Mateo’s telling of the Dream 9 events, embodies the neoliberal tropes of the citizen subject motivated by individualized social mobility.
One of the most distinct individualizing strategies employed in the Dream 9 demonstration is illustrated by demonstrators’ use of graduation caps and gowns during the event. León and Mateo remember wearing graduation caps and gowns as they asked for asylum at the US Port of entry. León describes being “thrown off” when NIYA organizers give the nine
DREAMers caps and gowns to wear. “Never in my life I thought I was going to cross the border in a cap and gown,” he remembers. They were wearing these same caps and gowns when they were released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement two weeks later. The caps and gowns help to construct the neoliberal US citizen subject as a student and/or graduate. The graduation regalia symbolize the DREAMers’ potential to become productive members of US society instead of drains on the state. This individualizing strategy presupposes the US citizen subject as the stereotypical college-educated citizen—white, middle class, and invested in neoliberal models of capitalist production. Thus, the Dream 9 make an argument based on neoliberal exceptionalism, asserting that they will fit into US capitalist economy—they will not be the “bad immigrant.” The caps and gowns signal the DREAMers’ submission to state forms of social management, including through institutions like the university, the military, and even the heteronormative family. These symbols frame the Dream 9 action (and, it could be argued,
DREAMer activism in general) as being only about regularization into normative societal structures. As León says during his presentation, “That’s all we want, just go to college, sit in a classroom like this and study. That’s all I ever wanted.” DREAMers are promising that they will be the good migrant. They will go to school. They will work. They will follow the rules and be
92 given equal opportunity to succeed, as the neoliberal American Dream alleges, if only they are given the chance to do so.
As social movements scholars Nicole Doerr, Alice Mattoni, and Simon Teune write in
“Toward a Visual Analysis of Social Movements, Conflict, and Political Mobilization,” “Media- savvy image creation is part of a larger trend toward professionalization in the organization of protest. The use of catchy imagery does, however, risk the perpetuation of hegemonic gazes and beliefs” (xv). While it may be rhetorically savvy for NIYA and other migrant-rights organizers to select the graduation cap and gown as the sartorial symbol for DREAMer demonstrations (in fact, young people wearing caps and gowns are often present in other DREAMer protests), the graduation regalia in the Dream 9 demonstration and, significantly, the repeated use of caps and gowns in many DREAMer protests perpetuate the hegemonic belief that only the exceptional neoliberal migrant should be conceptualized as citizen subject. This individualizing strategy prioritizes the rights of DREAMers, the “good migrants,” rendering them exceptional at the expense of those “bad migrants” who do not have the access or the desire to study and, therefore, are not worthy of rights, but are worthy of surveillance, incarceration, and deportation. Dissent gives rise to compliance; DREAMers shed the stereotypical image of “illegal immigrants” and buy into rhetorics of capitalist productivity.
In addition to desiring education and capitalist upward mobility, the neoliberal citizen subject that is performed and constituted in the Dream 9 protests is also exceptional because of her youth. As performed in the Dream 9 demonstration, citizenship and belonging for migrants of color is only for the young. While the purposeful exclusion of children, adults, and the elderly from this protest may be due to the structural motivations behind their organizing (the DREAM
Act stipulates age as a requirement for legalization), nevertheless, their exclusion works to
93 invisibilize older migrant populations and constitute a citizen subjectivity that is exceptional in its youth. Instead, the Dream 9 demonstration makes visible what Berlant refers to as the infantile citizen—a neoliberal idealized citizen who “is still innocent of knowledge, agency, and accountability, and thus has ethical claims on the adult political agents who write laws, make culture, administer resources, control things” (Queen of America 6). The Dream 9’s performance of their innocent desire to return home signals a naiveté that Berlant describes as “faith in the nation, ‘free’ from the encumbrance of ambivalent knowledge. The infantile citizen has a memory of the nation and a tactical relation to its operation. But no vision of sustained individual or collective criticism and agency accompanies the national system here” (51). While Berlant’s infantile citizen is always already white, here the Dream 9 perform this infantile citizen for rhetorical effect. In their infantile naiveté, they can call to the mother country for salvation.
The definition of citizenship constituted in the Dream 9 demonstration seems antithetical to DREAMer activism. In actuality, DREAMers are not always “good migrants.” They are risk- takers. They are unruly. They barge into senators’ offices and chain themselves to deportation buses. However, the Dream 9 performance materializes their subjectivities as good, deserving, exceptional migrants. The rhetorical choices that the Dream 9 make to persuasively make their arguments for policy change also reiterate mainstream discourses of migration that, as Berlant reminds us, are “central technolog[ies] for the reproduction of patriotic nationalism: not just because the immigrant is seen as without a nation or resources and thus as deserving of pity or contempt, but because the immigrant is defined as someone who desires America” (Queen of
America 195, original emphasis). In this performance of dissent against US immigration law,
DREAMers embody their desire for US national belonging and, along with NIYA organizers,
94 become complicit in neoliberal discourses and technologies that perpetuate the discrimination of people of color globally.
The Audience: Simultaneous Witnesses and Participants
While the 9 DREAMers walk into the US Port of Entry and request asylum, activists gather on both sides of the border to take part in the protest. A crowd of mostly young people of color shouts slogans of support, holds signs echoing the Dream 9’s pleas for asylum, and speaks up in condemnation of US immigration policies. These activists present an interesting perspective because they not only serve as an audience for the demonstration, but also as witnesses for and participants in the protest. In other words, although these activists are not the primary audience of the Dream 9’s message (because they are part of and/or support the organization that put together the demonstration), they still play the role of secondary audience and witness—viewing and documenting what is happening to then tell the story of what they see.
The activists also are themselves participants in the performance. Through sloganeering, call and response chants, and other popular protest strategies, they contribute to the Dream 9’s argument with their choreographed dissent.
Here I draw on a 36-minute video recording of the events on the US side of the border that was filmed by NIYA and streamed live on the website UStream.tv. Unlike the individualized telling of León’s and Mateo’s experiences, the video reflects the choreographed characteristic of the demonstration, where individual actions including chanting and speaking convey a collective message. The NIYA video was created to stream the demonstration live to those who could not participate in person and to get them involved, albeit virtually, in the day’s events. The video is filmed haphazardly as the videographer moves around the crowd trying to engage with different
95 activists who respond to him with various levels of enthusiasm. Sounds from the event can be heard as participants chant, yell, and talk.
As I consider NIYA’s recording and livestream of the Dream 9 demonstration, I am reminded of Gil Scott-Heron’s famous poem, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” The proliferation of digital recording technologies and online social media platforms has decreased popular reliance on mainstream media to document and televise the actions of social movements and has put the power of mediation on the hands of people on the street—the participants in and witnesses of protests and demonstrations. Hundreds of thousands of videos on YouTube feature protests and demonstrations from around the world. It seems like even though the revolution will not be televised, it will be streamed on YouTube.
While the mainstream media still has great power in the distribution of images and information about social movements, YouTube and other online video platforms including
UStream.tv provide an alternative way for social movements to represent themselves and avoid the de/legitimizing gaze of primetime news reports. The de/legitimizing gaze of the mainstream media, which provides salience and relevance to social movements by bringing their concerns to the frame of vision of mainstream America, also negates legitimacy through their myopic portrayal of protests and demonstrations. As Berlant reminds us:
Whether their acts are cast as naïve, ridiculous, insipid, and shallow, or merely
serious and unpragmatic, protesters are made to represent the frayed and fraying
edges of national society. The double humiliation of protest in the mainstream
media, making it both silly and dangerous, subtracts personhood from activists,
making their very gestures of citizenship seem proof that their claims are
illegitimate. (Queen of America 186)
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In a discursive economy in which protests by people of color are almost always presented by mainstream media as savage and mob-like and/or irrelevant and tedious, social movements by people of color seek to control their public image in order to legitimize their claims and protect themselves against false representations (I touch on the portrayals of unruly protests by people of color in Chapter Two). Therefore, as media and communications scholar Tina Askanius argues in “Protest Movements and Spectacles of Death: From Urban Places to Video Spaces,” “The awareness among activists of the imperative for the visual documentation of a protest event in order to bypass the gatekeepers of mainstream media and/or counter-spin their representations, as well as to provide visual evidence of police brutality, has made camcorders and camera phones and essential part of any demonstration” (110). Gesturing their awareness of the de/legitimizing gaze of mainstream media, NIYA organizers make sure to film at least some of the events of the Dream 9 demonstration and to make this recording available to the public online.
NIYA’s account of the events begins on the US side of the border after the Dream 9 have asked for asylum and been put into a vehicle to be transported to detention, a common practice used by ICE on asylum seekers. The video begins with a brief interview with the mother of
Marco Saavedra, one of the Dream 9. She speaks in Spanish, anxiety clear in her voice, “Por favor, por Marco Saavedra, que pongan en el Facebook, Twitter” (“Please, for Marco Saavedra, put this on Facebook, Twitter”). The camera moves left, cutting off the speaker and focusing on a young woman of color. Energetically, she exclaims in English, “They are putting the
DREAMers into the van. Call, Twitter, get the word out there!” The camera pans out to show the crowd gathered on the street, approximately fifty feet from the border fence, in front of one of the many stores in this Nogales, Arizona shopping district. CBP and Nogales Police Department
97 vehicles stand between the demonstrators and the border fence. The crowd is lively and energized. They raise their fists in the air and chant slogans in both Spanish and English. The chants are variations of two themes: “Bring the home”—the name of the NIYA campaign—and
“Undocumented and unafraid”—a popular slogan of empowerment for the undocumented community.
Because it is reaching audiences unable to participate physically in the demonstration, the livestreamed NIYA video is meant to put viewers on the streets, giving them the illusion that they are participating in the protest. Compared to a clearly edited news report clip, this video seems to be untouched and real. Through unsteady visuals, improvised dialogue, and live sounds the video presents viewers with the appearance of Truth. Askanius writes, “Graphicness is used to encode realism and as a signifier of veracity, enabling viewers to access the story that was never fully recorded or conveyed to them. In this manner, a discourse of truth and authenticity saturates the videos” (116). The amateur quality of this video rhetorically conveys a grassroots, unadulterated portrayal of the events by rejecting the polished quality of edited videos.
Despite its unedited feel, the NIYA video is carefully curated in ways that affect its message. To begin, the video of the performance is titled “Bring them Home” and captioned as follows:
Deportations have exploded in recent years, topping 400,000 in 2012, more than
double the number seven years earlier. U.S. lawmakers are debating an overhaul
to the country’s immigration system that could include a fix for immigrants who
were brought in illegally as children. Many have grown up in America and have
no recollection of life in another country, but they have no legal status in the US.
(“Bring them home”)
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The caption connects the video to the larger issues of increased deportations and immigration reform. Although not part of the performance, the message is part of the visual representation of that performance and, therefore, frames how viewers experience it. This textual framing, which
Askanius refers to as “jamming-by-tagging” (114), connects a video to a specific issue not by the content of the video but by the tags, comments, and titles that accompany the video. Without jamming-by-tagging this video to comprehensive immigration reform, the performance as represented in the NIYA livestream may be construed as focused on the well-being of the Dream
9 asylum seekers and not on the larger issue of migrant rights in the US.
The accompanying text also has conservative connotations. By stating that DREAMers have no recollection of their lives in other countries, the video’s accompanying text denies the transnational belongings experienced by many DREAMers who identify with the US and with their countries of birth even if they have never visited the latter. Interestingly, the accompanying text uses the word “illegally” to describe the DREAMers’ migration. The use of a variation of
“illegal” criminalizes the DREAMers’ parents and holds them responsible for the DREAMers’ precarity. NIYA’s use of “illegally” engages the language of oppressive discourses on migration that criminalize migrants and deny the global causes of migration in which these discourses are implicated.
The overt presence of the videographer in the form of the disembodied and omnipresent male voice that directs what the viewers see and hear also affects the video’s message. Viewers see the performance through his lens and hear from people he wants them to hear from. The videographer is the paternalistic mediator who guides viewers’ experience of the performance.
