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>> 1 Introduction: Latinas/os and Citizenship Excess In April 2010, Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed what at the time many observers considered the toughest immigration bill in the nation at a state level (Archibold 2010). The law ordered immigrants to carry their alien registration documents at all times and required police to question any detainees that they believed might be in the United States illegally. Opponents of the law argued that it would inevitably lead to racial profiling against the Latino population. In the weeks that followed, a mediated national debate about the merits of the law pitted Latino groups, human rights and social justice activists, nativist organizations, politicians, city councils, members of state and federal congresses, and an ever-polarizing media against each other. President Obama criticized the law but also explicitly agreed with some of the rationale used by Governor Brewer; he allocated an additional twelve hundred National Guard troops and half a billion dollars for increased border security. In the weeks that followed, politicians in other states began contemplating copying Arizona’s law. On May 2010, the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute released data 2 > 3 as hierarchies that are not strictly vertical: they are also about geography, about the difference between the here and there, about borders, about us-versus-them and the protection of the nation-state. Citizenship excess hence explains anti-Latino and anti-immigrant sentiment as both a pushing down (racism) and a pushing away (xenophobia) that accomplishes the goal of preserving the ethno-racial character of the nation-state. That is, citizenship excess is concerned with the ability of whites to claim a legitimate monopoly over the state. This ability is based in ideas of race that not only work internally (as vertical hierarchies) but are always embedded in transnational relations and politics because they originated in transnational relations and were used to justify internal and external colonialism (D. Gutiérrez 1999; Molina-Guzmán 2010, 14; Pérez 2004, 6, 95; Ana Rodríguez 2002; Romero and Habell-Pallán 2002, 4; Valdivia 2008). I call this theory citizenship excess because it is the citizen who is the political actor within the nation-state, because citizenship is how we articulate the relationship of individuals to states, and therefore citizenship and its excess is how we express ethno-racial supremacy. To construct political legitimacy in today’s society requires media, and therefore citizenship excess is also a media theory that explains how media structures participate in the pushing down and the pushing away of Latinas/os. The pushing down is done by discriminating against Latino participation in mainstream media (discussed in chapter 5) and by foreclosing Latino participation in media narratives that problematize Latino life in the United States (discussed in chapters 3 and 6). As in politics, the pushing down secures the preservation of vertical ethno-racial hierarchies .2 The pushing away is accomplished in media through processes of ethnic and linguistic balkanization that separate Spanish-language media (SLM), the only segment of U.S. media that consistently serves Latinas/ os, from mainstream media, which most Americans define in linguistic terms (discussed in chapters 2 and 4). The pushing away reconstructs the walls that stop access of Latinas/os to traditional ethno-racially white media, hence making it practically impossible for Latinas/os to participate in the majority’s public sphere. Both the discrimination (pushing down) and balkanization (pushing away) of Latinas/os secure the supremacy of ethno-racially white interests in political cultures and over the state. The theory of citizenship excess is rooted in history, and it relies on a set of political and cultural theories that explain political capital accumulation and its impact on Latinas/os. This introductory chapter elaborates on these roots by showing that uneven ethno-racial political capital 4 > 5 the number of Latinas/os was growing at a remarkable pace became a decade of anti-Latino and anti-immigrant politics. Our media environment reflected this duality, with SLM extolling the national benefits of Latino growth, and, increasingly, large portions of English-language media (ELM) crying foul. What began as fringe politics and extreme ELM by decade’s end had become relatively mainstream nativism and ethnonationalism mostly against Latina/o immigrants. By nativism I mean the “opposition to a minority on the basis of their ‘foreignness’” (Jacobson 2008, xxi). With ethnonationalism I refer to a strong affective investment in a nation that is defined in terms of ethnicity (Connor 1994, xi). Both nativism and ethnonationalism are...

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