After the Border Is Closed: Fascism, Immigration, and Internationalism in Ricardo A. Bracho's Puto

Discourses that cast fascism as a product of the Trump administration or as an emergent threat to US liberal democracy and civility whitewash the US ruling class's long history of pursuing fascist and authoritarian modes of political management both within and beyond the borders of its nation-state. A historical materialist and internationalist frame of analysis offers insight into US-based capitalism's historical reliance on the repression, militarized social control, and racialization of different segments of the global proletariat. The struggles of immigrants and refugees are crucial to this history, as well as to understanding the expansion of police states and profiteering from repression in our current conjuncture of capitalist crisis. This essay's analysis of Ricardo A. Bracho's dystopian science fiction play Puto demonstrates how social relations inherent to US-based capitalism and imperialism systematically produce racialized social hierarchies, racist state and parastate violence, militarism, and authoritarian modalities of social control. Puto is set in a near future in which the US state has closed its border with Mexico, revoked the citizenship of felons and left radicals, and established internal borders to police the mobility of those consigned to "ethnic catchment areas," while white supremacist gangs terrorize communists with impunity.