He points the camera at a woman and asks, “¿Que pasó con Marco?” She answers, “Acabamos de ver a Marco, ya está entrando a una van. Lo vimos todo. Por favor llamen, pongan en
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Facebook. Tenemos que traerlos a casa;” she then repeats herself in English, “We just saw
Marco coming out. We saw his cap and gown. Please call, Tweet, use Facebook. We need to bring them home!” This video practice reveals a masculinist approach to video-making that is doubly authorized. The male videographer controls what viewers see and hear by directing the recording. And, because viewers never see his face or body, the videographer erases himself so that the video maintains its element of “Truth.”
The videographer walks along the crowd trying to entice members of the crowd to speak on camera. A megaphone can be heard in the background— “Let them know that the community is here. El poder del pueblo!”—and a large banner reads, “Ni una más deportación.” He moves to the outside of the crowd where people are not as energized and convinces one woman to engage with the camera. She says, “We’re here because we’re trying to get our friends out.
They’ve been [in Mexico] all week. They grew up in the US and now they’re back [in Mexico], deported. . . We want all of you to start hashtagging all this, start getting this trending, that we’re here in Nogales because we want people to come home.” The crowd chants in the call and response style popular in social demonstrations— “When I say ‘let them’, you say ‘go’”—and the videographer directs people to put their fists up in the air. Then he leads the crowd on a chant of “Bring them home.”
Although the videographer is directing what can be seen and heard, he is not often the one speaking to the viewers. Instead, he prompts various demonstrators to speak into the camera and urge viewers to raise awareness of the event via phone and social media. By speaking directly to the viewers, the participant speakers invoke and address the video’s primary audience—those watching the video remotely. The remote viewers are not experiencing the demonstration first-hand. However, they are still a targeted audience of this performance that can
100 be reached only via livestream video. In this way, the livestream recording becomes part of the rhetorical performance. It does not simply serve the purpose of archiving the events. It helps create a persuasive argument for a specific audience.
The video pans out showing viewers a large banner that reads “Bring them home” being held by four young people and in the distance a sign that says, “Undocumented and unafraid” with a drawing of a raised fist. A tall man holds another sign; it reads “Bring Adriana Home.” A woman speaks to the camera, “Everybody, Marco and all the DREAMers have been detained.
Please keep calling. Bring them home! Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Tumbler, everything. Keep calling. They’re taking them. We don’t want them to take them. They’re ours. They’re our
DREAMers. Bring them home!” She joins the entire crowd as they repeat, “Bring them home!
Bring them home! Bring them home!” The videographer can be heard from his position off camera: “Make phone calls. Twitter, Facebook, sign the petition.”
Remote viewers are asked to engage the DREAMers’ argument not only by watching the performance, but also by spreading word about the events through social media. Although such
Internet “slacktivism” has been condemned as passive and antithetical to true radical engagement
(Scott-Heron indeed tells us that “you will not be able to stay home, brother”), through livestreamed videos and social media, activists can stay in their own homes and still participate in the revolution. The emphasis on online activism is particularly attractive for the Dream 9’s millennial viewers who may be quite adept at engaging wide audiences through social media.
Asking viewers to post information about the Dream 9 on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, etc. can
101 be read as a purposeful youth-centered strategy that seeks out youth participation through youth forms of engagement.40
With their focus on youth-led demonstrations, NIYA decenters the institutional power of migrant-rights organizing and puts its leadership in the hands of undocumented young people who often clash with the nonprofit industrial complex of mainstream migrant-rights organizations. Still, elements of neoliberal governmentality are evident in the Dream 9 demonstration, particularly in their use of individualizing strategies that instead of challenging the status quo, ask for recognition for DREAMers within the existing world order.
Individualizing strategies including calling the Dream 9 “friends” and asking specifically for their individual legalization are moves to petition the inclusion of DREAMers in a nation-state built on racialized exclusion.
Many of the young people featured in the video illustrate one of the Dream 9 individualizing strategies when they refer to the nine DREAMers as their “friends.” A young male says to the camera, “Bring them home. It’s important to send a message on your phones, get on the Internet right now and let everybody know they just took our friends. They put them in the back of a van with their schoolbooks and their uniforms to graduate. Get online right now and let everybody know. Bring them home!” These demonstrators ask that their “friends” be
40 The Pew Research Center reports that 67% of cell phone owners in the 18-29 age range use social networking sites on their phones, compared to 50% in the 30-49 age range; 49% of
“Hispanic” cell phone owners use social networking sites on their phones compared to 46% of black and 36% of white cell phone owners. (“Social Networking Fact Sheet”)
102 returned home; that their “friends” be released from detention; that their “friends” be given the right to stay in the US.
This rhetorical gesture of community support helps to constitute DREAMers as individuals who belong in the community, who have friends and a role in the nation-state. These
DREAMers are not unknown undocumented migrants; they are members of the community.
However, calling the Dream 9 “friends” makes the demonstration about local and individual cases, and not about a larger structural critique. This individualizing strategy puts the focus on changing the lives of the nine individuals asking for asylum and takes attention away from the larger problem of migrant discrimination.
The Dream 9 are further individualized through the demonstrators’ use of signs featuring their individual names with messages like “Bring Lizbeth Home” and “Bring Adriana Home.”
While organizers may be trying to humanize DREAMers—giving a face or at least a name to a statistic—these individualizing strategies of visibility risk diminishing the radical possibilities of this rhetorically innovative demonstration. Considering these individualizing strategies, the
Dream 9 demonstration can be read as a “demand for regularization, a means to legalize or
‘regularize’ the status” of these particular undocumented migrants (White 991). As White suggests, “Regularization programs... are themselves forms of governance, acting to categorize and separate those worthy of permanent residency and eventual formal citizenship from those deemed unworthy and dangerous” (991). These practices illustrate the performative contradiction in DREAMer discourses, where resistance reinforces state power because it is an effect of that power. This performative contradiction is inherent in social movement organizing within neoliberal contexts that privilege the individual and is particularly visible in DREAMer performances that rely on individualizing practices demanding regularization.
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In addition, for DREAMers in the Dream 9 demonstration, the nation-state serves both as the site of their oppression—through the immigration policies that deny them the ability to live legally in the US—and the opportunity for their potential liberation—through regularization into the US civic body. The nation-state’s paradoxical double duty in the Dream 9 demonstration, however, eclipses state oppression and instead highlights the state’s liberatory possibilities. As
Kwon argues, “In addressing social injury through mainstream political representation, incorporation, and redistribution, the state as a site of domination and oppression—and as a site in which to wage struggle and confrontation—disappears” (60). By asking for visibility in mainstream political discourses and economies, the US nation-state and the US government as its instrument are framed as having the power to fix the DREAMers’ situation by providing regularization and recognition within dominant conceptualizations of citizenship. Underplaying the state’s responsibility in causing the DREAMers’ marginalization blocks the Dream 9 demonstration’s potential for structural critique of state power.
The videographer walks up to the border fence and asks a young woman across the border, “¿Que ha pasado? Platica con todos.” (“What happened? Talk to everyone.”) She responds, “Pues lo que está pasando es que hay que darle chance a los niños que estudien, que tengan un mejor futuro. Aquí en México está muy dificil todo.” (“What is happening is that they need to give the children a chance to study, to have a better future. Here in Mexico everything is very difficult”). Another woman interrupts, “Que les den papeles.” (“Give them papers”). As previously stated, in the Dream 9 demonstration, the US is presented as agent, actor, and savior with the power to “give them papers,” “let them go,” and “bring them home.” However, the flaws in the current neoliberal model of political economy that maintains the oppression of migrants are not made visible through this demonstration.
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And, as the Dream 9 demonstrators constitute the US as their savior, they also frame
Mexico’s positionality within migrant rights discourses. Not only does the demonstrator across the border reference the inferior economic conditions in Mexico, but also the DREAMers’ efforts to move the US government to action frame Mexico as impotent—even innocent—when it comes to the DREAMers’ precarity. This move supports the position of the US as a global power, disregards how the US is implicated in Mexico’s current economic and social situation, and absolves Mexico of any responsibility in its citizens’ well-being.
Among the chants and excited yells of demonstrators, there is a significant police presence that reflects the prevalent criminalization of migrants and youth of color in the US.
CBP and police officers face the excited crowd stoically. The videographer turns to one of the police officers standing nearby and asks if he is going to write about this on Facebook. The officer responds, “I don’t get on that, man.” When the Dream 9 reach the Port of Entry, they are handcuffed and taken away in a white van;41 the CBP vehicles leave the area and activists are free to walk up to the border fence. Activist chant as they walk along the side of the border fence toward the US Port of Entry; officers stand next to the fence facing the crowd. The group chants:
“Sin papeles, sin miedo, undocumented and unafraid.” A woman speaks to the camera: “We don't know what’s going to happen to the DREAMers right now. They were taken by border
41 The practice of detaining asylum seekers has been condemned by the America Civil Liberties
Union and other similar groups who believe it to be inhumane and illegal. Despite an injunction that stops the detainment of some asylum seekers, many are still handcuffed when they present themselves at the US/Mexico border and detained at prison-like centers for short periods of time.
(“RILR v. Johnson”)
105 patrol; we don't know where they are at but we are still bringing the message, undocumented and unafraid, bring them home, let them go, bring them back to the place that they’ve always called home.”
The Dream 9 demonstration exemplifies the complex and conflicting rhetoric of social movements in neoliberal contexts. Despite the problematic individualizing strategies I’ve outlined, radical gestures in the protest signal NIYA’s attempt to complicate dominant discourses of citizenship and migration. For example, one of the most highly used slogans by demonstrators, “Undocumented and unafraid,” can be read as a desire for the state to recognize undocumented young people without asking them to regularize or assimilate but taking into account how their status as undocumented influences their identities. By claiming identities as undocumented, demonstrators are asking for undocumented young people to be accepted into the national citizen imaginary, but not within racialized frameworks of citizenship that would traditionally exclude them as undocumented young people of color. Instead, they are constituting undocumented citizen subjects. The Dream 9 are conveying pride in their status as undocumented and demanding that they be seen as citizens. This radical rhetorical move challenges dominant notions of citizenship as a juridical status by constituting citizens who do not fit the legal stipulations of this identity construct.
The camera pans again among the crowd and we can see a small white sign with rainbow colored letters that reads “Unafraid and unashamed” and another one stating “Bring Luis home.”
Then the videographer makes one final appeal to the livestream viewers, “Ok, so they took our friends. We’re asking everybody, please make phone calls. Phone calls as soon as possible.
ASAP. Phone calls, Facebook, Twitter. Hacer llamadas, por favor.” The crowd walks to the US
Port of Entry to continue the protest.
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3.4 Performances of Citizenship in the Neoliberal Nation-State
Doerr, et al. argue, “As a means of self-expression and as a carrier of a message to spectators, the body is the enjeu protesters bring into political conflicts” (xiv). In performances of dissent, bodies, props, and slogans are responsible for signifying both the overt claims of the group in protest and the tacit arguments that such performances inevitably posit. Therefore, paying attention to performances is crucial to understanding how subjectivities are constituted and how social movements function in contexts of neoliberal constrain. Analyzing the Dream 9 performance not only illustrates how this particular youth organizing group makes arguments for the legalization of DREAMers, but also demonstrates how such performances constitute
(non)citizen subjectivities that challenge normative ideas of the citizen subject. After all, as
Taylor (2010) reminds us, national identity “is not so much a question of being as of doing, of being seen doing, of identifying with the appropriate performative model” (258). My analysis suggests that US citizenship cannot solely be construed as a juridical status; it must also be understood as a performative identification that is continuously constituted through its performance.
Furthermore, the performative contradiction of the Dream 9 events highlights the paradox of the nation-state in migrant rights demonstrations in which the nation-state is evoked as the object of desire and the cause of exclusion for undocumented migrants and other people of color.
This paradox makes visible how the nation-state and citizenship as a rights-bearing status are not productive ways to organize society inasmuch as equality remains a social goal. Even though both constructs—citizenship and the nation-state—are often taken for granted in neoliberal nationalist discourses, I read the contradictions of these two constructs as embodied in the
Dream 9 demonstration to argue that both citizenship and the nation-state carry insidious
107 neoliberal underpinnings that always already result in the oppression of Othered populations.
