This essay begins with a twelve-year old hiss. Some twelve years ago, I was in a UC Berkeley audience listening to Anthropologist Leo Chavez discuss the images of immigration that had appeared on the covers of major news magazines over the previous thirty years.[1] The images he presented were tacky but provocative. Not surprisingly, the covers confirmed that in the popular press the narrative of immigration circulated in an unrelenting celebratory-threat loop: "Isn't America terrifically welcoming?" bounced to "The nation is under siege!"

But then, another aspect of those images struck me and I leaned over to a friend and whispered, "This stuff is so homoerotic." "No it is not." She hissed back, "It's a heterosexual rape fantasy." A bit chastened, I thought, "Of course. Nation as woman. Men as protectors against the penetrative, rapacious impulses of other men."[2] But, I later wondered, as I reconsidered the images that had struck me: a man climbing through what might be an anus made from the U.S. flag? Police groping or maybe searching men while the image itself draws our attention to the tight butts and crotches of the supposed "aliens."[3] Did the one interpretation really cancel the other out?

Copyright 1979 U.S. News & World Report, L.P. Reprinted with permission.

Copyright Business Week. Reprinted with permission.

What was not in question for either of us was whether or not sexuality was part of the story. Mexicans have always had a curiously eroticized role in the U.S. popular imaginary. From the 19th century forward, the sex life of Mexicans, or rather white men's fantasy of it, has subtended expansionist efforts.[4] Certainly, after 1848, a concerted effort to feminize Mexican men in order to hypermasculinize white men and boys found its way into nearly every fictional account that involved Mexico. Over the course of the twentieth century this feminized stereotype gave way in part to that of the drug addled rapist and the domineering, macho cad.[5] "Gay," however, could not be said to constitute a large percentage of stereotypes proffered about Mexican men in the U.S. press. So I remained puzzled by these insinuations of homoeroticism.

I subsequently tangled with what felt like a half-baked insight and the largely unanswered question: How might a homophobic response to homoerotic portrayals of Mexican men help to structure anti-immigrant hysteria? And could an analysis of anti-immigrant hysteria in concert with homophobia help us understand the ongoing violence in the Southwestern U.S.? It is obviously not enough to assert that these images are simply or merely suggestive of a subtle play with a homoerotics that participates in the grand discourse of othering. Not really interested in the realm of analogy (i.e., othered queers are, like "aliens", strangers to the normative), I first approached the question by considering the work of the border—analyzing it as an abjection machine and as a state-sponsored aesthetic project, and as a practice, not a static, violent, hybrid place, or a refulgent metaphor but rather as a network of regulatory mechanisms and disciplinary triggers.[6]

Significant work on immigration and sexuality has been produced since that confounding hiss.[7] Eithne Luibhéid, for example, offered one of the first monographs to consider how the U.S. uses sexuality to regulate immigration and reproduce sexual categories. Other crucial studies began to unpack the interanimating work of sexuality and citizenship showing, as Jacqui Alexander would insist, that "heterosexuality is at once necessary to the state's ability to constitute and image itself, while simultaneously marking the site of its own instability."[8] More recently Alexander has called for further study of the state's investments in sexuality so that we might understand the "ideological traffic between and among formations that are otherwise positioned as dissimilar."[9] I hope to take up that challenge in an effort not simply to understand the stakes of heterosexualizing citizenship, but also to see how those stakes are immersed in a nativist homophobia that lays siege to the nation and enables the slow-motion massacre of migrants.

To return to Chavez's talk. He was presenting his work in the aftermath of Proposition 187, in a moment when Chicano Studies scholars turned renewed and outraged attention to the work of representation and, in particular, to how images and metaphors were mobilized to permit the renewal of a Nativist agenda that was then intensifying across the country.[10] Yet, in doing this work, the analysts of Prop 187 and its enabling culture have tended to ignore an odd part of the proposition's history.

