The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, Second Edition / Edition 2

by Leo Chavez

Overview

News media and pundits too frequently perpetuate the notion that Latinos, particularly Mexicans, are an invading force bent on reconquering land once their own and destroying the American way of life. In this book, Leo R. Chavez contests this assumption's basic tenets, offering facts to counter the many fictions about the "Latino threat." With new discussion about anchor babies, the DREAM Act, and recent anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona and other states, this expanded second edition critically investigates the stories about recent immigrants to show how prejudices are used to malign an entire population—and to define what it means to be American.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804783521
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	04/17/2013
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Leo R. Chavez is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society (1998) and Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation (2001).

Read an Excerpt

The Latino Threat

CONSTRUCTING IMMIGRANTS, CITIZENS, AND THE NATION

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By Leo R. Chavez

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8351-4

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE LATINO THREAT NARRATIVE

It is time we stopped thinking of our nearest neighbors [Canada and Mexico] as foreigners.

Ronald Reagan

By a psychological and cultural mechanism of association [with 'alien' and 'illegal' undocumented workers] all Latinos are thus declared to have a blemish that brands us with the stigma of being outside the law. We always live with the mark indicating that whether or not we belong in this country is always in question.

Renato Rosaldo

DESPITE RONALD REAGAN'S PLEA for a more civil political discourse, the tone of the public debate over immigration became more alarmist between 1979 and 1999, when the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo commented on the stigma accorded all Latinos, and this trend has continued up the present time. The events of September 11, 2001, heightened a public discourse on the dangers the United States faces in the contemporary world. President George W. Bush developed a general strategy for the national security of the United States while critics focused on the dangers inherent in forging an empire in the modern world. Americans seemed willing to allow the constitutional rights of foreigners and immigrants to be diminished so long as those of citizens appeared to remain intact, a dangerous bargain at best. But if there has been one constant in both pre- and post-9/11 public discourse on national security, it has been the alleged threat to the nation posed by Mexican and other Latin American immigration and the growing number of Americans of Mexican descent in the United States. The themes in this discourse have been so consistent over the last forty years that they could be said to be independent of the current fear of international terrorism. However, the events of 9/11 "raised the stakes" and added a new and urgent argument for confronting all perceived threats to national security, both old and new.

The Latino threat, though old, still has currency in the new, post-9/11 world. Consider Samuel P. Huntington's views expressed in an article in the March– April 2004 issue of Foreign Policy. Huntington compared Latinos, especially Mexicans, with earlier waves of European immigrants and found that "unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream." He also made these assertions: "Demographically, socially, and culturally, the reconquista (re-conquest) of the Southwest United States by Mexican immigrants is well underway"; "In this new era, the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of those immigrants compared to black and white American natives."

Huntington's statements are all the more remarkable given the historical context in which they were made. At the time, the United States was waging war in Iraq, deeply involved in the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, and still searching for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda operatives worldwide. And yet amidst all these crises, Huntington singled out Latin American, particularly Mexican, immigration as America's most serious challenge. But this threat did not suddenly surface after 9/11; Huntington had raised the alarm a year before the attack on the World Trade Center. In 2000, Huntington wrote in the American Enterprise: "The invasion of over 1 million Mexican civilians is a comparable threat [as 1 million Mexican soldiers] to American societal security, and Americans should react against it with comparable vigor. Mexican immigration looms as a unique and disturbing challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity, and potentially to our future as a country."

Rather than discarding Huntington's rhetorical excesses as bombastic hyperbole, we are better served by attempting to clarify the social and historical context of such pronouncements. How did Mexican immigration, the Mexican-origin population, and Latin American immigration in general come to be perceived as a national security threat in popular discourse? Such ideas do not develop in a vacuum. They emerge from a history of ideas, laws, narratives, myths, and knowledge production in the social sciences, the natural sciences, the media, and the arts. In other words, they exist within a "discourse," a formation or cluster of ideas, images, and practices that construct knowledge of, ways of talking about, and forms of conduct associated with a particular topic, social activity, or institutional site in society. As Stuart Hall has noted, "These discursive formations, as they are known, define what is and is not appropriate in our formulation of, and our practices in relation to, a particular subject or site of social activity; what knowledge is considered useful, relevant and 'true' in that context; and what sorts of persons or 'subjects' embody its characteristics."