The Dream 9’s desire for citizenship, or at the very least their desire for the nation-state, sabotages their radical agenda and permeates their demonstration with conservative nationalist undertones. This analysis reads the Dream 9 demonstration as a performance of dissent that is structured by the desire to belong to the nation-state. Their desire for regularization, undoubtedly motivated by pain, marginalization, and violence (Agathangelou, et al.), works against the possibility of imagining other ways to end the precarity of extra-legal migration and undocumented US residence. In the chapter that follows, I continue complicating citizenship and the nation-state as constituted in migrant-rights discourses and performances.
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CHAPTER FOUR
PAPÁ, MAMÁ, I’M COMING HOME: A TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF
HOME AND FAMILY IN THE “BRING THEM HOME” CAMPAIGN
“There is an irreconcilable tension between the search for a secure place from which to speak,
within which to act, and the awareness of the price at which secure places are bought,
the awareness of the exclusions, the denials, the blindnesses on which they are predicated.”
-- Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders
“The reality is quite plain: the ‘end of the era of nationalism,’ so long prophesied,
is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value
in the political life of our time.”
-- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
A young girl sits on a metal folding chair; behind her, a windowless white wall. She faces the camera and speaks assertively in English with a hurried Spanish accent.
“I am Ingrid Dominga Gallego Reyes. I am 13 years old. I’m from Chetumal, Quintana
Roo.”
Ingrid then tells her story in Spanish about living in Mesa, Arizona for nine years and returning to Mexico as a result of the fear induced by Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deportation regime. But in Mexico, Ingrid describes, things are not much better. She tells of being bullied at school and becoming depressed. She wants to return to the United States—to Mesa, Arizona—to pursue a career as a doctor, help her parents, and be with her little brother.
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“So, family, friends,” Ingrid says in English as she finishes her story. “I coming [sic] home.”
This confessional-style video was posted on 28 September 2013 on NIYA’s YouTube channel and is titled “BringThemHome: Ingrid, 13, Fighting to Return with her Sister to
Arizona.” It is one of at least nine videos recorded in the same format. They all present young people who are trying to petition the US for asylum. Each video features the same white background, the asylum seeker speaking directly to the camera, and the narrative of returning to a birth country to find that things were not as expected. They even contain the same ending, some variation of “Mom, dad, family, friends, I’m coming home.”
But what is the home that these young migrants want to return to? In the epigraph to this chapter, Mohanty reflects on the contradictions inherent in the idea of home. Home, which
Mohanty describes as “the place where one lives within familiar, safe, and protected boundaries”
(90), provides its supposed safety and security at the expense of “exclusions” and “blindnesses.”
Common aphorisms evidence how the US constitutes the idea of home in familial and spatiotemporal modes. The popular US American saying, “home is where the heart is,” connotes a familial dimension to home, defining home as the location of loved ones, wherever that location may be. “There’s no place like home,” on the other hand, conveys the spatiotemporal aspects of home defined as an unmoving, originary place to return to—the desired place of safety.
The nation in turn provides a home that is both familial and spatiotemporal. Political theorist Danielle Allen in Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of
Education describes this national identification as a friendship built on the recognition of “a shared life—not a ‘common’ nor an identical life—only one with common events, climates,
110 built-environments, fixations of the imagination, and social structures” (xxii). In this way, Allen theorizes the nation as a family-like community of citizens built on supposed identification and shared experience. Identification among members of the national family not only creates the nation, but also helps its various members act with a common purpose. Benedict Anderson in his landmark work on nationalism, Imagined Communities, writes that the nation is “an imagined political community” (6) with much salience in today’s political life. Imagined as a place with
“deep, horizontal comradeship” (7), the nation is a community imagined as a monolith that moves through time, existing ahistorically and moving unitedly toward a “limitless future” (12).
The nation in turn depends on the idea of home, both as familial and spatiotemporal, as its organizing principle and elicits home nostalgia—a longing for family, safety, love—in the form of patriotism. As Anderson argues, “for most ordinary people of whatever class the whole point of the nation is that it is interestless. Just for that reason, it can ask for sacrifices” (144).
Like the love of family, the nation’s love is disinterested and demands selfless love and unyielding devotion in return.
But despite the imaginings of stability, unity, and love that the imagined nation may hold, the nation is inherently exclusionary. As Espiritu writes in Home Bound, “Evocations of home and community—as a claim to truth, originary place, and authenticating devices—are often problematic because they signal who is ‘in’ but also who is not” (182). Appeals to the rhetoric of home—a rhetoric that is highly persuasive in the contemporary moment of nationalist fervor— often reproduce exclusions, as Espiritu suggests. In this chapter, I theorize how home is evoked in migrant-rights discourses to expose the limits and possibilities in this seemingly benign construction. I argue that in migrant-rights activism the nation is constructed through the idea of home as a space that reproduces heteropatriarchal and neoliberal ideologies.
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This chapter explores how the rhetorical performances of the “Bring Them Home” campaign imagine the nation through a desire for belonging and define notions of home and family with implications for the nation-state. I draw on Hesford’s definition of rhetoric as “a practice of making and remaking social and political relations and incorporating subjects into discursive formation and regimes of truth” (12). By evoking the social and political relations of the nation-state, home, and family, NIYA provides new discursive formations challenging dominant narratives that exclude migrants of color from the US national imaginary. However, these new discursive formations also reproduce heteropatriarchal discourses that constitute the hegemony of the state.
I use the lens of transnational feminisms to analyze how migrant-rights discourses utilize a rhetoric of home and family values to argue for migrant belongings. Transnational feminist theory analyzes global power structures for the ways in which they organize conditions of inequality and exploitation transnationally. As an analytic, transnational feminism seeks to unveil the global workings of heteropatriarchy with the intention of transformation through collective action; it takes into account global structures of neoliberalism and heteropatriarchy in analyzing the lives of women throughout the world. Finally, within a critique of neoliberalism, transnational feminism questions the legitimacy of national borders as they buttress Western hegemony globally and white heteropatriarchy locally. My analysis adopts a transnational feminist approach to the study of migrant rhetorics in order to highlight how home, family, and nation are inescapably intertwined—racialized, gendered, and sexualized. Transnational feminism helps me to analyze how identities are reconfigured through global power dynamics.
As with Chapter Three, I take as a case study demonstrations in NIYA’s “Bring Them
Home” campaign. However, I focus my inquiry on expressions of home and family in NIYA
112 videos that advocate for immigration reform. The texts I examine are themselves performances, although they differ in nature from those I examine in the previous chapter. These videos, as the opening to this chapter illustrates, are texts created in preparation for collective action. This chapter’s focus on home seeks to complement Chapter Three’s analysis of the citizenship rhetorics of migrants in protest to create a richer understanding of how citizenship, especially as it seeks to claim a home space, is constituted through migrant-rights discourses.
4.1 The Neoliberal Nation as Defined through Conceptualizations of Home and Family
Acknowledging the importance of multimodality to social movements in our digitally networked society, I examine multimodal texts to explore how sights and sounds work together to create rhetoric that constitutes citizenship and belonging through tropes of home and family in the context of the neoliberal nation. Doerr, et al. argue that social movements have always engaged the senses, particularly sight, “Activists articulate visual messages, their activities are represented in photos and video sequences, and they are ultimately rendered visible, or invisible in the public sphere” (xi). Similarly, migrant-rights social movements appeal to their audience’s sense through multimodal42 texts in order to gain recognition and make persuasive claims.
42 My understanding of multimodality draws on Adam Banks’ work on the DJ as digital griot. In
Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Banks theorizes the multimodal work of the DJ as “standing between tradition and future, holding the power to shape how both are seen/heard/felt/known. exhibiting mastery of techniques, but always knowing that techniques carry stories, arguments, ways of viewing the world… disrupting the line/text/narrative
/argument/worldview/world to recreate all through the arrangement” (4). As such, I theorize
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To select the texts I analyze in this chapter, I chose from the vast array of videos online that petition the US government for immigration reform. I began by visiting the NIYA YouTube channel, where I found Ingrid’s narrative from this chapter’s opening. From there, I used a technique that I describe as a “hyperlinked snowball sampling:” Once I clicked on one relevant video (i.e., Ingrid’s narrative), a list of similar videos appeared on the right-hand side of the
YouTube interface, allowing me to find other relevant videos. This hyperlinked mechanism is built into the YouTube interface. Similar to snowball sampling in which one participant leads the researcher to another, in “hyperlinked snowball sampling” one text led me to another through the hyperlinked YouTube interface.
From the recommended linked texts, I looked for variety in the strategies used to create each text (e.g., confessional-style videos, recordings of groups sharing their stories, montages featuring still images and music, etc.) and selected those with themes of family and home. Out of eleven texts that met the thematic criteria, I selected three that presented different filming strategies. I noticed that most NIYA texts feature either women, young adults, or children. The exclusion of adult men seemed a purposeful strategy for NIYA. This prompted me to analyze how gender and age play a role in migrant-rights rhetorics in order to answer the following questions:
How are home and family developed as tropes in migrant-rights rhetorics? How are home and family particularly gendered and aged in migrant-rights activism? What are the implications of gendered and aged migrant positionalities as constituted through migrant-rights rhetorics?
multimodal rhetorics as those that shuttle between tradition and innovation, using digital, audio, video, and textual modes to convey messages that disrupt linear narrative.
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The three texts I selected suggest the moralizing agenda of neoliberalism in terms of heteronormative family values through the rhetorical tropes of the nation-as-family and the nation-as-home, rhetorical constructions of the nation as a familial home space, dependent upon the unity of the heteropatriarchal family. Butler’s theory of the performative contradiction highlights how the rhetorical tropes of the nation-as-family and the nation-as-home can create the conditions for the inclusion of migrants who are framed as belonging to traditionally configured families; yet, it also demonstrates how these tropes restrict belonging by being limited to neoliberal family configurations.
I describe the texts here briefly and will go into more detail in the subsequent section.
The first text is a video recording that shows a group of women and children sitting in a large room. The women take turns telling their stories to the camera in Spanish. The second text is a montage that features the story of a mother and her struggle to reunite with her child, and uses a combination of still images, music, Spanish narration, and English subtitles. Finally, I analyze
Ingrid’s narrative from the chapter’s opener. The format of this text is simple—just a young girl speaking directly into the camera—and evokes a reality TV confessional style. All three texts are connected to NIYA in some way, whether NIYA’s logo is present in the text or the text’s title mentions NIYA or the “Bring Them Home” campaign. The texts have gotten hundreds of views on YouTube, with the most popular being the video recording of the group of women with 865 views.
Motherhood and the Nation-as-family in the Migrant Mothers’ Story. Throughout the second week of March 2014, approximately 150 previously deported or self-deported migrants asked for asylum into the US at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in San Diego, California as part of the Dream
150 action of NIYA’s “Bring Them Home” campaign. A 3-minute-9-second video titled “Bring
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Our Mothers Home #WeAreElvira” was created as a precursor to the Dream 150 events and features some of the mothers and children who would take part in the action (Ingram). This video features a large room with approximately ten women and their children who sit in front of a blue sign with the hashtag #BringthemHome. The letter “o” in the word “home” is the red, white, and blue rising sun logo from Obama’s presidential campaigns. The women and children vary in ages. Some of the women hold their children on their laps. More children sit on the floor in front of the women.
The text is accompanied by the following short caption: “#REFORMA150 Reform Starts
With Us. Watch live 12 noon: bit.ly/reformstartswithus.”43 During the video, the audience is
43 The video linked here features, among other things, an interview with NIYA organizer Rocio
Hernandez Perez. Hernandez Perez took part in the Dream 30 action, failed to receive asylum or humanitarian parole, and was deported back to Mexico where she became a migrant-rights organizer. What is interesting in Hernandez Perez’s interview is her description of the organizational logic behind the Dream 150 action. She states that on the day featured in the video, those crossing would be mothers, children, and LGBTQ people seeking asylum. She explains that the fathers and rest of the children had already attempted to cross. NIYA asked the fathers to cross separately from the mothers to maximize the possibility of all family members being given parole. If the families cross together, Hernandez Perez explains, ICE would detain and deport the fathers, granting parole only to the mothers who can remain in the US with their children. Crossing each parent separately with a child makes it more difficult for the US to deport the fathers because they have at least one of their children in tow. This tactical move demonstrates how ICE deportation policies prompt the separation of the family and the absence
116 addressed by four women who talk about their reasons for returning to their countries of origin and their desire to go back to the US. This video constitutes the US nation-as-family claiming that these women should be given asylum along with their children because they are mothers motivated by motherly duty, and, therefore, belong in the US.
