Citizenship Excess

Front matter

CITIZENSHIP EXCESS

Latino/as, Media, and the Nation

HECTOR AMAYA

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

PART I: DEFENDING THE WALLS 1 Toward a Latino Critique of Public Sphere Theory 41 2 Nativism and the 2006 Pro-Immigration Reform Rallies 68

3 Hutto: Staging Transnational Justice Claims in the Time of Coloniality 95

PART II: CONDITIONS OF INCLUSION 5 Labor and the Legal Structuring of Media Industries in the

Case of Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006) 161 6 Mediating Belonging, Inclusion, and Death 190 Conclusion: The Ethics of Nation 221 Notes 231 References 243 Index 263 About the Author 275

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

And then all good things come to those who have the one best thing. Possess that one, and the others come in train. Or, to change the metaphor, a dominant good is converted into another good, into many others, in accordance with what often appears to be a natural process but is in fact magical, a kind of social alchemy.

—Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice

I have not had a usable citizenship for the past couple of decades. I have been living in the United States with a Mexican passport. I moved away from Mexico, my country of birth, in 1992 and have lived a life that I did not plan. I could not have planned it. In Navojoa, the small Mexican northern city where I was born, I had few contacts with immigrants, and immigrant narratives were relatively rare, unless they came from Hollywood films. Who can forget Chaplin on the move? Several uncles, aunts, and even my sister eventually migrated to either Los Angeles or Calgary before me, but I now recognize that the years when they were immigrants and I was not, they spoke about their experiences too enthusiastically, even when describing the penuries of loneliness in countries not theirs. It was not their fault. I know that as an immigrant I have never fully talked about the strangeness of my experiences to people back in Mexico, not because I am trying to hide it but more because I am a bit ashamed of complaining while stubbornly holding on to a life-project that I chose and has given me some grief. There is also some guilt about complaining about emotional things while my wallet is full. I am a professor, after all: do I really have the right to complain?

My life is relatively good, but not having a usable citizenship has become a constant issue and the inspiration for my scholarship. I live in a political world in which I cannot fully participate. But I would be lying if I claimed to feel always victimized. That is not how it works. For the most part, there is simply a strong sense of otherness that marks my affective relations to social and political systems. Once in a while I do feel outraged or moved to commiseration. A few other times, I actually take pleasure in my difference and relish being able to step back and simply watch, like an anthropologist, the world unfold with the strange logic of

>> vii viii << PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS an alien civilization. In all of these issues, I am not the standard but the exception. Most residents of the United States who walk around without citizenship have more reasons than I to be outraged. The majority of immigrants from Latin American must fight against poverty, biased law enforcement, educational systems that refuse to treat them as equals, and, increasingly, a lack of political rights and basic access to basic goods and social benefits. To make matters worse, Latino culture and Latino media seem marginal. What is the value of Univision or Telemundo if you cannot talk about telenovelas around the cooler with others? Latino social networks seem overdetermined, socially engineered by a masterful mind set on ghettoizing immigrant life. The incentives seem sweet enough: the Mexican store around the corner; the international-food aisle at the supermarket; the American Express card; every four years, the World Cup of soccer (Go Costa Rica! Go Mexico! Go El Salvador!); politicians trying to talk in Spanish (often a bit funny); and Spanish-language media reminding you that you belong to a large community of nonbelongers.

I have thought enough about citizenship that I could come up with dozens of silly similes to try to explain how it feels not having it (for instance, “Not having citizenship is like walking without shoes”). I will spare you. Neither will I place in front of you a tragic narrative exploring our postcoloniality, our loss, becoming undone. I will also try to avoid constructing a romance that lionizes a fight against all odds. Instead, in this book, I explore a simple metaphor from another scholar. In the epigraph, Walzer talks about dominant goods, and throughout the book, he discusses citizenship and wealth as two such goods. Compellingly, he describes how dominant goods have currency in many social fields, and thus they assure the bearer a trading advantage. Over time, this trading advantage in multiple social spheres accumulates and exponentially multiplies, allowing the possessor of the one good to be at the top of many hierarchies. Echoing Walzer, this book shows the centrality of citizenship. But unlike Walzer, I am invested in querying liberalism and the public sphere, two central theoretical constructs that explain and reconstitute the centrality of citizenship. My hope is to provide a theoretical framework and vocabulary that explains the state of marginalization of Latinas/ os in the United States.