Mexico, Mexican immigrants, and the U.S.-born of Mexican origin are the core foci of the Latino Threat Narrative, but the threat is often generalized to all Latin American immigrants and at times to all Latinos in the United States. In the discursive history of Mexican immigration, specific themes of threat emerge, become elaborated, and are often repeated until they attain the ring of truth. This is a story with a number of interwoven plot lines, or narrative themes: the construction of "illegal aliens" as criminals, the Quebec model, the Mexican invasion and reconquista (reconquest) of the United States, an unwillingness to learn English and integrate into U.S. society, out-of-control fertility, and threats to national security. An examination of these themes provides the necessary context for understanding the debates over citizenship and immigrants' rights in the United States that are discussed in the following chapters.

CONSTRUCTING THE "ILLEGAL ALIEN"

Restrictions on immigration and citizenship have always been about how we imagine who we are as a people and who we wish to include as part of the nation, whether this is explicitly recognized or not. Underscoring this observation is Mae Ngai's authoritative history, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, which concentrates on the early twentieth century but illuminates much that is being debated in the early twenty-first century. The immigration reforms of the 1920s created major restrictions in the flow of immigrants, in the process producing hierarchies of people and nationalities. Western and northern Europeans were the desired immigrants, and their movement hither was the goal of the national origins quotas. Southern and eastern Europeans, Asians, Africans, Mexicans, and other Latin Americans were less desirable, even when demand for their labor made their immigration necessary. The 1920s also witnessed a profound new importance placed on the territorial imperative of national borders, which coincided with new techniques of surveillance, the creation of the Border Patrol, and immigrant health examinations. Out of this new order of border control emerged the "illegal aliens," those who bypassed border controls and found ways to enter the country. The large-scale restrictions of the 1924 immigration law "generated illegal immigration and introduced that problem into the internal spaces of the nation." As Ngai argues, "Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal imposs
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Latino Threat by Leo R. Chavez. Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part 1 Constructing and Challenging Myths

1 The Latino Threat Narrative 23

2 Cultural Contradictions of Citizenship and Belonging 48

3 Latina Sexuality, Reproduction, and Fertility as Threats to the Nation 73

4 Latina Fertility and Reproduction Reconsidered 97

Part 2 Media Spectacles and the Production of Neoliberal Citizen-Subjects

5 Organ Transplants and the Privileges of Citizenship 115

6 The Minuteman Project's Spectacle of Surveillance on the Arizona-Mexico Border 135

7 The Immigrant Marches of 2006 and the Struggle for Inclusion 157

8 DREAMers and Anchor Babies 181

Epilogue 209

Notes 221

Bibliography 251

Index 287

Editorial Reviews

"Leo Chavez [...] has written a revised, updated and extended second edition of his insightful book The Latino Threat . . . [H]e leaves us with the bleak reality that [the Latino Threat Narrative] remains pervasively in full force today. This makes the second edition of The Latino Threat a timely and excellent book. It is a 'must-read' for politicians, academics, and anyone interested in immigration, Latina/o studies, race/class/gender inequalities and the politics of immigration."—San Juanita Garcia, Bulletin of Latin American Research

"[The Latino Threat's] very breadth also opens new terrain for more detailed study and theorization. Chavez identifies pervasive, historically rooted myths and fears of immigrants, and specifically Latinos, in Anglo-American culture and its mainstream media . . . [I]t productively exposes the problematic discursive roots of much North American common sense in a way that a more narrowly focused study could never do. This is its real contribution and likely the reason the first edition proved so popular at the upper undergraduate level . . . Chavez deploys substantial, convincing data illustrating contemporary Latino cultural changes that belie the threat discourse; one can only hope that his message can shine a light on the pervasive presumptions of these Latino threat narratives."—Paul Ryer, Latin American Research Review

"The time is certainly ripe for a second edition to Leo Chavez's Latino Threat, which is replete with updated information on draconian immigration laws, as well as coverage of the presidential debates of 2012, which showcased the vituperative and vitriolic discourse of the Latino Narrative Threat . . . The Latino Threat is accessible and essential reading for students and professionals alike, and fosters advocacy for policy change, as well as the need to understand the psychologically and emotionally damaging repercussions of structural racism and nativist discourse practices, and their effects on provision of language access, health disparities, and social services for Latino immigrants."—Catherine Carballeira, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare

Praise for the First Edition: "Leo R. Chavez makes a forceful case for the proposition that Latino immigration to the United States is everything its supporters and opponents say it is—and much more. There is no secret reconquest conspiracy among Mexican immigrants—but Chavez also highlights the more subtle effect: Latino immigrants are changing the culture of the United States in much the same way as did every previous surge of new residents. This is a book with rich rewards for the serious student of the entire phenomenon of Latino immigration into the United States."—Bill Richardson, Former Governor of New Mexico