The nation-as-family as constructed in the mothers’ video is built primarily on the traditionalist idea that women have certain moral duties that they must perform and that these moral duties are centered on the family. This notion, presented in the video as if it were common sense, assumes that women, as mothers, have an inherent obligation to act selflessly in favor of their children and their families. The theme of motherly duty is introduced by the first woman who speaks in the video, Elvira Arellano, who has become an icon for the family reunification and sanctuary movements in the US. Arellano is an undocumented woman from Mexico who became a vocal advocate for the rights of migrant families after taking up sanctuary in the
Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago when she was issued a deportation order
(Aizenman and Hsu). Arellano was eventually arrested on 19 August 2007 when she left the church to attend an immigration rally in Los Angeles, California. She was deported back to
Mexico shortly after where she continued her activist work with migrants. Arellano represents the archetypal migrant mother who will do anything for her children. Her struggles to reunite with her US-born son have inspired a resurgence in the religious sanctuary movement in the US.
Having Arellano’s story as the video’s opener and having the hashtag #WeAreElvira as the video’s title highlights that, for women, the claim to US belonging is legitimated through their
of father from the family unit. It also explains the absence of adult males from NIYA YouTube videos.
117 identities as mothers, which are in turn defined by their adherence to motherly duty.44 If the US is constructed as the nation-as-family, mothers should be able to make a claim for their inclusion.
However, Mohanty suggests that the construction of normative femininity, of which motherhood is a characteristic, in relation to the idea of nation not only “[mobilizes] women in the ‘service’ of the nation, but they also become the ground on which discourses of morality and nationalism are written” (Feminism Without Borders 133). The women in this video are mobilized to build the nation-as-family in which migrant mothers can belong. They help to construct the discourse of motherly duty—a nationalist discourse that relies on gendered and sexualized notions of belonging—that legitimizes their belonging in the neoliberal nation-state.
Through the discourse of women’s motherly duty, women are understood as part of the nation first and foremost as mothers. Holding her young daughter on her lap, a second woman describes how she returned to her country of origin to help her mother who was diagnosed with cancer and to care for her sick son who had to have surgery. She states that even though this was a very difficult decision for her, she did it because “primero soy madre” (“First, I am a mother”).
The idea that women are first of all mothers helps to make migrant women acceptable to the nation-as-family. This move rhetorically eliminates other differences that women may have across cultures, races, nationalities, etc. This is why the rhetoric of motherhood is so effective in
44 The logic of the responsible selfless mother has also been employed by conservative agents to argue for migrant self-deportation. State laws like Arizona’s SB1070 and Alabama’s HB56 work on the logic that once undocumented parents experience how difficult it is to live normal lives in the US, they will do what is best for their families and self-deport back to their birth countries.
(State of Arizona)
118 building the trope of nation-as-family. It helps to build identification among women across difference so that all can make a claim for national belonging.45 The statement of “primero soy madre” negates other possible identities that this woman may have and clouds any disparaging association that a US audience may have with this woman (for example, as a so-called “illegal alien”). The rhetoric of motherly duty assumes a universal experience of motherhood, obscures the heterogeneity within this identity, and privileges motherhood as migrant women’s only valuable subject position.
The third woman we hear cements this assumption. She states that the reason she left the
US and returned to her country of origin was to help her daughter who was dying. She says, “Yo hice lo que cualquier madre hubiese hecho en ese momento de desesperación y angustia” (“I did what any mother would have done in that moment of desperation and anguish”). Sitting erect and looking straight into the camera, the woman directly seeks identification among all mothers. She appeals to a universalized code of motherly duty where all mothers are compelled to act in the same, commonsensical way. In this way, she helps to make the argument that she and the other migrant women share a common core of beliefs around motherly duty. While this is an effective way to build identification and to constitute the nation-as-family that appeals to US audiences, it also, as Cacho suggests, “[distracts] us from critiquing the structural conditions of global capital
45 Of course there are objections to the rhetoric of motherhood as used in migrant-rights arguments. As I reviewed in Chapter Two, the rhetorical figures of the anchor baby and the terrorist baby position women of color as threats to the nation-state specifically because of their ability to reproduce. Thus, motherhood helps build identification in the texts I analyze here, but can also be criminalized and deployed in anti-migrant discourses.
119 and neoliberal reforms that create, perpetuate, and aggravate hyperexploitability and legal vulnerability” (118). Indeed, framing deportations and failed immigration legislation as breaking the laws of family love hides the violence that these laws enact on bodies of color and legitimizes the patriarchal gendered division of labor in which only women are responsible for the care and well-being of children, the maintenance of culture, and the unity of family and nation.
The way in which the rhetoric of motherhood eases the culpability of failed immigration laws is evident in the story of the fourth woman who speaks in the video. After a still image of her family is shown on the screen, we hear and see the fourth mother, a young woman who describes how her family returned to Mexico because in the US they faced discrimination and feared ICE would separate them. Her minute-long narrative is the longest in the video and incorporates moves that help sketch the rhetoric of motherly duty that constitutes the US nation- as-family and the migrant mother as its citizen. I transcribe and translate it here in its entirety to illustrate the complexity of the rhetorical moves she utilizes:
Nos tuvimos que regresar de Arizona por las We had to return [to Mexico] from Arizona leyes anti-inmigrantes por que andábamos en because of the anti-immigrant laws, because la calle o trabajando y la demás gente nos we were on the street or working and other echaba la policía por vernos hispanos y people would call the police on us because we teníamos miedo a que en vez de la policía looked Hispanic and we were afraid that llegara la, este, el ICE. Y, este, por miedo de instead of the police, ICE would arrive. And separarnos de nuestras niñas nos tuvimos que because of this fear of being separated from regresar a México. Y ahora pues me our girls we had to return to Mexico. Now I arrepiento porque está muy feo; la regret it because it is very ugly; the crime,
120 delincuencia, asaltos, asesinatos, secuestros, assaults, murders, kidnappings, and I don’t y no quiero que en una de esas a mis niñas me want that one of these times my girls get las secuestren. No aguantaría yo eso, que me kidnapped. I would not be able to bear it if my arrebataran a mis niñas. Como ahorita le girls got snatched. Like now, one of our girls quitaron la niña a mi esposo, se la was taken away from my husband, they arrebataron. Yo no sé por que porque es su snatched her. I don’t know why because she’s hija. Y la tienen en un centro de detención. his daughter. And they have her in a detention
Están separados y no es justo que esté center. They are separated and it isn’t fair that separada de su papa. Por favor, al she is separated from her dad. Please, to the presidente, que nos ayude en esto, a estar las President, help us with this, to be together as familias unidas. Que no nos separen mas. families. Don’t separate us anymore. Thank
Gracias. Ayúdanos por favor. you. Please help us.
About halfway through her monologue, the woman begins to cry and has to stop to compose herself. She places her left hand on her chest and shakes her head as she speaks of being unable to bear being separated from her daughters. This section of the video relies the most heavily on pathos, as viewers hear the fear and sadness in the woman’s speech. Her shaky voice divulges her weariness and her desire to be safe and together with her family. The strong emotional appeal in this part of the woman’s narrative might be why video editors chose to include such a long portion of this woman’s story.
The fourth woman’s focus on her daughters, which serves as the emotional catalyst in her narrative, underscores how migrant precarity is produced through immigration law. Her fear of being separated from her daughters, a fear that has come true as she describes her husband being separated from one of the girls, motivates her and her husband to first leave the US and then
121 drives their desire to return. Paradoxically, the US is presented first as threatening family unity,
“por miedo de separarnos de nuestras niñas nos tuvimos que regresar a México,” and then as the place that can provide it by helping the woman avoid the kidnappings that she states are rampant in Mexico, “no quiero que en una de esas a mis niñas me las secuestren.” In this woman’s narrative, the US nation-as-family is a complex construction that does not fully satisfy the migrant family’s need to avoid separations. In the US, her husband and their daughter are ultimately separated, “Y la tienen en un centro de detención. Están separados y no es justo que esté separada de su papa,” even though their return to the US was supposed to help keep them together. The incongruence in her narrative signals the multifaceted characteristic of migrant citizenship rhetorics. Here, the nation-as-family is presented as the home that can provide unity and safety, even though the same narrative recognizes the impossibility of unity and safety for the migrant family. It seems that to belong in the nation-state migrants must shape their rhetorics in ways that often contradict their experiences. This example appeals to and reproduces the neoliberal idea that the US is an exceptional nation that can provide safety and unity where other nations fail, yet it lacks the empirical evidence to support such a claim. The women in this video plea for a return to the US to be with their families, even though the US often contributes to their separation.
In her narrative, the fourth woman makes visible the persecution her family felt in the US after what she terms “anti-immigrant laws” were passed in Arizona. This is an important moment in NIYA’s migrant-rights rhetoric because, unlike the other women in this video, this woman’s narrative points specifically to immigration laws and how they aggravated the lives of her and her family. This particular moment is an opportunity for a structural critique of discriminatory immigration laws and their dehumanizing enforcement. The moment, however, is fleeting; the
122 opportunity for critique is never fulfilled. On the other hand, in asking to return to the US to save her family, the woman asks the audience to ignore the fact that those same anti-immigrant laws are still in place and that there is sustained discrimination of people of color in the US. The woman proposes that the solution to her problem is a return to the US so that she can escape from the crime in Mexico. While this solution would help her avoid the violence she is concerned about in Mexico, it would do nothing to counter the structural inequalities she would face as a migrant of color in the US nor would it help curve the violence in Mexico. In petitioning Obama to help her and the other mothers, the woman asks him to take the smallest possible action—granting this group of women and children asylum—instead of asking he address the neoliberal market policies and politics that have put this woman in her precarious situation and that continue to put other women in similar position.
Nation-as-family in the Story of Isabel and Sarai. Isabel Martinez lived in Chicago with her daughter Sarai, a US citizen. After Martinez is deported to Mexico for being undocumented, she attempts to cross back into the US seven times without success. Before taking part in the Dream
150 action, Martinez tells her story in a 4-minute-and-49-second montage titled “Isabel Martinez
Bring Them Home NIYA.” She talks about Sarai and her desire to return to the US to be with her.
The montage incorporates Martinez’s narration in Spanish, subtitles in English, still images, and music. Through Martinez’s story, the montage constitutes the nation as a familial space, claiming that Martinez and other migrants should be allowed asylum in the US for family reunification purposes. Important to the construction of the US nation-as-family in Martinez’s text is the image of the heteropatriarchal family, privileged in dominant US family discourses despite the
US Supreme Court’s decision about the constitutionality of same-sex marriage on 26 June 2015.
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Martinez’s story is used to represent the many parents who have been separated from their children because of US immigration laws. Through the use of metonymy, Martinez’s video creates a normativized image of the migrant family that fits the dominant heteropatriarchal idea of family in the US. This rhetorical move helps to create identification between US audiences and asylum-seeking migrants, and to de-emphasize the migrant-rights aspect of NIYA’s plea.
First, the still images that accompany Martinez’s narrative feature small groups of Latin@s— presumably migrant families, parents, children, men, and women. Viewers are not told which of these, if any, is a picture of Martinez and her daughter Sarai. Overlapping Martinez’s voice with the images of multiple families creates the message that this story is not just about Martinez’s family but about many similarly situated migrant families. Second, the opening slide of the video also generalizes Martinez’s situation. It reads, “In the hope of reuniting with those they love, 150 people seeking asylum crossed through Tijuana as part of the NIYA Bring Them Home campaign. This is the story of one of those people.” Noticeably, this short passage does not mention any names or characteristics of the people seeking asylum or of Martinez. All characteristics mentioned are vague. Using Martinez’s story as metonym for all separated migrant families helps to place emphasis on the theme of family reunification and deemphasize politically controversial migrant-rights activism. For example, the text states that these people are “reuniting with those they love,” leaving it open for the viewer to fill in the meaning of this phrase. They are called “people,” not migrants, not DREAMers. There is nothing to signal that these “people” were deported or self-deported back to the countries of their births. Viewers are to see them simply as families, albeit a particular type of family that serves the mythos of the heteropatriarchal nation-state.
