HW

The_Latino_Threat_Constructing_Immigrants_Citizens..._----_1._The_Latino_Threat_Narrative-1.pdf

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

ronald reagan

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

renato rosaldo

1 the latino threat narrative

despite ronald reagan’s plea for a more civil political discourse,1 the tone

of the public debate over immigration became more alarmist between 1979 and

1999, when the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo commented on the stigma ac-

corded all Latinos,2 and this trend has continued up the present time.3 The events

of September 11, 2001, heightened a public discourse on the dangers the United

States faces in the contemporary world. President George W. Bush developed a

general strategy for the national security of the United States while critics focused

on the dangers inherent in forging an empire in the modern world.4 Americans

seemed willing to allow the constitutional rights of foreigners and immigrants to

be diminished so long as those of citizens appeared to remain intact, a dangerous

bargain at best.5 But if there has been one constant in both pre- and post-9/11

public discourse on national security, it has been the alleged threat to the na-

tion posed by Mexican and other Latin American immigration and the growing

number of Americans of Mexican descent in the United States. The themes in

this discourse have been so consistent over the last forty years that they could be

said to be independent of the current fear of international terrorism. However,

the events of 9/11 “raised the stakes” and added a new and urgent argument for

confronting all perceived threats to national security, both old and new.

Chavez, Leo. The Latino Threat : Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, Second Edition, Stanford University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucr/detail.action?docID=1162035. Created from ucr on 2021-10-07 02:56:50.

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24 ConstruCting and Challenging myths

The Latino threat, though old, still has currency in the new, post-9/11 world.

Consider Samuel P. Huntington’s views expressed in an article in the March–

April 2004 issue of Foreign Policy. Huntington compared Latinos, especially

Mexicans, with earlier waves of European immigrants and found that “unlike

past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into

mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic

enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant

values that built the American dream.”6 He also made these assertions: “Demo-

graphically, socially, and culturally, the reconquista (re-conquest) of the South-

west United States by Mexican immigrants is well underway”; “In this new era,

the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional

identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin

America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of those immigrants

compared to black and white American natives.”7

Huntington’s statements are all the more remarkable given the historical

context in which they were made. At the time, the United States was waging

war in Iraq, deeply involved in the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, and still

searching for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda operatives worldwide. And yet

amidst all these crises, Huntington singled out Latin American, particularly

Mexican, immigration as America’s most serious challenge. But this threat did

not suddenly surface after 9/11; Huntington had raised the alarm a year before

the attack on the World Trade Center. In 2000, Huntington wrote in the Ameri

can Enterprise: “The invasion of over 1 million Mexican civilians is a compa-

rable threat [as 1 million Mexican soldiers] to American societal security, and

Americans should react against it with comparable vigor. Mexican immigra-

tion looms as a unique and disturbing challenge to our cultural integrity, our

national identity, and potentially to our future as a country.”8

Rather than discarding Huntington’s rhetorical excesses as bombastic hy-

perbole, we are better served by attempting to clarify the social and histori-

cal context of such pronouncements. How did Mexican immigration, the

Mexican-origin population, and Latin American immigration in general come

to be perceived as a national security threat in popular discourse? Such ideas do

not develop in a vacuum. They emerge from a history of ideas, laws, narratives,

myths, and knowledge production in the social sciences, the natural sciences,

the media, and the arts. In other words, they exist within a “discourse,” a forma-

tion or cluster of ideas, images, and practices that construct knowledge of, ways

of talking about, and forms of conduct associated with a particular topic, social

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the latino threat narrative 25

activity, or institutional site in society.9 As Stuart Hall has noted, “These discur

sive formations, as they are known, define what is and is not appropriate in our

formulation of, and our practices in relation to, a particular subject or site of

social activity; what knowledge is considered useful, relevant and ‘true’ in that

context; and what sorts of persons or ‘subjects’ embody its characteristics.”10

Mexico, Mexican immigrants, and the U.S.-born of Mexican origin are the

core foci of the Latino Threat Narrative, but the threat is often generalized to

all Latin American immigrants and at times to all Latinos in the United States.

In the discursive history of Mexican immigration, specific themes of threat

emerge, become elaborated, and are often repeated until they attain the ring

of truth. This is a story with a number of interwoven plot lines, or narrative

themes: the construction of “illegal aliens” as criminals, the Quebec model, the

Mexican invasion and reconquista (reconquest) of the United States, an unwill-

ingness to learn English and integrate into U.S. society, out-of-control fertility,

and threats to national security. An examination of these themes provides the

necessary context for understanding the debates over citizenship and immi-

grants’ rights in the United States that are discussed in the following chapters.

ConstruCting the “illegal alien”

Restrictions on immigration and citizenship have always been about how we

imagine who we are as a people and who we wish to include as part of the na-

tion, whether this is explicitly recognized or not. Underscoring this observation

is Mae Ngai’s authoritative history, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the

Making of Modern America, which concentrates on the early twentieth century

but illuminates much that is being debated in the early twenty-first century.

The immigration reforms of the 1920s created major restrictions in the flow

of immigrants, in the process producing hierarchies of people and nationali-

ties. Western and northern Europeans were the desired immigrants, and their

movement hither was the goal of the national origins quotas. Southern and

eastern Europeans, Asians, Africans, Mexicans, and other Latin Americans were

less desirable, even when demand for their labor made their immigration nec-

essary. The 1920s also witnessed a profound new importance placed on the ter-

ritorial imperative of national borders, which coincided with new techniques of

surveillance, the creation of the Border Patrol, and immigrant health examina-

tions. Out of this new order of border control emerged the “illegal aliens,” those

who bypassed border controls and found ways to enter the country. The large-

scale restrictions of the 1924 immigration law “generated illegal immigration

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26 ConstruCting and Challenging myths

and introduced that problem into the internal spaces of the nation.” As Ngai

argues, “Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and

political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social

reality and a legal impossibility—a subject barred from citizenship and without

rights.”11

Mexican immigrants quickly became associated with the term illegal alien.

