By: Alexis Ortiz & Chyanne Smith

1. Whose “America”? The Politics ofRhetoric and Space in the Formation ofU.S. NationalismAimee Carrillo Rowe By: Alexis Ortiz & Chyanne Smith

2. “In New York City, two more officers were arraigned today in the alleged police brutality case that’s quickly become a citywide scandal. Officer T. W. and T. B. pleaded not guilty to charges they assaulted Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant. . . . The superseding indictment handed up late yesterday added a new charge against all four arrested officers—aggravated harassment—meaning the officers allegedly assaulted Louima because of his race.” —All Things Considered, August 22, 1997

3. *The article of Abner Louima’s abuse served as a rallying point for activists to mark the unrestrained violence that arises within the state’s protection of it’s citizens and the racist assumptions about U.S. citizenship. * The form of abuse (being claimed to be an act of racism) shows the brutality of white hegemony (the dominance of one social group or nation, in this case being white supremacy, and calls this issue into question. This causes arguments that work to remove such accusations to keep the white body politic intact. * The abuse of people of other skin colors is unspoken of among the white body politic- a set of discursive and material practices designed to keep us in our place: a largely indentured population whose labor sustains the nation, but whose voices, needs, and basic human rights must be subordinated to the needs of U.S. capitalism. * The dismissal of such these actions localizes systematic violence in order to get rid of the contradiction that there is unfreedom in the land of the free, then (in this case) makes the NYPD back into heroes.

4. *Such acts can be put into context as “White Victimage” -White victim is the result of ‘white anxiety’ at the dissolution historically centered white identity, which is being changed because of shifting racial and national configuration. *The White Victimage discourse assumes that whiteness is the foundation of national society, and is ‘under siege by foreign bodies.’ *Through the logics of white victimage politics are legitimized by assuming that the playing field is leveled, saying “we are all victims now”, which allows for the claimed inclusion of excluded groups.

5. How do we begin to imagine the radical visions of inclusions for transformative (trans)nationalism that Cuban Nationalist Jose Marti said in “Our America”? *Marti was very critical of Latin American countries that base their nationalism on U.S. or European forms, saying that the forms should come from the indigenous, colored, classed, and most disenfranchised(Deprived the rights of citizenship) population from within the national space. *Marti was an astute student of the liberation struggles of all the Latin American countries and the creatable connections between them. *He envisioned a transnational, anticolonial nationalism that would create and integrative approach to the study of nationalism and transnationalism. -Nationalism: loyalty and devotion to one’s nation (Merriam Webster Dictionary) -Transnationalism: extending or going beyond one’s boundaries. (Merriam Webster Dictionary)

6. * The role of Latin America’s “northern neighbor” driven by “madness and ambitions” is obvious in Jose Marti’s work and he said that ““The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is Our America’s greatest danger.”, and he envisioned “Our America” as a liberated Latin America that would build from the momentum of it’s first independence from Spain to gain it’s second independence from the United States. *He had concerns that the American imperialist expansion was an obstacle for the revolutionary forms he envisioned. *After the Annexation of Mexico 150 years ago, the U.S. is seeking new forms of colonization that undermine Latin American independence on many fronts. *In this new era of transnationalism people flow more freely across national borders and capitalist exploits assume a more flexible character than in the past, thus military occupation and annexation opens doors for interrelated forms of control. *The shared forms of control would then allow the U.S. to be able to make Latin America more profitable for their benefit.

7. *The cultural productions of Anglo Anxieties over the demographic shifts is a form of ideological control where fear would be turned around and redirected as violence towards racialized immigrants and migrant workers, being a process where whiteness becomes a material force. *Anti-immigration inverts violence, turning it on racialized bodies which could cause white on color violence that could torment entire populations. *This condition would create uncertainty among immigrants and allow the U.S. to benefit from this violence by retaining social control. *This inversion of “white privilege” secures power and becomes a material force that would constrain the racialized body and liberate the unmarked white body. *The formation of U.S. nationalism restrains the empowerment and free movement of working-class people of color and thus undermines the possibility of “Our America.”

