Notes
Introduction
When referring to nativism, I am drawing on political scientist Cas Mudde’s definition as “a xenophobic form of nationalism” that sees both nonnative persons and their alleged ideas as a threat to the nation-state’s culture, security, and economic well-being. See Mudde, The Far Right in America (New York: Routledge, 2017), 89. Yet nativism is not merely prejudice. As Mudde illustrates, nativism reflects a set of beliefs regarding how the state should be structured, with nativists often seeking “a congruence of state and nation—the political and the cultural unit.” See Uri Friedman, “What Is a Nativist?,” Atlantic, April 11, 2017. As a form of boundary-based nationalism, nativism might initially appear to run counter to America’s understanding of itself as a welcoming “nation of immigrants.” But as scholars have long noted, nativist and right-wing politics have a long history in the United States. For example, particular definitions of whiteness have long shaped America’s exclusionary immigration policies, with laws targeting Chinese, Catholics, and Jews as well as a variety of other racialized populations. See historian John Higham’s Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (1955; repr., New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002). Today, nativism is a core feature of the radical Right, with expressions of populism and authoritarianism tending to “pass through a nativist filter.” See Friedman, “What Is a Nativist?”
See Julio Ricardo Varela, “As He Bungles This Crisis, Trump Turns to a Familiar Scapegoat: Immigration,” Washington Post, March 23, 2020; “Donald Trump Calls Covid-19 ‘Kung Flu’ at Tulsa Rally,” Guardian, June 20, 2020; BBC News, “US–Mexico Border: Thousands of Migrants Expelled under Coronavirus Powers,” April 10, 2020; Maria Verza and Ben Fox, “US Expels Thousands to Mexico after Largely Halting Asylum,” AP News, April 9, 2020; Joel Rose, “Immigration Grinds to a Halt as President Trump Shuts Borders,” NPR, March 18, 2020; Tal Axelrod, “Trump Threatens to Withhold Visas for Countries That Don’t Quickly Repatriate Citizens,” Hill, April 10, 2020; Adam Rogers, “Calling the Caravan’s Migrants ‘Diseased’ Is a Classic Xenophobic Move,” Wired, October 31, 2018.
For more on the history of race, immigration, and public health, see John Mckiernan-Gonzáles, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas–Mexico Border, 1848–1942 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), and Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
In addition to using the national-origin term Mexican in this work, I also use the terms Latino and Latinx throughout. I use Latinx as the gender neutral and nonbinary alternative to Latino. However, when referring to Latinx subjects in plural terms, I will also use the term Latinos, as both terms refer to the diverse group of individuals living in the United States who trace their ancestry to the Spanish-speaking regions of Latin America and the Caribbean. For more on the political and theoretical possibilities of these terms, see Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Ed Morales, Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture (New York: Verso, 2018); and Claudia Milian, LatinX (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
See Trip Gabriel, “A Timeline of Steve King’s Racist Remarks and Divisive Action,” New York Times, January 15, 2019.
Comparing the selection of “good immigrants” to dog breeding, King opined, “You want a good bird dog? . . . Pick the one that’s the friskiest . . . not the one that’s over there sleeping in the corner.” See Glenn Thrush, “Rep. King Compares Immigrants to Dogs,” Politico, May, 22, 2012; Stephen Pitti, “Congressman King, Cantaloupe Calves and Drug Mules,” Huffington Post Latino Voices, July 25, 2013; P. J. Brendese, “Borderline Epidemics: Latino Immigration and Racial Biopolitics,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 2, no. 2 (2014): 168–87.
Kevin Murphy, “Kansas Lawmaker Suggests Immigrants Be Shot Like Hogs,” Reuters, March 25, 2011.
See the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, “Mainstreaming Hate: The Anti-Immigrant Movement in the U.S.,” November 2018.
As is widely known, the international movement of people has become a political flashpoint, in both the United States and throughout Europe. For the purposes of this book, my focus is on the U.S. and Latinx populations, particularly Mexicans and Mexican Americans.
Alice Ollstein, “Data Clashes with Emotion as CPAC Immigration Panel Goes off the Rails,” Talking Points Memo, February 23, 2018.
Throughout this work, I generally refer to migrants rather than immigrants. The term immigrant generally refers to someone who has moved from one country to another with plans to relocate permanently. Technically, immigrants in the United States generally refers to legal permanent residents, those who hold visas, or those who have become U.S. citizens. By contrast, migrant is a broader term that refers to anyone who is in the process of relocating to another country as well someone who has already moved. The term is inclusive of refugees and asylum seekers as well as people who are still on the move or who have moved to a country but wish to eventually return to their home country. Migrant also makes no reference to legal status. For more on the distinctions between the two terms, see Adrian Vore, “‘Immigrant’ vs. ‘Migrant’: What’s the Difference?,” San Diego Union-Tribune, September 25, 2015. Moreover, as Alfonso Gonzales notes in Reform without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State, when referring to Latinos, the term migrant better reflects the more “circular relationship” of migration from the Global South and the fact that many Latinx families have been migrating between nations for generations. Indeed, “in the case of indigenous migrants it could be argued that their history of circular migration within the Americas actually predates the modern nation state.” See Gonzales, 184.
See Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, “More Mexicans Leaving than Coming to the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, November 19, 2015.
Ana Gonzalez-Barrera and Jens Manuel Krogstad, “What We Know about Illegal Immigration from Mexico,” Pew Research Center, June 28, 2019, and Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “U.S. Unauthorized Immigrant Total Dips to Lowest Level in a Decade,” Pew Research Center, November 27, 2018.
See Ana Raquel Minian, “Looking South: The Development of Mexico’s Emigration Practices,” and Tomás Jiménez, “‘This Too Shall Pass’: Mexican-Immigrant Replenishment and Trumpism,” both in Democracy on the Line: Trumpism and the Latino Predicament, ed. Phillip (Felipe) Gonzales, Mary Louise Pratt, and Renato Rosaldo (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of Advanced Research Press, forthcoming).
Minian, “Looking South,” 150.
Minian, 150. See also Anna Minian, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018).
Peter Beinart, “There Is No Immigration Crisis,” Atlantic, June 27, 2018. For more on demographic and policy shifts within the Mexican nation-state, see Minian, Undocumented Lives.