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Similarly, the descriptive text that is posted along with the video provides little specificity about Martinez’s story. The text reads, “This is the story of Isabel and her daughter Sarai, who is waiting for her in Chicago. Visit http://action.dreamactivist.org/bring…” The only specific connection with migrant rights is the mention of NIYA and the “Bring Them Home” campaign in the title. Viewers who are unfamiliar with the “Bring Them Home” campaign will perhaps fail to see this text as advocating for migrant rights and instead focus on the family reunification aspect of the video. Considering divisive popular and political discourses regarding immigration reform, this seems like a smart rhetorical move by NIYA to appeal to US audiences who might still be unwilling to support amnesty for undocumented border crossers but who may be more sympathetic to the plight of separated families.
The focus on the family continues when Martinez’s narration begins. After stating her name and her Mexican national origin, Martinez begins describing her daughter. She describes
Sarai as a sweet child who loves to laugh and reminisces about spending time with her, “Me daba un beso… y siempre me decia, ‘Descanza mami. Estas muy cansada porque fuiste a trabajar’” (“She would give me a kiss… and she would always tell me ‘Rest mommy. You must be very tired because you had to work’”). During her descriptions of Sarai, multiple images of happy families screen in the background. These images accompanied by Martinez’s narration help to develop the rhetoric of family that is key to the construction of nation-as-family. Images, as Hesford argues, “may be more immediate and memorable than words at the sensory level, but, like all texts, images acquire social value and symbolic overtones from larger frames of reference” (8). This specific conceptualization of family, developed here through the pictures of families but especially through the rhetorical interplay of image, text, and sound, gains a very
125 particular meaning: the nation is a heteropatriarchal familial space reserved for the hard-working and responsible nuclear family.
The NIYA video plays on the salience of the heteropatriarchal family to craft a family rhetoric that appeals to US audiences. Arguing that these families are similar to the heteropatriarchal family valued in the US, NIYA creates identification between US citizens and their quintessential Other—Latin American undocumented migrants. By building identification,
NIYA can claim that Martinez and the migrants she represents share common values with US citizens as prompted by neoliberalism’s emphasis on individual responsibility, labor, sacrifice, and, therefore, respectability in the pursuit of the ever elusive American Dream. The images that accompany Martinez’s narrative reinforce a heteropatriarchal model of family: a mother holding a tired child; an opposite-sex couple hugging and smiling; a woman holding two young boys.
While nowhere does it say that these images are of families, the composition of the images (and their placement alongside Martinez’s motherly narrative) make them seem representative of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family. There are no images of people appearing to be same-sex couples or belonging to other non-normative family configurations. Most pictures feature adults and children, implying parentage. As Cacho argues, for marginalized groups “connections to heterosexual nuclear families are crucial to illustrate respectability and deservingness” (128).
Seeking to appear as normative as possible, undocumented migrants must align themselves with the ultimate structure of normativity, the nuclear heteropatriarchal family. Since the nation is constituted as a familial space—but primarily for heteropatriarchal families—the migrants represented in this video must seem to belong to heteropatriarchal families in order to be included in the nation-state.
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The emphasis on the heteropatriarchal migrant family, however, eclipses the complex configurations of migrant families who are just as often separated by immigration laws, economic conditions, and other societal stressors. Martinez’s video evidences the ruptures in the heteropatriarchal migrant family narrative, as viewers witness the fear she feels of the implications of her separation from Sarai. Martinez’s motherly fear, which fulfills traditional notions of motherly gender roles, also highlights cracks in the idea of the monolithic heteropatriarchal family structure. As sounds, images, and words come together to emphasize her motherly fear during her separation from Sarai, viewers realize that the model of the traditional heteropatriarchal family is unrealizable within migrants’ precarious lives. One minute and eight seconds into the video, the music suddenly becomes much more dramatic. What had been a syncopated beat becomes one sustained grave violin note. Accompanying this change in sound, the images also change. After featuring images of happy families, the screen is filled with a picture of a serious little girl glancing over her shoulder and looking piercingly straight into the camera. The image remains on the screen for 36 seconds while Martinez talks about her motherly fear:
Lo que mas me asusta es de que ella pueda What scares me most is that something bad sufrir algún daño de alguna mala persona, o could happen to her because of a bad person, que la traten mal porque no está con familia. or that someone would mistreat her because
Que esto la afecte, cambie su forma de she is not with her family. That this could crecimiento. Ella es muy desenvuelta y no affect her and she would change in her quiero que se vuelva tímida, triste. Tengo development. She is very sociable and I don’t mucho miedo también pues de que los want her to become shy or sad. I’m also very intentos que estoy hacienda para poder afraid that in these attempts I have made to try
127 reunirme con ella, pues me pase algo y no and get back to her, something could happen volver a verla. to me and I would never see her again.
Martinez’s fears build on the mother’s traditional role as caretaker of her children to create the worry that in separation the mother cannot fulfill that role. Her desire to return to the US implies that only the US nation-as-family can relieve the separation between mother and child, and ease the tension in the heteropatriarchal family. Here, the rhetoric of family reinforces the unequal power dynamics of the heteropatriarchal family in which the women are the primary and individual caretakers of the children and their value is measured by how well they can perform this important role. However, Martinez’s motherly fear also highlights the impossibility of the migrant heteropatriarchal family through the father’s noticeable absence.
NIYA’s heteropatriarchal family rhetoric leads viewers to assume that Sarai has a father who is still in her and Martinez’s lives. However, in Martinez’s narrative the father is not in charge of taking care of Sarai. He does not share in Martinez’s worries about Sarai’s well-being.
He has been extricated from family obligations. The father’s absence both supports and contradicts the image of the heteropatriarchal family that constructs nation-as-family. First, the absence of the father from Martinez’s narrative reinforces the idea that in the traditional heteropatriarchal family the gendered division of labor ascribes the mother with all child-rearing duties. However, the normativized family that constructs the nation-as-family is also a nuclear, married family that fulfills Judeo-Christian family ideals. The absence of the father may bring forth questions in US audiences about how the migrant family measures up to the heteropatriarchal Judeo-Christian US family model. Is Sarai’s father dead or, worse, deadbeat? Is the mother unmarried and, therefore, presumably immoral according to Judeo-Christian “family values”?
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The suspicious absence of the father exposes the inner workings of the family rhetoric used to argue for migrant belongings in the US nation-state. Migrant-rights family rhetoric creates a mutually exclusive binary between criminal and family in order to argue for the inclusion of undocumented migrants into the US civic imaginary. The NIYA text asks for these families to be allowed into the nation-state through the logic that being families negates the possibility of being criminals. However, males of color cannot cleanse themselves from their association with criminality in popular discourse (see Chapter Two for more on this). Since they blemish the family with criminality, they can only be part of the family as an absence, even if their absence raises questions about the family’s legitimacy. Here lies the impossibility of the heteropatriarchal migrant family. Migrant-rights family rhetoric constitutes the US nation-as- family as a space of familial love and unity. Only upon Martinez’s return to the US, will she and
Sarai be able to share their familial love and live together peacefully. The father, however, cannot share in this love and unity because he presents a threat to the nation-state (not to mention the adult male is disproportionate targeted by immigration laws). Even though the rhetoric of the heteropatriarchal family appears to successfully argue for migrant belonging, it is unsuited to reflect the complex lives of undocumented migrants who are often separated by the very states in which they are asking for inclusion.
Nation-as-home in Ingrid’s Narrative. As Ingrid’s narrative in the opening of this chapter makes evident, rhetorics of home and family help NIYA to make arguments for changes in US immigration policy that would recognize DREAMers as de facto US citizens. Ingrid took part in
NIYA’s Dream 30 demonstration in which, following the model of the Dream 9 and Dream 150, approximately 30 undocumented migrants, this time from multiple Latin American countries and of various ages, presented themselves at a US Port of Entry and asked for asylum in the US.
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Unlike the Dream 9 demonstration in which the main claim was that DREAMers are basically and exceptionally US American, the Dream 30 asked to return to the US based on the idea that this country is their home and can provide the safety that home is supposed to entail. Ingrid’s video exemplifies the moral imperative of neoliberalism—that home is supposed to be a safe space structured, like the nation-state, through patriarchal values including hard work and personal responsibility for one’s own security.
Ingrid’s confessional-style narrative illustrates how the nation-as-home is constituted via themes of safety, family reunification, and career; but her narrative is not exceptional. In fact,
Ingrid’s sister, Jessica, was featured in her own similar video. Other videos in this confessional- style genre also present these themes and underline how citizenship is defined via rhetorics of home. The confessional video genre showcases the complex characteristic of multimodal migrant-rights claims. The fact that the videos follow specific genre conventions highlights the rhetoricity of the narratives being told. Although there is a person telling the story in each video, the generic themes unveil a calculating institutional appeal behind the message. The tightly scripted videos make visible the organizational structure of migrant-rights activism, a move that seems to silence stories that diverge from the normative script for the benefit of the common good. And yet, the rhetorical move to standardize these migrants’ stories under these scripted themes is also highly effective in challenging the totalizing force of state-sanctioned persecution, such as was experienced by undocumented migrants in Arizona after the signing of SB1070 into law.
Ingrid’s video reveals the structure of the rhetorics of citizenship used to appeal for her
US national belonging. I transcribe and translate Ingrid’s short narrative in its entirety here to
130 identify how the themes of family, safety, and career work together in this genre to make claims that Ingrid belongs in the US through the rhetorical trope of the nation-as-home:
Vivimos en Mesa, Arizona nueve años. Nos We lived in Mesa, Arizona nine years. We vinimos a México por que Sheriff Joe Arpaio came to Mexico because Sheriff Joe Arpaio sacaba a gentes y pues teníamos mucho was removing people and, well, we were very miedo y corríamos peligro. Por ese motivo scared and we were in danger. For that reason regresamos a México. Pero en México tenía we returned to Mexico. But in Mexico I was mucho miedo por que iba a la escuela y me very scared because I would go to school and perseguían y no me gustaba y cuando llegaba they would follow me and I didn’t like it and a mi casa llegaba con miedo y no se me when I got home I was scared and it wouldn’t quitaba y mi mamá no me pudo ir a buscar go away and my mom couldn’t look for me at como trabajaba. Y a veces a mi mamá la school because she worked. And sometimes asustaron también y me dio mucho miedo y they would also scare my mom and I got very no quise regresar a estudiar y cuando fui la scared and I didn’t want to return to school
última vez me jalaron y pues me empujaron y and the last time I went they pulled me and corrí. Y corrí a mi casa y pues llegué muy well they pushed me and I ran. And I ran asustada y me duró muchos días para que se home and I got there very scared and it was me quitara el espanto. Y ya no quise ir a la many days before my fear went away. And escuela. Y ahorita quiero regresar a Estados then I didn’t want to go back to school. And
Unidos, a Mesa, Arizona, porque quiero tener now I want to return to the United States, to mi carrera y sacar mi carrera y ayudarles a Mesa, Arizona, because I want to have a mis papas. Siempre he tenido sueño de ser career and complete my studies and help my doctora y quiero terminar mi carrera y parents. I’ve always dreamed of being a
131 ayudar a mis papás por todo lo que han doctor and I want to finish my education and hecho por nosotros y quiero regresar a help my parents for everything they’ve done ayudarlos y estar con mi hermanito. for us and I want to return to help them and to
be with my little brother.
Ingrid’s narrative illustrates the structuring impossibility of neoliberalism for undocumented migrants: while the neoliberal home requires personal responsibility for individual safety, the nation-state increases measures of securitization that impede individual safety for undocumented migrant families. The fear of Arpaio’s deportation regime experienced in Mesa, Arizona disrupts Ingrid’s idea of home by eliminating safety from the home space.
