Mapping migrant vernacular discourses: Mestiza consciousness, nomad thought, and Latina/o/x migrant movement politics in the United States

ABSTRACT

This essay reads the Latina/o/x migrant vernacular discourses that emerge out of pro-migrant activism. Anzaldúa’s notion of mestizaje – a logic of border consciousness – is put into conversation with Deleuze’s notion of nomad thought – a logic of movement – to inform a rhetorical strategy for reading the vernacular archive of social movement discourse. The “No Papers, No Fear” is one such social movement that demonstrate the logic of mestizaje/nomadism in their communication strategies. This study illuminates three tensions that define the ways Latina/o/x migrants in the US navigate the spaces of citizenship: tensions between movement/stasis, migrant identity/national identity, and fear/safety.

KEYWORDS:

• Latina/o/x Migration
• Movement
• Mestizaje
• Nomad Thought
• Vernacular Discourse

Notes

1 The use of “Latina/o/x” has been widely adapted and was chosen instead of the term “Latinx” to be more inclusive. For more on this usage, see de Onís (2017).

2 Deleuze responds to Nietzsche in reference to the imperial despot recoding the territories captured in war to a system of imperial thought. Nietzsche, Deleuze argues, is nihilistically asserting that the entire territory’s codes are recoded systematically and absolutely in the interest of empire, from center to the fringes. However, for Deleuze, “It is true that rural communities at their center are caught and transfixed in the despot’s bureaucratic machine, with its scribes, its priests, its bureaucrats; but on the periphery, the communities embark on another kind of adventure, display another kind of unity, a nomadic unity, and engage in a nomadic war-machine, and they tend to come uncoded rather than being coded over” (p. 258).

3 Holling and Calafell use the term “Latin@” as a gender-inclusive name for those who identify with Latina/o/x heritage. In reference to their scholarship, the author will this use Latin@, but Latina/o/x in all other cases.

4 For example, A. González, Chávez, and Englebrecht (2014) describe how the various artistic and discursive expressions of the Old South End in Toledo, OH comprise a vernacular archive.