Beinart, “There Is No Immigration Crisis.”
See Bradley Jones, “Majority of Americans Continue to Say Immigrants Strengthen the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, January 21, 2019, and Jones, “Race, Immigration, and Discrimination,” in The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2017).
To be clear, I’m not arguing that white nativism animates all criticisms of immigrant action. What this project seeks to understand is the particular logic of nativist subjects who are most deeply animated by anti-immigrant sentiments and who desire the intensification of violence against migrants.
See Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020); Katherine Schaeffer, “Far More Americans See ‘Very Strong’ Partisan Conflicts Now than in the Last Two Presidential Election Years,” Pew Research Center, March 4, 2020, and Norm Ornstein, “Yes, Polarization Is Asymmetric—and Conservatives Are Worse,” Atlantic, June 19, 2014.
Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal, White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 202.
Lee Drutman, “Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond: Tensions between and within the Two Parties,” report from the 2016 VOTER Survey, June 2017. The Democracy Fund Voter Study Group is a research collaboration of scholars and analysts that came together in 2016 to study the evolving view of the American electorate.
Diana C. Mutz, “Status Threat, No Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Race,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 8, 2018.
See Daniel Denvir, All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It (New York: Verso, 2020). Alfonso Gonzalez describes this bipartisan, pro-enforcement consensus as a form of “anti-migrant hegemony”; see Reform without Justice, 5.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986 is often seen as pro-immigrant legislation, providing amnesty for more than a million undocumented immigrants and creating pathways to legalization that also allowed for family reunification. See Leo Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 7; Tanya Golash-Boza, Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions, and Deportations in Post-9/11 America (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2012), 37–38. The law also sought to impose sanctions on employers, leading them to develop strategies to dodge federal oversight and consigning undocumented workers to a secondary labor market in which labor laws are routinely flouted. Employers devised workarounds that forced undocumented workers underground, making them more vulnerable. Ten years later, Bill Clinton passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, which made it more difficult for undocumented immigrants to adjust their status and become legal. Clinton also signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which sought to “end welfare as we know it.” Part of this legislation also restricted legal immigrants’ use of food stamps and Supplemental Security Income and barred legal immigrants from using Medicaid for five years after entry. See Chavez, Latino Threat, 7. Clinton’s policies also led to a significant increase in the number of people being detained and deported in the United States. See Golash-Boza, Immigration Nation; Adam Goodman, The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020); Denvir, All-American Nativism.
Julián Aguilar, “She’s an Undocumented Immigrant, a Taxpayer and an Essential Worker. But She Won’t Get a Stimulus Check,” Texas Tribune, April 16, 2020.
Abrajano and Hajnal, White Backlash, 49.
Abrajano and Hajnal, 202, propose an immigration backlash theory that suggests changes in racial/ethnic demographics and media coverage as two mechanisms likely triggering public fears and anxieties over immigration.
Abrajano and Hajnal, 51.
Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xix; W. E. B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” Atlantic, May 1915.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 9–10.
Linda Martín Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 15. Also see Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, xv. In addition to Alcoff and Olson, scholars of whiteness and white supremacy to whom I turn include W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1869–1880 (1935; repr., New York: Free Press, 1998); Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors, a Red Record, Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900; repr., Salem, Mass.: Ayer, 1990); James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955; repr., Boston: Beacon, 2012); Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; repr., New York: Vintage, 1992); Lawrie Balfour, The Evidence of Things Not Said (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991; repr., New York: Verso, 2007); Pierre L. van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York: John Wiley, 1967); Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998; repr., Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); T. R. R. Cobb quoted in William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1960); and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Hagar Kotef, “Violent Attachments,” Political Theory 48, no. 1 (2020): 17. Other work in this vein includes Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and Lee Bebout, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, xv.
Olson, xv.
Joel Olson, “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2008): 704. Of course, as numerous scholars have noted, it was initially Reconstruction that marked the first national effort to truly challenge the politics of white supremacy and white democracy. Following the Civil War, the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Reconstruction constitutional amendments marked the effort to graft the principle of equality onto the Constitution, with the federal government (not the states) put in charge of enforcement. These three constitutional amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped Black men with the right to vote. Establishing the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteeing the privileges and immunities of all citizens, the changes wrought by Reconstruction have been described as representing a “second founding of the United States.” Unfortunately, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, along with many in the southern states, as well the Supreme Court all sought to actively undermine these newly established rights. A series of court decisions narrowed the rights guaranteed in the amendments; states actively undermined them; and by 1877, Jim Crow laws establishing racial segregation were being established and Herrenvolk democracy reestablished. See Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1989; repr., New York: HarperPerennial, 2014); and Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).
Van der Berghe, Race and Racism, 18. A concept in Nazi ideology, Herrenvolk refers to the idea of a “master race,” superior to other races and entitled to dominate and rule over their inferiors. Coordinated and imposed from above, der Berghe uses a comparative lens to consider the “paternalistic” and “competitive” modes of intergroup relations of various political regimes (including Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and the United States).
Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 59.
Roediger, 60.
Roediger, 152.
Charles Mills, “White Right: The Idea of a Herrenvolk Ethics,” in Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 152.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, xv.
Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 167.
Adam Serwer, “The Cruelty Is the Point,” Atlantic, October 13, 2018.
Olson, “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” 709.
Olson.
See John Laidler, “The Earnings Gap between Black and White Men,” National Bureau of Economic Research, April 18, 2020; Thomas B. Edsall, “Black People Are Not All ‘Living in Hell,’” New York Times, April 27, 2017; Jody Agius Vallejo, “Latino Elites Are Paying the California Dream Forward,” Conversation, November 7, 2017; Jody Agius Vallejo, Barrios to Burbs: The Making of the Mexican-American Middle Class (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012).
In saying this, I do not seek to ignore or downplay the implications of the ongoing shift in aggregate white partisanship. Trump was elected in 2016 because of the white vote. The majority of white men and women (58 percent) voted for Republican Donald Trump, whereas only 37 percent of whites voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton. See Alec Tyson and Shiva Maniam, “Behind Trump’s Victory: Divisions by Race, Gender, Education,” Pew Research Center, November 9, 2016. As Abrajano and Hajnal note, fully “91 percent of Republican identifiers are now white,” while “slightly under half of all Democratic identifiers are now nonwhite.” See Abrajano and Hajnal, White Backlash, 211; see also ANES (American National Election Studies), 2012 Time Series Study [data set], Stanford University and University of Michigan [producers], http://www.electionstudies.org/. Republican voters are mostly white, while the Democratic electorate is far more multiracial. Such statistics speak to a troubling dynamic regarding whiteness, white identity, and practices of partisan and ideological identification.
