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Papers by Steven Osuna
Brown Journal of World Affairs, 2022
Her work examines the intimate consequences of U.S. foreign and immigration policies for Central ... more Her work examines the intimate consequences of U.S. foreign and immigration policies for Central American migrants and Latinx families in the United States. Her books include Sacri cing Families:
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis , 2022
On March 27, 2021, a Salvadoran refugee named Victoria Salazar was brutally killed by police in t... more On March 27, 2021, a Salvadoran refugee named Victoria Salazar was brutally killed by police in the Mexican resort town of Tulum, Quintana Roo. In this article, I introduce a “proletarian feminist analysis” to the study of Central American displacement and forced migration to argue that Victoria Salazar’s death is a “social murder.” Although Mexican police murdered Victoria Salazar, I contend that the social degradation and working-class precariousness in El Salvador and Mexico, all shaped by neoliberal capitalist relations of exploitation and afflicting cisgender and trans women in distinctive ways, set the conditions for Ms Salazar’s social murder.
Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies , 2021
When I was a graduate student, Clyde Woods welcomed me to Black stud-ies and the University of Ca... more When I was a graduate student, Clyde Woods welcomed me to Black stud-ies and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He told me I would be okay, and he made sure to knock me upside the head when I was not paying attention. He also debated with me about the merits of the Wu-Tang Clan. He was not too fond of them. From the day I met him in 2009 to the night I said goodbye in 2011, Clyde was an important part of my intellectual development, and he continues to be part of the organic intellectual I am continuously becoming.
Journal of World Systems Research, 2021
This article argues Mexico's war on drugs was a tactic by elites in both the United States and Me... more This article argues Mexico's war on drugs was a tactic by elites in both the United States and Mexico to legitimate the Mexican neoliberal state's political, economic, and ideological governance over Mexican society. Through tough on crime legislation and maintenance of free market policies, the war on drugs is a "morbid symptom" that obfuscates the crisis of global capitalism in the region. It is a way of managing a crisis of legitimacy of Mexico's neoliberal state. Through arguments of Mexico as a potential "failed state" and a "narco-state," the United States has played a leading role by investing in militarized policing in the drug war and securitization of Mexico's borders to expand and maintain capitalist globalization. In the twenty-first century, the ideology of manifest destiny persists, but instead of westward expansion of the U.S. state, it serves as the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism.
Race & Class, 2020
Since the election of Donald Trump, MS-13, the Salvadoran street gang, has become a national secu... more Since the election of Donald Trump, MS-13, the Salvadoran street gang, has become a national security and foreign policy concern for his administration. Due to the violence of street gangs like MS-13, El Salvador has become a country with the highest rates of homicides, alongside forced migration. Like much of the mainstream media and personal accounts of asylum seekers, the arguments about violence emerging from street gangs in El Salvador from the Trump administration are based on actual material conditions, but what is often missing are the root causes. This article argues that the production of a moral panic over MS-13 has been transnationalised between the United States and El Salvador to displace the contradictions of global capitalism in El Salvador to a local and deported relative surplus population. It argues that the spectre of MS-13 in El Salvador and throughout US cities must be placed within the limits of a Salvadoran revolution, the insertion of the Salvadoran political economy into the global capitalist system in the 1980s, the development of a neoliberal Salvadoran state, and the US sponsoring of law-and-order polices in the country as a response to regulate a relative surplus population.
Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, 2019
In the 1990s, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division gained notoriety for its corru... more In the 1990s, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division gained notoriety for its corruption charges and excessive use of force. The Rampart scandal was not an isolated incident but rather an expression of the normalized violence of the LAPD during the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the city. As street reporters, the Psycho Realm, a Chicano hip-hop group, documented this violence through their rap albums. According to blues scholar Clyde Woods, hip hop is a “blues revival movement” that serves as a tradition of investigation and criticism. Following Woods’s framework, I conduct a content analysis of the music
of the Psycho Realm through a conjunctural analysis of 1990s Los Angeles
to discuss the link between the violence of policing and neoliberal racial
capitalism in the city. I argue that the music of the Psycho Realm provides a disordering narrative and practice that disrupt the normative understanding of policing, as well as political economy, and envisions an alternative social warrant. Analyzing the music of the Psycho Realm and the violence of policing in 1990s Los Angeles off ers a lesson for ongoing debates revolving around police violence and reform policies.
