Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant

Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation

by Lisa A. Flores

In the 1920s, the US government passed legislation against undocumented entry into the country, and as a result the figure of the “illegal alien” took form in the national discourse. In this book, Lisa A. Flores explores the history of our language about Mexican immigrants and exposes how our words made these migrants “illegal.” Deportable and Disposable brings a rhetorical lens to a question that has predominantly concerned how do differently situated immigrant populations come to belong within the national space of whiteness, and thus of American-ness? Flores presents a genealogy of our immigration discourse through four the “illegal alien,” a foreigner and criminal who quickly became associated with Mexican migrants; the “bracero,” a docile Mexican contract laborer; the “zoot suiter,” a delinquent Mexican American youth engaged in gang culture; and the “wetback,” an unwanted migrant who entered the country by swimming across the Rio Grande. By showing how these figures were constructed, Flores provides insight into the ways in which we racialize language and how we can transform our political rhetoric to ensure immigrant populations come to belong as part of the country, as Americans. Timely, thoughtful, and eye-opening, Deportable and Disposable initiates a necessary conversation about the relationship between racial rhetoric and the literal and figurative borders of the nation. This powerful book will inform policy makers, scholars, activists, and anyone else interested in race, rhetoric, and immigration in the United States.

Genres: Politics

236 pages, Hardcover

Published October 14, 2020

Reviews

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is only a smidge over 150 pages. However, it took me months to get through meaningfully, as someone is not a rhetorical scholar. I can easily eat up hundreds of pages of adult fiction or even philosophy in a day. However, the breaks I took to parse and evaluate the documented undulation within the rhetorical climate of immigration was well worthwhile. I recommend for anyone willing to engage with a text that dives deep, hits hard, gives you meaningful chances to increase your own lexicon (differentiating between a metonym and a synecdoche for myself) and leaves you with an uneasy feeling of ontological history that is likely about to repeat again.