See David Remnick, “An American Uprising,” New Yorker, May 31, 2020, and Emily Stewart, “George Floyd’s Killing Has Opened the Wounds of Centuries of American Racism,” Vox, June 10, 2020.
While my analysis draws on Olson’s regarding “the enduring problem of whiteness,” I approach white identity in more dynamic terms, as another iteration of how race works—less as an identity that must simply be abolished and more as a “historically evolving identity-formation” produced in diverse locations and continually undergoing reinterpretation and contestation. In doing this, I make a critical distinction between an ideology of whiteness and white identity. As noted earlier, whiteness is a political project, an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of power and privilege. White identity, by contrast, is a characteristic of the self that has no biological or scientific foundation, a social identity that, as Bruce Baum insists, “comprises one of the myriad ways in which some people have come to understand themselves and their relations to others.” Baum, “For Joel Olson, with Trayvon Martin on My Mind,” New Political Science 36, no. 2 (2014): 242. And while whiteness is certainly constitutive of white identity, my analysis echoes Linda Martín Alcoff’s in refusing the conflation of whiteness with white identity. Such an approach better equips us to consider how subjects who claim a white identity are continually engaged in practices that either sanction or repudiate whiteness. See Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 66; Alcoff, Future of Whiteness, 15.
Of course, the policies, practices, and laws that nativists seek to impose on migrants are often not legal and have been subject to numerous challenges in the courts—see, e.g., Miriam Jordan, “Judges Strike Several Blows to Trump Immigration Policies,” New York Times, October 11, 2019; Dara Lind, “Judge Tells Trump to Stop Sending Central American Asylum Seekers Back to Mexico,” Vox, April 8, 2019. My point is less about the legality or legitimacy of the current laws governing immigration and more about the opportunity that noncitizens offer nativists to invoke the law in order to enact violence against what is generally perceived as nonwhite population. Akin to earlier assertions of whiteness as standing like state-sanctioned segregation, anti-immigrant practices offer nativists the increasingly rare opportunity to combine practices of overt racial domination with the invocation of law.
For a brilliant analysis of how American citizenship and conceptions of freedom, agency, and sovereignty have been shaped by narratives of victimization and vengeance, see Elisabeth Anker’s Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014). For more on how such affective investments shape Mexican and Latinx populations, see Bebout, Whiteness on the Border; Arnoldo De León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016); Chavez, Latino Threat; Nicholas Villanueva, The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017); and Laura Gomez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (2007; repr., New York: New York University Press, 2018).
See Bebout, Whiteness on the Border, 4. See also Gomez, Manifest Destinies; Victoria Hattam, In the Shadow of Race: Jews, Latinos and Immigrant Politics in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and G. Cristina Mora, Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
See HoSang and Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots, 6.
For more on the complex story regarding Latinos and their relationship to whiteness, see Benjamin Márquez, LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014); Patrick Lukens, A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights: FDR and the Controversy over Whiteness (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012); and Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (1996; repr., New York: New York University Press, 2006). A growing number of Latino studies scholars are exploring how Latinos have sometimes claimed whiteness, negotiating not only the Black–white binary but also how they inhabit categories such as not-Black and off-white. Of course, Latinos may recognize themselves as white while also arguing for anti-racist, pro-immigrant policies. But other white-identified Latinos might display their own anti-migrant narratives. Latino police officers, ICE agents—all may (though not necessarily) have a close relationship to whiteness. Some may even fall prey to white supremacy. In sum, whiteness is a vexed category, even for the Latinos who both claim and repudiate it. See Gabriela Resto-Montero, “With the Rise of the Alt-Right, Latino White Supremacy May Not Be a Contradiction in Terms,” Mic, December 27, 2017.
In claiming that a significant portion of conservatives exhibit intense affective reactions against Latinx citizens and noncitizens, I am not arguing that Latinos are the only population facing visceral political, racial, and cultural hostility from the Right. Anti-Muslim hysteria is clearly producing particular forms of racialized hate speech and violent xenophobia—as seen in the ongoing efforts of the Trump administration to ban individuals from a variety of countries in Africa and the Middle East. We’ve seen an increase in anti-Semitic incidents; anti-Asian sentiments are increasingly visible (ranging from long-standing anti-Asian hostility aimed at China and Japan to the racism against South Asians that often merges into Islamophobia to the rise in assaults, harassments, and hate crimes related to the COVID-19 pandemic). Transphobic and misogynist policies attacking the rights of women and sexual minorities have been frequent and ongoing. And of course, anti-Blackness and settler colonialism represent two of the most foundational and dominant racial logics circulating both historically and today. In placing Mexicans at the center of my analysis, I am not calling on political theorists to replace the Black–white binary with a new racial hierarchy that erases or sidelines the significance of other populations and histories. Instead, this essay is a call for developing deeper and more specific knowledge of the various populations that make up the American racial order. In this instance, rather than the all-too-common references to the racial subordination of “Black and Brown people,” scholars should move beyond such cursory generalizations and instead provide deeper analyses of the specific historical and political dynamics occurring within various racialized populations. See Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing,” in Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, ed. INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, 66–73 (Boston: South End Press, 2006); see also Bebout, Whiteness on the Border, 11.
For more on how liberal freedom pivots around the question of movement, see Hagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governance of Mobility (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
Alexander Livingston, Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 81.
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893, in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner . . . and Other Essays (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 2.
See Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2017), 397–443; Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland (New York: Basic Books, 2019); Annie McClanahan, “Life Expectancies: Mortality, Exhaustion, and Economic Stagnation,” Theory and Event 22, no. 2 (2019): 360–81.
1. Freedom on the Frontier
Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 72.
Indentured servants were generally Englishmen bound by contractual arrangements to serve a master for a specific number of years, usually four to seven, as repayment for their ocean passage, following which the servant would become free.
See Edmund Morgan, American Slavery—American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 129, and Jordan, White over Black, 47–48.
Morgan, American Slavery, 215.