U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance , 2017
The Futures of Black Radicalism, 2017
Each generation must discover its mission, ful ll it or betray it, in relative opacity.
Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter., 2016
Ethnicities Vol. 15(2) 234-254, Apr 2015
In the last 30 years, the mass transnational migration of Salvadorans and Mexicans to the U.S. fr... more In the last 30 years, the mass transnational migration of Salvadorans and Mexicans to the U.S. from their countries due to changes in the world capitalist system, and its specific effects on their homelands, has made Los Angeles the most Mexican and Salvadoran populated city in the United States. Within the everyday struggles of the working class in Los Angeles, an internal antagonism between these two Latina/Latino communities has developed that has divided them yet, dialectically, a sense of solidarity between them vis-a`-vis the dominant racialized regime of the U.S. has also emerged. This paper investigates this dialectical interplay of tension and solidarity between Salvadoran and Mexican communities in Los Angeles through qualitative interviews with 20 young adults who are children of mixed Salvadoran–Mexican migrant families. This paper will contextualize their families’ experiences within a larger theoretical, analytical, and historical framework of the global capitalist system and recent transnational processes, including neoliberalism, migration, and the racialization of Latina/Latinos in the U.S. The exploration of the participants’ families and their relationships to a series of structural and cultural factors that ground both communities, such as racialized labor market competition, migration, and national belonging, may assist in explaining this dialectical interplay of tension and solidarity.
Book Reviews by Steven Osuna
American Quarterly , 2022
Book Review of Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing... more Book Review of Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. By Stuart Schrader. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019; Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision. By Brendan McQuade. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019; Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico. By Marisol Lebrón. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019; And Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD. By Max Felker-Kantor. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
Brown Journal of World Affairs, 2022
Her work examines the intimate consequences of U.S. foreign and immigration policies for Central ... more Her work examines the intimate consequences of U.S. foreign and immigration policies for Central American migrants and Latinx families in the United States. Her books include Sacri cing Families:
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis , 2022
On March 27, 2021, a Salvadoran refugee named Victoria Salazar was brutally killed by police in t... more On March 27, 2021, a Salvadoran refugee named Victoria Salazar was brutally killed by police in the Mexican resort town of Tulum, Quintana Roo. In this article, I introduce a “proletarian feminist analysis” to the study of Central American displacement and forced migration to argue that Victoria Salazar’s death is a “social murder.” Although Mexican police murdered Victoria Salazar, I contend that the social degradation and working-class precariousness in El Salvador and Mexico, all shaped by neoliberal capitalist relations of exploitation and afflicting cisgender and trans women in distinctive ways, set the conditions for Ms Salazar’s social murder.
Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies , 2021
When I was a graduate student, Clyde Woods welcomed me to Black stud-ies and the University of Ca... more When I was a graduate student, Clyde Woods welcomed me to Black stud-ies and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He told me I would be okay, and he made sure to knock me upside the head when I was not paying attention. He also debated with me about the merits of the Wu-Tang Clan. He was not too fond of them. From the day I met him in 2009 to the night I said goodbye in 2011, Clyde was an important part of my intellectual development, and he continues to be part of the organic intellectual I am continuously becoming.
Journal of World Systems Research, 2021
This article argues Mexico's war on drugs was a tactic by elites in both the United States and Me... more This article argues Mexico's war on drugs was a tactic by elites in both the United States and Mexico to legitimate the Mexican neoliberal state's political, economic, and ideological governance over Mexican society. Through tough on crime legislation and maintenance of free market policies, the war on drugs is a "morbid symptom" that obfuscates the crisis of global capitalism in the region. It is a way of managing a crisis of legitimacy of Mexico's neoliberal state. Through arguments of Mexico as a potential "failed state" and a "narco-state," the United States has played a leading role by investing in militarized policing in the drug war and securitization of Mexico's borders to expand and maintain capitalist globalization. In the twenty-first century, the ideology of manifest destiny persists, but instead of westward expansion of the U.S. state, it serves as the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism.
