Citizenship Excess: Latino/as, Media, and the Nation

Notes

>> 231 Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. In this book, I use excess in the Marxian, not psychoanalytic or poststructuralist , sense. While in psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, excess means the unruly and potentially progressive undisciplined aspects of reality or language, here I use excess as the accumulation of surplus political value. In this tradition, excess leads to abuses of power. 2. For an elaboration of ethno-racialization of Latinas/os, see Aparicio (1994) and Molina-Guzmán (2010, 4–7). For a fascinating example of its complexity, see Frances Negrón-Muntaner (2002). 3. I am particularly indebted to the following: Rodolfo Acuña, Tomás Almaguer, Linda Bosniak, Wendy Brown, Nicholas De Genova, Enrique Dussel, Lisa Flores, Ian Haney-López, Cheryl Harris, Bonnie Honig, Engin Isin, Walter Mignolo, Toby Miller, David Montejano, Armando Navarro, Chon Noriega, Michael Omi, Aihwa Ong, Anibal Quijano, América Rodriguez, George Sanchez , Otto Santa Ana, Rogers Smith, Howard Winant, and Aristide Zolberg. Others play a very important role, in particular in the developing of cases, but these scholars are this book’s theoretical and historical DNA. 4. I use the term Latinas/os to designate populations with ethnic or historical roots in Latin America and the Caribbean (Romero and Habell-Pallán 2002). I am aware that the category itself is unstable and racially and ethnically complex and that it includes communities that seem to have little in common. It designates families with centuries-old roots in the U.S. territories, particularly in the Southwest, as well as immigrants who have just arrived. It includes colonial subjects such as Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, Cuban political refugees, part of the Latin American intellectual elites who have found themselves immigrants in the metropoles, and what some scholars call “economic refugees,” a large category of immigrants forced north for economic reasons. Differences notwithstanding , most of these communities have been ethnicized and racialized similarly by racial formations that construct them as foreign (regardless of their citizenship status) and as ethnic and racial others (De Genova and RamosZayas 2003, 2; Mayer 2004; Oboler 2006, 11; Pérez 2004; Rivero 2005, 129–131). Lastly, it is worth remarking that the culture of Latinas/os with Mexican ancestry looms large over other immigrants and Latino citizens and that this culture is also quasi-hegemonic. This produces tensions. For instance, in reference 232 > 233 14. I use liberal and republican in the way political scientists use them. In political theory, liberalism is a type of government that has the central goal of engendering individual freedoms and equal rights. Republicanism is a type of government controlled by the citizens and, thus, is the basis for democracy. The United States is typically historicized and theorized as a political organization based both on liberal and republican ideals. 15. On this I am not alone. Nicole Waligora-Davis (2011) does the significant work of refiguring the effects of race on African Americans by theorizing a racial location based on ethno-territoriality. Her work wisely privileges the terminology of refugee, asylum seeker, and alien to help us reimagine African American history from the position of space or, better, lack of space. Simply, centuries after arrival, African Americans are yet to find sanctuary in this nation, “a site in which the sanctity of human life is preserved” (xiii). Similar to WaligoraDavis in my commitment to reimagining race from the position of space and legal imaginaries, but less expectant that the nation can become sanctuary for Latina/os, my theory of citizenship excess avoids the language of yearning. 16. This issue was already relevant in Marx’s time. He discusses it in his famous writing “On the Jewish Question,” where he supports the evolution of an abstract, as opposed to religious or, I might add, ascriptionist, state (Marx 1975, 211–241). 17. For theories of the new racism, see Bonilla-Silva (2001, 193), Oliver and Shapiro (2006, 19), and Wilson (1996, 219). 18. For a detailed elaboration on subjectivity and self, see P. Smith (1988, xxiii–xiv) and Miller (1993). 19. There are significant differences in the way different communities relate to citizenship. The clearest cases are differences between Mexicans, who are often linked to foreignness and illegality, and Puerto Ricans, who have been U.S. citizens but colonial subjects for a century (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003). 20. To read on issues of whiteness in the Puerto Rican context, see NegrónMuntaner (2002, 47–53). 21. It is worth noting that legal historian José Cabranes never found...