The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity

Rebordering the Nation: Hybrid Rhetoric in the Immigrant Marches of 2006

3 Rebordering the Nation Hybrid Rhetoric in the Immigrant Marches of 2006 Latina/o immigrants remain in(sub)ordinate, both because that space of in-between-ness that Latina/o immigrants occupy is always subalternised and other-ified. But also, and herein lies the promising menace of that space, as the makers of in(sub)ordinate speech. —Nathaniel I. “Nacho” Córdova Between March and May of 2006, several million people, mostly documented and undocumented immigrants, engaged in organized protests of proposed federal immigration legislation in cities throughout the country. In Chicago, for example, one hundred thousand people marched, while in Washington, DC, forty thousand protestors gathered outside the capitol. Demonstrators in Milwaukee numbered almost fifteen thousand, while in Denver and Detroit nearly fifty thousand congregated. In Los Angeles, on March 25, 2006, almost a million people filled the streets in one of the largest demonstrations of recent history. One of the first and most influential of these nationwide protests, La Gran Marcha in Los Angeles spurred demonstrations in cities across the country for close to two months. In towns large and small, from Des Moines, Iowa, to New York City, protestors organized by the thousands, demanding that immigrants be granted rights, protections, and a clear path to nationalization.1 These recent protests, and the anti-immigrant and restrictive legislation that spurred them, typify the contestation over borders and citizenship traced throughout this book as well as the enduring tension between exclusion and inclusion that structures the nation’s civic imaginary. Renewed attempts to police the boundaries of U.S. citizenship and strengthen the borders of the nation in the form of anti-immigrant laws and vigilante border policing constitute contemporary moments of rhetorical and material bordering. Though some of the motivations for these bordering 84 | Chapter 3 practices remain the same, the border also moves and materializes in response to a number of new challenges, including neoliberal economics, globalization, and new waves of transnational migration. In this context, contemporary immigrant rights demonstrations represent moments of vernacular rhetoric through which Latina/os and immigrants have cooperated with and contested borders, articulating renewed and reimagined visions of U.S. citizenship. These vernacular rhetorics, however, are not without their own problems, for modern movements often mobilize against nativist policies only to reify the very exclusivity of U.S. citizenship. In this chapter I unpack these arguments by analyzing the protests and demonstrations over immigration policy that took place throughout 2006. In particular, I focus on La Gran Marcha because it was one of the earliest, largest, and most influential of the nationwide protests. This particular demonstration highlights a vernacular rhetorical strategy through which Latina/o and immigrant movements contested borders and performed U.S. citizenship. I argue that contemporary protest movements evince the emergence of a hybrid Latina/o citizenship discourse that fuses multiple national traditions, diverse cultures and languages, different political identities, and various constituents. Rather than negotiating assimilation or articulating a border discourse that moved between and held in tension belonging and alienness, some contemporary Latina/o vernacular discourses, evidenced in the 2006 pro-immigrant demonstrations, can be understood as crafting a hybrid, transnational vision of the national imaginary. Rather than performing inclusion or straddling the borders of citizenship, the vernacular discourses I examine in this chapter transcend these options to create something new that challenges the preeminence of race, legality, culture , and single-state national identity. Before exploring these vernacular rhetorics of hybridity and citizenship in more detail, this chapter first discusses the contexts of contemporary immigrant mobilizations and evolving politics of borders and immigration , and then I explain my use of the term hybridity and how it helps to contextualize the vernacular performances of citizenship by immigrant and Latina/o social movements, which are examined in the third section of the chapter. Bordering Contemporary Immigration Scholars and political pundits who write about the contemporary challenges to borders and citizenship have increasingly noted a broad set of transformations in the civic imaginary. They argue that twentieth-century economic, demographic, and cultural changes brought on by globalization have rearranged the terrain of borders and citizenship.2 In particular, one of the oft-repeated claims is that the integration Rebordering the Nation | 85 of the global economy, communication networks, relations of governance, and the greater flow of people across national borders demonstrates how the strictly national paradigms of citizenship and borders fall short. Observations concerning the evolving transnational dimensions...