I need to thank an array of people, organizations, and institutions that were essential for the completion of this project. I first have to mention Southwestern University, the place where I began writing on the subject of citizenship and Latinas/os seven years ago. There, I received expert

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS >> ix and kind advice from Mary Grace Neville, Jay Baglia, Teena Gabrielson, Erika Berroth, and Katy Ross, who lent me their editing and theoretical skills. However, the book itself was written at the University of Virginia, a place where Jeffersonian ideals seep deeply into the ground. It is perhaps natural that it is in these buildings and gardens, full of hope for the political, that my own reflections on citizenship, discourse, justice, and equality happened.

At University of Virginia, I received the sustained support of the College of Arts and Sciences, Dean Meredith Woo, Associate Dean Karen Parshall, and Vice President for Research Dr. Thomas Skalak. Last, I have to thank the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, Chair Andrea Press, and the Verklin Program on Media Ethics for energizing my research financially and emotionally.

My writing group at the University of Virginia must be singled out for providing me with their expertise and insights every step of the way. This book could not have happened without them. Sylvia Chong, Daniel Chavez, and Jennifer Petersen have left a deep imprint in my work, and their knowledge on ethnicity, race, film, media, and the juridical are now central to the project. I cannot thank them enough for their patience, their theoretical views, and the unwavering commitment to excellence that pushed me forward. Last, I need to thank New York University Press for providing such a rigorous set of reviewers.

Biography is also origins. I wish to thank my parents, Mita and Hector, who are the real origin of the book and to whom this work is dedicated. They are the structure in my thought, my moral fiber, and my perseverance; whatever wisdom I may possess I have only borrowed from them.

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 Arizonas law. On May 2010, the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute released data

>> 1 showing that a majority of voters wanted similar laws passed in their states (48 percent versus 35 percent). The support for this type of legislation came despite the fact that the majority of voters also believed (45 percent versus 40 percent) that it would lead to discrimination against Hispanics (Quinnipiac’s terminology). Tellingly, according to Quinnipiac, the majority of blacks and Latinas/os opposed the legislation. As in other times in history, state discrimination and mistreatment of minorities was accepted as reasonable, a sacrifice the majority was willing to make for the well-being of the nation-state. Here, a majority defined the nation-state decisively and undisputedly in ethno-racial terms and embraced political and legal excess as the proper privilege of ethno-racially white citizenship.’

Inspired by events such as those in Arizona, this book introduces citizenship excess to investigate the convergence of legal and political excess with ethno-racial privilege. Citizenship excess theorizes that citizenship is inherently a process of uneven political capital accumulation and that the unevenness follows ethno-racial lines. As important, the term excess signals that citizenship cannot be rehabilitated within the nation-state. This theory helps us see that excess happens when those who are in power can organize political markets in such a way that political transactions yield a surplus value that they accumulate. The accumulation of such surplus political value, over time, becomes the basis for more and for easier accumulation.

Citizenship excess is a political and media theory that explains ethno-racial inequality as the product of the nation-state and the political, cultural, and legal systems that sustain it. In particular, citizenship excess explains why Latinas/os in general and immigrant Latinas/os in particular are the target of so much ethnic resentment and hate by a large portion of the citizenry and by mainstream politicians, media, and law. I find the problem very complex and traditional racial explanations of why this is happening rather unsatisfactory. Traditional U.S. explanations of race, such as those put forward by Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994), emphasize vertical racial hierarchies within nations. Their theory of racial formations would explain anti-Latino and anti-immigrant sentiment as a sort of pushing down of these communities with the goal of reproducing a vertical racial hierarchy with whites on top and the rest fighting for political crumbs. As in Omi and Winant’s explanation, citizenship excess starts with empirically verifiable vertical racial hierarchies in the United States, but it historicizes and theorizes these hierarchies in transnational terms, 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-Guzman 2010, 14; Pérez 2004, 6, 95; Ana Rodriguez 2002; Romero and Habell-Pallan 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.” 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 accumulation is an intrinsic and foundational characteristic of the United States that relates to its political roots and that is crucial to the way political majorities have debated and treated Latinas/os. As importantly, this unevenness is a political and legal foundation of the nation-state and not only the contingent manifestation of deep-seated racism and xenophobia that surfaces in times of political and economic crisis. I support this claim with scholarship on race, gender, and globalization coming from political theory, critical legal studies, citizenship studies, critical race theory, and Latino studies.’ So I do not make this claim alone, but I bring to the table the language of excess and do so for a very tactical reason. Excess signals that this theory of citizenship is filtered through a Marxian understanding of politics based on one axiom: political and judicial systems can be described as interrelated social fields that follow economic rules. Just as excess of economic wealth is a social problem, I argue that excess of political capital is a political and legal problem. The political and legal fields, which define the nation-state, organize the production and distribution of political goods and give political and legal ground to the racism and xenophobia that give meaning and texture to the lives of Latinas/os in the United States.