According to Ngai, “As numerical restriction assumed primacy in immigra-

tion policy, its enforcement aspects—inspection procedures, deportation, the

Border Patrol, criminal prosecution, and irregular categories of immigration—

created many thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants.”12 However, it was

ironic that Mexicans became so closely identified with the term illegal, since

they were not subject to numerical quotas and were defined as “white,” unlike

Asians, and thus were not excluded as racially ineligible for citizenship. The

“whiteness” of Mexicans was a legal definition that was a by-product of Mexi-

co’s signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the U.S.-Mexican

War. Mexicans living in what was now U.S. territory were allowed to become

U.S. citizens, a privilege reserved for “white” immigrants at the time. Despite

such legal definitions, Mexicans were still considered “not-white” in the public

imagination.13 Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries had a similar problem. Their racial designation was ambiguous in

that they were viewed as undesirable and inferior to earlier waves of northern

and western European immigrants, yet Italian “whiteness” in contrast to Afri-

can, Asian, and Mexican Americans was never in doubt.14

Asians and Mexicans became legally racialized ethnic groups.15 I use racial

ized here to indicate that these are not genetic-based categories of race but,

rather, labels that are socially and culturally constructed based on perceived

innate or biological differences and imbued with meanings about relative social

worth.16 Asian immigrants were denied a pathway to citizenship, and Mexicans

were associated with illegal alien status and subjected to Jim Crow segrega-

tion throughout the U.S. Southwest. Legally racialized because of their national

origin, Mexican and Asian immigrants found themselves cast as permanently

foreign and faced obstacles to their integration into the nation.17 For example,

in 1925, David Starr Jordan, past chancellor of Stanford University and an ar-

dent eugenicist, commented that “the Mexican peon, who for the most part

can never be fit for citizenship . . . is giving our stock a far worse dilution than

ever came from Europe.”18 As a result, these racial formations produced “alien

citizens”—“Asian Americans and Mexican Americans born in the United

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the latino threat narrative 27

States with formal U.S. citizenship but who remained alien in the eyes of

the nation.”19

Such perceptions complicated debates over legalization programs for

undocumented immigrants at the time. Some believed that undocumented

immigrants should be allowed to legalize their status, while others wanted

them deported. Not surprisingly, therefore, legalization programs in the early

twentieth century were applied unevenly, reflecting hierarchies of nationality

and race. At that time, hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants,

primarily from Europe, were allowed to adjust their status to that of legal im-

migrants and eventually citizens. Americans viewed as unjust the deportation

of ordinary immigrants with homes and families in the United States. Deporta-

tion was justifiable for criminals, but not for otherwise law-abiding immigrants

who had established roots in the country. This reasoning, however, did not ap-

ply to Mexicans, who also desired to adjust their status. They were subject to

a different logic that began with the premise of criminality because of their

illegal entry into the nation. As Ngai observed, “By contrast [to European un-

documented immigrants], walking (or wading) across the border emerged as

the quintessential act of illegal immigration, the outermost point in a relativist

ordering of illegal immigration.”20 The current opposition to allowing undocu-

mented immigrants to become legal immigrants (the “pathway to citizenship”)

begins with the same association of illegal entry with criminality, and Mexicans

are still the prototypical “illegal aliens.”21

Also prevalent in the early twentieth century was the belief that providing

immigrants with rights, even the equal protection guaranteed by the Fourteenth

Amendment, diminished the value of citizenship.22 This belief still has currency

in contemporary debates over allowing undocumented immigrants access to

driver’s licenses and publicly funded education, medical care, and housing.23 To

some, such rights and privileges appear as rewards for illegal entry. Rather than

rewarding “illegals,” public opinion often declares that they should be punished

and removed from the country. Thus, for some, universal access to these rights

and privileges blurs the line between citizen and noncitizen and thus cheapens

citizenship.

The historical lesson is that “illegality” is socially, culturally, and politically

constructed.24 As people move across ever porous national boundaries, their

status is determined by policies in those nation-states, not by some essential

quality inherent in the migrant’s genetic code or personal philosophy of life.

Policy makers, using Foucauldian techniques of governmentality, construct

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28 ConstruCting and Challenging myths

classifications to further bureaucratic control of populations, including,

and perhaps most especially, migrants.25 Being an unauthorized migrant, an

“illegal,” is a status conferred by the state, and it then becomes written upon the

bodies of the migrants themselves because illegality is both produced and ex-

perienced. But illegality itself is a status resulting from political decisions made

by governmental representatives who could just as well have decided to allow

migrants to enter under the sanction of law, as legal immigrants, legal workers,

or legal guest workers. The migrants themselves are the same people, whether

deemed legal or illegal by their receptive states. What marks the illegal is the

receiving state’s unwillingness to recognize the conditions that create a demand

for labor, most notably falling fertility rates, aging populations, and values that

construe certain jobs as “immigrant jobs.” As a result, a legal fiction emerges,

one that recognizes that x number of migrant laborers will be attracted to most

of the industrialized nations but also recognizes that politicians will respond

to the fears of immigration among their constituents by allowing in far fewer

legal immigrants/workers than the actual flow.26 The surplus could have been

allowed to enter legally, but instead the “illegal” entrant is constructed. The to-

tal flow, the x number of in-migrants, continues, albeit under these constructed

categories of legal and illegal migration. What follows is an examination of the

condition of illegality, not so much in the actual lives of “illegal aliens” but in

the representations of that condition in public discourse.

invasion, reConquest, and the quebeC model

Since its formation in the 1920s, the idea that Mexican undocumented im-

migrants are “criminals” has continued in public discourse, but in the 1970s

a new trope was added: Mexican immigration as an invasion of the United

States.27 Over time, the invasion theme evolved, with the elaboration of the no-

tions of a Mexican reconquest of the U.S. Southwest and what I call the Quebec

model. In the Quebec model, the Quebecois independence movement among

French-speaking Canadians is held up as an example of the threat posed by

Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants and their descendants, who suppos-

edly maintain linguistic and socially separate lives from the rest of U.S. society.

These themes are repeated so often that they become a taken-for-granted set of

assumptions about the inability and unwillingness of Mexican immigrants and

their children, extending for generations, to become part of society. Hunting-

ton’s observations, above, are among the latest renditions of these assumptions,

but as we will see, they build upon a long history of such assertions about the

threat of Mexican immigration, Mexican Americans, and Latinos in general.

