The Homoerotics of Immigration Control

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”. ¹ 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. ² 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. ³ 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. ⁴ 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. ⁵

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.

1. Alexander Zaitchik, “Christian’ Nativism.” Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report. Winter 2006.[↑]
2. Frank Rich, “How Hispanics Became the New Gays” New York Times 11 June, 2006.[↑]
3. Secure Borders Coalition[↑]
4. 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.[↑]
5. David Brooks, “Two Steps Toward a Sensible Immigration Policy.” New York Times 14 August, 2005.[↑]