Deportable and Disposable

Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant

Lisa A. Flores

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780271087887
• eBook ISBN:
  9780271088655
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In the 1920s, the US government passed legislation against undocumented entry into the country, and as a result the figure of the "illegal alien" took form in the national discourse. In this book, Lisa A. Flores explores the history of our language about Mexican immigrants and exposes how our words made these migrants "illegal."

Deportable and Disposable brings a rhetorical lens to a question that has predominantly concerned historians: how do differently situated immigrant populations come to belong within the national space of whiteness, and thus of American-ness? Flores presents a genealogy of our immigration discourse through four stereotypes: the "illegal alien," a foreigner and criminal who quickly became associated with Mexican migrants; the "bracero," a docile Mexican contract laborer; the "zoot suiter," a delinquent Mexican American youth engaged in gang culture; and the "wetback," an unwanted migrant who entered the country by swimming across the Rio Grande. By showing how these figures were constructed, Flores provides insight into the ways in which we racialize language and how we can transform our political rhetoric to ensure immigrant populations come to belong as part of the country, as Americans.

Timely, thoughtful, and eye-opening, Deportable and Disposable initiates a necessary conversation about the relationship between racial rhetoric and the literal and figurative borders of the nation. This powerful book will inform policy makers, scholars, activists, and anyone else interested in race, rhetoric, and immigration in the United States.

NOTES

Preface

1. Lind, “First Immigration Raids.”

2. Ibid.

Introduction

1. Following Nicholas De Genova, I invoke the term “migrant” as a disruption to what he names the “implicit teleology” of immigrant, which both presumes a particular linear movement and frames migrants from the perspective of the “immigrant-receiving” nation-state. See De Genova, “Legal Production,” 161. I often use “Mexicans” as a broad term, to include Mexican nationals and US residents, regardless of residency status or citizenship. I am guided here by Eithne Luibhéid, who reminds us that categories of citizenship and residency status are slippery. See Luibhéid, “Sexuality, Migration.”

2. Presented by his son Henry de C. Ward. As cited in Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization on Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico. 70th Cong., 1st sess., February 21 to April 1928. https://congressional-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/congressional/result/congresultpage:pdfevent?rsId=16B9044E198&pdf=/app-bin/gis-hearing/c/8/7/7/hrg-1928-imn-0004from1to_805.pdf&uri=/app-gis/hearing/hrg-1928-imn-0004.

3. Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization on Immigration from Countries of the Western Hemisphere. 70th Cong., 1st sess., February 21–April 5, 1928, 9.

4. Ibid., 26.

5. Quoted in Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization on Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico. 69th Cong., 1st sess., January 28, 29, February 2, 9, 11, and 23, 1926, 7.

6. Widely regarded as the act that closed the door to undesirable migration, the Immigration Act of 1924 had a monumental impact on most existing immigration patterns. With its imposition of quotas based on national origins, the act prioritized and sanctioned “white” immigrants—particularly British, Irish, and German—and precluded virtually all legal immigration from populations deemed, then and now, nonwhite. See, for instance, Ngai, “Architecture of Race”; Putnam, Radical Moves, 82–122; Samhan, “Politics and Exclusion”; Yuill, “In the Shadow.” Despite heated debate demanding that other populations—namely, Mexicans—be excluded or restricted as well, the act put no such limitations on the Western Hemisphere. For more, see Lee, “Chinese Exclusion Example,” 52, and Ngai, “Nationalism, Immigration Control,” 13.

7. For instance, in 1925, the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization considered a lengthy report on race and immigration from Latin America that concluded that Mexican and Latin American migrants introduced a racial reproductive threat akin to that of Blacks. See US Congress, House, Committee, Immigration from Latin America, the West Indies, and Canada.

8. US Congress, House, Committee, Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico, 31.

9. Ibid., 35.

10. Molina, How Race Is Made, 31–39. As Mark Reisler details, these characterizations of Mexicans had been circulating for several years. See Reisler, “Always the Laborer.”

11. Scholars attribute the exemption of Mexican quotas to larger international concerns, suggesting that US relations with Mexico could be strained if quotas were placed on Mexico but not on Canada. See Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal, 18, and Calderón-Zaks, “Debated Whiteness amid World Events,” 340. Such arguments reflect the national discourse of the time. For instance, national newspapers regularly reported that passage of the Box Bill and the related Harris-Box Bill would anger Mexico and complicate US relations with them. See, for instance, “Mexican Immigration: Undersecretary Cotton Opposes Bill to Restrict Influx from Border Country,” Wall Street Journal, May 17, 1930, 3; “Oppose Mexican Quota: Business Interests in Mexico, U.S. Launch Campaign Against Harris-Box Bill,” Wall Street Journal, May 28, 1930, 3; “Quota Bill Resented: Mexicans May Retaliate,” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1930, 1. Still, advocacy for continued quota exemptions likely also turned on the prevalent narrative that Mexican migrants were not the reproductive threat articulated by Ward a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Program
• Welcome to Participants of the 62nd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale : GRANT FRAME
• Plenary Papers
• Woolley’s Excavations at Ur: New Perspectives from Artifact Inventories, Field Records, and Archival Documentation : RICHARD L. ZETTLER
• Sîn-City: New Light from Old Excavations at Ur : JONATHAN TAYLOR
• Bad Moon Rising: The Changing Fortunes of Early Second-Millennium BCE Ur : KATRIEN DE GRAEF
• Conference Papers : (Alphabetical by Author)
• The Moon Watching Over the Sun and Venus: Revisiting the Attributes and Functions of Nanna/Sîn in Mesopotamia : ISABEL GOMES DE ALMEIDA & MARIA DE FÁTIMA ROSA
• Detecting Social Tensions in the Archaeological Record: Official and Vernacular Figurine-Making Traditions at Ur in the First Millennium BCE : ANASTASIA AMRHEIN
• Old Babylonian Terracottas from Ur: Ancient and New Perspectives : LAURA BATTINI
• Series Page