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the latino threat narrative 29

As legal immigration began to increase after 1965, public anxiety over un-

documented immigration was also increasing. Although it was difficult to es-

timate the actual numbers of unauthorized immigrants in the United States in

the 1960s and 1970s, Leonard F. Chapman Jr., then-commissioner of the Immi-

gration and Naturalization Service (INS), publicly announced that alarmingly

high numbers (as many as ten to fifteen million or more) of “illegal aliens” were

“flooding” into the country at the time.28

The media’s display of such large numbers carries meanings apart from

their mathematical references. Because it is difficult to assess the accuracy of

such numbers and what they mean—for example, their relative impact in a na-

tion as large as the United States—such numbers become images. They jump

off the page or the television at the reader or viewer, but these numerical images

are flat, in that they lack the depth of understanding that comes with historical

context, economic explanations, and social science elaboration. Consequently,

numbers such as these invoke simplified responses—low/high, good/bad,

affirmative/alarmist, assurance/fear—depending upon the prevailing senti-

ment toward immigration. An assured response to such purportedly large

numbers might be that the nation’s economy is doing so well that it is attract-

ing and absorbing many eager new workers. However, in this case, at that time,

the media’s display of these numbers underscored beliefs that there were “too

many” undocumented immigrants. Thus, even though these numbers turned

out to be exaggerated, the authority of their source—the INS—meant that they

entered public discourse as a symbol of alarm.29

For example, the December 1974 cover of the American Legion Magazine

depicted the United States being overrun by “illegal aliens” (Figure 1.1). Most

of the cartoon people in the image are Mexicans storming, en masse, across

the U.S.-Mexico border, breaking down a sign that reads “usa border” and

another one reading “keep out.” Other immigrants are landing by boats along

the East Coast, flying in and swimming from the Caribbean, parachuting

across the Canadian border, and all of them are converging upon, and inundat-

ing, the nation’s institutions, most notably welfare, education, housing, jobs,

and medical care. Such images were to become more frequent in the nation’s

magazines over the next three decades, contributing to an increasingly alarmist

discourse on Mexican immigration.30

The Quebec model first surfaced, ever so subtly, on the cover of the Decem-

ber 13, 1976, issue of U.S. News and World Report, which featured the headline

“Crisis across the Borders: Meaning to U.S.” The cover illustration was a map

of North America with two arrows, both beginning in the United States, one

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30 ConstruCting and Challenging myths

pointing to Mexico and one pointing to Canada. The crisis in Mexico was the

potential for increased migration to the United States. The problem in Canada

was Quebec, where many French-speaking residents were pushing for greater

sovereignty and even separation from the English-speaking provinces. The

Quebec movement was, perhaps, particular to the Canadian context, especially

the effect of the 1967 Canadian law concerning bilingualism and biculturalism

put into place by Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau.31 The particularities of

the Canadian context undermine the comparison with Mexican immigration’s

implications for the United States, but, as we will see, the Quebec independence

movement came to serve as a metaphor, or civics lesson, for the threat of na-

tional division inherent in the “Mexican problem.”

The invasion theme continued to be represented in the nation’s magazines

for the next three decades. The April 25, 1977, issue of U.S. News and World Re

port featured the cover headline: “Border Crisis: Illegal Aliens Out of Control?”

The specific “out of control” behavior was clarified in the accompanying article

as Mexican immigrants’ use of welfare and medical services, displacing citizens

from jobs, and turning to crime, all of which threatened the economic security

of the nation. The article also referred to Mexican immigrants as “invaders” and

asserted that the “U.S. has lost control of its borders” (p. 33).

figure 1.1. Cover of the American Legion magazine, December 1974. Illustration by James

Flora. © Jim Flora Art LLC. Used by permission.

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the latino threat narrative 31

On January 29, 1979, the same magazine published yet another cover on

the “invasion,” with the headline “Illegal Aliens: Invasion Out of Control?” The

magazine notes that “up to 12 million” undocumented immigrants might have

been in the United States at the time and that by the year 2025 they could ac-

count for 10 percent of the population. The negative implications of undocu-

mented immigration raised by the magazine included displacing U.S. citizens

from jobs, use of welfare, and crime. But even more important was the internal

threat posed by the children of immigrants, an idea that is central to the recon-

quest theme and the Quebec model. Labor secretary Ray Marshall was quoted

as saying that illegal immigration “sows the seeds of a bitter civil-rights strug-

gle in the 1990s by the children of today’s illegal aliens” (p. 41). The magazine

story asserted that the threat was magnified because “the traditions of Mexican

Americans remain undiluted, refreshed daily by an influx of illegal immigrants

from the mother country” (p. 42). “Undiluted traditions” was another way of

saying that Mexican Americans did not assimilate into American society and

culture. They remained separate and apart—so separate and apart, in fact, that

there was no mixture, no dilution. Characterizing Mexican Americans as for-

eigners who remain foreign (undiluted) gave added urgency to the invasion

metaphor of the article and the cover.

The 1980s witnessed continued repetition of the invasion theme and an

elaboration of the Quebec model. U.S. News and World Report’s issue of March

9, 1981, featured an illustrated map of the North American continent, including

Mexico. The United States was the focal point of the map, and the stars and

stripes of the U.S. flag covered it. To the north was Canada, with the image of a

Mountie holding the Canadian flag and a French Canadian holding the Quebec

flag in one hand and raising his other hand in a defiant, closed-fisted gesture to-

ward the Mountie. To the south was Mexico, where a line of men emerged from

the mountains and walked single file toward California. The man in front had

his left foot ready to step on the red and white of California, at about San Diego.

The headline read “Our Troubled Neighbors—Dangers for U.S.” The Quebec

“problem,” the magazine made clear, was a model for what was prophesied to

become the Mexican “problem,” a reconquest of the United States.

The reconquest theme was reiterated in the early 1980s. Time’s June 13, 1983,

issue featured an article on Los Angeles titled “The New Ellis Island.” Time

warned its readers that “Los Angeles is being invaded” (p. 18); that “the statistical

evidence of the immigrant tide is stark” (p. 19); and that there was a “staggering

influx of foreign settlers” (p. 20). Immigration, according to the magazine, had

caused dramatic changes in the ethnic composition of Los Angeles. But Time

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32 ConstruCting and Challenging myths

singled out Mexicans, who, because the Southwest was once part of Mexico, ar-

rived “feeling as much like a migrant as an immigrant, not an illegal alien but a

reconquistador,” or reconqueror (p. 24).

The now fully elaborated triple threat of invasion, reconquest, and a

Quebec-like separatist movement soon took on even greater currency in public

discourse. U.S. News and World Report’s cover on March 7, 1983, announced:

“Invasion from Mexico: It Just Keeps Growing.” And in the April 1, 1985, edi-

tion of the New Republic, House majority leader Jim Wright worried about “a

Balkanization of American society into little subcultures” (p. 25). In that same

issue, Richard Lamm, the ex-governor of Colorado, feared that immigration

would result in “a vast cultural separatism” and that the children of Latino im-

migrants would not grow up as loyal Americans but might instead lead “seces-

sionist” riots in the Southwest to “express their outrage at this country” (p. 25).