Morgan, 385.
Morgan, 325.
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 26.
Robinson, 67.
Morgan, American Slavery, 20.
Robinson, Black Marxism, 26–27.
Portuguese ships began supplying the Spanish and Portuguese settlements in America with Negro slaves. By 1550, European enslavement of Blacks was more than a century old, and slavery had become a fixture of the New World. The first Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, but as historian Winthrop Jordan has observed, little is known about their precise status during the next twenty years. Slaves formed only a small part of the Virginia labor force until the 1680s. See Jordan, White over Black, 44.
Jordan, 74.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 34. Also see Morgan, American Slavery, 155.
Morgan, American Slavery, 308.
Morgan, 155.
Morgan, 155, 327.
Morgan, 327.
Morgan, 269–70.
Morgan, 332–33.
See Morgan, 345, and Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 37.
Morgan, American Slavery, 381.
Morgan, 386.
Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan, 2019), 3.
Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf, 1975), 3.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 42.
Grandin, 49.
Kotef, “Violent Attachments,” 64, 138.
Kotef, 94.
Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 142–43.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 24.
Grandin, 27.
James Monroe, State of the Union Address, December 7, 1824.
See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 165, and Kotef, “Violent Attachments,” 119.
Kotef, “Violent Attachments,” 100.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 11.
Turner, 3.
Turner, 2.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 116.
Grandin, 3.
Alexander Livingston, Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 80.
Rogin, Fathers and Children, 3.
Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; Alyosha Goldstein, ed., Formations of United States Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).
Rogin, Fathers and Children, 3.
Rogin, 7.
Rogin, 121.
Jordan, White over Black, 91.
Jordan, 120.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963; repr., New York: Penguin, 1990), 233–34, 218.
Arendt, 223.
For more on “dilemma of authorization” and the various practices to which postrevolutionary Americans turned in their desire to seize authority and speak in the people’s name, see Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
Grandin, End of the Myth, 67.
Lisa Lowe would later develop this critique on an international register, describing the range of connections linking Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas through practices of settler colonialism, slavery, and colonial labor relations as “global intimacies”—practices that created the conditions of possibility for Western liberalism. See Intimacies of Four Continents.
Describing this dynamic, Alexis de Tocqueville characterized America’s democracy as an “Anglo-American confederation” where the positions of the two other races (“Indians and the Negroes”) were “tangent” to his subject “being American, but not democratic.” See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (1835; repr., New York: HarperCollins, 1966), 316.
Arendt, On Revolution, 235.
For more on the relationship between war, sexuality, police power, race, and racism in the United States, see Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), and Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).
James Baldwin, “On Being White . . . and Other Lies,” Essence Magazine, April 1984.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, xviii.
Olson, xix.
Olson, “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” 708.
Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 2.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 43.
Olson, “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” 708. See also Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 43.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 43.
Olson, “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” 707–8.
Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, xx.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 700–701.
Olson, “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” 709, and Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 29–30.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 44.
Morgan, American Slavery, 344.
T. R. R. Cobb, quoted in Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South, 193; Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 39.
Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996), 9–10.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 74.
Of course, Jim Crow was also sometimes applied to other populations deemed nonwhite, including (at particular times and in particular regions) Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. See Darius Echeverría, “Beyond the Black–White Binary Construction of Race: Mexican Americans, Identity Formation, and the Pursuit of Public Citizenship,” Journal of American Ethnic History 28, no. 1 (2008): 104–11. However, for populations deemed not-Black, segregation was unevenly applied, while for African Americans, it was a much more consistent and pervasive system.
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 93.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, xv–xvi.
See Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (New York: Bold Type, 2017); Aida Hurtado and Mrinal Sinha, Beyond Machismo: Intersectional Latino Masculinities (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016); Kathy Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988).
By contrast, a single white woman could sometimes own property and make contracts in her own name. See Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
Indeed, early rape laws defined sexual assault as a property crime against the husband or father whose wife or daughter had been “defiled.” See Kersti Yllö and M. Gabriela Torres, eds., Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage and Social Change in Global Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
See Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 33, 53–59; Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); June Melby Benowitz, Days of Discontent: American Women and Right-Wing Politics, 1933–1945 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); June Melby Benowitz, Challenge and Change: Right-Wing Women, Grassroots Activism, and the Baby Boom Generation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017); Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (New York: Perigee, 1983).
For more on how the practices of white supremacy have shaped the politics of gender and sexuality, see Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1981; repr., New York: Crossing/Penguin, 2012); Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981; repr., Albany: SUNY Press, 2015); Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women Studies (1982; repr., New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2015); Barbara Smith, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983; repr., New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000); bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist Thinking Black (1989; repr., New York: Routledge, 2015); Gloria Anzaldúa, ed., Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990); and Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81; also see Shatema Threadcraft, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 59.
Olson, 33.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 24.
Peter S. Onuf, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 107.
Arendt, On Revolution, 238.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 24.
Grandin, 25.
Turner, “Significance of the Frontier,” 54; Rogin, Fathers and Children, 89.
Rogin, Fathers and Children, 89; Turner, “Significance of the Frontier,” 54, 52.
Turner, “Significance of the Frontier,” 53.
van den Berghe, Race and Racism, 101.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 65.
The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, “Reading Room,” Northeastern University School of Law.
Mary Elizabeth Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi 1830–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 3.
Rogin, Fathers and Children, 132.
Rogin, 132, 133.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 22.
The Paxton Boys were a group of Scotch-Irish frontiersmen who “rampaged through western Pennsylvania, murdering scores of Conestoga, scalping their victims and mutilating their corpses.” Grandin, 21. Following the Conestoga Massacre, the Paxton Boys formed a vigilante mob to protest the central government and the claim that they weren’t doing enough to protect setters. See Grandin, 57–58. The Paxton Boys gained a large number of allies throughout the colony and were never punished for their murder or crimes.
Grandin, 22.
Grandin.
Grandin.
Grandin, 7.
Grandin, 131.
Livingston, Damn Great Empires!, 80–81.
Livingston, 81.
For more on how the tendency to conflate expansion with liberty produces an inability to consider how boundaries and limits can be something other than repressive, see Ian Angus, “Empire, Borders, Place: A Critique of Hardt and Negri’s Concept of Empire,” Theory and Event 7, no. 3 (2004).
See Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans, 230.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 701.
Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans, 244–45.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 32.
Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 43.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 136.
Library of Congress, The “Dred Scott” Decision: Opinion of Chief Justice Taney (Washington, D.C., [1857] 1860).
Given his racial politics, we should not be surprised that Donald Trump often cites Andrew Jackson as his favorite American president and the one with whom he feels the most affinity. After touring Jackson’s plantation in 2017, Trump stated, “Inspirational visit, I have to tell you. I’m a fan.” Trump had a portrait of the seventh president hung next to his desk in the Oval Office at the start of his term in 2016. See “Trump Cites Andrew Jackson as His Hero—and a Reflection of Himself,” Washington Post, March 15, 2017. On June 26, Trump signed an executive order to prosecute anyone attempting to destroy or vandalize a monument, memorial, or statue, signing the order following attempts by protesters to pull down the statue of Andrew Jackson in Washington, D.C.’s, Lafayette Square. Trump has called the Jackson statue “a great monument.”
Grandin, End of the Myth, 51. In a coffle, slaves would have a U-shaped piece of metal, or yoke, put around their necks. The yoke was attached to a long pole, with the pole containing a number of yokes, each holding one slave, so that the group of slaves were chained together in a line.
Grandin, 54; Rogin, Fathers and Children, 42.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 51; Rogin, Fathers and Children, 41.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 51.
Grandin, 52.
Grandin, 58.
Grandin, 59.
Grandin, 67.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 44.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 96.
Grandin, 56.
2. A Desire for Land but Not People
Grandin, 316.
Grandin, 92.
Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Penguin, 2016), 132.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 84.
In this section, I often use the term Anglo when talking about white settlers. In doing this, I’m drawing on the work of Latinx studies scholars who study racial politics in the American Southwest. In his note on terminology, Arnoldo de Leon defines Anglos as “any white, English-speaking, non-Mexican American.” As Mark Allan Goldberg notes, while the term Anglo is closely associated with Anglo-Saxon, in the Southwest, the term did not simply refer to people of English descent. Instead, since the late eighteenth century, the term Anglo was used to distinguish U.S.-born whites from American Indians and from ethnic Mexicans. And while whiteness is certainly “central to Anglo identity,” whiteness was both “complicated and contested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Texas,” with some ethnic Mexicans and “elite and light-skinned Mexicans” claiming whiteness even while experiencing “social, political, and economic marginalization.” In this way, the term Anglo supplements the language of whiteness, serving as a “historically descriptive” way to mark the “racialized divide that developed in Texas and the rest of the Southwest as English-speaking whites poured in and worked to establish dominance over ethnic Mexicans.” See Mark Allan Goldberg, Conquering Sickness: Race, Health, and Colonization in the Texas Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), xix.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 85.
Grandin, 94–95.
Grandin, 95.
In claiming that a significant portion of conservatives exhibit intense affective reactions against Latinx citizens and noncitizens, I am hardly saying that Latinos are the only population facing visceral political, racial, and cultural hostility from the Right. Anti-Muslim hysteria is clearly producing particular forms of racialized hate speech and violent xenophobia, as seen in the ongoing efforts of the Trump administration to ban individuals from a variety of countries in Africa and the Middle East. We’ve seen an increase in anti-Semitic incidents; anti-Asian sentiments are increasingly visible (ranging from long-standing anti-Asian hostility aimed at China and Japan to the racism against South Asians that often merges into Islamophobia). Transphobic and misogynist policies attacking the rights of women and sexual minorities have been frequent and ongoing. And of course, anti-Blackness and settler colonialism represent two of the most foundational and dominant racial logics circulating both historically and today. In placing Mexicans at the center of my analysis, I am not calling on political theorists to replace the Black–white binary with a new racial hierarchy that erases or sidelines the significance of other populations and histories. Instead, this book is a call for developing deeper and more specific knowledge of the various populations that make up the American racial order. In this instance, rather than the all-too-common references to the racial subordination of “Blacks and Latinos,” scholars should move beyond such cursory generalizations and instead provide deeper analyses of the specific historical and political dynamics occurring within various racialized populations. See Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy”; see also Bebout, Whiteness on the Border, 11.
Including Texas, Mexico lost more than half its territory in the war. See Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 13.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 92, 94.
Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 14. For further discussion of the All-Mexico movement, see Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York: Vintage, 1963), 107–43, and David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 522–26, 551–52, 555–57, 561.
As David Gutiérrez notes in Walls and Mirrors, in the popular 1840 adventure travelogue Two Years before the Mast, author Richard Henry Dana strongly influenced American popular perceptions of northern Mexican society by painting “an unflattering portrait of Californios” as “thriftless, proud . . . of little education . . . and none of the best morality.” Gutiérrez 18–19. But alongside his disparagement of the population, Dana’s enthusiasm regarding the territory Mexicans inhabited was clear: describing “‘California’s four or five hundred miles of sea-coast, . . . good harbors, . . . fine forests, . . . and herds of cattle,’ Dana was moved to wonder, ‘In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!’” See Dana, Two Years before the Mast (1940; repr., New York: Airmont, 1966), 136, 137; see also Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 18–19.
William H. Wharton, “Address on Texas Independence,” Magazine of History 22, no. 4 (1922): 236.
Wharton, emphasis original.
James Gordon Bennett, “Is the Mexican War Ended?,” New York Herald, June 5, 1846.
Bennett.
Bebout, Whiteness on the Border, 2.
Bebout, 24.
Bebout, 71.
See De León, They Called Them Greasers, 1, 3–5.
Gomez, Manifest Destinies, 49.
Gomez, 5
Gomez, 5.
Gomez, 119.
Gomez, 121.
Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given, 8.
Saldaña-Portillo, 191.
Saldaña-Portillo, 225.
Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 15.
Bebout, Whiteness on the Borders, 42.
Bebout, 43.
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 238–39. Horsman highlights editorials from Whig newspapers, summing up their argument against annexing Mexican territory: “Why should the national character be sullied by the use of force or the population diluted by alien ingredients?”
Grandin, End of the Myth, 92.
Congressional Globe, 29th Cong., 2nd sess., February 9, 1848, appendix, 327, and Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., 1st sess., January 4, 1848, 98–99, quoted in Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 241. See also Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 16.
De León, They Called Them Greasers, 5.
Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given, 156, 203.
Saldaña-Portillo, 9.
Saldaña-Portillo, 376. Importantly, Saldaña-Portillo shows that in the colonial record of New Spain, indios bárbaros was a more fluid category than the fixed idea of barbarism that emerges following U.S. conquest: “bárbaros, like the term Chichimecas for the Nahaus, also indicated a nomadic incivility, a heathen recalcitrance. The Nahuas had considered these northern tribes who resisted incorporation into their empire. . . . Nevertheless . . . for Spanish administrators and vecinos of the northern frontier, indios bárbaros existed on a continuum of Christian unity, of Catholic humanity, not outside of it. Indios bárbaros could be friends and allies, or mortal enemies, but the steadfast intent of Spanish Empire was to bring them (by persuasion or force) under the mantle of Christian dominion. . . . Bárbaro’s condition was considered remediable, capable of shifting from recalcitrant foreigner to intimate relation. . . . Unlike their Anglo-American counterparts for whom Indian savagery came to signify an inevitable vanishing from the scene/seen of empire and nation, for the Spaniards the indios bárbaros filled the landscape with the promise of colonial mission.” See Saldaña-Portillo, 154–55.
Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 20.
Bebout, Whiteness on the Border, 62.
De León, They Called Them Greasers, 11.
De León, 10–11.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 98.
Grandin, 98.
Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict during the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 175.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 11.
De León, They Called Them Greasers, 2.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 151.
John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17, no. 1 (July–August 1845).
Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 15.
Gutiérrez, 15.
Congressional Globe, 29th Cong., 2nd sess., February 10, 1847, 191, quoted in Horseman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 241; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 16.
Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 19.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 97.
Grandin, 97.
Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given, 195. As Saldaña-Portillo notes, article 9 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo states the following:
Article 9: “The Mexicans who, in the territories aforesaid, shall not preserve the character of citizens of the Mexican Republic . . . shall be incorporated into the Union of the United States and be admitted, at the proper time (to be judged of by the Congress of the United States) to the enjoyment of all the rights of the citizens of the United States according to the principles of the Constitution; and in the mean time shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction” (193, emphasis added).
Citing early American scholar David Kazanjian, Saldaña-Portillo writes, “The fulfillment of the promise of article 9 formally required Mexicans to give up, to relinquish, the ‘character’ of Mexicanness in order to enjoy ‘all the rights of the citizens of the United States’ promised by the treaty. As the first sentence of article 9 stipulates in the prohibition ‘shall not preserve the character,’ Kazanjian suggests, ‘the first step on the road to becoming a U.S. citizen is a negation, a becoming un-preserved, disposed of, lost, wasted’ (2003, 207). Becoming a U.S. citizen required the loss of a Mexican character that is at once national and racial, as the vernacular use of ‘character’ underscores.” See David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), and Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given, 194.
Bennett, “Is the Mexican War Ended?”
Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 21.
Gomez, Manifest Destinies, 87.
For more on the relationship between economics, racial prejudice, and mob violence, see William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 33–51.
Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 193.
Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, 1.
See Villanueva, Lynching of Mexicans, 105, and Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, 65.
Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018), 6.
Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, 75.
Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 24, 1–2.
Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 10, 254.
Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 20.
Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, 84.
Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 11, 90.
See Lily Meyer, “The Texas Ranger: Good Guys No More,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 31, 2018.
Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 178.
Martinez, 122; see also Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, 64; Villanueva, Lynching of Mexicans, 103–4.
Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 175. To drive home the legally sanctioned nature of the violence, in 1919, when Texas state representative José Tomás Canales (the state’s sole Hispanic representative at the time) set up a joint committee to probe the Rangers’ criminal conduct, defenders claimed that Texas Rangers were justified in using any violent means necessary to protect white Americans, arguing that opponents of such actions had no grasp on the volatile climate at the border. Congressman Claude Benton Hudspeth, a former Ranger, advocated for local residents taking the law into their own hands, arguing that “you cannot handle those Mexicans with kid gloves, not when they come twelve miles below El Paso and steal a milk cow every night or two. . . . I don’t believe in murdering people, but there are a bad class of men along the River that have to be handled in a certain way.” For Hudspeth and many of his colleagues, state brutality was a necessary means for dealing with Mexicans who were criminal by nature. Despite their legal training, Hudspeth and others described Mexican residents as not having the legal protections or rights guaranteed to American citizens and foreign nationals. See Martinez, 208–9, 211.
Martinez, 235.
Martinez, 233.
Martinez, 233. See also Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), and Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, Lynching Photographs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 232.
Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, 9–10.
Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 4.
Wood, 31, 24.
3. The Authoritarian Turn
Olson, “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” 709.
Olson.
Alcoff, Future of Whiteness, 9.
8kun is the rebranded, relaunched message board formerly known as 8chan, which went offline in August 2019 after white supremacist content was linked to multiple mass shootings. 8chan itself was an offshoot of 4chan, a less controversial message board that still operates.
Harel Shapira, Waiting for José: The Minutemen’s Pursuit of America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013), 22, 36.
Shapira, 25.
Shapira, 152.
Shapira, 20.
Kotef, “Violent Attachments,” 15.
Aaron Martinez, “Armed Civilians Are Detaining Migrants at the Border. The ACLU Wants Them Investigated,” El Paso Times, April 19, 2019.
Martinez.
Martinez; Alicia A. Caldwell, “Civilian Militia Group Stops Migrants at the U.S.–Mexico Border,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2019.
Hernández, Migra!; Todd Miller, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014); Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River (New York: Riverhead, 2018); Jason de León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
Will Carless and Michael Corey, “To Protect and Slur: Inside Hate Groups on Facebook, Police Officers Trade Racist Memes, Conspiracy Theories and Islamophobia,” Reveal, June 14, 2019; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012); Andrew Dilts, Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).
Hernández, Migra!, 20–23.
David Roediger, xx.
Hernández, Migra!, 55.
See David Cortez, “I Asked Why They Joined Immigration Law Enforcement. Now I’m Urging Them to Leave,” USA Today, July 3, 2019, and Brittny Mejia, “Many Latinos Answer Call of the Border Patrol in the Age of Trump,” Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2018.
Cortez, “I Asked Why They Joined Immigration Law Enforcement.”