Praise for the First Edition: "Leo Chavez has produced a superb, well-argued, and thought provoking book. Tackling subjects such as the Minutemen in Arizona, immigrant marches, Latino reproduction, and organ transplants, the book not only sheds a critical light on how, through the mass media, Latinos have been constructed as illegitimate members of society, it also provides powerful evidence to undermine the taken-for-granted truths marshaled to marginalize this population."—American Ethnologist

Praise for the First Edition: "In this tour de force volume, Leo Chavez offers a penetrating analysis of how Latinos have been socially constructed as a threat to the American nation by bigoted political actors for their own cynical purposes and draws expertly on logic, facts, and reason to expose the mythical threat for the intellectual fraud and moral travesty that it truly is."—Douglas S. Massey, Princeton University

"Chavez offers us a thoughtful analysis of conflicts over the meaning of citizenship in an increasingly globalized world. In an era of debate over immigration reform, this book is essential reading for scholars, policy makers, and a thoughtful public alike." —Caroline B. Brettell, Southern Methodist University

From the Publisher

Praise for the First Edition: "In this tour de force volume, Leo Chavez offers a penetrating analysis of how Latinos have been socially constructed as a threat to the American nation by bigoted political actors for their own cynical purposes and draws expertly on logic, facts, and reason to expose the mythical threat for the intellectual fraud and moral travesty that it truly is."

Princeton University - Douglas S. Massey

Praise for the First Edition: "Leo Chavez has produced a superb, well-argued, and thought provoking book. Tackling subjects such as the Minutemen in Arizona, immigrant marches, Latino reproduction, and organ transplants, the book not only sheds a critical light on how, through the mass media, Latinos have been constructed as illegitimate members of society, it also provides powerful evidence to undermine the taken-for-granted truths marshaled to marginalize this population."

American Ethnologist

"[The Latino Threat's] very breadth also opens new terrain for more detailed study and theorization. Chavez identifies pervasive, historically rooted myths and fears of immigrants, and specifically Latinos, in Anglo-American culture and its mainstream media . . . [I]t productively exposes the problematic discursive roots of much North American common sense in a way that a more narrowly focused study could never do. This is its real contribution and likely the reason the first edition proved so popular at the upper undergraduate level . . . Chavez deploys substantial, convincing data illustrating contemporary Latino cultural changes that belie the threat discourse; one can only hope that his message can shine a light on the pervasive presumptions of these Latino threat narratives."

Latin American Research Review - Paul Ryer

Praise for the First Edition: "Leo R. Chavez makes a forceful case for the proposition that Latino immigration to the United States is everything its supporters and opponents say it is—and much more. There is no secret reconquest conspiracy among Mexican immigrants—but Chavez also highlights the more subtle effect: Latino immigrants are changing the culture of the United States in much the same way as did every previous surge of new residents. This is a book with rich rewards for the serious student of the entire phenomenon of Latino immigration into the United States."

Former Governor of New Mexico - Bill Richardson

"Chavez offers us a thoughtful analysis of conflicts over the meaning of citizenship in an increasingly globalized world. In an era of debate over immigration reform, this book is essential reading for scholars, policy makers, and a thoughtful public alike."

Southern Methodist University - Caroline B. Brettell

"The time is certainly ripe for a second edition to Leo Chavez's Latino Thread, which is replete with updated information on draconian immigration laws, as well as coverage of the presidential debates of 2012, which showcased the vituperative and vitriolic discourse of the Latino Narrative Threat . . . The Latino Threat is accessible and essential reading for students and professionals alike, and fosters advocacy for policy change, as well as the need to understand the psychologically and emotionally damaging repercussions of structural racism and nativist discourse practices, and their effects on provision of language access, health disparities, and social services for Latino immigrants."

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare - Catherine Carballeira

"Leo Chavez [...] has written a revised, updated and extended second edition of his insightful book The Latino Threat . . . [H]e leaves us with the bleak reality that [the Latino Threat Narrative] remains pervasively in full force today. This makes the second edition of The Latino Threat a timely and excellent book. It is a 'must-read' for politicians, academics, and anyone interested in immigration, Latina/o studies, race/class/gender inequalities and the politics of immigration."

Bulletin of Latin American Research - San Juanita Garcia