The reconquest and separatist inclinations of Mexican immigrants and

their offspring were also the theme of the August 19, 1985, cover of U.S. News

and World Report, which announced: “The Disappearing Border: Will the Mex-

ican Migration Create a New Nation?” The accompanying article, titled “The

Disappearing Border,” stated the “reconquest” theme as if it were a fact, with

little need of supporting empirical evidence:

Now sounds the march of new conquistadors in the American Southwest. The

heirs of Cortés and Coronado are rising again in the land their forebears took

from the Indians and lost to the Americans. By might of numbers and strength

of culture, Hispanics are changing the politics, economy and language in the

U.S. states that border Mexico. Their movement is, despite its quiet and largely

peaceful nature, both an invasion and a revolt. At the vanguard are those born

here, whose roots are generations deep, who long endured Anglo dominance

and rule and who are ascending within the U.S. system to take power they

consider their birthright. Behind them comes an unstoppable mass—their

kin from below the border who also claim ancestral homelands in the South-

west, which was the northern half of Mexico until the U.S. took it away in the

mid-1800s. Like conquistadors of centuries past, they come in quest of fabled

cities of gold. America’s riches are pulling people all along the continent’s His-

panic horn on a great migration to the place they call El Norte. (p. 30)

Importantly, in the U.S. News and World Report narrative of invasion and re-

conquest, it was not just recent Mexican immigrants who posed a threat but

even those Americans who were descended from the first Spanish-speaking

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the latino threat narrative 33

explorers of the Southwest. Not even 400 years of living in the Southwest,

and over 150 years of that period as U.S. citizens, reduced the threat posed by

Latinos (note the quote’s reference to Hispanics, not Mexican Americans) in

the Southwest. Apparently, according to this argument, they had remained so-

cially and linguistically separate, biding their time for a “revolt” and takeover.

In other words, the conspiracy for the reconquest of the Southwest had been

in operation for generations and spanned centuries. That so far-fetched and

unsupported a scenario could be seriously presented in a national magazine

attests to how deeply the taken-for-granted assumptions about invasion and re-

conquest had, by this point, entered into public discourse. No critical perspec-

tive on the assumption of difference was put forward here, a difference so great

and incommensurable that the people so designated were not even subject to

the normal expectations of social and cultural change.32 It was as if Mexican

Americans and other Latinos existed in an ahistorical space apart from the life

that took place all around them. They were cast as “alien-citizens,” perpetual

foreigners with divided allegiances despite being U.S. citizens by birth, even

after many generations.33 Such notions became an acceptable part of public

discourse even among otherwise learned scholars.

Indeed, during the 1990s, the Mexican invasion and reconquest were at the

heart of a veritable publishing industry that emerged, playing on the public’s

fears of immigration. Among the many books on the topic that have appeared

since the early 1990s are Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s Disuniting of America; Pe-

ter Brimelow’s Alien Nation; Georgie Anne Geyer’s Americans No More; Pat-

rick J. Buchanan’s Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant

Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization; Victor Davis Hanson’s Mexi

fornia: A State of Becoming; Samuel Huntington’s Who We Are: The Challenges

to America’s National Identity; Tom Tancredo’s In Mortal Danger; Jim Gilchrist

and Jerome R. Corsi’s The Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders;

and Patrick Buchanan’s second book on the topic, State of Emergency: The Third

World Invasion and Conquest of America. These works often explicitly refer to

the Mexican invasion, the Quebec model, and the Mexican reconquest of the

U.S. Southwest.

Schlesinger’s Disuniting of America was an important contribution to the

literature on the threat of immigration to the nation. Here was the archetypical

Harvard liberal intellectual raising the alarm about the social separatism caused

by bilingual education, the cult of ethnicity promoted by multiculturalists,

and the disintegrative effects that would occur if immigrants and their offspring

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34 ConstruCting and Challenging myths

did not assimilate. He also cited the example of Canada (the Quebec model)

and its inability to make a federal multiethnic state work. Schlesinger’s obser-

vations were not entirely novel, but they carried great weight, and his ideas

were echoed in the writings of many other authors, including those mentioned

below. He was also the first of three prominent professors, the others being

Samuel Huntington and David Kennedy, who warned of the disuniting poten-

tial of Latin American immigrants, especially from Mexico.

In 1994 Patrick Buchanan, a nationally recognized conservative politician,

expressed his deep concern that a Quebec-like threat loomed large in America’s

future. In an opinion article in the Los Angeles Times, Buchanan reasoned

that sometime in the near future the majority of Americans would trace their

roots not to Europe but to Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and

the Pacific islands.34 He thus asked: What would it mean for “America” if, for

example, South Texas and Southern California became almost exclusively La-

tino? He provided the following answer: “Each will have tens of millions of

people whose linguistic, historic and cultural roots are in Mexico,” and thus,

“like Eastern Ukraine, where 10 million Russian-speaking ‘Ukrainians’ now

look impatiently to Moscow, not Kiev, as their cultural capital, America could

see, in a decade, demands for Quebec-like status for Southern California.”35 For

Buchanan, Latino immigrants and their children posed the risk of a separatist

movement, which would very likely seek to take over U.S. territory and return

it to Mexico’s control.

In Alien Nation, Peter Brimelow argued that Hispanics were particularly

troublesome, going so far as to claim that they were “symptomatic of the Amer-

ican Anti-Idea,” an idea that is neither defined nor clarified.36 But Brimelow

leaves no doubt what he means: “Symptomatic of the American Anti-Idea is the

emergence of a strange anti-nation inside the U.S.—the so-called ‘Hispanics.’ ”

The growth of an anti-nation inside the nation is a way of retelling the threat

characterized by the Quebec model. In this case, in addition to Hispanic popu-

lation growth, Brimelow asserted that the various groups of people lumped

together as “Hispanics” had, in effect, an artificial identity because of their dif-

ferences. But because U.S. government agencies treated them as a homogenous

“protected class” and encouraged bilingualism and the teaching of Spanish,

Hispanics were now much less encouraged to assimilate to American culture.