In 1991, during his first term as governor of California, Pete Wilson vetoed AB101, a bill to extend protection against discrimination on the job to gays and lesbians. In response to the veto, queers across the state took to the streets in nightly protests that snarled traffic in Los Angeles and San Francisco for two weeks. That West Hollywood queers were among the most active startled and scared the Republican political machine, since it depended on that particular constituency's political docility to maintain a stranglehold over Southern California politics. The next year, convinced that his governorship was endangered, and stung by recession as well as a formidable Democratic opponent, Wilson signed virtually the same version of AB101.[11]

He subsequently, and almost immediately, faced a different sort of crisis—the outrage of the Republican far right. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition released The Gay Agenda, a film deploring Wilson's support of the legislation. The film depicts the AB101 protests alongside images of queers enjoying themselves in other, outrageous ways—in bars, at parades and so forth. The film, in Jaqui Alexander's words, "spectacularizes yet again heterosexual anxiety in a manner that puts homosexuality on display" (199). It also tells us that Wilson supports and even encourages supposedly anti-family pleasure. Conservative groups around Southern California then began circulating calls for money to challenge Wilson in the next gubernatorial primary. Wilson's strategy to placate his base entailed a brilliant change of subject. He shifted the locale for their homophobic anxiety rather than challenge its production. He supported, popularized, and campaigned for Proposition 187, an anti-immigration referendum that broadly refuted a century of U.S. thinking about citizenship and took as its charge the statewide regulation of immigration. It turned nurses and school teachers into immigration officials by charging them with surveillance responsibility, and it denied basic emergency care and benefits to all non-citizen immigrants regardless of how formal their status.[12]

Perhaps the first emblem of the neoliberal structural adjustment programs that came home to the United States in the 1990s (like welfare reform a few years later), Prop 187 turned the focus off of Lou Sheldon's gyrating gym boys protesting public policy and onto the abjected body of the poor immigrant mothers and children who were apparently sucking welfare money and hospital care from a then recession-weary state, as well as, and more particularly—the roving family-less migrant men who embodied, as they waited for work on a street corner, some sort of threat to the nation. The change of "subject" galvanized conservative support for Wilson, who went on to win re-election on Prop 187's coattails.

This essay is not the place to reexamine the import of Proposition 187 in spurring a new Nativist agenda, but it is useful to note here that in virtually none of the analysis of either AB101 and its aftermath or Proposition 187 and its aftermath do the two come together. It may be that the linkage between the two is circumstantial, but that it has gone unexamined underscores an ongoing refusal to think about immigration and sexuality together. What I would like to suggest here then, is that this shift from AB101 to Proposition 187 was not merely or only a clever politician's ruse. Rather, the homophobia generated around AB101 (and the notion of gay rights it solidified) helped sustain the anti-immigrant fervor that propelled proposition 187 from a crackpot, unconstitutional idea, into a widely-copied national platform for Wilson's presidential ambitions. Wilson could change from gay rights to this particular subject because the homophobia generated in the family values response effectively produced a sense of fear and, as the film's repeated jump shots suggest, social dislocation and dysphoria. What tied 101 and 187 together was in part the presumed assumption that both "the gay agenda" and the "immigrant agenda" took aim at the patriarchal white family, threatening to expose its homoerotic implications on the one hand, its vulnerability to multiple forms of desires, and on the other, its presumed status as a privileged, racialized site of consumption and protected locale for national reproduction. The move between 101 and 187 was not simply a shift from a battle over the regulation and production of citizenship to the sharpening of economic nationalism in nativist guise; it was also a signal of a vibrant relay that derives from, even as it enhances, a nationalist erotics.

Bill Clinton found similar comfort in the homophobia-anti-immigration relay. Damaged by his administration's early promise to change the military's anti-gay policies, he took solace, it would seem, in his capacity to appropriate anti-immigrant fervor to reinstate his legitimacy as guardian of the nation. When Proposition 187 seized the imagination of a California electorate, Clinton quickly solidified his own neoliberal agenda by championing and expanding Operation Gatekeeper. Concerned that Proposition 187 demonstrated wide cross-over appeal for voters, and cognizant of his need to maintain California's electoral votes, Clinton appropriated anxiety about immigration, decrying the unhumanitarian aspects of Prop 187 that his evacuation of welfare would later mimic, while simultaneously taking up the mantle of law and order to harness anti-immigrant fervor.