In the following sections, I bridge the gap between citizenship excess and a Marxian view of politics and critical race theory, the two most immediate theoretical contexts for citizenship excess. The link to Marx explains the reason for choosing the word excess, and the link to critical race theory explains why I approach the problem of ethno-racial inequality from the perspective of citizenship and not centrally from the perspective of race. These sections should prepare us to tackle the basic question of why I use citizenship excess and not simply citizenship or, if you wish, what is the difference between citizenship and citizenship excess and what are the advantages of using the term citizenship excess. My goal is that by the end of the introduction, I will have shown that there is something intrinsically poisonous in citizenship, a quality that cannot fully be contained, an excess that feeds the power hungry and that convinces otherwise good people that oppression is just.

The Marxist Roots of Citizenship Excess

Today, Arizona is not the exception but the rule. The first decade of the new century has been very difficult for Latinas/os in general and Latino immigrants in particular.* A decade that began with the recognition that 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 the pushing away, the xenophobia, I referenced earlier. They share the political view that the United States ought to remain an ethno-racially white nation with ethno-racially white values and socio-cultural characteristics. Unlike nativism, ethnonationalism may welcome immigrants, but only after they radically assimilate." Arguably, ethnonationalism is a milder form of nativism. For brevity’s sake, I will refer to both groups of people who espouse these views as nativists but will specify when needed as to whether the nativism I refer to is radical or mild.

In this book, I am concerned with political, social, and media events that have pitted Latinas/os against vocal and powerful nativist forces. I am concerned with social, cultural, and political battles that will undoubtedly shape the future of Latinas/os and the type of liberal democracy the United States will have in the twenty-first century. I am referring to battles such as immigration and securitization, which are broad sites of conflict in which Latinas/os and nativists play important but different roles as social agents. Nativists try to harness the power of the state to discipline, control, and shape the political potential, and future, of Latinas/os. Latinas/os try to appeal to broader definitions of belonging and liberalism to claim the complex rights of citizenship. In a post-9/11 world, these battles have been won by nativists who have used the issues of immigration and securitization to produce anti-Latino legal and political structures, as in recent events in Arizona. For me, the issue is how to make sense of these very complex phenomena without losing sight of the key moving pieces and their histories. So applying some Marxian and economic ideas helped me organize these moving pieces and allowed me to see a predictable pattern in the way discourses and practices were woven through time.° This pattern has three types of effects, which produce three types of citizenship excess: institutional effects, which I discuss first; specific forms of consciousness; and political and cultural effects, which I discuss in the following sections and in the rest of the book. So let me start by quickly describing this Marxian perspective. I will do so, first, by describing how this perspective organizes four of the key moving pieces. The next sections will deepen these propositions.