Arpaio’s infamously harsh enforcement of immigration laws causes Ingrid’s family to feel persecuted—no longer safe in their own home—and prompts their return to Mexico in search of the safety they have lost. Significantly, although Ingrid’s narrative presents the US as posing a threat to the safety of her family (“corríamos peligro”), the cause of threat is specific and localized. Because it is Arpaio who is “removing people,” viewers are led to believe that it is not the US as a whole that is threatening this young girl’s safety; it is only this local authority figure that is dangerous. The nation remains pure and, therefore, can continue to be imagined as a home space where family, safety, and career can be found.
On the other hand, the lack of safety that Ingrid describes she and her mother feel in
Mexico is generalized. The audience of Ingrid’s narrative does not know who are the people pushing, pulling, chasing, and scaring Ingrid. A generalized “they” perpetuate these actions
(tellingly, in the Spanish transcript “they” are not even referred to by pronoun because the conjugated verb form denotes the plural subject). This of course could be ascribed to the nervous speech of a young girl. However, this lack of specificity in the object of threat in Mexico
132 juxtaposed with the very specific naming of Arpaio as the object of threat in the US moves the blame or the point of reference to Mexico as a whole. In other words, because Ingrid does not mention who is threatening her in Mexico, the entire nation of Mexico takes the place of the missing referent. The Mexico constituted in Ingrid’s narrative has forfeited the possibility of providing safety and, therefore, of providing a home for Ingrid and her family. While the US is able to maintain its characteristic as a safe space, Mexico is characterized as a dangerous place.
And so NIYA outlines the US using nationalist discourses of exceptionalism that posit the US as safe compared to the dangerous Mexico. US citizenship is, thus, constituted through the idea that nation equals home and home equals safe space.
Ingrid’s narrative continues to sketch the boundaries of the neoliberal nation-as-home through the theme of safety when she describes her personal struggle with victimization by her nameless Mexican bullies. In her description, this oppression is presented as her and her family’s individual struggle that they individually remedy by fleeing Mexico and returning to the US. The same can be said for the individualization of the state violence that Arpaio represents. Arpaio’s deportation regime is presented as a human rights violation that her family faces individually and that they attempt to remedy also individually by returning to Mexico. By taking personal responsibility for their own safety, Ingrid’s family is presented as fulfilling the requirements of the neoliberal home. However, this rhetorical move also illustrates what Hesford describes as the tendency in human rights discourses to “[recast] structural inequalities, social injustices, and state violence as scenes of individual trauma and victimization” (27). The individualization of structural racism overlooks the state’s responsibility in perpetuating the violences that accompany it. Ingrid’s video does not condemn the US politics that sanction Arpaio’s racist and violent practices. Neither does her narrative denounce the Mexican government’s apparent lack
133 of regard for its people. Ingrid’s narrative recasts the precarity of her and her family as an individual struggle and, therefore, squanders the opportunity to critique the structural racism that
Mexican migrants experience on both sides of the border. The safety of home is sought individually so that the promise of safety that nation-as-home produces can also be delivered individually.
Furthermore, the video highlights Ingrid as young and vulnerable to emphasize the idea that the US nation-as-home can and must provide for her safety. The look of Ingrid’s video gives prominence to Ingrid’s youth and provides a powerful emotional appeal for US audiences. Ingrid sits alone in a white room. She talks directly to the camera. Although Ingrid is a teenager, she looks and sounds very young in this video. Ingrid’s hair is pulled back in a braid across her head.
She wears a long-sleeved cotton t-shirt with a cartoon face of a little girl on it. The little girl on
Ingrid’s shirt sports an oversized pink bow on her head. Ingrid’s hands sit on her lap for the duration of the video. Her hairdo, clothing, and posture evoke ideas of childhood. The youthful braid and pink bow on her shirt reproduce stereotypical ideas of a childlike and hyperfeminine aesthetic. The way Ingrid holds her hands on her lap, her arms close to her body, not taking up any more space than absolutely necessary, give her a demure appearance. Ingrid’s performative reproduction of the idealized neoliberal girl subject facilitates appeals of belonging through that subject formation. The message is clear: viewers are to see Ingrid as a little girl. The video not only highlights Ingrid’s youth, but also her vulnerability. Viewers do not know if she is with her parents or if her parents are already in the US. That is irrelevant; to the audience, she is alone and vulnerable in her struggle. Although NIYA also created a video of Ingrid’s sister, video makers chose to record their stories separately, highlighting each girls’ helplessness. Playing up Ingrid’s youth and vulnerability is an effective rhetorical move because it gives US audiences the impetus
134 for wanting to provide safety for Ingrid. US audiences may be more willing to provide a safe home—a nation-as-home—to a vulnerable child than to an unruly teenager.
There is also, however, something very troubling in Ingrid’s youth and vulnerability on display. In this video, Ingrid’s youth and vulnerability are spectacles for viewers to watch. As
Hesford argues, “The ideology of innocence that surrounds childhood… [makes] children’s human rights politically salient yet also voyeuristic” (153). Ingrid’s youth and vulnerability are displayed by NIYA, perhaps in a rhetorically auspicious move, to persuasively construct the trope of nation-as-home. However, as Hesford suggests, children’s rhetorical agency—their “ability to represent themselves” (Hesford 153)—is subordinated by the spectacle of children’s vulnerability. In her video, Ingrid seems to lack the possibility of representing herself. She is a conduit of NIYA’s trope of nation-as-home. It could be anyone taking Ingrid’s place in that video. Indeed, many other young undocumented people do take her place as they are featured in their own videos that utilize the same tropes.
Ingrid is represented as the young and vulnerable subject to allow the US to save her by providing her with a safe home. In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s landmark text “Can the
Subaltern Speak?,” the author uses the sentence “white men are saving brown women from brown men” to illustrate how Western academic discourses constitute the oppressed (subaltern)
Third-World woman subject—notice how she is racialized, sexualized, and gendered—in order to save her. Spivak critiques Western intellectuals for ignoring the role they play in the discursive construction of the subaltern as a monolithic subject. For Spivak, there is an
“unrecognized contradiction within a position that valorizes the concrete experience of the oppressed, while being so uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual” (220), not only in maintaining oppression through complicity in hegemonic power structures, but also in
135 discursively constituting the oppressed as objects of analysis. As Spivak writes, “this benevolent first-world appropriation and reinscription of the Third World as an Other is the founding characteristic of much third-worldism in the US human sciences today” (236). I see a similar appropriation and reinscription occurring in Ingrid’s narrative. Through the careful crafting of
Ingrid’s youth and vulnerability in her video, NIYA organizers appropriate Ingrid for their rhetorical purposes and reinscribe her as a subject to be saved by the benevolent US nation-as- home. This rhetorical action presents not only a power move in which NIYA organizers exert their power, albeit a benevolent type of power, over Ingrid, but also one in which the US exerts power over Mexico by eliminating Ingrid’s agency to represent Mexico and herself as anything other than dangerous and in danger.
There is, of course, the possibility that Ingrid as well as the other women I have discussed in this chapter are aware that they are voicing appeals that are both enabling and constraining.
Constituting the nation via tropes of home and family is a rhetorical position NIYA seems to believe will persuade a US audience to think of Ingrid and the other migrants as worthy of asylum, with the featured migrants’ personal narratives shaped to fit these themes. Ingrid and the other women may be aware of the rhetorical effectiveness of these appeals, allowing their stories and identities to be manipulated to meet a desired end—acceptance into the US. However, as diverse migrant stories are shaped into a singular narrative, there are moments where the fit is not quite right. These moments are like cracks in NIYA’s rhetoric—moments when the tightly planned rhetorical appeals do not fulfill their purpose. The ineffective rhetorical shaping of migrant stories is particularly evident in how tenuously the theme of family reunification and career advancement are developed in Ingrid’s narrative. The theme of family reunification is crucial in the construction of the trope of nation-as-home. NIYA’s “Bring Them Home”
136 campaign joins other migrant-rights movements in highlighting family reunification as an important reason to halt the deportations of mothers and fathers. However, the theme of family reunification comes only at the end of Ingrid’s narrative—as if an afterthought—when Ingrid mentions wanting to be with her little brother. It is unclear where her little brother is or whether she is currently separated from him. Ingrid’s parents are also not mentioned. The undeniable lack of specificity in Ingrid’s narrative makes the theme of family reunification ineffective in NIYA’s citizenship rhetoric.
Family, on the other hand, is present throughout Ingrid’s story, as she positions herself through her and her family’s experiences. It is noteworthy that for much of her narrative, Ingrid uses the plural verb forms (e.g., “vivimos,” “nos vinimos,” “teníamos”, “corríamos,”
“regresamos”), as if she constitutes her identity through her family. Interestingly, the use of the plural verb form stops when Ingrid and her family arrive in Mexico after fleeing Arpaio’s persecution. When telling about her experiences in Mexico, Ingrid begins to speak only about herself (e.g., “Pero en México tenía mucho miedo…”). Tellingly, the family in Ingrid’s narrative exists only in the US. The family lives, experiences, and acts as one in the US. In Mexico, the family is either absent or peripheral, as in the case of Ingrid’s mother who could not help her avoid bullies at school. The US is positioned as the home space where family plays a strong role in Ingrid’s subjectivity. This subtle rhetorical move helps to construct the US nation-as-home, supports the idea that deportation functions to divide families, and serves as an appeal to the moralizing family values agenda of neoliberalism.
A similar effect occurs when the theme of career advancement is employed in Ingrid’s story. She mentions near the end of the video that she wants to return to Mesa, Arizona to study to become a doctor and help her parents. Ingrid presents this goal as only an option if she can
137 return to the US. The implication is that the US nation-as-home can provide the opportunity for career advancement and capitalist upward mobility in a way Mexico cannot. This rhetorical move, therefore, serves two purposes. First, it continues to constitute the nation-as-home by ascribing the US the supposedly unique ability to provide Ingrid with the opportunity of upward mobility for her and her family. Second, it helps to associate Ingrid and other migrants in the
“Bring Them Home” campaign with dominant neoliberal ideology and US exceptionalism. For
NIYA to make a persuasive case for Ingrid’s asylum, they must present her as homo oeconomicus, “an intensely constructed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues” (Brown 10). Ingrid performs the good neoliberal citizen subject; her preoccupation with career advancement is not selfishly monetary.
She wants to become a doctor so that she can “help her parents” and pay them back for everything they have done for her. An economic model of investments and returns is, therefore, extended to the realm of the family and the home, where Ingrid will invest time, energy, and money in her education and get in return the wealth she needs to help her parents live more financially prosperous lives. Ingrid’s neoliberal dream can only come true in the US, according to her narrative. The US nation-as-home is a neoliberal nation that promises Ingrid the opportunity to increase her value and pay back her emotional debt to her parents.
4.2 Constructing the Heteropatriarchal Nation-State
The tropes of home and family used in the NIYA texts illustrate how the familial home is always a function of the national imaginary, always imbricated in the construction of the nation and always affected by iterations of the nation-state. My analysis highlights the “irreconcilable tension” that the desire for nation is always accompanied by the limits of what nation (as home
138 and family) can provide. The neoliberal nation-state limits how families can be configured into such an imaginary and dictates what it takes for families to be recognized within it. Despite the presumption of safety and unity that nation-as-home and nation-as-family are imagined to offer, national formations are dynamic and can, therefore, fall short in delivering the hopes of those who desire it.
The texts I examine in this chapter argue for a type of citizenship that is based on espoused family values focused on belonging to home and family. The women and children in these videos constitute a nation based on safety and family, and argue for their belonging in this ever-evolving apparatus. This move sets a precedent in which only members of the heteropatriarchal family can be recognized as citizens of the nation and granted its protection.
The women and children who are fleeing the abuse of their families in their home countries cannot be recognized within this framework.
Furthermore, NIYA’s migrant rights rhetoric disregards the ways in which NAFTA and other neoliberal economic policies have denied indigenous populations and others across Latin
America who labor under the exploitative and displacing logics of such policies the right to stay in their homes and make a living— “el derecho a no migrar” (Cacho 123). The preoccupation with “coming home” to the US ignores the fact that a good way to end the suffering of at least some migrants of color would be to create the conditions for their safety, happiness, and prosperity in the countries of their births, without fear of separation, violence, or abject poverty.
