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Refracting Immigration Rhetoric: the Struggle to Define Identity, Place and Nation in Southern Arizona

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Refracting Immigration Rhetoric: the Struggle to Define Identity, Place and Nation in Southern Arizona City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2019 Refracting Immigration Rhetoric: The Struggle to Define Identity, Place and Nation in Southern Arizona Emily Duwel The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3010 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] REFRACTING IMMIGRATION RHETORIC: THE STRUGGLE TO DEFINE IDENTITY, PLACE AND NATION IN SOUTHERN ARIZONA by EMILY DUWEL A master’s thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Liberal Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, The City University of New York 2019 © 2019 EMILY DUWEL All Rights Reserved ii Refracting Immigration Rhetoric: The Struggle to Define Identity, Place and Nation in Southern Arizona by Emily Düwel This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Liberal Studies in satisfaction of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts. Date Michael Blim Thesis Advisor Date Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis Executive Officer THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Refracting Immigration Rhetoric: The Struggle to Define Identity, Place and Nation in Southern Arizona by Emily Düwel Advisor: Michael Blim This thesis examines the refraction of immigration rhetoric in a local context through a collection of letters to the editor of Southern Arizona’s largest and only daily newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, for the period 2006-2010. The purpose is to further insight into the process by which xenophobic nationalism is both contested and legitimated ‘on the ground,’ within a violent paradigm of nativist rhetoric and exclusion. Findings reveal essential disjunctures between and within letter-writers’ conceptions of moral proximity and the social contract—as delimiting those obligations and expectations that inhere between society, the self and the stranger—as well as competing notions of legitimacy based, on the one hand, on an overarching and at times homogenizing myth of nation and, on the other, in rootedness to the cultural and historic particularities of place. These disjunctures point to a profusion of contradictory ideations, the struggle over which exposes the efforts of community members to contest and redefine the boundaries of societal norms within the context of emergent nationalism. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to extend sincere gratitude to my advisor Michael Blim, for his invaluable guidance and insight. Heartfelt thanks are also owed to Gerald Sider for wise counsel offered over the years, as well as to Ellen Basso, Michelle Martinez, and Kim Arth Nishihara for their continuous encouragement. I am additionally grateful to the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program as a whole for allowing me the opportunity to pursue this project, Katherine Koutsis for her ready help, the CUNY GC Digital Initiatives Institute fellows for their worthwhile instruction, Jim Turner and Ceci Garcia for enriching my understanding respectively of the history of the Southwest and Southern Arizona’s local Latino communities, and the Arizona Daily Star for making its article database publicly available and generously providing its marketing metrics. I owe in addition a significant debt of appreciation to my husband Matthias Düwel, parents Jean and Jake Stern and brother Alex Stern for their patience and support. Lastly, I wish to dedicate this thesis to the memory of Xóchitl Cristina Gil-Higuchi, whose creative and social engagement in the community of Tucson, New York City and beyond inspired its completion. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... iv LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................... viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ........................................................................................................ ix CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................1 A. Thesis purpose ...............................................................................................................2 B. Methodology ..................................................................................................................9 II. NATIONALIST STRATEGIES, POETICS & AGENCY .......................................................11 A. Nationalism by any other name ...................................................................................11 B. The inclusive and exclusive ‘melting pot’ ...................................................................13 C. Nativism vs. racism ......................................................................................................15 D. Nationalism and globalization .....................................................................................18 III. THE ‘BORDER CRISIS’ IN CONTEXT ................................................................................22 A. The social geography of migration ..............................................................................23 B. Place and people ..........................................................................................................26 C. A collapsing desert bubble ...........................................................................................31 D. Codifying exclusion .....................................................................................................33 IV. SHAPING THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE ..........................................................................40 A. Coalescing interests .....................................................................................................40 B. Legislating prison profits .............................................................................................43 C. Marketing ‘illegal’ immigration ..................................................................................45 D. Peddling partisanship ...................................................................................................48 E. Border insurrections .....................................................................................................49 V. MEDIATING ‘ILLEGAL’ IMMIGRATION ...........................................................................54 A. Conjuring the intruder ..................................................................................................54 B. Projecting “illegal” as a national brand .......................................................................56 C. Local media representations of the ‘border crisis’ .......................................................59 vi VI. REFRACTING THE ‘BORDER CRISIS’ ..............................................................................64 A. An overview of the dataset ..........................................................................................64 B. Having ‘skin in the game’ on the public green ............................................................72 C. Sentiment and nation ....................................................................................................77 D. Principal letter themes ..................................................................................................88 1. The social contract ...................................................................................................91 2. Legality, criminality and civil rights ......................................................................104 3. The greater good ....................................................................................................113 4. Security and enforcement ......................................................................................127 5. Nation, self and ‘other’ ..........................................................................................135 6. Rhetoric ..................................................................................................................151 VII. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................156 NOTES .........................................................................................................................................166 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................174 vii LIST OF FIGURES 1. County population to land mass comparison ...........................................................................27 2. Percentage of different ethnicities, by county ..........................................................................29 3. Recurring subjects in Arizona Daily Star 2006-2010 news items ...........................................60 4. Unique dataset writers and letters, aggregated by stance ........................................................66 5. Number of dataset letters published per year ...........................................................................68 6. Distribution of dataset letters by location ................................................................................69
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