Alienated Citizens: "Hispanophobia" and the Mexican Im/Migrant Body.

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Alienated Citizens: “Hispanophobia” and the Mexican Im/migrant Body

by

Kathy Jurado

Chair: María E. Cotera

This dissertation analyzes 20th century representations and discursive constructions of the Mexican im/migrant body through an eclectic variety of cultural texts produced during three “Hispanophobic” moments in American history. The Depression era, the Post War era and the mid 1990s have been isolated as key historical moments when the Mexican im/migrant body becomes highly visible in public discourse as evidenced in the deportation drives of 1930 and 1954 as well as the heightened nativism evidenced in 1994 when Proposition 187 was passed in California. During these moments, the Mexican body became a metaphoric landscape upon which broader questions of citizenship and national identity were battled. Anti-immigrant rhetoric circulating at these times racialized and pathologized the ethnic Mexican body resulting in profoundly dehumanizing effects that extended onto the Mexican/American community living in the United States. More importantly, however, I show how Latina/o culture workers have consistently identified and challenged these dehumanizing discourses in their cultural productions and in effect rehumanized the oft maligned Mexican im/migrant body. The works of the various Latina/o authors and artists this dissertation analyzes reveal the complex ways in which citizenship and race are problematically conflated and blurred particularly during politically charged times. This dissertation engages an interdisciplinary approach by looking at novels (such as The Adventures of Don Chipote and Under the Feet of Jesus), scholarly research (like Jovita Gonzalez’s Master’s Thesis and Ernesto Galarza’s commissioned report Strangers in Our Fields) and on-line digital media (as evidenced in the work of Alex Rivera and Lalo Alcaraz) in order to map the long history of articulated responses to dehumanizing, anti-immigrant rhetoric. Further, this dissertation will show how the works of these Latina/o culture workers constitute vital, if obscured, counter-narratives that fill in the historical gaps, erasures and misconceptions that have continuously marginalized, if not erased, Mexican Americans from the U.S. national imaginary.