Translating Empire: The Border Homeland of Rio Grande City, Texas (original) (raw)

Crossing the Border: The Interdependence of Foreign Policy and Racial Justice in the United States

Yale Hum. Rts. & Dev. LJ, 1998

This article was initially presented as part of a panel on Critical Race Theory and International Human Rights at the Critical Race Theory Conference held at Yale Law School in November, 1997. I am grateful to Berta Esperanza Hernandez-Truyol for organizing the panel, to C. Cooper Knowles for many hours of research, to the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project for generously sharing. information on the internment of Japanese Peruvians, to the members of the Original Legal Scholarship Collaborative Project who encouraged my research in this area, and to the editorial staff of the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal. This research has been supported by a grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund and by the Georgia State University College of Law. Special thanks go to Kelly Jordan for thinking and rethinking these concepts with me through this article's many iterations.

Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries

2011

Book Reviews / internatlonai and Comparative i6Ŝ tates. When transport and communication made travel possible, Yankees continued to regard Mexico as exotic and appreciated it for its natural beauty, essentially ignoring its people, development, and institutions. As a result the author contends that visitors from the north "preferred not to study Mexico but to escape to what they saw as a primitive and timeless refuge from modern civilization" (p. 149). Consequently, even increasing tourism "did not validate Mexico's existence as an autonomous viable nation" (p. 175). The very brief section dealing with the Mexican Revolution follows the well-known path of the writings of the day, again focusing on the press and other publications, and the accounts written by such prominent writers as John Reed, who wrote about civil conflict in Mexico until they shifted their attention to reporting on the European War. Through it all, the author sees the citizens and writers of the United States as stubbornly retaining only their own outlook regarding Mexico, ignoring reality to continue perceiving Mexico as "timeless rather than progressive, exotic rather than civilized, and happy rather than hard working" (p. 218). Historians will undoubtedly find the author's use of the word Americans when referring to citizens of the United States itself culturally insensitive, ignoring the Latin American view that American is a term that applies to all citizens of the American continents.

The state of exception and the imperial way of life in the United States–Mexico borderlands

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2015

This paper situates recent events in the US–Mexico borderlands in relation to modalities of power used in the expansion of U imperial hegemony. Specifically, I link acts of legal suspension to expedite construction of border barriers on the US southern border with genealogies of imperial dispossession and racial violence to build an argument about imperialism as a way of life in the US. In so doing, my goal is to support ongoing efforts to forge coalitions better able to contest legal suspension as a predominant technique of government.

Covering the Border War Introduction chapter

Choice 2021 Winner: Outstanding Academic Title: Media & Communication- Covering the Border War: How the News Media Create Crime, Race, Nation, and the USA-Mexico Divide examines the notion of the body politic in border newspaper coverage of the USA-Mexico divide and how the nation and immigration are racially imagined in crime news discourse, where whiteness is associated with order and brownness is associated with disorder in a variety of imaginative, nativist ways. By applying critical discourse analysis methodology to the Los Angeles Times, Arizona Republic, Albuquerque Journal, and Houston Chronicle during a peak epoch of border militarization policies (1993–2006), brownness emerges through a news crime frame that reflexively shows the values and meanings of whiteness and the nation. At the body scale, border crossings threaten the whiteness of the national body through suggestions of rape and disfigurement. Border news discourse feminizes the nation with nurturing resources and services under threat of immigrant “rape” as well as expresses racial anxiety about a “changing face” of the nation. Border news coverage constructs immigrants as home intruders at the house scale, both human and animal. Whiteness at this scale reflexively signifies a law-abiding, rightful owner of property protecting against criminal trespassing. Brown immigrants are also seen as wild animals, which constructs whiteness burdened with the task of animal management. Whiteness at the regional scale suggests a masculinized, militarized battleground or a settled region threatened by a brown, cataclysmic flood. Finally, the nation scale complements the body scale but in a more contemporary and scientific way. Whiteness reflects a body politic fighting the disease of cancer/immigration in two ways: with an imagined militaristic, immune system and with hi-tech, aggressive operations. This “diseased body politic” communicates whiteness and nativism about the border through discursive border symptoms and border operations that represent the intersection of immunology discourse, the racial construction of the body politic, and anxiety about postmodern economic transformation and its impact on national borders.

Mexico, Iraq, and the two-party system: studies in white supremacy

Socialism and Democracy, 2005

Manifest destiny From the annexation of Mexico to the occupation of Iraq, a common theme threads its way, as a kind of political ethos legitimizing brutal intervention in the name of democracy. While the first instance couched itself in a new ideology called "Manifest Destiny," the second attempted a more juridical form of projective self-defense called pre-emption. These constitute the end-points of a 150-year period in which the US has intervened aggressively in other nations over a hundred times. 1 A common structure inhabits the political justifications for these interventions, which seem strange at the hands of a democratic government and system. But the same structure is seen to inhabit the machinery of that democracy, namely, its twoparty system. It is the nature of that structure that I wish to examine here. During the Congressional and popular debates on the annexation of Mexican territory in 1846, a peculiar dilemma arose (RMD, 231) 2. Should the US annex or colonize the Mexican territory? Many whites opposed annexation in favor of colonization because they feared that accepting the Mexicans as citizens would corrupt the racial purity of 1. Prof. Zoltan Grossman tabulates well over 110 instances of US military intervention in the world (khttp://www.neravt.com/left/invade.html). See also Michael Parenti, Imperialism 101 (City Lights, 1995); US War Crimes in the 20th Century

Encased encounters : remapping boundaries of U.S. and Mexican indigeneity

2011

I would like to begin my acknowledgements by thanking the faculty and staff in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UCSD for all their love and support during my time as a graduate student. I am especially indebted to my committee: Professors Natalia Molina, Roberto Alvarez, Eric Van Young, and Ricardo Dominguez. Their patience, guidance, and faith in my work and in me, have meant the world. I would particularly like to thank my chair, Professor Ross Frank. Ross is a great listener skilled in the art of hearing what is important and pushing you to do the same. He has seen my vision through its many stages and has always had my back. I would like to thank Yen Le Espiritu for her warmth, humor, and her unyielding commitment to the Ethnic Studies project and department. I would like to thank my cohort members: Ashley, Thuy, Faye, Theo, and Monika. Though we began as classmates, Monika Gosin ended up one of my best friends. She is a spiritual stronghold.