The Rhetorics of US Immigration: Identity, Community, Otherness ed. by Johanna Hartelius (review)

The book The Rhetorics of US Immigration provides its readers with “an integrated sense of the rhetorical multiplicity circulating among and about immigrants” through “innovative inquiry” that examines (1) rhetorical authority in immigration debates and its epistemological implications, (2) the struggles of DREAMers between the need to intervene publicly and politically and the fear that encourages invisibility and secrecy, (3) how citizenship is more often defined in terms of who is not rather than who is an American, and (4) the function of mediated emotion and affect that “elicit strong emotions in target audiences” (1, 11–14). Consistent with the project’s objective to consider the “synergistic discovery of intersections” within and between the chapters, Hartelius introduces the volume by situating the chapters within the political, economic, and rhetorical elements of immigration, and D. Robert Dechane concludes by complicating our notions of community/communion, immigration, and some ethico-political considerations. In line with the project’s objective, our exposition of the chapters attempts to find ways the chapters mutually inform the different symbolic strategies employed on the issue of immigration, including invitational rhetoric, redefinition, negation, and cultural enthymemes.

Alesandra B. Von Burg and Yazmin Lazcano-Pry invite us to engage the personal stories of immigration told by immigrants. Von Burg analyzes the Where Are You From? Project, a collection of video interviews and narratives about experiences of migration and mobility, and argues these digital narratives make it possible to invent new ways of seeing immigration that allow us to consider the mobility of people horizontally rather than hierarchically. Lazcano-Pry analyzes Documented Dreams, a compilation of letters written by undocumented students at GateWay Early College High School to potential donors. In these letters, the students flex their rhetorical expertise as they adeptly perform citizenship by sharing their experience as immigrants. J. David Cisneros’s essay complicates the strategic potential of shared personal experiences in 30 Days. Through his analysis, he demonstrates why “repeated attempts to humanize immigrants in pop culture and political rhetoric have failed” and also offers suggestions as to how “such efforts could be undertaken more productively” (253).

Essays in the volume also consider the strategy of redefinition. Anne Teresa Demo’s analysis of Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journal of Hope, a document jointly produced by U.S. and Mexican Catholic bishops, demonstrates how the Catholic bishops used Pope John Paul II’s “hemispheric vision of ecclesial solidarity” to argue for greater protections for the “‘inherent human dignity’” of migrants, regardless of legal status (57, 59). To make the argument regarding the effective function of providing a “check on state sovereignty,” the bishops employed a strategy where they first affirmed and then contested a state’s right to deny passage (61). The question Demo posits in the essay’s closing is: “As clergy increasingly seek to alter the political debate about immigration policy, will the focus be on reconceiving the stranger or the state?” (64).

Claudia A. Anguiano analyzes an example of redefinition through “self-identification” in the “Undocumented and Unafraid” campaign in 2010, where “undocumented youths openly defied fear and criminalization” (103). Karma I. Chávez’s essay is concerned with the systemic nature of definition in her queer rhetorical critique of the National Immigrant Justice Center’s petition. Chávez finds that although LGBT people should have their abuses addressed, the rhetoric of the petition naturalizes the “criminalization” of migrants and ignores the “horrific treatment” that has been “well documented” and directed at “imprisoned migrants of all genders and sexual identities” (78). Moreover, the petition “misses the broader context of queer and trans oppression, which includes a complex of economic and material conditions” (83).

Anguiano analyzes Colorblind.com’s call to “Drop the I-Word” as an attempt to redefine undocumented immigrants as not “illegal” because doing so is inaccurate, dehumanizing, and racist. However, legality has not always been a key...