8. White Space, Brown Powder Immigration laws have privatized the nation; it is now a bounded space into which only some of the people can walk some of the time. —Anannya Bhattarcharjee, “The Public/Private Mirage” *Anannya Bhattarcharjee’s study of domestic violence shows that noncitizen South Asian women living in the United States are subjected to citizenship tests of “good faith” mediated by their husbands or domestic employers. *Immigrations laws make the woman dependent of the man who takes care of her, giving him the power to her capacity to be recognized as a member of the national society. *Bhattarcharjee’s studies demonstrates the ways in which the nation-state exerts an active and invisible pressure that constrains the mobility of social subjects disenfranchised by their lack of access to citizenship

9. *The existence of bounded national space that Bhattarcharjee refers to relies on borders. * Borders provide space with meaning by carving it up and signifying, both materially and discursively, zones of demarcation between inside and outside, one side of the border and the other. *An approach of rhetoric, space, and power call for a critical examination of the discursive formations through which the borders and that which the borders distinguish become a material force. *Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson describe the border as composed of “cement trenches, chain-link fences, light-green paddy wagons, uniforms, binoculars, and soon, perhaps, steel walls, as well as multiple paranoid discourses of national and racial contagion.”

10. *The U.S.-Mexican border region has historically been a highly contested space, revealing the competing and converging needs of capitalism, imperialist expansionism, and a U.S. nationalism deeply embedded in whiteness. *The history of the southwestern United States, “the borderlands,” has been and remains a site of Anglo uncertainty that seeks to strike a balance between competing hegemonic desires. *As Marti's concern over the annexation of Latin America foreshadowed, the changing conceptualization of the border region radically alters the lived experiences of its inhabitants, demarcating who can move within a certain space and under what conditions, as well as the nature and agency of the forms of mobility that become possible for differently situated social groups.

11. Pete Wilson (Politician from California) *Wilson argues that the US fails to control its borders. *He references his Irish roots and describes how even though they were in the same position as African Americans they actually made wise decisions (using labor unions, the Catholic Church, and the Democratic Party *These decisions were made in order to secure white privileges.

12. *He also sees the Irish as people who are hard working and do not freeload on society (he shares the opposite opinion about Mexican immigrants.) *He refers to Mexican immigrants as “criminal aliens” because he feels that they are here to do bad to the country. *“As we struggle to keep dangerous criminals off our streets, we find that fourteen percent of California’s prison population are illegal immigrants— enough to fill eight state prisons to design-capacity. And through a recession that has caused the loss of one-third of the revenues previously received by state government, as we have struggled to maintain per pupil spending and to cover fully enrollment growth with classrooms around the state bursting at the seams, we’re forced to spend $1.7 billion each year to educate students who are acknowledged to be in this country illegally.” This shows how he feels about immigrants and how they're are over populating the country.

13. * The power of whiteness: to define the national space secures a privileged standpoint for whites, since whiteness is defined against racialized others, who are at once reduced to a dark backdrop on which the unmarked hegemonic space of whiteness performs. *Whiteness becomes equated with citizenship, and citizenship with freedom, revealing the specific moves through which “this country’s national identity, normality, and superiority are not independent, however, of the existence of nonwhites.

14. *An integral part of defining free Americans is by contrast to those who are non-American and unfree.” *Many people argue that there have been violent acts inflicted upon white people, which have been caused due to “hatred” that most immigrants have against white people. *But now a new plan to keep the boarder crossers away was put into play.

15. *The border-control program, at a cost to the [INS] (Immigration and Naturalization Service) of $2.6 million a month, will militarize areas along the border in California and Arizona. *But to this day the same question as before still arises “who is America?” *The immigration struggle still continues to this day and Rowe still wonders when all of these things will finally be settled.