“In effect,” Brimelow noted, “Spanish-speakers are still being encouraged to as-

similate. But not to America.”37

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the latino threat narrative 35

In Americans No More, Georgie Anne Geyer argued that excessive immigra-

tion, especially unauthorized immigration, and the rights accorded immigrants

were diluting the meaning of U.S. citizenship. Mexicans, in particular, posed a

threat to California, and thus the nation, because their “high” birth rates were

changing the demographic and political landscape. Geyer worried that “illegal

aliens, with no commitment to the country and no respect for its common

principles,” were forming “their own political power groups to challenge the

old citizens’ America.”38 In her version of events, reconquest through reproduc-

tion would lead to disastrous demographic and political changes: “By the end

of the 20th century, America itself had changed—it was in danger of drifting

toward becoming a Third World nation, and crucially important parts of it, like

once-glorious California, were actually moving backwards in time and back-

wards in development.”39

In November 1996 the eminent Stanford historian David M. Kennedy wrote

in the Atlantic Monthly about the Quebec model and “the Reconquista.”40 De-

spite the seeming interdependence between Mexico and the United States,

Kennedy argued that Mexican immigration did not follow the pattern of plu-

ralism supposedly exhibited by European immigrants. Mexicans were from a

single cultural, linguistic, religious, and national source, and they concentrated

in one geographical region, the Southwest. The United States, according to

Kennedy, had had no experience comparable to this regional concentration of

Mexican Americans. According to Kennedy, the possibilities of this trend were

that Mexican Americans could, if they chose to do so, “preserve their distinctive

culture indefinitely”:

They can challenge the existing cultural, political, legal, commercial, and

educational systems to change fundamentally not only the language but also

the very institutions in which they do business. . . . In the process, Ameri-

cans could be pitched into a soul-searching redefinition of fundamental ideas

such as the meaning of citizenship and national identity. . . . If we seek his-

torical guidance, the closest example we have at hand is in the diagonally op-

posite corner of the North American continent, in Quebec. The possibility

looms, that in the next generation or so we will see a kind of Chicano Quebec

take shape in the American Southwest, as a group emerges with strong cul-

tural cohesiveness and sufficient economic and political strength to insist on

changes in the overall society’s ways of organizing itself and conducting its

affairs.41

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36 ConstruCting and Challenging myths

By using the word “Chicano,” Kennedy was expanding the threat to include

U.S.-born Mexican Americans, who, in this scenario, would maintain a dis-

tinctive culture and language “indefinitely.” The heretical idea that U.S.-born

Chicanos were steeped in U.S. culture and spoke English was not a part of the

scenario—otherwise where would be the threat? Kennedy simply assumed that

U.S.-born Chicanos had so little social, cultural, political, or economic capital

in U.S. society that they would want to form a separate country. Otherwise,

if these “truths” were not self-evident, proof of a reconquest conspiracy and

proof of Latino unwillingness to integrate socially and culturally would have to

be provided in no uncertain detail. But because these taken-for-granted truths

were self-evident, merely invoking the Quebec example served as ample evi-

dence that a certifiable Latino threat existed.

Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren also found an increase in alarmist

rhetoric and imagery in their analysis of the New York Times, Washington Post,

Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times between 1965 and 1995. They searched

for the words “undocumented,” “illegal,” or “unauthorized” paired with “Mex-

ico” or “Mexican immigrants” and the words “crisis,” “flood,” or “invasion.”

Massey and Pren found that “the use of the negative metaphors to describe

Mexican immigration was virtually nonexistent in 1965, at least in major news-

papers, but thereafter rose steadily, slowly at first and then rapidly during the

1970s to reach a peak in the late 1970s, roughly at the same time illegal migra-

tion itself peaked.”42 They attributed the increase in negative rhetoric to politi-

cians, who discovered the advantages of raising fears about Latino immigrants

and illegal immigration, and to the media’s realization of how much could be

gained through continued use of verbal and visual images of the border under

siege.

It must be noted that not all public discourse on immigration was alarmist,

especially during the latter half of the 1990s, which experienced an economic

boom. With low unemployment rates and significant job growth, suddenly

immigrant labor was in demand. It was as if Ross Perot’s warning of a “giant

sucking sound” finally took place, except the jobs created were in the United

States and not in Mexico, as he predicted would occur as a result of the North

American Free Trade Agreement of 1994. So many undocumented workers were

drawn to jobs in the United States that about 8.8 million were estimated to be

there in 2000 and 10.3 million in 2004.43 Moreover, the expanding economy cre-

ated a hyper-demand for immigrant labor that pulled Mexican immigrants to

ever more “exotic” locations in the Midwest and the southeastern United States,

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including North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Georgia.44

It was also perhaps due to economic expansion and the need for immigrant

labor that alarmist public discourse was superseded, if only for a few years, by

more moderate views on immigration. George Will, in Newsweek, argued that

today’s immigrants, including Mexicans, were no different from Italians and

other earlier waves of immigrants.45 The AFL-CIO suddenly changed its policy

to one that favored legalizing and unionizing undocumented immigrants.46

Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan noted that immigrants were good

for the economy.47 And George W. Bush, shortly after assuming the presidency

in 2001, put forward an ambitious immigration reform plan that would have

legalized Mexican undocumented immigrants and created a new guest worker

program for Mexican workers.48 Negative reactions to Bush’s proposals dredged

up the reconquest theme, as evidenced by a cartoon of the U.S. president with

Mexico’s president, Vicente Fox (Figure 1.2).

Time magazine’s June 11, 2001, cover image illustrated just how subtly the

idea of reconquest, or a Mexican takeover of the United States, could be evoked

(Figure 1.3). Here were two smiling Latino children dressed like American chil-

dren anywhere might be dressed. Although the image of the children might

have evoked a sense of pleasantness, the text raised an alarm about Mexican

immigration: “Welcome to Amexica: The border is vanishing before our eyes,

creating a new world for all of us.” Because the term Amexica, made up by

figure 1.2. Cartoon of George W. Bush and Mexican president Vicente Fox, in response to

Bush’s immigration reform proposals, by Rick Tuma. Courtesy of CNSNews.com.

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38 ConstruCting and Challenging myths

blending parts of the words America and Mexico, was framed by the “vanishing

border” statement, it was Mexico that was intruding on America, slowly taking

it over or obliterating it. Colors were used to reinforce the message; the letters

are in red, white, and blue, except the C, which is in green, a key color of the

Mexican flag. Suddenly the rather pleasant-looking children were revealed as

part of a reconquest of America, which was occurring because the “vanishing

border” was letting them, and others like them, into the country, thereby creat-

ing a “new world.”