Race & Class, 2020
Since the election of Donald Trump, MS-13, the Salvadoran street gang, has become a national secu... more Since the election of Donald Trump, MS-13, the Salvadoran street gang, has become a national security and foreign policy concern for his administration. Due to the violence of street gangs like MS-13, El Salvador has become a country with the highest rates of homicides, alongside forced migration. Like much of the mainstream media and personal accounts of asylum seekers, the arguments about violence emerging from street gangs in El Salvador from the Trump administration are based on actual material conditions, but what is often missing are the root causes. This article argues that the production of a moral panic over MS-13 has been transnationalised between the United States and El Salvador to displace the contradictions of global capitalism in El Salvador to a local and deported relative surplus population. It argues that the spectre of MS-13 in El Salvador and throughout US cities must be placed within the limits of a Salvadoran revolution, the insertion of the Salvadoran political economy into the global capitalist system in the 1980s, the development of a neoliberal Salvadoran state, and the US sponsoring of law-and-order polices in the country as a response to regulate a relative surplus population.
Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, 2019
In the 1990s, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division gained notoriety for its corru... more In the 1990s, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division gained notoriety for its corruption charges and excessive use of force. The Rampart scandal was not an isolated incident but rather an expression of the normalized violence of the LAPD during the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the city. As street reporters, the Psycho Realm, a Chicano hip-hop group, documented this violence through their rap albums. According to blues scholar Clyde Woods, hip hop is a “blues revival movement” that serves as a tradition of investigation and criticism. Following Woods’s framework, I conduct a content analysis of the music
of the Psycho Realm through a conjunctural analysis of 1990s Los Angeles
to discuss the link between the violence of policing and neoliberal racial
capitalism in the city. I argue that the music of the Psycho Realm provides a disordering narrative and practice that disrupt the normative understanding of policing, as well as political economy, and envisions an alternative social warrant. Analyzing the music of the Psycho Realm and the violence of policing in 1990s Los Angeles off ers a lesson for ongoing debates revolving around police violence and reform policies.
U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance , 2017
The Futures of Black Radicalism, 2017
Each generation must discover its mission, ful ll it or betray it, in relative opacity.
Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter., 2016
Ethnicities Vol. 15(2) 234-254, Apr 2015
In the last 30 years, the mass transnational migration of Salvadorans and Mexicans to the U.S. fr... more In the last 30 years, the mass transnational migration of Salvadorans and Mexicans to the U.S. from their countries due to changes in the world capitalist system, and its specific effects on their homelands, has made Los Angeles the most Mexican and Salvadoran populated city in the United States. Within the everyday struggles of the working class in Los Angeles, an internal antagonism between these two Latina/Latino communities has developed that has divided them yet, dialectically, a sense of solidarity between them vis-a`-vis the dominant racialized regime of the U.S. has also emerged. This paper investigates this dialectical interplay of tension and solidarity between Salvadoran and Mexican communities in Los Angeles through qualitative interviews with 20 young adults who are children of mixed Salvadoran–Mexican migrant families. This paper will contextualize their families’ experiences within a larger theoretical, analytical, and historical framework of the global capitalist system and recent transnational processes, including neoliberalism, migration, and the racialization of Latina/Latinos in the U.S. The exploration of the participants’ families and their relationships to a series of structural and cultural factors that ground both communities, such as racialized labor market competition, migration, and national belonging, may assist in explaining this dialectical interplay of tension and solidarity.
American Quarterly , 2022
Book Review of Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing... more Book Review of Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. By Stuart Schrader. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019; Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision. By Brendan McQuade. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019; Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico. By Marisol Lebrón. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019; And Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD. By Max Felker-Kantor. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.