In this way, these rhetorics idealize the US while demonizing Mexico and other countries of origin. The US is imagined as the great (white) savior for these poor (brown) families. The US is framed as having no problematic racial politics (which it does) and no anti-immigrant sentiment
(which it also does). The US is given the power to assuage family suffering but only through
139 granting asylum.46 These migrant-rights rhetorics understate the need for larger immigration reform or for more equitable global economic policies.
In presenting a critique of migrant-rights rhetorics, I want to acknowledge, as Cacho writes, that “decentering the state as sole authority over legitimate power and recognized personhood requires being willing to be critical of what makes us vulnerable to state violences and what makes us susceptible to the state’s seductions” (145). The rhetorics that I’ve analyzed in this presentation evidence a performative contradiction through their vulnerability to state violences and their susceptibility to the state’s seductions. These migrant rhetorics empower the nation-state as sole authority over recognized personhood, and, this very move makes them subject to the exclusions that constitute the nation-state. Still, I recognize that these families are seduced by the promise of state protection—a relatively safe place to live with the promise of the
American dream, however flawed and false this promise may be. NIYA is also seduced by the nation-sate’s power of granting immediate results that make a difference in the lives of individuals. Each person that is granted asylum in the US could have an easier life. Backing this
46 In contrast to the myth of US benevolence toward migrants, recent practices by the Obama administration have created an even more dangerous path for migrants seeking to reach the US, many of them fleeing violence in their Central American homes. On 10 October 2015, the New
York Times reported on the implications of the US’s practice of paying Mexico to stop migrants from reaching the US/Mexico border. Claiming that the US has paid Mexico “tens of millions of dollars” during the past 15 months to spend on migration enforcement, the article argues that the
US has become directly implicated in the dangers that migrants face crossing Mexico as they are persecuted by corrupt police officers and smuggled across the vast nation (Nazario).
140 sort of individualized regularization is tempting for an activist organization that I believe has the best interests of these migrants in mind. My analysis of migrant-rights activism illustrates how to inhabit these contradictions, the intersections between inclusion and exclusion, to generate the critical tools necessary to critique taken-for-granted constructions, including citizenship and the nation-state, and move toward more egalitarian possibilities. I discuss such possibilities in the following chapter.
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CHAPTER FIVE
THE POSSIBILITIES OF (NON)BELONGING
“Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature,
and that man is by nature a political animal.”
-- Aristotle, The Politics
“Citizenship is, inherently, a normativizing project—a project that regulates and disciplines the
social body in order to produce model identities and hegemonic knowledge claims.”
-- Amy Brandzel, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is part of Obama’s immigration legacy, providing deportation deferment and work authorization for young people who came to the US as children and meet certain qualifications, such as age, education, and conduct requirements. Announced on 15 June 2012, DACA may be considered a victory of migrant-rights activists who pressured the Obama administration to provide relief for undocumented young people upon the US Congress’ failure to pass the DREAM Act. Indeed,
DACA has had general, albeit limited, positive results. According to the US Citizenship and
Immigration Services, 638,897 DACA cases were approved since the program’s beginning
(Deferred Action). Furthermore, a report by the American Immigration Council found that
DACA “widened access to the American mainstream” for its recipients, with 59% of beneficiaries obtaining a new job, 57% acquiring a driver’s license, and 45% increasing job earnings after acquiring DACA (Gonzales and Bautista-Chavez). While these new opportunities to access “the American mainstream” perhaps pale in comparison to the decreased anxiety that
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DACA recipients may experience when they no longer have to worry about their deportation, the program still masks the continued state-sanctioned precarity that undocumented migrants experience in the US. For example, while DACA recipients may not worry about their own deportation, their family members are still at risk of detention and deportation. In fact, the same report by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services found that 70% of DACA recipients
“know someone who has been deported,” and 13% of them have had a parent or sibling deported
(Gonzales and Bautista-Chavez).
While DACA has eased the lives of some undocumented young Latin@s in the US,47 undocumented US residents are still being marginalized in their everyday lives, detained in dehumanizing and life-threatening conditions, and deported at exorbitant rates. The prohibitive costs for DACA application (a non-refundable $465) deter low-income youth from applying and gaining access to mainstream life. No undocumented migrants, including DACA recipients, are eligible for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Humiliating tactics of surveillance are being newly implemented, including making Central American asylum seekers wear bulky ankle bracelets like those worn by convicted criminals under house arrest. And most recently, in a moment demonstrative of the continued marginalization of undocumented migrants, Obama had transgender woman Jennicet Gutiérrez removed during the White House’s Gay Pride celebration when she interrupted the president asking him to release LGBTQ migrants from
47 In the article “Becoming DACAmented: Assessing the Short-Term Benefits of Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA),” sociologist Roberto G. Gonzales, et al. outline how undocumented young people with higher levels of education and better access to community resources benefit the most from DACA (1866).
143 detention.48 Although some migrant-rights activists may celebrate DACA as a step in the right direction, a vast portion of the undocumented population remains excluded while the Obama administration can hail this as a victory in its progressive agenda. From a more nuanced perspective, DACA may be considered as a victory for migrant rights but only in a very narrow sense.
Policies such as DACA illustrate the overarching claim in this dissertation: when arguments for belonging are based on the nation-state and on the government as the purveyors of rights, the victories achieved are narrow and can eclipse structural oppressions. Comparable to the case of the DREAMer activism I’ve examined in this project, migrant-rights activists’ preoccupation with citizenship and mainstream national belonging tarnishes their victories with the exclusionary underpinnings of neoliberal societal structures. As Brandzel reminds us,
“Citizenship is, inherently, a normativizing project—a project that regulates and disciplines the social body in order to produce model identities and hegemonic knowledge claims” (n. pag.).
Activist rights-based arguments that are framed by traditional definitions of national belonging, such as those exemplified by DACA’s logic and by the DREAMer activism I examine in the previous chapters, also serve a normativizing purpose, recognizing only the good neoliberal subjects and disregarding or outright oppressing those who cannot perform such subjectivities.
48 The ACLU reports that LGBTQ migrants detained by the Department of Homeland Security face disproportionate levels of violence and sexual abuse while in custody, and that prolonged isolation for LGBTQ migrants in “protective custody” is common practice in migrant detention centers. (In Their Own Words)
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5.1 Limits and Possibilities in DREAMer Activism
As I demonstrate in this project, migrant-rights activism can create both conditions of inclusivity and exclusivity. While the activism I’ve analyzed in this dissertation works to challenge the differential inclusion (Espiritu) of undocumented migrants into the US body politic, its limitations supersede any possibility for radical structural change. And, I argue, it is the ubiquity of neoliberal ideology in migrant-rights activism that precludes its radical potential.
Because such activism is subject to neoliberal ideology, undocumented young people and other migrants who would benefit from radical change are often limited to asking for regularization into the exclusionary neoliberal system of income inequality. Reaching for rhetorical aims under the constrains of neoliberal societal contexts, migrant rhetorics strategically employ neoliberal tropes in order to persuade US audiences. Themes of family unity, capitalist production, and individualized success are present in migrant-rights activism and, I argue, derail the possibility for comprehensive structural critique. The consequences of such co-opted rhetoric are dire, as undocumented migrants indirectly contribute to state-sanctioned precarities by empowering the neoliberal nation-state as the granter of personhood.
Furthermore, in arguing to be recognized by the US nation-state, the migrant activists that
I have analyzed in this study often support the narrative of US exceptional benevolence that institutes a false binary between the West and the Other. In the migrant-rights activism discussed in this project, the US is often framed as the great savior for poor undocumented migrants, despite the material, political, and juridical obstacles that the undocumented face in this country.
While the myth of US benevolence is being challenged from both inside and outside the structures of institutional power (presidential candidate Donald Trump, for example, has discarded any pretense of US benevolence, instead taking a stance of aggression toward
145 undocumented migrants and other people of color), migrant-rights activism still perpetuates this myth by appealing to the nation-state as both object of desire and salvation.
Contributing to the narrative of US exceptionalism is the carefully constructed rhetorical figure of the undocumented migrant, a subject that not only desires the nation but also pleads for its salvation. The rhetorical figure of the undocumented immigrant, as constructed via immigration discourses, represents the zenith of US exceptionalism—the person willing to risk life and limb in order to attempt a shot at the so-called American Dream. This figure contributes to the construction of the US nation-state as the land of equal opportunity, the pursuit of happiness, and all of the other neoliberal values associated with the idealized nation. While this in essence may not seem negative, these nationalist clichés allow for the continued US American ethos of denial that absolves the US from migrant discrimination and obscures the structural causes of migrant dehumanization. In trying to frame undocumented migrants as acceptable to the nation-state, migrant-rights activism uses rhetorics that present a limited and neoliberal portrayal of migrant communities, migrant lives, and migrant desires. These limited portrayals not only misrepresent migrant realities and precarities, but also reproduce neoliberal nationalist narratives that perpetuate migrant exclusion.
And yet, I cannot discount the productive possibilities of migrant-rights and justice- framed activism, not only in effecting small changes in immigration policies (e.g., DACA and
DAPA49), but also in highlighting the inadequacy of citizenship and the nation-state. In such
49 Obama announced Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents
(DAPA) through an executive action on 20 Nov. 2014. As the name suggests, DAPA was supposed to provide deferred deportation and work authorization for parents of US citizens or
146 migrant-rights activism, the nation-state signifies not only the desired object of belonging but also the source of non-belonging. Desiring to belong in the nation-state reproduces its exclusions. This performative contradiction evidenced in migrant-rights activism exposes the limitations of citizenship in the nation-state, not only as a social movement strategy but also as a form of belonging that provides equitable conditions. In making visible this performative contradiction, migrant dissent exposes the paradox of the nation-state in neoliberal contexts and provides a critical lens with which to read claims of belonging based on its borders. The performative contradiction in migrant-rights activism unveils the seductions of citizenship and, simultaneously, the impossibility of citizenship for undocumented migrants—a paradoxical understanding of citizenship that can move activists and scholars toward radical politics of change.
5.2 Citizenship Seductions
Despite the troubling logic of citizenship and national belonging, citizenship can still be seductive, as illustrated by migrant-rights activism. But what is seductive about citizenship? To move beyond facile answers to this question (i.e., US citizenship grants people permission to access certain government services, avoid deportation, and attain legal employment), I look to the concept’s roots in Ancient Greek thought to infer what can be considered seductive about citizenship, especially to populations who have previously been marginalized and silenced. Both
Plato and Aristotle, two foundational minds in the study of Western rhetoric, had a preoccupation
lawful permanent residents who meet certain criteria. DAPA was challenged in the courts and has yet to be implemented. (“Executive Actions on Immigration”)
147 with defining citizenship. For Plato, citizenship was a privileged position, as all citizens were exempt from economically productive labor (this sort of work was to be done by non-citizens and slaves) so that citizens could dedicate their time to crafting and influencing the laws of the city. As historian Derek Heater writes in A Brief History of Citizenship, even though for Plato
“the status of citizenship [was to be] inherited through [maternal and paternal] lines of descent,” all citizens were not created equal; “they [were to be] divided into four classes or grades according to their computed wealth” (15). As such, citizenship created social hierarchies, most of them based on class and/or birthplace.
Aristotle suggests that citizenship and the state are inherent in human nature. In The
Politics, he writes, “Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity” (5). If humans are inherently political animals, then their very being is entangled in their ability to enact citizenship within a state. For Aristotle, being a citizen, and therefore a human, includes “[framing] policy and laws by discussion and
[operating] laws by making judgments” (Heater 18) as well as possessing virtue, which comprises “temperance, that is, self-control, the avoidance of extremes; justice; courage, including patriotism; and wisdom, or prudence, including the capacity for judgment” (Heater
19). Even though he acknowledges that there are different sorts of citizens, just like there are different types of states, the basic premise of citizenship for Aristotle is the ability to hold governmental office. An Aristotelian citizen is one who participates in the running of society.
Aristotle states, “He who has the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration of any state is said by us to be a citizen of that state” (53). Yet, he also implies an affective dimension to citizenship, which Heater describes as “a special kind of civic friendship [that]
148 supplies the vital bonding which ensures that citizens work together in a spirit of mutual goodwill” (19).