Citizenship Excess at Institutions

The four moving pieces are tightly interwoven in a dramatic structure, a battle over social positions and political power between (1) nativists and (2) Latinas/os that is brokered by (3) the state and (4) the media. (1) There is broad anti-Latino hate among the political right deeply influenced by nativism and a general anti-Latino sentiment among the majority of the U.S. population. Nativists concentrate their hate and political efforts on attacking undocumented immigrants, but nativists also have broad concerns about the willingness of immigrant Latinas/os to assimilate, to learn English, and to play by the political and economic rules by which everybody else plays. (2) Latinas/os are becoming more powerful, and they showed their political might in the pro-immigration reform marches. Latino civic organizing has succeeded at making visible the might of the Latino electorate, and that has influenced local and state politics, but in 2006, Latinas/os failed to push for immigration reform at the federal level. (3) Although ideally the state should broker between groups, that has not been the case. Under Republican control from 2000 to 2008, the state, as represented by the political and legal systems, seemed co-opted by nativists, and it produced, through legal or political systems, anti- Latino law. Although Democrats took control of the federal government in 2008, the influence of nativism did not subside. In 2010, Republicans, energized by a Tea Party that includes many nativist voices, took control of the House of Representatives, and, with that, the power of nativists to set the political agenda was cemented.’ Simply, the power of the state to broker between nativists and Latinas/os is practically gone. (4) Ideally, media, in its capacity as public sphere, should be a space where different groups can come together and present their points of view, debate them, and influence general public opinion. That is the way the Founding Fathers imagined it; it is the way most Americans think of it today. So, has media played the role of a public sphere? In the United States, we have an incredibly dynamic and diverse media system that, regardless of its dynamism and variety, has failed to provide a general platform for Latino voices. Simply put, it has gone nativist. This is not only because of Fox and Rupert Murdoch but also because of CNN (Lou Dobbs), talk radio, and the general unwillingness of mainstream fictional media to include Latino narratives. Ironically, SLM, which serves the majority of Latinas/ os, has been thriving, but it is isolated and incapable of shaping general public opinion because of linguistic differences. So, like the state, the power of the media to broker seems negligible, and the fight between Latinas/os and nativists appears absolutely rigged. How do we explain these complex and important phenomena, particularly as this type of national scenario seems to echo events in Europe, where nativism also seems to be on the rise?

We can start by noting that we are witnessing a battle of Marxian proportions between the haves and the have-nots. Nativists are economically wealthier, and they have sizable political capital because they claimed legal and cultural ownership of the U.S. territory. Nativists then transform this political capital into legal and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986).® For instance, nativists characterize undocumented immigration in terms of sovereignty under threat. This narrative has played wonderfully in political cultures and media, and it has provided the narrative energy for news that framed Latino immigrants as an invading horde, the barbarians knocking at the walls, and the nativists as defenders of the motherland. Latinas/os, on the other hand, are poorer; they have weak territorial claims; and the legal and political frameworks that, since the 1960s, have given them a foothold in the state have become increasingly unpopular since Reagan.’ Yes, Latino numbers have been growing, but this also means that the Latino population seems more like a threat to a majority that, after 9/11, is too concerned with security of the physical and economic kind. So nativists have accumulated political capital that they have used both to accumulate even more political, legal, and cultural capital and to make their political messages seem more mainstream. In contrast, Latinas/os’ political capital has dwindled, and the losses have been in direct proportion to the gains of nativists.

The Marxian analogy does not end here. Witnessing the past couple of decades of political battles between nativists and Latinas/os, it is impossible not to notice a certain economic logic to the way political and legal losses and gains have been allocated. Pierre Bourdieu’s work on political and cultural capital is useful here to help us understand that society works as a giant political market, a field of power if you wish, where different communities bring their wares and trade with the goal of surviving or moving up the political and cultural ladder.’® Following Bourdieu, I propose that the political market follows a few basic rules of trade that are easily observable and worth mentioning right here:

‘The first thing that is striking about this field of power is that in order to participate, you must be a citizen. Noncitizens have practically no say, and undocumented immigrants are simply the worst off of the have-nots. Although all citizens are allowed to participate in the field of power, the most politically wealthy class is ethno-racially defined. They tend to be white and economically wealthy; they often attend the same universi-

ties; and they are frequently members of the same clubs. They also have the habit of speaking on behalf of everybody else and succeed at doing

so because they often own or control media. It is not a monolithic class. Others may become part of it, but they must adopt the “ethnic” part of the ethno-racial. Those who wish to join the ranks of the political elite must speak with their accent, eat their food, go to the same universities, and succeed at accumulating something that can be traded for political wares, for example, money, cultural capital, or votes.

This giant field of power allows for trade in several fine currencies including votes and civic behavior. But there is no finer currency than law, and many citizens would gladly trade their political wares for having their views become law.’ So communities with quick access to legal systems have the power to trade that access in exchange for the votes and energetic civic behavior of other communities.

Although a great deal of political capital is the accumulation of political currencies, such as votes and civic behavior (“I will vote for your proposal if you vote for mine”; “I will march for your cause if you march for mine”), political capital is also the result of currency accumulated in other social markets including wealth, prestige, and, as Bourdieu (1986) would note, cultural capital.

