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8 Looking “Illegal” Affect, Rhetoric, and Performativity in Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 Josue David Cisneros What does it mean to look like a noncitizen? How can someone’s legal citizenship status be determined by their physical characteristics, actions, or demeanor ? These questions point to the embodied and performative levels at which border rhetorics operate in contemporary American society. As essays in this volume by Julia Johnson, Bernadette Calafell, and Dustin Goltz and Kimberlee Pérez demonstrate, discursive and political bordering is situated within a larger body of affects and performances that structure what it means to be a US American. Citizenship and civic belonging are continually (re)enacted, (re)iterated, and read (lacking) on certain bodies through their individual and social performances (Cisneros, “(Re)Bordering”; Hariman and Lucaites).1 in other words, to enact citizenship is to perform a certain way of being rooted in specific affects and emotions (feelings of safety, sameness, belonging, community, and so on).2 Performing particular types of difference, even if unintentional, can compel feelings of “alien-ness” and be construed as evidence of non-belonging (ono, this volume). in the twenty-first century, the illegal, brown, immigrant body demarcates this border between difference and sameness; that is, the figure of the racialized immigrant poses both the principal threat to and the condition of possibility for US citizenship (Calafell, “Disrupting the Dichotomy”; inda, “Performativity”). from national debates about immigration policy to concerns about the color and legal status of the (nonwhite) US president , recent efforts to “protect” the nation and “preserve” US identity have been enacted in opposition to the threat posed by “foreign,” brown bodies (DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic imaginary”; Hasian and McHendry, this volume; Silva). in contrast, US citizenship and civic identity are enacted through a “national affect” that connotes American-ness, which includes the English language, public displays of nationalism, and certain markers of socioeconomic class and race (Muñoz, “feeling Brown” 69). This connection between affects, performance, and citizenship is nowhere more evident than in anti-immigrant campaigns at the regional level. 134 / Cisneros from the infamous Proposition 187 of California to the recent attempts by local governments to enforce federal immigration law (so-called 287[g] agreements), increasingly state and local governments have taken on the onus of policing the borders (both physical and metaphorical) and prosecuting undocumented “aliens” (Cisneros, “Latina/os and Party Politics”; flores, “Constructing national Bodies”; ono and Sloop).The most publicized and most controversial of these recent regional border rhetorics is the state of Arizona’s anti-immigrant legislation, Senate Bill 1070 (“Support our Law Enforcement and Safe neighborhoods Act”). Passed in April of 2010, SB 1070 capitalized on a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment and fears over the potential spillover of “drug war” violence.The legislation aimed to secure the border with Mexico and eliminate undocumented immigrants using an approach to immigration policy known as “attrition through enforcement.” This predominant, aggressive, and nativist approach to immigration policy—which intends to decrease the immigrant population and deter future migration by increasing the surveillance , persecution, and hardship faced by the undocumented—has received support from anti-immigrant groups and is being emulated in states across the country (Chávez, this volume; fernández). Arizona’s infamous antiimmigrant bill has become the model for a host of state and local initiatives to persecute suspected undocumented immigrants, and thus represents a broader materialization in the affective and performative dimensions of contemporary border rhetoric (Wessler, “Hostile State Battles”). i argue that SB 1070 illuminates affective and material dimensions underlying this broader, contemporary approach to immigration developing across the country. in its efforts to police and persecute “illegal aliens,” SB 1070 has faced criticism from immigrants’ rights groups as well as the obama administration , and its reach was limited by federal court injunctions in June 2010. notwithstanding such criticism, Arizona’s legislation represents the escalation of militaristic and aggressive efforts by state and local governments to “secure” the border and prosecute immigrants as criminals, an approach that has achieved renewed purchase in states and localities across the country . i analyze both the legislative text of SB 1070 as well as its surrounding discourse to show that this broader approach to immigration policy (e.g., “attrition through enforcement”) represents a moment of articulation in an affective economy about citizenship, the border, and Latina/o immigrants. Specifically, SB 1070 codifies and materializes the racialized Mexican-Latina/o-brown-illegal-immigrant body as fearful and threatening , and it makes illegality a performative affect...

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