Description
Book SynopsisThe 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 yearsbookended by the right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trumpand 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
Trade ReviewA 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 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Central Americans among “US”
Chapter 1. Signifying US Central American Non-belonging
Chapter 2. Domesticated Subject? The Salvadoran Maid in US Television and Film
Chapter 3. Lance Corporal José Gutiérrez and the Perils of Being a “Good Immigrant”
Chapter 4. Central American Crossings, Rightlessness, and Survival in Mexico’s Border Passage
Chapter 5. The Cachet of Illegal Chickens in Central American Los Angeles
Conclusion: Seeing beyond the Dominant
Notes
Works Cited
Index