As Monica Muñoz Martinez notes, in 2015, the United States spent nearly $2 billion on immigration detention centers. Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 296. With multiple economic incentives to militarize the border, the United States now spends more on the “border–industrial complex” than it spends on the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Agency combined. See Todd Miller, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014). As Martinez notes, since 2009, “congressional appropriation laws have included language that sets a quota to maintain 34,000 immigration detention beds on a daily basis. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] is the only law enforcement agency subject to a statutory quota.” Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 296.
Esther Cepeda, “Don’t Judge Latinos Who Patrol the Border until You Walk in Their Shoes,” Al Día, May 2, 2018.
Rory Carroll, “Life as a Mexican American on the Border Patrol: ‘The System Is Not Broken,’” Guardian, December 12, 2016.
Mejia, “Many Latinos Answer Call.”
Cortez, “I Asked Why They Joined Immigration Law Enforcement.”
See Bebout, Whiteness on the Border, 4; see also Gomez, Manifest Destinies; Hattam, In the Shadow of Race; Mora, Making Hispanics.
Cantú, Line Becomes a River, 20, 33, 28.
Cantú, 101.
A. C. Thompson, “Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke about Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes,” ProPublica, July 1, 2019. After a yearlong investigation, CBP fired four agents and suspended thirty-eight without pay; see Molly O’Toole, “Border Agency Fires 4 for Secret Facebook Groups with Violent, Bigoted Posts,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2020.
Thompson, “Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group.”
Thompson.
Thompson.
HipLatina, “Why So Many Latino Men Join the Border Patrol That Dehumanizes Latinos,” July 2, 2019.
Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 232.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 43.
Van den Berghe, Race and Racism, 101.
Olson, “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” 708; see also Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 43.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 43.
Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 297.
Martinez, 297–98.
Sophia Tesfaye, “The Truth about Trump’s ICE Raids: Botched Mississippi Operation Is Good Optics,” Salon, August 9, 2019.
Meagan Flynn, “Detained Migrant Children Got No Toothbrush, No Soap, No Sleep. It’s No Problem, Government Argues,” Washington Post, June 21, 2019.
Rebecca Onion, “That Beautiful Barbed: The Concertina Wire Trump Loves at the Border Has a Long, Troubling Legacy in the West,” Slate, November 6, 2018.
Cora Currier, “Emboldened by Trump, U.S. Border Officials Are Lying to Asylum Seekers and Turning Them Away,” Intercept, July 12, 2017.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 98.
Brennan Center for Justice, “In His Own Words: The President’s Attacks on the Courts,” June 5, 2017.
Jacqueline Thomsen, “White House Says Judge Blocking Order on Asylum-Seekers ‘at War’ with Rule of Law,” Hill, July 3, 2019.
Adam Liptak, “Trump Takes Aim at Appeals Court, Calling It a ‘Disgrace,’” New York Times, November 20, 2018.
Brent Kendall, “Trump Says Judge’s Mexican Heritage Presents ‘Absolute Conflicts,’” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2016.
Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 28.
Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey, “The Adviser Who Scripts Trump’s Immigration Policy,” Washington Post, August 17, 2019; Jason DeParle, “How Stephen Miller Seized the Moment to Battle Immigration,” New York Times, August 17, 2019; Catherine Rampell, “Trump’s Immigration Policies Speak Louder than His Racist, Xenophobic Words,” Washington Post, July 18, 2019; Catherine Rampell, “The 1930s Were a Dark Period for Immigration Policies. There’s One Way Today’s Could Be Worse,” Washington Post, July 22, 2019; Molly O’Toole, “Trump Moves to Eliminate Nearly All Asylum Claims at Southern Border,” Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2019; Michael D. Shear, Miriam Jordan, and Caitlin Dickerson, “Trump’s Policy Could Alter the Face of the American Immigrant,” New York Times, August 14, 2019.
During his campaign rallies, Trump often gave melodramatic accounts of young American women murdered by “criminal aliens” living illegally in the United States. On the presidential campaign trail, Trump repeatedly referred to the killing of Kate Steinle in San Francisco. Speaking to Anderson Cooper about Steinle in July 2015, Trump stated, “This man, or this animal, that shot that wonderful, that beautiful woman in San Francisco, this guy was pushed back by Mexico. . . . Mexico pushes back people across the border that are criminals, that are drug dealers.” Indeed, a few weeks into his presidency, Trump signed one of his first executive orders, creating the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE), an office within ICE for which “angel families” had advocated despite the fact that immigrants (including the undocumented) commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens. See Dave Mosher, “Mollie Tibbetts’ Death Is Being Used to Push Debunked Ideas about Illegal Immigration and Violent Crime,” Business Insider, August 22, 2018; Kenneth P. Vogel and Katie Rogers, “For Trump and ‘Angel Families,’ a Mutually Beneficial Bond,” New York Times, July 4, 2018.
Jeff Sharlet, “He’s the Chosen One to Run America: Inside the Cult of Trump, His Rallies Are Church and He Is the Gospel,” Vanity Fair, June 18, 2020.
Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given, 257.
Speaking at a rally in Florida in May, Trump asked his audience how to stop migrants from crossing into the United States. When a woman at the rally shouted “shoot them!” Trump only smiled, saying, “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.” Three months later, in El Paso, Texas, the United States experienced one of the deadliest hate crimes ever committed against Latinos. See Paloma Esquivel, Esmeralda Bermudez, Giulia McConnell Nieto Del Rio, Louis Sahagun, and Cindy Carcamo, “For Latinos, El Paso Is a Devastating New Low in a Trump Era,” San Diego Union-Tribune, August 5, 2019; J. M. Rieger, “When a Rallygoer Suggested Shooting Immigrants in May, Trump Made a Joke,” Washington Post, August 5, 2019.
Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 40.
Wood, 31.
Felicia Sonmez and Mike DeBonis, “Trump Tells Four Liberal Congresswomen to ‘Go Back’ to Their Countries, Prompting Pelosi to Defend Them,” Washington Post, July 14, 2019; Brett Samuels, “Trump Rally Crowd Chants ‘Send Her Back’ about Ilhan Omar,” Hill, July 17, 2019.
HoSang and Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots, 104.
HoSang and Lowndes, 109; see also Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Cecilia Márquez, “Becoming Pedro: ‘Playing Mexican’ at South of the Border,” Latino Studies 16, no. 4 (2018): 461–81; John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973); Rogin, Fathers and Children.