Post-9/11 ameriCa

In the wake of the tragedy of September 11, 2001, the U.S.-Mexico border be-

came associated with a new threat, the gateway through which possible ter-

rorists might enter.49 On January 25, 2002, President Bush released a statement

from the White House, Securing America’s Borders Fact Sheet: Border Security:

“America requires a border management system that keeps pace with expand-

ing trade while protecting the United States and its territories from threats of

terrorist attack, illegal immigration, illegal drugs, and other contraband.” Time

magazine’s cover for September 20, 2004, showed the U.S. flag being torn apart

Time Magazine.

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the latino threat narrative 39

by two light-brown hands. The text stated: “Special Investigation—America’s

Border: Even after 9/11, it’s outrageously easy to sneak in.” In this image, the flag

represented both the fabric of the nation, which was being torn apart, and the

border between safety and terrorists trying to enter the country. The implicit

message was that this shredding of the nation’s border and the flag must be

stopped.

The new threat of terrorism resulted in calls for controlling the border as a

means of improving homeland security. As Mark Krikorian, executive director

of the Center for Immigration Studies, put it: “Blocking the enemy’s ability to

enter our country must be a central objective of homeland security.”50 That

none of the terrorists involved in the 9/11 carnage crossed the U.S.-Mexico bor-

der illegally was beside the point. Post-9/11 concerns with “the terrorist threat”

and national security resulted in greatly increased funding for border surveil-

lance and control, including passage of a bill to build a seven-hundred-mile

fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. Despite the added urgency of the new ter-

rorist threat, the old triple threat posed by Mexican immigration has continued

to play a key role in public discourse on immigration after 9/11.

Not long after 9/11, Patrick J. Buchanan’s book The Death of the West was

published. The book’s subtitle laid bare the author’s perspective: How Dying

Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. In

a chapter titled “La Reconquista,” Buchanan continued arguments he had pub-

lished in the Los Angeles Times almost a decade earlier. Not only was the Mexican

population in the United States growing rapidly, but there was also the problem

of assimilation: “Mexicans not only come from another culture, but millions are

of another race. History and experience teach us that different races are far more

difficult to assimilate” (p. 125). So this “Mexican race” had difficulty assimilat-

ing for reasons that were biological, what Buchanan perceived as their inherent

difference. This racial problem was different from a supposed lack of desire to

assimilate, which was cultural. But Buchanan added this to the mix as well:

Unlike the immigrants of old . . . [m]illions of [Mexicans] have no desire

to learn English or to become citizens. America is not their home; Mexico

is; and they wish to remain proud Mexicans. They have come here to work.

Rather than assimilate, they create Little Tijuanas in U.S. cities. . . . With their

own radio and TV stations, newspapers, films, and magazines, the Mexican

Americans are creating an Hispanic culture separate and apart from Ameri-

ca’s larger culture. They are becoming a nation within a nation. (pp. 125–26)

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40 ConstruCting and Challenging myths

Notice how quickly and easily Buchanan’s focus on immigrants had expanded

to include their children, and even later generations of Mexican Americans,

who were creating a separate culture and nation. A few pages later, Buchanan

put forward the Quebec model as the “predictable” future of California: “Amer-

ica’s largest state is on its way to becoming a predominantly Third World state.

No one knows how this will play out, but California could become another

Quebec, with demands for formal recognition of its separate and unique His-

panic culture and identity” (p. 140).

Victor Davis Hanson published Mexifornia: A State of Becoming in 2003.

Hanson, a fifth-generation Californian from a farming family, lamented for

times gone by, for the good old days when “the offspring of Selma’s immigrant

farmers learned English, they intermarried, and within a generation they knew

nothing of the old country and little of the old language”:

Now Selma is an edge city on the freeway of somewhere near twenty thousand

anonymous souls, and is expanding at an unclenched pace, almost entirely

because of massive and mostly illegal immigration from a single country:

Mexico. . . . I was deeply attached to the old town, now vanished. It was by no

means perfect, but it was a society of laws and customs, not a frontier town like

the current one, in which thousands reside illegally, have no lawful documen-

tation, and assume that Selma must adapt to their ways, not the reverse. (p. 2)

Hanson found that in America today schools were not interested in assimilat-

ing immigrants and their children. He deplored the “identity politics” of Chi-

cano studies programs. He believed that the children of Mexican immigrants

lacked an interest in becoming part of U.S. society, which led to their dropping

out of school, becoming gang members, and causing problems. Compounding

the problem, as Hanson saw it, was that Mexican immigrant families adhered

to a culture that stressed having many children.

Both Hanson and Buchanan pointed to the cultural politics of Chicano

studies programs and professors and to the student organization MEChA

(Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), a college student organization,

for perpetuating an ideology that claims the U.S. Southwest as Aztlán, the

mythical homeland of the Aztecs. This so-called ideology of Aztlán became

fused with the Quebec model in public discourse surrounding the 2003 race for

governor of California. Cruz Bustamante, the lieutenant governor, ran against

actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Schwarzenegger won. One of the key issues

raised about Bustamante was his participation in MEChA when he was an

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the latino threat narrative 41

undergraduate student.51 Opponents characterized MEChA, and thus Busta-

mante by association, as an organization that advocated the Chicano takeover

of the American Southwest because it was once Aztlán and thus rightfully

theirs.52 An image that appeared on the September 5–11, 2003, cover of the OC

Weekly, published in California’s Orange County, satirically represented Busta-

mante as an Aztec warrior, a representation the magazine was critiquing, not

advocating. The illustration had Bustamante wearing an eagle headdress com-

plete with large feathers and large Aztec earplugs, as he stared off into space.

The text read: “Fear of a Brown Planet: Cruz Bustamante Rises, Conservatives

Freak Out.” Thus, Cruz Bustamante, despite his protestations, had become an

Aztec warrior, a separatist, a member of the “Brown Klan,” and a militant intent

on “reconquering” the American Southwest.

Business Week’s March 15, 2004, issue raised the possibility that a separate

Hispanic nation might emerge within the United States. The bold headline

on the issue’s cover visibly shouted “Hispanic Nation,” followed by “Hispanics

are an immigrant group like no other. Their huge numbers are changing old

ideas about assimilation. Is America ready?” (Figure 1.4). Also included on the

cover was a photograph of a Latino family that stood in ironic opposition to

figure 1.4. Cover of March 15, 2004, edition of Business Week. Reprinted by permission.

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42 ConstruCting and Challenging myths

the cover’s text; the family’s dress suggested that they were solidly middle class

and the caption noted that they lived in Cicero, Illinois, outside the traditional

areas of concentration for the Latino population—California, Texas, Florida,

and New York.