Operation Gatekeeper entailed a systematic strategy of policing the Mexico/U.S. border at popular crossing points, through the massing of agents and technology, particularly in urban areas and along the Rio Bravo.[13] This strategy, still in place more than a decade later, makes it nearly impossible for people to cross individually or in small groups in rural California or Texas. People coming to the U.S. without a visa often must turn themselves over to smuggling enterprises or try to cross independently in the barren, parched regions of the Arizona Sonora desert. There they die from heat prostration, hunger, and exposure.

A centerpiece of Clinton's presidency and later welcomed by George Bush, Operation Gatekeeper has become the condition of impossibility for more than 3000 people.[14] Since the inception of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, on average, one person has died almost every day trying to cross the Mexico-U.S. border. Occasionally these deaths gain national attention, as, for example, when eleven skeletons were found in a railroad car in the Midwest months after the car had entered the U.S., or as when a border patrolman loaded a dead woman's body onto the hood of a patrol vehicle because a mortuary hearse failed to show up. But most often, these deaths go un-noted in the mainstream media. They occur in an underdeveloped region of the country; they occur regularly, most frequently from spring through early fall, during what one human rights activist calls "the dying season."[15] Why has such an abundance of death not stirred more debate? Why have the recent debates about so called immigration reform and the massive border fence not centered on the daily deaths? What prevents a national outcry sufficient to change public policy?

I'd like to suggest that a partial hint to the answer lies in the relay between AB101 and Prop 187—in the unspoken, unacknowledged desires that helps to structure national discourses about immigration and keeps nativism afloat in ever newer guises. The fights over AB101 and Prop 187 emerged after a sea change in the U.S. economy. The demise of a Fordist manufacturing system entailed, in part, the reorganization of the nation's political economy. The locus of capital accumulation transitioned from manufacturing to the management of money and led to what some call the financialization of the U.S. economy. To support this transformation, the Reagan-Bush administrations hacked away at the social safety net and supported policies that helped depress real wages for the majority of U.S. workers. By the end of the 1980s, the storied "nuclear family" could no longer function easily with only one wage-earner. In short, the much vaunted two-parent, single-bread-winner family structure was under economic duress—a duress made fiercer by a series of recessions that left most wage-earners feeling their vulnerability to economic change. It was in this political-economic climate that the battles over enlarging the concept of rights and maintaining access to social services emerged.

AB101 enlisted the State of California's legal infrastructure to protect people from forms of discrimination that had heretofore gone unrecognized. In substantially linking "rights of citizenship" to sexual identities, AB101 resexualized citizenship—or rather, uncoupled it from presumptive heteronormativity. Extending the mantle of "rights" challenged the abstraction of citizenship as neutral, and revealed it to be fully imbricated in the creation and support of heterosexuality. AB101 also confirmed the possibility that alternate structures of desire and consumption might thrive outside of the bounds of middle-class heterosexuality. In their response to Wilson's ultimate approval of a similar measure, Lou Sheldon and others suggested that the broadening of citizenship to include more than the heteronormative did indeed threaten the heteronormative, arguing that this effort to gain protection came at the expense of "families." Gays deserved the blame for the faltering political economy of the heteronormative family, not socio-economic shifts.

As Kitty Calavita has argued, every round of anti-immigrant fervor can be contextualized not simply in terms of how immigrants served as scapegoats for a particular crisis, but also in terms of the ways in which Nativist content varies as ideological needs shift. She notes, for example, that at different moments over the course of the last century, the demonized immigrant has served as "strikebreaker," "socialist and anarchist," "depressor of wages," and, most recently, as "tax burden."[16] Calavita argues that the central motif of Proposition 187—the immigrant as a leech on social services, as a figure who exploits the safety net and drains the tax coffers—emerged only after the social safety net had been rendered highly vulnerable. That is to say, the restructuring of the national economy and the attempt to dismantle the welfare state were well underway before the immigrant narrative changed. No longer the exploited, depressor of wages for working "Americans," the immigrant had become a fiscal burden to taxpayers.