HoSang and Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots, 112.
Geraldo Cadava, The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), xii–xiii.
Cadava, 335, 336.
Cadava, xii.
Cadava, 337.
Jennifer Medina, “Most Latinos Don’t Back Trump. But Some Wear Their Support Proudly,” New York Times, September 18, 2019.
Conclusion
Olson, “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” 709.
Olson, 709.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 76.
Olson, “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” 709.
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017); see also Dani Rodrik, Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017).
For more on the challenges of secular stagnation, see Sarah Brouillette, Joshua Clover, and Annie McClanahan, “Late, Autumnal, Immiserating, Terminal,” Theory and Event 22, no. 2 (2019).
Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, “America’s Social Safety Net Wasn’t Ready for the Coronavirus,” FiveThirtyEight, April 8, 2020.
Of course, while the Hart–Celler Act led to increased migration from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the legislation also contributed to our current dysfunctional immigration process in relation to Latinos, particularly Mexicans. Hart–Celler imposed the first cap on immigration from the Western hemisphere (North, Central, and South America), drastically reducing the number of legal options for entry and creating new, arbitrary legal quotas on Mexican and other Latin American migrants. See Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: U.S. Immigration Policy in the Age of Economic Integration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001); Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Philip E. Wolgin, “The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 Turns 50,” Center for American Progress, October 16, 2015; Tom Gjelten, “The Immigration Act That Inadvertently Changed America,” Atlantic, October 2, 2015.
David Kelly, “Vision That Inspires Some and Scares Others: Aztlan,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2006.
Chavez, Latino Threat; Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).
See Zack Beauchamp, “The El Paso Shooting Isn’t an Anomaly. It’s American History Repeating Itself,” Vox, August 6, 2019; Southern Poverty Law Center, “Hate Groups Reach Record High,” February 19, 2019; Andrew Exum, “America’s Gun-Culture Problem,” Atlantic, March 5, 2018.
Courtney Hagle, “How Fox News Pushed the White Supremacist ‘Great Replacement’ Theory,” Media Matters for America, August 5, 2019.
Hagle; Greg Price, “Fox News’s Audience Almost Exclusively White as Network Faces Backlash over Immigration Coverage,” Newsweek, August 10, 2018.
Hagle, “How Fox News Pushed the White Supremacist ‘Great Replacement’ Theory.”
Alexia Fernández Campbell, “Trump Described an Imaginary ‘Invasion’ at the Border 2 Dozen Times in the Past Year,” Vox, August 7, 2019; see also Aaron Rupar, “Trump Turns Shooting Migrants into a Punchline at Florida Rally,” Vox, May 9, 2019.
Thomas Kaplan, “How the Trump Campaign Used Facebook Ads to Amplify His ‘Invasion’ Claim,” New York Times, August 5, 2019.
Abigail Simon, “People Are Angry President Trump Used This Word to Describe Undocumented Immigrants,” Time, June 19, 2018; Michael Harriot, “All the Times Donald Trump Tweeted the Word ‘Infested,’” Root, July 29, 2019.
Alexia Fernández Campbell, “The El Paso Shooter Told Police That He Was Targeting Mexicans,” Vox, August 9, 2019.
Carmine Sabia, “Here Is the El Paso Shooter’s Entire Purported Manifesto,” Federalist Papers, August 3, 2019.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 54; Rogin, Fathers and Children, 42.
Grandin, End of the Myth, 116.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 128; James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; repr., New York: Vintage, 1992); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993); Morrison, “Mourning for Whiteness,” New Yorker, November 13, 2016.
Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 129.
Olson, 127.
Olson, 128.
Jiménez, “This Too Shall Pass,” italics added.
Noah Bierman and David Lauter, “Trump Backs Down in Fight over Census Citizenship Question,” Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2019.
Alcoff, Future of Whiteness, 10.
Alec Tyson and Shiva Maniam, “Behind Trump’s Victory: Divisions by Race, Gender, Education,” Pew Research Center, November 9, 2016.
See Justice Democrats, “The Future of the Party: A Progressive Vision for a Populist Democratic Party,” April 2018. According to Alcoff, numerous surveys have shown that “about half of whites agree with most people of color on many issues related to race on issues like antiblack racism, immigration, and criminal justice.” See Alcoff, Future of Whiteness, 9–10. See also Sean McElwee, “The Rising Racial Liberalism of Democratic Voters,” New York Times, May 23, 2018; Matthew Yglesias, “The Great Awokening,” Vox, April 1, 2019.
Nicholas Reimann, “Here Are All the Confederate Monuments Now Coming Down,” Forbes, June 9, 2020; Michael Levenson, “NASCAR Says It Will Ban Confederate Flags,” New York Times, June 10, 2020; Rick Rojas, “Mississippi Governor Signs Law to Remove Flag with Confederate Emblem,” New York Times, June 30, 2020.
Amy Harmon and Sabrina Tavernise, “One Big Difference about George Floyd Protests: Many White Faces,” New York Times, June 12, 2020.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Broadway, 2019), and Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York: Random House, 2018); see also Norm Ornstein, “Yes, Polarization Is Asymmetric—and Conservatives Are Worse,” Atlantic, June 19, 2014; Max Boot, “America Now Has a Party of Authoritarianism—It’s the GOP,” Washington Post, December 11, 2018; Paul Krugman, “The GOP Goes Full Authoritarian,” New York Times, December 10, 2018; Zack Beauchamp, “The Republican Party versus Democracy,” Vox, December 17, 2018; George Packer, “The Corruption of the Republican Party,” Atlantic, December 14, 2018; Jennifer Rubin, “The Descent of the GOP into Authoritarian Know-Nothingism,” Washington Post, February 17, 2020.
Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota’s 2020 Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration, Keystone, South Dakota, July 4, 2020.
Remarks by President Trump at the 2020 Salute to America, Washington, D.C., July 5, 2020.
Sergio Olmos, Mike Baker, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, “Federal Agents Unleash Militarized Crackdown on Portland,” New York Times, July 17, 2020.
Mike Baker, Thomas Fuller, and Sergio Olmos, “Federal Agents Push into Portland Streets, Stretching Limits of Their Authority,” New York Times, July 25, 2020.