Despite this visual incongruity, the cover’s text represented the Latino pop-

ulation as unique in contrast to other immigrant groups, who did not form

separate independent nations in the United States and for whom assimilation

was, supposedly, a smooth and linear process. Assimilation for other immi-

grant groups, historically and today, has been set up as a banner example of

the “old ideas about assimilation.” We can only assume that the Hispanics that

were the subject of Business Week’s 2004 cover were changing these old ideas in

ways that reflected not assimilation but rather the social, cultural, and linguistic

separatism that would result in a separate nation. In other words, Business Week

offered yet another rendition of the Quebec model.

That same year, Samuel Huntington published Who We Are: Challenges to

America’s National Identity, which focused on the threat of Mexican immigra-

tion. He repeated the problems with Mexican immigration found in the quotes

at the beginning of this chapter. He spoke of a Mexican reconquista, a blurring

of the border between Mexico and the United States, and the problem of a

blending of cultures (p. 221). This was happening, according to Huntington, be-

cause “Mexican immigrants and their progeny have not assimilated into Amer-

ican society as other immigrants did in the past and as many other immigrants

are doing now” (p. 222). He asserted that the areas where Mexican immigrants

and their children were not assimilating were in use of English, educational

attainment, occupation and incomes, and intermarriage, adding: “If this trend

continues, it could produce a consolidation of the Mexican-dominant areas

into an autonomous, culturally and linguistically distinct, economically self-

reliant bloc within the United States” (p. 247). In short, as in the Quebec model,

the reconquista would lead to the formation of a separate nation (p. 230).

Appearing in 2006 was Patrick J. Buchanan’s second book on the topic, State

of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. With chap-

ters titled “The Invasion,” “The Aztlán Plot,” and “The Return to Tribalism,”

Buchanan’s message that a Mexican invasion was taking place was apparent.

Speaking of the reconquista, however, Buchanan added a novel twist of trans-

national conspiracy to the retelling: for over a decade Mexico and its president,

Vicente Fox, had pursued a strategy that “aims directly at a reannexation of the

Southwest, not militarily, but ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, through

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the latino threat narrative 43

transfer of millions of Mexicans into the United States and a migration of

‘Anglos’ out of the lands Mexico lost in 1848” (p. 125). Buchanan noted, “In

California, the project is well advanced. As native-born Californians depart,

Hispanics move toward dominance. As Mexicans come in the millions—one

in six is already here—they are urged to seek U.S. citizenship to advance the

agenda of the mother country” (p. 125). Later, he explained a bit more about

how the takeover would occur: “La Reconquista is not to be accomplished by

force of arms, as was the U.S. annexation of the Southwest and California in

1848. It is to be carried out by a nonviolent invasion and cultural transforma-

tion of that huge slice of America into a Mexamerican borderland” (p. 132).

Also in 2006, Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project, and Je-

rome R. Corsi published Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders.

Although the book was as much about Jim Gilchrist and the Minuteman Proj-

ect as it was about undocumented immigration, it reiterated the Mexican inva-

sion theme in a chapter titled “The Trojan Horse Invasion,” and the reconquest

theme in a chapter titled “The Reconquista Movement: Mexico’s Plan for the

American Southwest.”

On May 11, 2010, Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed the state’s law on eth-

nic studies, known as HB 2281. The law reflects the perceived threat of Latinos

and their alleged reconquista of the U.S. Southwest. As the law states, “A school

district or charter school in this state shall not include in its program of in-

struction any courses or classes that include any of the following: 1. Promote

the overthrow of the United States government.”53 Anti-immigrant proponents

such as John Huppenthal, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction,

decided that Mexican American studies programs in Arizona’s high schools

promoted a takeover of the United States despite the lack of evidence sup-

porting such a claim. According to the Los Angeles Times, a report undertaken

by Huppenthal’s own office actually found no such evidence but did find that

the classes promoted ethnic and racial tolerance and increased positive school

performance.54 Nevertheless, the pervasiveness and taken-for-granted assump-

tions of the Latino Threat Narrative overwhelmed opposition to the school

board’s actions.

In 2011, Patrick J. Buchanan published his third book warning of America’s

impending doom: Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? Bu-

chanan notes that recent Mexican presidents have declared that the Mexican

nation (people) extends into the United States (pp. 138–39). He also sees evi-

dence of a conspiracy to take over the United States in Mexico’s dual nationality

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44 ConstruCting and Challenging myths

laws. He claims Mexico is constructing a Mexican nation inside the United

States, where U.S. citizens of Mexican birth and ancestry place loyalty to Mex-

ico before allegiance to the United States (p. 138). Buchanan then returns to his

oft-stated point: “Not only is our melting pot cracked, it has been repudiated

in favor of multiculturalism. Immigrants are urged to keep their language, cus-

toms, traditions, culture, and national identity. And the largest cohort comes

from a country, Mexico” (p. 142). The problem with Buchanan’s ad hominen ar-

gument about the threat to the nation posed even by citizen Latinos is that there

is no evidence to support their alleged lack of allegiance to the United States

nor information on changing language use and related cultural behaviors.

In May 2012, the U.S. Justice Department sued Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Mari-

copa County in Arizona for “racially profiling Latinos, abusing them in his jails

and retaliating against his critics.”55 These alleged unconstitutional behaviors

on Sheriff Arpaio’s part were directed against Latino citizens and immigrants

alike. Arpaio has achieved a level of notoriety rarely bestowed on a county sher-

iff. But for Sheriff Joe, being hailed as “America’s Toughest Sheriff” harkens

back to the exploits of earlier western lawmen, such as Wyatt Earp, Bat Mas-

terson, and Pat Garrett. Why is the sheriff so tough on Latinos? His 2008 book

(co-authored by Len Sherman), Joe’s Law: America’s Toughest Sheriff Takes on

Illegal Immigration, Drugs, and Everything Else That Threatens America, offers a

clue. Latinos threaten America, he writes, because they are not like his own Ital-

ian immigrant parents, who did not view America as somehow once belonging

to Italy. For Latinos: “A growing movement among not only Mexican nationals

but also some Mexican-Americans contends that the United States stole the

territory that is now California, Arizona, and Texas, for a start, and that massive

immigration over the border will speed and guarantee the reconquista of these

lands, returning them to Mexico” (p. 48).