Because law not only applies to the political market but shapes every other social market including the financial, cultural, educational, labor, health, housing, and media markets, the accumulation of political capital typically translates well into accumulation in other markets (Dudziak

and Volpp 2005; Oliver and Shapiro 2006). Bourdieu calls this principle “interconvertibility,’ or the ability of one type of capital to be converted into other types.’? In Arizona, for instance, shortly after the draconian immigration bill I mentioned earlier, the government produced a law prohibiting the teaching of Ethnic Studies in public schools. Ethnic Studies

is the only area of the public school curriculum that places the history of ethno-racial minorities at its center, and as a result, it is a type of cultural capital for ethnic minorities.

e Similarly, decreased political capital can easily translate into decreased capital in other markets. A lack of political capital is quickly converted into a lack of prestige or cultural capital, and this is typically the case for ethno-racial minorities and immigrant populations. Forbidding Ethnic Studies in public schools in Arizona decreases the prestige and cultural capital of ethno-racial minorities in the state.

What these rules tell me about the field of power is that, left to its own devices, it tends to produce excessive accumulation of political capital, and this tends to end up in the hands of citizens who are ethno-racially defined. Although these communities are not racially monolithic (e.g., President Obama or Governor Bill Richardson), they tend to welcome those who are white and those who are willing to assimilate by taking on white ethnic markers.

Of course, the field of power was never left to its own devices, and there have been plenty of legal, administrative, and discursive tools meant to provide checks and balances. We have always had administrative walls separating politics from other social fields, and none were more essential than the walls separating wealth from politics, those two most important social fields. But new laws allowing corporations almost unrestricted access to the political system by giving them free rein to fund election campaigns are increasingly eroding these walls.’* The ability to convert economic capital into political capital has become a grotesque part of our political present, and the results are in: the advertising cost of the 2010 elections (which was not a presidential election) was upward of $3.7 billion. Who can compete? Not many. Our media system is rich and has the potential to be prolific and diverse, but after the 1996 Telecommunications Act, our media has consolidated so that only a few corporations dominate most of the public sphere. Powerful political classes have used extraordinary events such as 9/11 to transform the institutional character of important government agencies and to reframe their activities in terms of security. Significantly, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the move of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to the DHS have permanently transformed both the discourse around immigration and state practices toward immigrants into state practices against immigration. And, perhaps most importantly, we have drastically redefined liberalism and republicanism,’* two political platforms that were meant to remind us that the role of the state is to provide the ground for all sorts of equality and that all people should have a right to participate in government. What happened to this definition of liberalism and republicanism? There are two types of answer that can help us here. One would propose that liberalism and republicanism are under siege and have been perverted by capitalism (neoliberalism) and racist xenophobia. The second view argues that liberalism and republicanism were never that pure. Thanks to critical legal scholars, political scientists, critical race theorists, and theorists of globalization, we know that liberalism and republicanism share too much genetic material with colonialism, racism, and imperialism to be so pure, and I show this throughout the book. Liberalism and republicanism appear alongside the formation of nation-states and alongside a world economy that depends on colonial expansion and uses theories of race and racist theories of law to justify human exploitation and land robbery. I expand on these points in the following section, but now I want to mention one last lesson from Marx that is worth remembering.

Citizenship Excess, Forms of Consciousness and Culture

Besides inspiring us to see the nation-state as a field of power where political capital is accumulated in complex but predictable ways, Marx is useful for helping us think about the long-term effects of social systems on forms of consciousness and culture. When Marx investigated the capitalism he encountered in the nineteenth century, he used the figure of the bourgeoisie to criticize a class of people capable of controlling the narrative frames that reconstituted their privilege. These frames centered on the values of profit, entrepreneurship, and efficiency in everyday life. They worked because all classes shared them, albeit as different elements of the narrative of wealth. I believe the long-term effects of citizenship excess impact consciousness in complex ways, producing an array of platforms for subjectivities and identities that allow for this relatively rigid political system to be legitimated by the majority. Not all of these effects translate into racism and xenophobia, but some do. Other effects simply help the majority rationalize the current system, even while recognizing its imperfections. With Marx and Michel Foucault, I believe one of the most common and deepest effects on consciousness is interiorizing the law, or what Foucault calls the production of “juridical subjectivities.” When I mention these juridical subjectivities, I have in mind the now-famous