If the debate over gay "rights" metamorphosed into Prop 187, it shifted again when Clinton took 187 national with Operation Gatekeeper and, later, welfare reform. Clinton shifted the emphasis from what immigrants "deserved"—emergency care, education, police protection—and what problems they caused or eliminated—depressed wages, labor shortages—to a rhetoric centered on their status as "legal" or "illegal." He deployed his anti-immigrant policies and the development of Operation Gatekeeper by producing a new grid of intelligibility where legality became the central hermeneutic. The emphasis, Clinton repeatedly claimed, should not be on all immigrants, but rather on those who entered the country informally or stayed beyond their visa. By emphasizing such "illegality" he shifted the focus in the U.S. imaginary to immigrants' criminality, to their supposedly bad behavior, and away from issues of labor, wages, and poverty. And by emphasizing immigrants as criminals with a wanton disregard for the law, he transferred the anxiety of what immigrants might want or demand from the U.S. (i.e., social services, protection from exploitation) and from what they might contribute to the country at large, to the utopian fantasy of a neutral criminal justice system. Under his guidance, new laws were passed that as Jennifer Chacon argues, "conflated illegal immigrants with crime" and also "operated to reify the links between all immigrants and criminality."[17]

In this light, the subsequent 3000 plus deaths have nothing to do with the transformation of the world economy, or with NAFTA, or with the ongoing impact of the Dirty Wars in Central America, nothing to do with the cost of living, nothing to do with the lack of affordable food or the polluted water supplies. These deaths have been machined through the mill of legality to become nearly the proper punishment for violating an unquestioned and naturalized law. In other words, the emphasis on legality removes the deaths from the context of a policing system that forces people to enter the U.S. political territory (they are always already in U.S. economic territory) in highly dangerous ways. Instead it contextualizes these deaths as a kind of passive capital punishment for an immigrant's willingness to skirt entry regulations.

Put differently, whatever sentiment might be mobilized by the sight of horrific deaths remains out of bounds, left behind in the narrative tangle that inscribes illegality as out of reach of the sentimental. The survivors of the dying season, due to their ontological status as illegal, cannot "access normativity" and therefore cannot, it would seem, lay claim to the sort of sympathy that might be used to build a movement to change violent policing practices.[18] They are stuck in the "it serves them right" realm where sympathy for their experiences remains out of bounds. Any movement to build a large-scale tale of horror, one that would mobilize an affective response to the daily deaths and violence, and to the imprisonment and policing practices they support, and thereby to produce a culture that questions such policies, has been dissipated by this emphasis on criminalization. Immigrants have been effectively blamed for their own deaths. In the long, twisted corridor from AB101 to the daily deaths of immigrants, the state's responsibility to ensure rights is transmogrified into its privilege to kill.

The anti-gay rights/anti-immigrant relay surfaced again during the 2004-2006 election cycle. In 2004 the Republicans used the threat of gay marriage to draw people to the polls and then in 2006 launched new anti-immigrant proposals in several states, notably in Arizona where it found success. Similarly, Tom Tancredo raised money for his ill-fated presidential campaign largely on an anti-immigrant platform. Yet if in 2008 anti-immigrant rhetoric may not drive electoral success, it has nonetheless become all the more tightly tied to "family values" as part in parcel of the "anti-gay agenda." As a 2006 report for the Southern Poverty Law Center recently noted, a number of "family values" organizations have publicly aligned themselves with the Nativist anti-immigrant movement opposing Congressional efforts at immigration "reform".[19] The report's author, Alexander Zaitchik wonders, "When did immigration assume a place next to abortion and traditional marriage as a "family" issue for the religious right?" He sees the connection as a swift and recent one, as does New York Times columnist Frank Rich who facetiously calls "Hispanics" the "new gays" and argues that Latinos are merely the latest in a long line of scapegoats.[20] What Rich sees as a handy trend is really a connection reaching back to the furor raised by Pete Wilson in 1991, and even further back, to the feminization of Mexican men initiated by popular culture in the 19th century.

Rich is right, of course, as is Calavita, that the scapegoat mechanism does function by circulating a series of signifiers through its machinery. And Zaitchik is correct to note the recently enhanced visibility of "Family Values" crusaders in the anti-immigrant imaginary. Indeed, Lou Sheldon, who originally led the protests against Wilson's acquiescence to gay rights, is now a highly visible and crucial supporter of the "Secure Borders Coalition"—a group that unites the religious right with the anti-immigrant militia movement.[21] But what Zatichik and Rich miss, and what has been set aside in much of the analyses of Prop 187 and AB101, is the extent to which racialization and sexualization are productive of each other; they are also constitutive of criminality and legality; this aspect enables their allegorical flexibility and capacity to stand in for one another (Hispanic as the new gay) and indeed helps to trigger their respective forms of panic and discrimination. Oddly enough, it is an anti-immigrant website that most acutely points to this work. "Daylaborers.org" opens with a photo of a group of Latinos standing on a street curb, one of whom grabs his crotch in a threatening fashion and another of whom throws a finger in an equally angry manner.[22] Below the photo is a series of mug shots of Latinos charged with crimes.

