From Threatening Guerrillas to Forever Illegals: US Central Americans and the Cultural Politics of Non-Belonging (Latinx: The Future Is Now) (Paperback)

From Threatening Guerrillas to Forever Illegals: US Central Americans and the Cultural Politics of Non-Belonging (Latinx: The Future Is Now) By Yajaira M. Padilla Cover Image
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Description


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.

About the Author


Yajaira M. Padilla is an associate professor in the departments of English and Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She is the author of Changing Women, Changing Nation.

Praise For…


A well-researched, poignant discussion of the representations, misrepresentations, and erasures of the expanding Central American and Latinx communities in the US. [Padilla's] work seamlessly illustrates the significance and consequences of these representations, or lack thereof...Recommended.
— CHOICE


Product Details
ISBN: 9781477325278
ISBN-10: 1477325271
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Publication Date: June 21st, 2022
Pages: 249
Language: English
Series: Latinx: The Future Is Now