Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Alienization, Fence Logic, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps
2009; Routledge; Volume: 95; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00335630802621078
ISSN1479-5779
Autores Tópico(s)Rhetoric and Communication Studies
ResumoAbstract Current figurations of the “immigration problem” in the United States challenge our understanding of the rhetoricity of contemporary bordering practices. The public discourse of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps serves to chart the alienization of undocumented migrants and the enactment of alien abjection on the U.S.–Mexico border. Alienization promises an antidote to majoritarian anxieties regarding national disunity in the form of a shoring-up of cultural boundaries that border-crossing subjects render troublesome. Ultimately, the fence logic engendered by groups such as the Minutemen reveals how struggles over the boundaries of citizenship both enable and limit an affect-charged civic imaginary. Keywords: BordersAlienizationMinuteman Civil Defense CorpsCitizenshipSocial Imaginaries An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2007 National Communication Association convention in Chicago An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2007 National Communication Association convention in Chicago Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Editor John Louis Lucaites, Mike Willard, Michelle Ladd, Scott Rodriguez, and two anonymous reviewers, each of whom made decisive contributions to the quality of the essay. Notes An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2007 National Communication Association convention in Chicago 1. Jeffrey S. Passel, “The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S.,” Pew Hispanic Center, March 7, 2006, http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/61.pdf/. It must be acknowledged that this is a contested statistic. My choice of “migrant” to characterize undocumented persons in the United States reflects my intention to leave open the variety of statuses, motivations, and modes of mobility of border-crossing individuals. For a sympathetic discussion of the term, see Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), xix–xx. 2. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25–73. 3. Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 26. 4. Ronald Walter Greene, “Malthusian World(s): Globalization, Race, and the American Imaginary in the Immigration Debates of the Twentieth Century,” in Argumentation and Values: Proceedings of the Ninth SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, ed. Sally Jackson (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1995), 191–95. See also Marouf Hasian Jr. and Fernando Delgado, “The Trials and Tribulations of Racialized Critical Rhetorical Theory: Understanding the Rhetorical Ambiguities of Proposition 187,” Communication Theory 8 (1998): 245–70; Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis, No One Is Illegal: Fighting Violence and State Repression on the U.S.–Mexico Border (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006). 5. Michael Curry, “On Space and Spatial Practice in Contemporary Geography,” in Concepts in Human Geography, ed. Carville Earle, Kent Mathewson, and Martin Kenzer (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), 3–32; Henk Van Houtum, “The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries,” Geopolitics 10 (2005): 672–79. 6. D. Robert DeChaine, “Imagined Immunities: Border Rhetorics and the Ethos of Sans Frontièrisme,” in Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice: Revisioning Academic Accountability, eds. Ranu Samantrai, Joe Parker, and Mary Romero (New York: State University of New York Press, in press). 7. Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, Brendan Bartley, and Duncan Fuller, Thinking Geographically: Space, Theory and Contemporary Human Geography (New York: Continuum, 2002), 33; Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity (New York: Routledge, 2002), 165. 8. On the rhetorical constructedness of borders, see Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 362–87; D. Robert DeChaine, Global Humanitarianism: NGOs and the Crafting of Community (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005). On the ambivalent character of border(ed) subjects, see Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987); Pablo Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.–Mexico Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 9. Aimee Carrillo Rowe, “Whose ‘America’? The Politics of Rhetoric and Space in the Formation of U.S. Nationalism,” Radical History Review 89 (2004): 119–20. 10. I borrow the term “alienization” from Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.–Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002), 143. 11. Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 51–52. 12. Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 204. 13. Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, “Minuteman Civil Defense Corps Replaces Volunteer Administrators,” http://minutemanhq.com/hq/print.php?sid=342/. 14. Minuteman PAC, http://www.minutemanpac.com/about.php/. 15. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders,” 381. See also Robert S. Chang and Keith Aoki, “Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination,” California Law Review 85 (1997): 1397; Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 16. On the complementarity of critical rhetoric and cultural studies, see Maurice Charland, “Rehabilitating Rhetoric: Confronting Blindspots in Discourse and Social Theory,” Communication 11 (1990): 253–64; Thomas Rosteck, ed., At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies, Revisioning Rhetoric: A Guilford Series (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 1–23. 17. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders,” 363. 18. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Unpacking 187: Targeting Mejicanas,” in Immigration and Ethnic Communities: A Focus on Latinos, ed. Refugio I. Rochín (East Lansing: Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University, 1996), 93. 19. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 3. 20. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 129. 21. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 44–62. 22. Mark Lawrence McPhail, The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 66. 23. Hemant Shah, “Race, Nation, and Citizenship: Asian Indians and the Idea of Whiteness in the U.S. Press, 1906–1923,” Howard Journal of Communications 10 (1999): 251. 24. Howard Winant, Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 59. 25. Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders, 27. 26. See, for example, Marx's discussion of alienation in “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin Books, 1975), 279–400. 27. Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 8–10. 28. Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 7–9. 29. Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 45. 30. Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 21–31. 31. Douglas S. Massey, “Understanding America's Immigration ‘Crisis’,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 151 (2007): 309–27. 32. It is worth adding that women and men are often differently alienized. As some scholars have noted, the meaning of “alien” is itself gendered, shifting its connotation according to particular sociohistorical exigencies. Hondagneu-Sotelo, for example, notes, “Contemporary xenophobia targets women and children because it is they who are central to making settlement happen” (“Unpacking 187,” 93). 33. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 18. 34. Hasian and Delgado, “Trials and Tribulations,” 257. 35. Otto Santa Ana, “‘Like an Animal I Was Treated’: Anti-immigrant Metaphor in U.S. Public Discourse,” Discourse and Society 10 (1999): 191–224. See also Sarah Hill, “Purity and Danger on the U.S. –Mexico Border, 1991–1994,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105 (2006): 777–99. 36. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders,” 363. 37. With a recent increase in applications for U.S. naturalization, and under pressure to err on the side of caution in vetting applicants for potential security threats, federal examiners have increased their rejection rates. In 2007, for example, approximately 12 percent of applications for naturalization were denied. See Julia Preston, “Perfectly Legal Immigrants, Until They Applied for Citizenship,” New York Times, April 12, 2008. 38. Bhikhu Parekh, “What Is Multiculturalism?” Multiculturalism: A Symposium on Democracy in Culturally Diverse Societies 484 (December 1999), http://www.india-seminar.com/1999/484/484%20parekh.htm/. 39. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 3–24. 40. Chris Simcox, “About Us,” Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, http://www.minutemanhq.com/hq/aboutus.php/. 41. Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 125–51. 42. The Border Fence Project emerged on the heels of the 2006 Secure Fence Act, authored by California Republican Representative Duncan Hunter, which required the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to build 854 miles of fence along the 1950-mile U.S.–Mexico border. 43. Chris Simcox, “Senate and President Promote Anarchy at Borders and in American Cities,” Minuteman National Blog, April 11, 2006, http://www.minutemanhq.com/b2/index.php/national/2006/04/11/. 44. Border Fence Project, BorderFenceProject.com, http://www .borderfenceproject.com/. 45. Chris Simcox, “Minuteman Corps Expands is [sic] Efforts to Secure the Border,” Minuteman Border Fence, January 2, 2007, http://www.minutemanhq.com/bf/pl7.php/. 46. “About Us,” Minuteman Border Fence, http://www.minutemanhq.com/bf/about.php/. 47. Simcox, “Minuteman Corps.” 48. Jim Wood, “A Letter to My Fellow Americans,” BorderFenceProject.com, http://www.borderfenceproject.com/letter.shtml/. 49. See, for example, Minuteman Border Fence. 50. Chris Simcox, “Open Letter to the President of the United States,” MCDC Forums, June 19, 2007, http://forum.minutemanhq.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t_11793/. 51. Chris Simcox, interview by Trish Hinojosa, NOW on the News, PBS, May 4, 2007. 52. Chris Simcox, interview by Alan Colmes, Hannity & Colmes, Fox News, April 3, 2006. 53. Susy Buchanan and David Holthouse, “Minuteman Leader has Troubled Past,” Southern Poverty Law Center, http://www.splcenter.org/intel/news/item.jsp?aid=149&site_area=1&printable=1/. 54. Simcox, “Open Letter”; “Donate to the Minuteman Border Fence,” Minuteman Border Fence, https://secure.responseenterprises.com/mmfence/?a=571/. 55. The MCDC works to document what it perceives as an increase in criminal activity in the United States as a result of unsecured borders. For example, the online MCDC forum includes a main thread titled “Illegal Alien Crime,” with the subheading “Please post any articles about illegal alien crime and DUI incidents here. Having these in one place will illustrate the tragic consequences of illegal migration.” “MCDC Forums,” Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, http://forum.minutemanhq.com/phpbb2/. 56. Simcox, “Minuteman Corps.” 57. “DIY Border Fence,” PirateNews.org, http://www.piratenews.org/newswire/html/. No documentation for either of these statistics is provided on the website. 58. Brian Bonner, “Minutemen to Build Arizona-Mexico Border Fence,” April 20, 2006, http://bonner.wordpress.com/2006/04/20/minutemen-to-build-arizona-mexico-border-fence/. 59. Chris Simcox, “Message from Chris Simcox,” Minuteman Border Fence, http://www.minutemanhq.com/bf/about.php/. 60. Simcox, “Open Letter.” 61. Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in The Media Reader, ed. Manuel Alvarado and John O. Thompson (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 13. 62. Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, “About Us.” 63. Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, “The Minuteman Pledge,” http://www.minutemanhq.com/hq/mmpledge.php/. 64. Wood, “Letter to my fellow Americans.” 65. “Build It Now!” Minuteman Border Fence, http://www.minutemanborderfence.com/. 66. Simcox, “Open Letter.” 67. Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, “Minuteman Pledge.” 68. Simcox, “Minuteman Corps.” 69. “Become a Cyber Minuteman!” BorderFenceProject.com, http://www.borderfenceproject.com/cybermm.php/. 70. Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper, 147–48. 71. Anne Demo, “Sovereignty Discourse and Contemporary Immigration Politics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 295. 72. David Newman, “On Borders and Power: A Theoretical Framework,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 18 (2003): 20. 73. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (New York: New Republic, 1935), 70. 74. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). See also Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 75. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. 76. See, for example, Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005); Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Benjamin Lee, eds., “New Imaginaries,” Special Issue, Public Culture 36 (2002); Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, eds., Counterpublics and the State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 77. Julia Preston, “As Pace of Deportation Rises, Illegal Families Are Digging In,” New York Times, May 1, 2007. I was unable to locate reliable data regarding 2007 deportation rates. 78. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 269. 79. Dana L. Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 285–306. 80. DeChaine, “Imagined Immunities.” 81. Robert S. Chang, “A Meditation on Borders,” in Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States, ed. Juan F. Perea (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 244, 246. Additional informationNotes on contributorsD. Robert Dechaine D. Robert DeChaine is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Liberal Studies at California State University, Los Angeles
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