This website brings me back to that hiss. There is no reason to presume that the heterosexual rape fantasy that my friend saw in any way contradicts my sense that the images played with a homoerotic imaginary. Obviously, depending on the audience, heterosexual rape fantasies can be very homoerotic. More to the point, both of our comments highlight the homosocial economy so crucial to the management of nationalism and suggest the extent to which homophobia and anti-immigrant hysteria dovetail into the regulation and promotion of the hetero-patriarchal, white family structure.

The potentially homoerotic images of immigrants framed as illegal in the popular press ignite a homophobic panic. This is not to say that the immigrants are themselves queer, though undoubtedly some would identify this way. Rather the portrayal of groups of men massed together on street corners, peering into windows, apparently without wives or children signals something. Similarly, the frequent citation of large groups of men living together, again without the presence of women, signals something. If it were not scary, New York Times columnist David Brooks would not include this sort of detail in an anti-immigrant screed:

He's no racist. Many of his favorite neighbors are kind, neat and hard-working Latinos. But his neighborhood now has homes with five cars rotting in the front yard and 12 single men living in one house... He read in the local paper last week that Anglos are now a minority in Texas and wonders if anybody is in charge of this social experiment... What we can do is re-establish law and order, so immigrants can bring their energy to this country without destroying the social fabric while they're here.[23]

Why should 12 single men living together be a problem? How can 12 men living together possibly "destroy the social fabric"? Why is such an image coupled with an anxiety over declining white hegemony? Perhaps they destroy it because they signal alternate organizations for consumption and reproduction. In this manner they suggest an alternative to the normative family. My conjecture here is that part of what sustains this emphasis on illegality, and the continuing death of immigrants, part of what maintains the U.S. anti-immigrant furor, is the desire to police desire, to reinscribe it along racialized and sexualized lines. That homophobia has preceded anti-immigrant hysteria in the current moment is not simply a coincidence. In other words, the seeming excess that homosexuality signals—its out of boundedness—clearly also signals the seeming excess that the racialized sexuality of non-whites has signaled for two centuries or more.

Similarly, the heterosexual rape fantasy implicit to the images of threatening men seeking entry to a nation gendered female reinscribes the importance of homosociality to national management. If, as Craig Smith argues, homosocial bonding establishes "domination and structures masculinity," then it is a fairly useful tool for nation-building. Perhaps for this reason men populate the majority of images of migrants in the popular press. Women are much less likely to be represented as actually crossing, entering, penetrating, borders. When shown, women are more often depicted as abjected mothers. But of course the homosociality suggested here is an uneven one—fractured by race and inequality.

The object of the rape fantasy is important here as well. The nation as woman is also the family as homeland and property. While it might be easy to understand that queer desire offers alternative venues for desire, intimacy, and consumption, and thereby poses a challenge to the normative heterosexual family structure, it is less easy to see why immigrants might be seen to threaten that structure—or why they should be narrated as such. As Calavita points out, immigrants came to be the symbolic release valve for a political economy that no longer needed the nuclear family structure with its patriarchal single-bread winner. They took the blame for policies that had rendered vulnerable every type of household but the wealthiest.

It doesn't actually matter to the nativist agenda then how family-friendly Latinos "really are" or claim to be. Jacqui Alexander's insights are helpful here. She points out that "family values" campaigns signal that the "ideological dominance of heterosexuality" is endangered.[24] Homophobia and nativism come together around "family values" and reveal the ongoing project of the state to manage sexuality, to educate desire and consumption, to restrict the targets of its largesse. But they also reveal paradoxically, that "family values" mean Anglo hegemony. That said, we can indeed see how a neoliberal narrative of rights has been harnessed to much of the discourse about both homosexuality and immigration. Both are narrated as "choices" and hence as moral acts. As Alexander notes, this process defines status as conduct and then makes that conduct into a propensity for criminality.

