From threatening guerrillas to forever illegals : US Central Americans and the cultural politics of non-belonging / Yajaira M. Padilla.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Padilla, Yajaira M., author.

Series:

Latinx (Series)

Latinx: the Future Is Now

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Central Americans--United States.

Central Americans.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (199 p.)

Place of Publication:

Austin, Texas : University of Texas Press, [2022]

Summary:

The experience of Central Americans in the United States is marked by a vicious contradiction. In entertainment and information media, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are hypervisible as threatening guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and “forever illegals.” Central Americans are unseen within the broader conception of Latinx community, foreclosing avenues to recognition. Yajaira M. Padilla explores how this regime of visibility and invisibility emerged over the past forty years—bookended by the right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump—and how Central American immigrants and subsequent generations have contested their rhetorical disfiguration. Drawing from popular films and TV, news reporting, and social media, Padilla shows how Central Americans in the United States have been constituted as belonging nowhere, imagined as permanent refugees outside the boundaries of even minority representation. Yet in documentaries about cross-border transit through Mexico, street murals, and other media, US Central Americans have counteracted their exclusion in ways that defy dominant paradigms of citizenship and integration.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Central Americans among “US”

Chapter One. Signifying US Central American Non- belonging

Chapter Two. Domesticated Subject? The Salvadoran Maid in US Television and Film

Chapter Three. Lance Corporal José Gutiérrez and the Perils of Being a “Good Immigrant”

Chapter Four. Central American Crossings, Rightlessness, and Survival in Mexico’s Border Passage

Chapter Five. The Cachet of Illegal Chickens in Central American Los Angeles

Conclusion. Seeing beyond the Dominant

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-4773-2528-X

OCLC:

1299386903