The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity by Josue David Cisneros (review)

For more than a century and a half, the figure of the border has loomed large in public discourse concerning the character and constitution of U.S. civic identity. At once a spatializing metaphor and a moralizing apparatus for delineating and regulating social difference, a border is both symbolically constructed and materially experienced. It is a preeminently rhetorical construction, or more accurately, an enactment, reflecting motivated political practices and implicated in complex figurations of social-cultural power. Border rhetorics have figured prominently in shaping (im)migrant experience and in struggles to define terms of inclusion in and exclusion from the U.S. national body. Taking border rhetorics seriously, as Josue David Cisneros compellingly argues in The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity, impels rhetorical scholars to reflect critically on how Latina/o individuals and collectivities in the United States have historically constructed, negotiated, and challenged borders of citizenship and identity. Through an array of often-fraught vernacular rhetorics, Cisneros contends, Latina/os have performed and continue to perform a complex, and complicating, (re)bordering of the U.S. civic imaginary.

Departing from traditional scholarly characterizations of citizenship and borders as static and stable entities, The Border Crossed Us proceeds from an assumption that national belonging is a product of rhetorical invention and contestation. Viewed as social constructions that are rhetorically constituted and subject to challenge, Cisneros contends that borders and citizenship are performatively enacted, wrought through hegemonic struggles between “citizen” insiders and “alien” outsiders. These citizen and alien statuses, however, are not static identity categories; rather, they are fluid and variable subject positions replete “with constraining and enabling effects on subjectivity, belonging, and agency” (8). Citing the U.S.-Mexico border and the sociopolitical history of Latina/os in the United States as exemplars of rhetorical and hegemonic struggles over civic identities, Cisneros argues that consideration of “the Latina/o context is crucial to understanding the rhetorical construction and contestation of borders and citizenship” (9). Rather than taking the traditional tack of considering civic identity as it is engendered in majoritarian discourse, Cisneros advocates for the value of a critical examination of Latina/o vernacular rhetorics of borders and citizenship, which “do not just assert social space but also have the potential to radically restructure the boundaries of belonging and the parameters of civic identity” (13).

In the four chapters that follow the introduction, Cisneros develops his argument by way of case analyses of vernacular border rhetorics, tracing an uneven historical trajectory of efforts by Latina/os to define and challenge definitions of national identity. Chapter 1, entitled “Negotiating the Border,” focuses chiefly on debates held at the 1849 California Constitutional Convention in which native Mexican “Californios,” newly colonized as a result of the Mexican-American War and the subsequent Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, attempted to craft an understanding of citizenship that integrated both U.S. and Mexican civic traditions. The appeals by Californios to chart a middle ground between U.S. and Mexican notions of citizenship, argues Cisneros, ultimately failed to generate adequate “epistemic disobedience” (47), owing to their inability to unmoor themselves from the racial and colonial logics that favored prevailing conceptions of Anglo civic culture. Though Californios were unsuccessful in their efforts at the convention, Cisneros argues that such mid-nineteenth-century border rhetorics “illuminate the liberatory and constraining possibilities of Latina/o vernacular discourse and the legacy of Latina/o citizenship struggles throughout U.S. history” (22).

Chapter 2, “Inhabiting the Border,” jumps ahead to the mid-twentieth-century emergence of the Chicano movements and the vernacular rhetorics to which their activism gave voice. Cisneros focuses on the embodied actions of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Alliance of Land Grants) and the rhetorical performances of its leader, Reies López Tijerina, analyzing the group’s movement between poles of assimilation and...