Rhetoricity of borders: whiteness in Latinidad and beyond

ABSTRACT

The politics of visibility and whiteness are multifaceted, complicated, and nuanced in how Latinidad is perceived, represented, and stereotyped. For U.S. Latino/a/x folks, Latinidad is often identified through typical signifiers: name (e.g., anglicized and/or Spanishized), how one speaks both English and Spanish, and the color of one’s skin; stereotypic and phenotypic markers that tend to rely on codes of Spanish-accented English and dark skin, dark eyes, and/or textured hair. This essay unpacks these and other marked signifiers through an exploration of whiteness in Latinidad as part of border identities and rhetorics. From the vantage point of the U.S./México border and borders beyond, whiteness and Latinidad are complicated, yet common relationships. Using work related to racial recognition and racial scripts, I argue that whiteness and Latinidad both challenge and reify stereotypical understandings of Latinas/os/xs, through questioning belonging, performing privilege, and erasing marginalization.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• Latinidad
• borders
• racial recognition
• racial scripts
• privilege

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Yasmeen Abutaleb, “What’s Inside the Hate-Filled Manifesto Linked to the El Paso Shooter,” The Washington Post, August 4, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/04/whats-inside-hate-filled-manifesto-linked-el-paso-shooter/.

2 Natalia Molina, How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014); Lisa A. Flores, “Mobility, Containment, and the Racialized Spatio-Temporalities of Survival” (National Communication Association Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, Baltimore, MD, November 15, 2019).

3 Jennifer E. Potter, “Brown-Skinned Outlaws: An Ideographic Analysis of ‘Illegals’,” Communication, Culture & Critique 7, no. 2 (2014): 228–45.

4 D. Robert DeChaine, ed., Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2012).

5 See the following chapters in D. Robert DeChaine, ed., Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2012): Lisa A. Flores and Mary Ann Villarreal, “Mobilizing for National Inclusion: The Discursivity of Whiteness Among Texas Mexicans’ Arguments for Desegregation,” 86–100; Dustin Bradley Goltz and Kimberlee Pérez, “Borders Without Bodies: Affect, Proximity, and Utopian Imaginaries Through ‘Lines in the Sand,’” 163–78; Michelle A. Holling, “A Dispensational Rhetoric in ‘The Mexican Question in the Southwest,’” 65–85; Kent Ono, “Borders That Travel: Matters of the Figural Border,” 19–32.

6 See the following chapters in D. Robert DeChaine, ed., Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2012): Marouf Hasian Jr. and George F. McHendry Jr., “The Attempted Legitimation of the Vigilante Civil Border Patrols, the Militarization of the Mexican-US border, and the Law of Unintended Consequences,” 103–16; Zach Justus, “Shot in the Back: Articulating the Ideologies of the Minutemen through a Political Trial,” 117–30.

7 Josue David Cisneros, “Looking ‘Illegal:’ Affect, Rhetoric, and Performativity in Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2012), 133. See also Josue David Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of ‘Immigrant as Pollutant’ in Media Representations of Immigration,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (2008): 569–601.

8 Molina, How Race is Made in America; Flores, “Mobility, Containment, and the Racialized Spatio-Temporalities of Survival.”

9 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity: Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018).

10 Molina, How Race is Made in America, 2; see also Flores and Villarreal, “Mobilizing for National Inclusion,” 96.

11 Molina, How Race is Made in America, 6–10.

12 Flores, “Mobility, Containment, and the Racialized Spatio-Temporalities of Survival,” 6.

13 Ibid., 15.

14 Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre, “Portraying the Political: National Geographic’s 1985 Afghan Girl and a US Alibi for Aid,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 4 (2010): 336–56.

15 Thomas K. Nakayama (Forum Editor), “Forum: Whiteness and Communication,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020).

16 Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, “On Being a White Person of Color: Using Autoethnography to Understand Puerto Ricans’ Racialization,” Qualitative Sociology 27, no. 2 (2004): 183.

17 Vidal-Ortiz, “On Being a White Person of Color,” 179–203.

18 Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines (New York: Washington Square Press, 2008), 226.

19 Elizondo Griest, Mexican Enough, 6.

20 Elizondo Griest, Mexican Enough, 284–5.

21 Flores and Villarreal, “Mobilizing for National Inclusion,” 98.

22 Appiah, The Lies That Bind, 129.

23 Bernadette Marie Calafell, Latina/o Communication Studies: Theorizing Performance (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 89.

24 Anita M. DeRouen and M. Shane Grant, “Must(n’t) See TV: Hidden Whiteness in Representations of Women of Color,” in Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education, eds. Tammie M. Kennedy, Joyce Irene Middleton, and Krista Radcliffe (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), 58; they cite Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 19–20.

25 DeRouen and Grant, “Must(n’t) See TV,” 56.

26 Victor Villanueva, “Reflections: Calling a White a White,” in Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education, eds. Tammie M. Kennedy, Joyce Irene Middleton, and Krista Radcliffe (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), 253.

27 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 158.

28 Sarah De Los Santos Upton, “Communicating Nepantla: An Anzaldúan Theory of Identity,” in This Bridge We Call Communication: Anzaldúan Approaches to Theory, Method, and Praxis, eds. Leandra Hinojosa Hernández and Robert Gutierrez-Perez (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 124.

29 Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House: A Memoir (Minneapolis, MN: Gray Wolf Press, 2019).

30 Carmen Maria Machado and Shereen Marisol Miraji, “Carmen Maria Machado Takes Us ‘In The Dream House,’” CodeSwitch, National Public Radio, January 7, 2020, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/793291687.

31 Machado and Miraji, “Carmen Maria Machado Takes Us.” This excerpt was lightly edited to exclude vocal fillers (“like”) for better readability.

32 Calafell, Latina/o Communication Studies, 115.

33 For more discussion on language and Latinidad, please see: Stacey K. Sowards, “Linguistic Capital: Latinx and English/Spanish Language Fluency,” in Latina/o Communication Studies: Theories, Methods, and Practice, eds. Leandra Hinojosa Hernández, Diana I. Bowen, Amanda R. Martínez, and Sarah de los Santos Upton (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2019), 73-95; Stacey K. Sowards, “#RhetoricSoEnglishOnly: Decolonizing Rhetorical Studies through Multilingualism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 477–83.

34 Lisa A. Flores, “Toward an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 349–50.

35 Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma R. Chávez, “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4, 322. See also Vidal-Ortiz, “On Being a White Person,” 189.

36 Myra Washington, “Woke Skin, White Masks: Race and Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 261–6.

37 Mickie Lynn, “The Border Wall as Architecture: Teeter Totter Wall brings ‘Pink Joy’ and Links People of the US and Mexico,” Times Union, August 2, 2019, https://blog.timesunion.com/wagingpeace/the-border-wall-as-architecture-teeter-totter-wall-brings-pink-joy-and-links-people-of-the-us-and-mexico/12847/.