There is and is not a linear movement between AB101, Prop. 187, Operation Gatekeeper, 3000-plus deaths, and Tom Tancredo's failed presidential campaign. Better we understand these terms and histories and discourses as a kind of assemblage with a powerful impact. Gay citizen-activists and many of the non-gay immigrant poor may see themselves as strange bedfellows, but their relationship is indeed an embedded one.

Endnotes

1. Leo R. Chavez, Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. [Return to text]

2. See Between Woman and Nation: Nationalism, Transnational Feminisms and the State. Ed. Norma Alarcón, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo Moallem. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. [Return to text]

3. See, for example, the covers of Business Week, 23 June, 1980 and U.S. News and World Report, 29 January, 1979. [Return to text]

4. Consider, for example, the 19th century U.S. obsession with Mexico's mixed-race population. See Arnoldo De Leon, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Reginald Horseman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Race, and Production of Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. [Return to text]

5. For a helpful summary of this material see Belinda Rincón, "Heroic Boys and Good Neighbors: Militarism, Gender, and State Formation in the Young Adult Fiction of María Cristina Mena." Unpublished manuscript. Curtis Marez, Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. [Return to text]

6. Mary Pat Brady, "The Fungibility of Borders." Nepantla (Spring, 2000); Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. [Return to text]

7. Lionel Cantú, "A Place Called Home: A Queer Political Economy of Mexican Immigrant Men's Family Experiences." In Queer Families, Queer Politics: Challenging Culture and the State. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001; Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidades. New York: NYU Press, 2003; Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005; Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Luibhéid and Cantú, Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Martin Manalanson, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. [Return to text]

8. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. [Return to text]

9. Alexander, 190. [Return to text]

10. See Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tied Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Kent Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. [Return to text]

11. Robin Podolsky, "Stretching the World," LA Weekly, 15 November, 1991, 14; Doug Sadownick, "The Center Moves West," LA Weekly, 15 November 1991, 14; Moira Rachel Kenney, Mapping Gay L.A.: The Intersection of Place and Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. Jane Gross, "California Governor, in Reversal, Signs a Bill on Gay Rights in Jobs," New York Times, 26 September, 1992. [Return to text]

12. Wilson may have inadvertently signaled the connection between AB101 and Proposition 187 when he complained, in a major public statement, that immigrants came to the U.S. because of its "perverse incentives" (i.e., social welfare programs). Qtd. in Calavita, 289. [Return to text]

13. See, Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the 'Illegal Alien' and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. New York: Routledge: 2001; Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. [Return to text]

14. See Wayne A. Cornelius, "Controlling 'Unwanted' Immigration: Lessons from the United States, 1993-2004," Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31(4), July 2005: 775-794. He estimates deaths in the first ten years of Operation Gatekeeper to be nearly 3000. In the intervening four years many hundreds if not thousands more have died. [Return to text]

15. Evelyn Nieves. "Illegal Immigrant Death Rate Rises Sharply in Barren Areas." New York Times. 6 August, 2002. [Return to text]

16. Kitty Calavita, "The New Politics of Immigration: "Balanced-Budget Conservatism" and the Symbolism of Proposition 187." Social Problems 43:3 (August 1986): 284-305. [Return to text]

17. Jennifer Chacon, "Unsecured Borders: Immigration Restrictions, Crime Control and National Security." Connecticut Law Review 39: (July 2007). [Return to text]

18. Jose Muñoz, "Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs)" Theatre Journal, 52:1 (March 2000): 67-79 68. [Return to text]

19. Alexander Zaitchik, "Christian' Nativism." Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report. Winter 2006. [Return to text]

20. Frank Rich, "How Hispanics Became the New Gays" New York Times 11 June, 2006. [Return to text]

21. Secure Borders Coalition. [Return to text]

22. For a provocative discussion of this photo see Daniel E. Solís y Martínez: "Bodies of Civilization and Bodies of Desire: The Construction of Masculinities Between Day Laboring Men and the Men Who Hire Them," Culture Critique. 1:1. [Return to text]

23. David Brooks, "Two Steps Toward a Sensible Immigration Policy." New York Times 14 August, 2005. [Return to text]

24. Alexander, 226. [Return to text]