the latino threat narrative as disCourse

Perhaps it is only by becoming aware of the mind-numbing repetition glimpsed

in the examples above that we can get a true sense of the degree to which the

narratives of invasion, reconquest, and the Quebec model have become taken-

for-granted assumptions about the threat posed by Mexican immigrants, by

Mexican Americans with multiple generations in the United States, and at

times by all Latinos. Although more could have been included, those presented

above are enough to demonstrate that the pattern has been established. The dis-

course of these pundits, authors, and scholars is unified in its representations of

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the latino threat narrative 45

Latinos, especially Mexican immigrants and their descendants, as people who

will not and cannot become part of U.S. society. The Latino Threat Narra-

tive, as a discourse, is an example of Michel Foucault’s notions of knowledge

and power. The objects of this discourse are represented as the Other and as a

“threat” and “danger” to the nation through such simple binaries as citizen/

foreigner, real Americans / “Mexicans” or real Americans / “Hispanics,” natives/

enemies, us/them, and legitimate/illegal. Once constructed in this way, Mexican

and other Latin American immigrants, and even U.S.-born Latinos, can then

be represented as “space invaders”—as Nirmal Puwar has put it—whose repro-

duction, both social and biological, threatens to destroy the nation’s identity.56

What I am getting at might better be understood in relation to Antonio

Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and common sense.57 Hegemony is the system

of values, attitudes, morality, and other beliefs that passively or actively sup-

port the established order and thus the class interests that dominate it. Com-

mon sense is the largely unconscious and uncritical way of perceiving the world

that is widespread in any given historical epoch. Common sense incorporates

within it the prevailing consciousness, or hegemony, that is largely internalized

and taken for granted by members of society.

The Latino Threat Narrative works so well and is so pervasive precisely be-

cause its basic premises are taken for granted as true. In this narrative, Latinos,

whether immigrant or U.S.-born, are a homogenous population that some-

how stands apart from normal processes of historical change. They are im-

mutable and impervious to the influences of the larger society and thus are not

characterized as experiencing social and cultural change. They are uneducated,

monolingual Spanish speakers, segregated into ethnic enclaves. Because they

lead separate social and linguistic lives, one must assume that they marry only

their own kind. They are locked into Catholic doctrine, leading to high fertil-

ity rates. In this narrative, Latinos, especially Mexican immigrants and their

children, are seldom represented as agents of positive change, because their

unwillingness to integrate denies them the opportunity to influence the larger

society in any appreciable way, except in the negative—as a threat to existing

institutions (e.g., education, social services, medical). In other words, the La-

tino Threat Narrative posits a neo-evolutionary scenario but in reverse, the de-

volution of society. Because of these characteristics, Latinos, especially those

of Mexican origin, are said to be outside the practices of citizenship/subject-

making and incapable of feelings of belonging.58 In this way, the Latino Threat

Narrative constructs distinctions between citizens and noncitizens, elaborating

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46 ConstruCting and Challenging myths

a segmented citizenship in which some members of society are valued above

others. Such differences, once constructed and normalized, rationalize and

justify governmental practices and policies that stigmatize and punish certain

categories of immigrants and their children.

The discursive construction of Mexican immigrants and their children, and

often of Latinos in general, resonates with anthropologist Mary Douglas’s in-

sights into the cultural constructions of Purity and Danger. She argues that

culture classifies things and people into categories that make order out of an

otherwise chaotic existence. When something or someone is “out of place,” it

or they are often considered dangerous, as pollution, threatening the purity of

those in place—that is, in their “proper” category. Mexicans in the United

States are constructed in the discourse examined here as people out of place

and thus as a threat to the nation in which they reside. Put another way, one

that Benedict Anderson might agree with, the Latino Threat Narrative does

not imagine Latinos, whether immigrants or U.S.-born, as part of the national

community.59 When they do enter into the social imaginary, however, it is as an

internal threat to the larger community.

Through news stories, TV and radio talk shows, movies, and more, the

media construct social imaginaries, the implicit understandings that form

collective subjectivities and make common practices possible.60 Social imagi-

naries, argues Edward LiPuma, exist by virtue of representations and provide

the taken-for-granted assumptions about identities (e.g., citizens, immigrants,

consumers) and belonging in the world. For people immersed in these social

imaginaries “there appear to be no genuine alternatives,” for “modern agents

have increasingly come to imagine these imaginaries as the unquestionably real

and natural ground for acting in the world.”61

The Latino Threat Narrative is a social imaginary in which Latinos are “vir-

tual characters.” They exist as “illegal aliens,” “illegitimate recipients of organ

donations,” “highly fertile invaders,” and “unassimilable separatists bent on a

reconquest of the U.S. Southwest.” Their lives are part of a virtual reality, one

that is not necessarily tied to empirical evidence. Learning what we know about

immigrants indirectly through the media is what anthropologists Daniel Miller

and James G. Carrier call virtualism.62 Virtualism is a critique of contemporary

capitalist society and the problems that result when virtual reality is perceived

as reality and then we attempt to make the world conform to that virtual vi-

sion.63 We learn about the Latino threat through the media, but the actual lives

of Latinos, whether immigrants or U.S.-born, may not correspond to those

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the latino threat narrative 47

constructed, virtual lives. And yet anti-immigrant sentiment and immigration

laws are in many ways a response to what we think we know about the Latino

threat based on the virtual lives with which we are familiar.

The virtual lives of “Mexicans,” “Chicanos,” “illegal aliens,” and “immi-

grants” become abstractions and representations that stand in the place of real

lives. Rather than actual lives, virtual lives are generalized, iconic, and typified

and are turned into statistical means. They are aggregate figures melded into

cost-benefit analyses. They are no longer flesh-and-blood people; they exist

as images. Because of this, a “global card trick” occurs between virtual per-

sonas and real-life personas.64 The virtual personas of Latino immigrants—

represented as a threat to the nation—make the authority that has accumulated

for real immigrants in their role as workers and consumers vanish. The posi-

tive contributions of Latino immigrants often disappear in public discourse

by means of this card trick. Through their very visible marches and demon-

strations, immigrants have attempted to subvert the taken-for-granted truths

accorded to virtual immigrants and to assert what they believe are their very

real, material contributions to society.

As we make this critique of modern culture, we must always keep in mind

that real immigrants do exist. Undocumented immigrants have lives. Immi-

grants and their children eat, breathe, and dream in cities and towns across

America. How their actual lives “live up to” their virtual lives as represented in

the Latino Threat Narrative is the subject of the next chapter.

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