From Threatening Guerrillas to Forever Illegals: US Central Americans and the Cultural Politics of Non-Belonging
The experience of Central Americans in the United States is marked by a vicious contradiction. In entertainment and information media, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are hypervisible as threatening guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and "forever illegals." Central Am...
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Zusammenfassung: | The experience of Central Americans in the United States is
marked by a vicious contradiction. In entertainment and information
media, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are
hypervisible as threatening guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and
"forever illegals." Central Americans are unseen within the broader
conception of Latinx community, foreclosing avenues to
recognition.
Yajaira M. Padilla explores how this regime of visibility and
invisibility emerged over the past forty years-bookended by the
right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump-and how
Central American immigrants and subsequent generations have
contested their rhetorical disfiguration. Drawing from popular
films and TV, news reporting, and social media, Padilla shows how
Central Americans in the United States have been constituted as
belonging nowhere, imagined as permanent refugees outside the
boundaries of even minority representation. Yet in documentaries
about cross-border transit through Mexico, street murals, and other
media, US Central Americans have counteracted their exclusion in
ways that defy dominant paradigms of citizenship and
integration. |
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DOI: | 10.7560/32526-1 |