Ancient Greek deliberations about the state and citizenship intimate both citizenship’s seduction and its flaws. Citizenship is indeed a privileged position. Although today’s citizens may not be relieved of capital production, citizenship endows citizens with certain privileges
(e.g., voting, holding presidential office) that legitimize their voices in the eyes of the state, giving them influence (or at least the illusion of influence) over the workings of society.
Citizenship also possesses an affective dimension, a feeling of collectivity that may be seductive to migrants who have had to surrender community ties in search for better lives. Citizenship, however, is hierarchical. As exemplified by the race-based inequalities that I describe in Chapter
Two, not all citizens are created equal in the eyes of the law. Thus, citizenship does not only constitute differences between citizens and (non)citizens, but also among differently racialized, sexualized, and gendered citizens. Finally, by positioning citizenship and the state as natural, the ancient Greeks also assumed the necessity of citizenship and of the state. They posited citizenship and belonging as inherently human and, therefore, rationalized the desire for citizenship as part of human nature—not an idea to be interrogated.
Nevertheless, citizenship, as I’ve shown in this dissertation, is nothing natural. Both citizenship and the nation-state are discursive constructions built on exclusion. The rights of the citizen are always built on the backs of the rightless. The privileges that US citizenship endows on those who possess it—including not only the right to vote, but also the right to live free from the fear of deportation, to be guaranteed the protection of the law, and to be able to pursue a path to happiness—only have value in comparison to those who do not have them. So, when migrant- rights activists make claims for their belonging, claims that are based on citizenship, they are
149 asking for a piece of a pie of which there will never be enough for everyone. Scholars and activists who advocate for citizenship and national belonging for undocumented populations are reinforcing somebody’s exclusion.
5.3 A Politics of (Non)Belonging
To avoid the exclusionary pitfalls of citizenship, scholars and activists must imagine— instead of new ways of belonging—the productive possibilities of (non)belonging. Rather than arguing for citizenship and belonging, focusing on a politics of (non)belonging may provide possibilities for societal configurations that reject the exceptionalism of any particular group by moving from rights-based to justice-oriented claims. A politics of (non)belonging not only rejects belonging as a privileged position, but also recognizes and highlights that belonging is always exclusionary and can never reach egalitarian societal aims. Thus, a politics of
(non)belonging provides a critical position that remains skeptical of arguments for belonging and of attempts at inclusion that only work to reinforce exclusions, such as for example the DREAM
Act’s attempt to open the door to regularization for a small portion of the 11 million undocumented people living in the US while setting stipulations that rationalize the marginalization of the ones left behind.
The question remains, what may a politics of (non)belonging look like? The work of the radical queer scholar/activist group Against Equality explores the need for a politics of
(non)belonging and exemplifies the sort of logic necessary to imagine what seems unimaginable.
I draw parallels between Against Equality’s project and my own to illustrate how a politics of
(non)belonging may be possible. In the introduction to Against Equality: Queer Revolution not
Mere Inclusion, authors Ryan Conrad, Karma Chávez, Yasmin Nair, and Deena Loeffler argue that “the rise in a particular notion of ‘gay rights’ is particularly dependent upon the erasure of
150 the political and economic rights of the most marginal” (8). The specific notion of gay rights that
Against Equality critiques is based on the push for marriage equality, the end of Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell in the military, and the institution of hate crime legislation that includes special punishments for anti-gay crimes. These three basic tenets of mainstream gay rights activism, the authors argue, do not constitute structural change that creates inclusion for all minoritized populations, but instead advocates for the regularization and assimilation of queer individuals into the neoliberal and discriminatory status quo: “Today, capitalism does not seek to exclude gays and lesbians—instead, it seeks to integrate them into its structure of exploitation as long as they don’t upset the stats quo” (29).
Against Equality’s critiques of the mainstream gay rights movement suggest an approach to migration and citizenship that moves toward a politics of (non)belonging. In my work I echo
Nair’s question from “Against Equality, Against Marriage,” “Surely the point is not to change an archaic institution but to change, you know, the world?” (26). Mainstream youth migrant-rights activism has focused on advocating for legalization and regularization of undocumented young people into the US’s capitalist system through advocating for drivers’ licenses, in-state tuition to public universities, job permits, and deferred deportation for college attendance or military service. These tenets of mainstream youth migrant-rights activism, however, do not bring forth structural changes that create just conditions for undocumented migrants across the US. Instead, these moves work to assimilate and regularize some undocumented young migrants into the US’s neoliberal and inherently hierarchical system. While some room is made in neoliberal capitalism for exceptional young undocumented people, the economic system of white middle-class heteropatriarchal supremacy remains largely unchanged. The goals of assimilation and
151 regularization implied in mainstream migrant-rights activism will not achieve the structural reorientation of US society.
My project calls for a politics of (non)belonging that is based first on a dedicated critique of taken-for-granted assumptions about the benefits and necessities of belonging. Conrad, et al. write about the importance of staunch critique to instituting structural change, “The structures of assimilation are so tenacious that they need, first and foremost, hard and insistent critiques in order to dismantle the authority and power they have accrued over the years” (11). In this dissertation, I have exercised a type of critique that I believe is necessary to take migrant-rights activism beyond its assimilationist tendencies. My critique, based on Butler’s notion of the performative contradiction, recognizes that resistance is inherent to power and, therefore, always reproduces power. It follows that resistance to the exclusionary and discriminatory power effected via immigration law can reproduce the power of the law. As I observed in Chapter
Three, when young undocumented migrants attempt to resist their persistent exclusion from the
US civic body through the same ideas of nation, exceptionalism, and capitalist production, they in essence reproduce the power of the nation-state that excludes identities deemed non-normative or threatening to the neoliberal status quo. Similarly, as I explored in Chapter Four, when arguments for inclusion are based on the state’s heteropatriarchal structures of home and family, inclusion only replicates the state rather than demanding structural change so that those who do not fit into the neoliberal state’s prescribed structures of belonging (i.e. family and home) can still hope to attain justice.
Critique can lead to openings for (non)belonging, small ruptures that illustrate the existence of new societal configurations that do not entirely rely on citizenship, the nation-state, or the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration. Although small, such ruptures are
152 evidence that new imaginings are possible. An example of such a rupture is the slogan
“Migration is Beautiful,” which exemplifies a pro-migrant argument that attempts to skirt the pitfalls of belonging. The slogan “Migration is Beautiful,” popularized by artist and activist
Favianna Rodriguez, calls for a reconceptualization of migration. The slogan, which already represents a non-dominant way of looking at migration, is accompanied by the image of a monarch butterfly—a species that has come to symbolize freedom of migration. Rodriguez has described this effort as a way “to reimagine migration as something beautiful and natural… Like the monarch butterfly, human beings cross borders in search of safer habitats. Like the monarch butterfly, human beings cross borders in order to survive. The butterfly is ultimately about our right to move” (qtd in Leal). While the slogan of “Migration is Beautiful” has been used in all sorts of migrant-rights demonstrations that go beyond the scope of this project, the meaning behind the slogan itself is what I argue can contribute to a politics of (non)belonging. By reframing migration as beautiful instead of something that stems from desperation, breaks laws, and separates families, “Migration is Beautiful” prompts scholars and activists not only to re- think the causes of migration but also to imagine a world where movement is inherent to human connections and survival. Framing migration, as opposed to citizenship, as “beautiful and natural,” challenges the assumption that citizenship and belonging are the only ways to structure a society. The slogan also questions the stability of belonging. “Migration is Beautiful” can be read to imply the universality of migration and, therefore, trouble the idea that a subject’s belonging is a given. I must note that I am not advocating that activists and scholars dismiss or gloss over the challenges that migration creates for people and communities, but instead I am highlighting that in order to imagine radical change to the structures of inequality that result from the tyranny of belonging, questioning the hegemony of citizenship is absolutely necessary.
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The framework of intersectionality also signals the existence of fragmentations in the tyranny of belonging, as it points to belonging as heterogeneous and multidimensional. In her landmark essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Kimberlé Crenshaw defines intersectionality as recognizing the multidimensionality of experience, where race and gender are not mutually exclusive and amount to more than the sum of their parts (139).
Migrant-rights activism that approaches the migrant experience through the lens of intersectionality has the potential to trouble belonging as a monolith and move towards a politics of (non)belonging.
For example, the UndocuQueer Manifesto by the Queer Undocumented Immigrant
Project (QUIP) illustrates how activist discourses can embrace intersectionality and refuse exceptionalism in their search for justice through coalition. QUIP is a branch of the migrant- rights organization United We Dream that seeks to “organize and empower” undocumented
LGBTQ migrants by adopting “an intersectional analysis in their efforts to advance and build power for the rights of [migrant and LGBTQ] communities” (“QUIP’s Mission”). The
UndocuQueer Manifesto is a bilingual statement in which QUIP members demand rights on their own intersectional terms as queer and undocumented: “Immigrant rights are queer rights, queer rights are immigrant rights… don’t make us choose one” (United We Dream). Rejecting one- dimensional approaches to identity and oppression, the manifesto challenges the single narrative of belonging: “We have beautifully crafted our lives despite the injustice of being queer and undocumented, despite always being asked to separate the queer from our undocumented stories”
(United We Dream). Finally, the manifesto pledges coalition and rebukes the niche openings
(Nicholls) that fragment the migrant-rights movement: “We need to acknowledge that…
154 regardless of opportunities that may arise we must always be there to support one another because our lives, spirits, and existence didn’t cross by accident” (United We Dream). The
UndocuQueer Manifesto hence illustrates a move toward a politics of (non)belonging via its rejection of belonging as stable and its critique of unidimensional configurations of community and identity. While the undocuqueer movement has been critiqued for its reliance on visibility and inclusion within the state (Chávez; White), the manifesto signals the movements’ desire to transcend belonging as a singularly privileged social movement strategy and organizing societal structure.
Finally, I’d like to touch on one last rupture, one that not only challenges neoliberal belonging but that also presents the limitations of the neoliberal nation-state. Such ruptures occur where the neoliberal nation-state has failed to live up to its mythos of protection, opportunity, and social mobility. Ethnic studies scholar Michelle Téllez calls such ruptures as occurring in the
“spaces of neoliberal neglect”—locations in the shadows of the nation-state, where the nation- state’s institutional arms are notoriously absent. Téllez discusses the possibilities for resistance, community, coalition, and autonomy in the spaces of neoliberal neglect through her work on the community of Maclovio Rojas in Mexico, an unsanctioned housing settlement near Tijuana that the Mexican state has at times neglected completely and at others fought to destabilize since it’s inception more than two decades ago. Mexico’s neglect of Maclovio Rojas has allowed the community to flourish in radical ways that challenge neoliberal models of belonging, from centering community women as organizers and political agents to making activism and engagement in la lucha against the oppressive Mexican state prerequisites for residence. The residents of Maclovio Rojas, as Téllez argues, perform a localized citizenship with which they connect to their communities through a purposeful rejection of the power of the nation-state.
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Such a rupture in the tyranny of belonging presents interesting possibilities with which to challenge normative notions of the nation-state and citizenship; my future work will pay careful attention to potential spaces of neoliberal neglect in which radical transformation may be possible.
The critique in which I’ve delved in this dissertation has prompted me to look for such ruptures of (non)belonging while maintaining a critical eye on how these moves may reinforce a reliance on belonging. The practices I’ve examined always inhabit a space of “both/and”—both resistance to and reproduction of dominant narratives of belonging, citizenship, and the nation- state. Yet my project theorizes the “both/and” as a productive location in which the frictions in citizenship and the nation-state are generative possibilities that unveil the myth of belonging as having any radical potential. Disrupting the taken-for-granted nation-state, this project contributes to scholarship about the rhetorics of migration by providing new avenues for radical possibilities for undocumented migrant populations.
To end, I return to Butler’s claim that “there can be no radical politics of change without performative contradiction” (Butler and Spivak 66) to emphasize that the performative contradiction evidences the myth of citizenship and of the nation-state and, therefore, can lead to radical re-imaginings and to a politics of (non)belonging. I find hope in inhabiting the contradiction—hope in the possible new imaginings that the performative contradiction can elucidate.
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