Citizenship Excess: Latino/as, Media, and the Nation

2. Nativism and the 2006 Pro-Immigration Reform Rallies

68 > 69 While Navarro’s approach is quite apt at explaining the convergence of different contexts that produced the PRM’s struggles, he historicizes the rise of nativism as a sort of anomalous civic manifestation in an otherwise promising liberal democracy where hope is possible and reasonable. Implied in his conclusion is that the PRM may have succeeded with better organization , leaders, long-term political platforms, and coalitions. Perhaps. But lost in his analysis are two issues that offer alternative hypotheses to explain the challenges encountered by the PRM. The first is the issue of whether to characterize nativism as anomalous civic behavior or whether to think of it as traditional. I explore the latter possibility. The second is whether the PRM’s successes and failures should be explained mostly in terms of civil society, as Navarro does, or whether to explain them in terms of the public sphere. I concentrate on both elements while emphasizing the latter. My goal is to complement Navarro’s work by suggesting that the PRM’s lack of success at the federal level was partly the result of nativists’ ability to tap into traditional legal and political discourses of xenophobia and their ability to dominate the majoritarian public sphere. At stake here is a view of politics that understands that discourse is central to political processes legitimized by consensus and that to successfully participate in civil society, social movements (and their opponents) need media. A political group may be able to change leadership, may be able to change and refine political programs, but it cannot change the need for media, nor can it, by itself, change media structures. In addition to relying on theorists of the public sphere such as Nancy Fraser (1990) and Jürgen Habermas (1989), I carry on this analysis using Michel Foucault’s (1991, 2007) work on liberal governmentality, a theoretical approach that places discourse at the center of the political while recognizing the liberal reliance on civil society (see chapter 1). It is not difficult to argue that nativism is citizenship excess, evidence of coloniality, and that nativists tend to abuse their political and legal privileges to enact xenophobia. It is harder to think of nativism as normal political and legal behavior that is constitutive of nation-states, as proposed by coloniality. But I believe this hypothesis can be sustained if we reflect on the ease with which nativists came to occupy key locations in the political and media world, without much struggle or fanfare. The ease with which nativists managed to shape the public sphere and actual government speak to the fact that these were not xenophobic exceptions . Attentive to coloniality’s propositions regarding administration, law, and policy, I argue that our traditional political culture of liberalism 70 > 71 migration law from the U.S. Congress. Republican President George W. Bush, a Texan and arguably the most Latino-friendly president ever, had proposed early in his presidency a set of bills that would give millions of undocumented immigrants a path toward citizenship. Together with Mexico’s President Vicente Fox, Bush had drafted an immigration reform bill by 2001 that would have allowed a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. But 9/11 changed the president’s priorities, moving the agenda away from Bush’s hopes for Latino immigrant workers to his fears for mainstream U.S. citizens. For the next few years, the executive office and Congress embraced these fears with almost a pathological gusto, giving shape to a legal framework that effectively accomplished two things. Government legislated more legal ways of enacting xenophobia (e.g., the so-called Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, and wiretapping ) while legally weakening the extraordinary promise of egalitarianism through adjudication of rights represented in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. If citizenship is understood, echoing T. H. Marshall, as “full membership in a community” (1973, 70), everybody’s citizenship suffered . But not everyone suffered to the same degree. Adding ground to the claim that citizenship excess is an active process of ethno-racial political capital accumulation, the post-9/11 United States became a social and cultural landscape fertile for general expressions of ethno-territorial xenophobia (“this is our land”), paralleling the speech acts of a troubling and troubled administration. The United States of Bill O’Reilly (Fox), Lou Dobbs (CNN), Pat Buchanan (Clear Channel), and Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo (U.S. House of Representatives) went mainstream. This...