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Introduction On Border Crossings and the Crossing Border The border is also a migrant. —Rebecca Solnit We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us. —Popular slogan in the immigrant rights movement The “problem” of the U.S.-Mexico border and of the borders of U.S. identity seems to grow ever larger in the political debate and public discourse of the United States. This is reflected in more and more instances of anxiety over the sanctity of the border (or lack thereof), increasing efforts to shore up border security, and greater contestation over the meaning and potential pliability of the borders between “citizen” and “foreigner.” As evidence of these observations, consider a few examples from the last decade. In the summer of 2005, the “Minutemen Civil Defense Corps” and the “Minuteman Project” organized in Arizona to take border enforcement into their own hands. Angered by what they perceived as the “crisis” of illegal immigration, the Minutemen groups organized their own efforts at border enforcement: policing the border between the United States and Mexico, confronting border crossers, pressuring the U.S. Border Patrol to step up its own enforcement efforts, and creating an all-around mass media spectacle for the twenty-four-hour TV news networks. Concurrent with and also partly because of these vigilante border movements, then-president George W. Bush mounted a nationwide campaign for immigration reform, the efforts of which culminated in debate over HR 4437 (known as the Sensenbrenner bill) in late 2005 and early 2006. In response to this proposed immigration reform bill, Latina/o and immigrant groups across the country organized dozens of protests throughout the 2 | Introduction summer of 2006, claiming that the legislation would enact a number of overly restrictive immigration provisions. By the end of 2006, several million protestors had organized to demand rights and paths to naturalization for undocumented immigrants.1 In the wake of these mass mobilizations, a number of state and localgovernments— from Arizona and Utah to Georgia and Virginia—instituted some of the most restrictive immigration legislation in decades. Though differing in the details, these measures were part of a concerted effort to step up border enforcement by further criminalizing undocumented immigration as well as legalizing police surveillance and profiling of suspected “illegal aliens.” Protests, boycotts, and court battles that arose in response to one of these specific laws, Arizona’s SB 1070, attracted national attention. Much of that law was eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a high-profile case. At the same time, immigrant rights groups, emboldened by the limited success of the 2006 protests, organized for the passage of the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors), which would provide avenues for naturalization of immigrant youth. Despite a variety of protests and media spectacles by DREAM activists, the DREAM Act was defeated in Congress in 2010.2 These contemporary examples demonstrate that political controversy about the “problem” of the border and the borders of U.S. citizenship has reached renewed intensity . On one hand, border anxiety has bred attempts to militarize the border, enforce immigration policy, and police the boundaries of U.S. identity. On the other, these efforts have been met with protests, contestation, and attempts to negotiate the parameters of citizenship. Contemporary controversies over borders, immigration, and U.S. identity attest to the shifting nature of borders, both physical and figurative— to their porousness and pliability, to the prevalence and persistence of border transgressions , and to the impossibility of keeping borders intact.3 The Border Crossed Us explores these and other efforts to restrict and expand U.S. citizenship and the borders of national belonging. The title of the book is drawn from a popular saying of contemporary immigrant activists—“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” This slogan exemplifies two important themes of the book. First, it encapsulates my emphasis on performative rhetorics of borders and citizenship : how public discourse creates, contests, and moves the borders of belonging, both metaphorically and materially. Second, the slogan points to my particular focus on Latina/o vernacular discourses of borders and citizenship—on rhetoric about borders and citizenship that emerges from Latina/o communities. Through critical rhetorical analysis of public discourse, The Border Crossed Us explores case studies of debate over borders and citizenship in the context of U.S. Latina/ os. I pay particular attention to how Latina/o groups—including Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Chicana/os, and Latina/o immigrants—cooperated with, challenged, and...

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