(Re)bordering the civic imaginary: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Volumn 97, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 26-49

  Cisneros, Josue David ^a  

^a NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Citizenship; Hybridity; Immigration; La gran marcha; Social protest

Indexed keywords

EID: 79951684081     PISSN: 00335630     EISSN: 14795779     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2010.536564     Document Type: Article

References (168)

1. D. Robert DeChaine, "Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Alienization, Fence Logic, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps," Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 43.
2. DeChaine, "Bordering," 46.
3. Vanessa B. Beasley, You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 5.
4. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994);
5. Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
6. Hector Amaya, "Latino Immigrants in the American Discourses of Citizenship and Nationalism During the Iraqi War," Critical Discourse Studies 4 (2007): 237-56;
7. Bernadette Marie Calafell and Fernando Delgado, "Reading Latina/o Images: Interrogating Americanos," Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004): 1-24;
8. Leo R. Chavez, Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);
9. J. David Cisneros, "Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of 'Immigrant as Pollutant' in Media Representations of Immigration," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11 (2008): 569-601;
10. Anne T. Demo, "Sovereignty Discourse and Contemporary Immigration Politics," Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 291-311;
11. Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
12. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
13. DeChaine, "Bordering," 45.
14. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction," Public Culture 14 (2002): 1-19.
15. DeChaine, "Bordering," 50.
16. This is a point discussed in studies of migration, including Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging (New York: Routledge, 2000).
17. "Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005," (HR 4437, December 16, 2005), Available from THOMAS (Library of Congress), http://thomas.loc.gov.
18. Leo R. Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 154-5.
19. Adrian Felix, Carmen Gonzalez, and Ricardo Ramirez, "Political Protest, Ethnic Media, and Latino Naturalization," American Behavioral Scientist 52 (2008): 618-34.
20. Chavez, Latino Threat; DeChaine, "Bordering."
21. Beth Baker-Cristales, "Mediated Resistance: The Construction of Neoliberal Citizenship in the Immigrant Rights Movement," Latino Studies 7 (2009): 69.
22. Jenna M. Loyd and Andrew Burridge, "La Gran Marcha: Anti-Racism and Immigrants Rights in Southern California," ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 6 (2007): 1-35.
23. Robert Asen, "A Discourse Theory of Citizenship," Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 189-211.
24. I use the notion of appropriation here in the sense that Helene Shugart does, i.e., the deployment of dominant and oppressive discourses by subaltern groups so that "the original meaning, which may pose a threat to the appropriator, is deconstructed,... and the agenda of the appropriator is advanced instead."
25. Helene A. Shugart, "Counterhegemonic Acts: Appropriation as a Feminist Rhetorical Strategy," Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 211.
26. This essay brings together a number of sources documenting LGM: a fifteen-minute video recording of protestors outside of City Hall recorded by CBS 2/KCAL 9 (a local Los Angeles television station), several short videos taken by protestors or observers available on the Internet Archive, and photographic images taken from the website of Unity Corp (Cuerpo de Unidad)-one of the organizing groups of the protest. "Immigration March Draws Thousands of Protestors," CBS 2/KCAL 9 Los Angeles, March 25, 2006, http://cbs2.com/ video/?id = 15998@kcbs.dayport.com; Cuerpo de Unidad, Inc., "La Gran Marcha 2006," 2006, http://www.granmarcha.org; "La Gran Marcha, Los Angeles," Internet Archive, http:// www.archive.org/details/LaGranMarchaLosAngeles.
27. C Chavez, Latino Threat;
28. Alfonso Gonzales, "The 2006 Mega Marchas in Greater Los Angeles: Counter-Hegemonic Moment and the Future of El Migrante Struggle," Latino Studies 7 (2009): 30-59.
29. Cisneros, "Contaminated Communities"; DeChaine, "Bordering."
30. Lisa A. Flores, "Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration," Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 381.
31. Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders, Chapter 5.
32. Michelle A. Holling, "Forming Oppositional Social Concord to California's Proposition 187 and Squelching Social Discord in the Vernacular Space of CHICLE," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 202-22.
33. Vanessa B. Beasley, "Presidential Rhetoric and Immigration: Balancing Tensions between Hope and Fear," in Who Belongs in America: Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration, ed. Vanessa B. Beasley (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 14.
34. Hugh Mehan, "The Discourse of the Illegal Immigration Debate: A Case Study in the Politics of Representation," Discourse & Society 8 (1997): 249-70.
35. Matt A. Barreto, Sylvia Manzano, Ricardo Ramirez, and Kathy Rim, "Mobilization, Participation, and Solidaridad: Latino Participation in the 2006 Immigration Protest Rallies," Urban Affairs Review 44 (2009): 747.
36. Gonzales, "Mega Marchas," 39.
37. Barreto et al., "Mobilization, Participation, and Solidaridad," 746.
38. Fernando P. Delgado, "Chicano Movement Rhetoric: An Ideographic Interpretation," Communication Quarterly 43 (1995): 446-54;
39. John C. Hammerback and Richard J. Jensen, "Ethnic Heritage as Rhetorical Legacy: The Plan of Delano," Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 53-70;
40. A War of Words: Chicano Protest in the 1960s and 1970s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985);
41. The Rhetorical Career of Cesar Chavez (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1998).
42. Lisa A. Flores, "Constructing National Bodies: Public Argument in the English-Only Movement," in Argument at Century's End: Reflecting on the Past and Envisioning the Future, ed. T. A. Hollihan (Annandale, VA: National Communication Association, 2000), 436-45;
43. M Hasian and Fernando Delgado, "Trails and Tribulations of Racialized Critical Rhetorical Theory: Understanding the Rhetorical Ambiguities of Proposition 187," Communication Theory 8 (1998): 245-70; Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders.
44. Sharon Ann Navarro and Armando Xavier Mejia, Latino Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004).
45. Gonzales, "Mega Marchas," 38.
46. Felix et al., "Political Protest, Ethnic Media, and Latino Naturalization."
47. Quoted in Gonzales, "Mega Marchas," 43.
48. Gonzales, "Mega Marchas," 43.
49. Adrian D. Pantoja, Cecilia Menjivar, and Lisa Magana, (Eds). "The Spring Marches of 2006: Latinos, Immigration, and Political Mobilization in the 21st Century," special issue, American Behavioral Scientist 52 (2008).
50. Richard D. Pineda and Stacey K. Sowards, "Flag Waving as Visual Argument: 2006 Immigration Demonstrations and Cultural Citizenship," Argumentation & Advocacy 43 (2007): 164-74.
51. Tomas F. Summers Sandoval., "Disobedient Bodies: Racializa-tion, Resistance, and the Mass (Re)Articulation of the Mexican Immigrant Body," American Behavioral Scientist 52 (2008): 580-97.
52. Beasley, You, the People; Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);
53. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007);
54. Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005);
55. Angela G. Ray, "The Permeable Public: Rituals of Citizenship in Antebellum Men's Debating Clubs," Argumentation & Advocacy 41 (2004): 1-16;
56. Kirt H. Wilson, "The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 89-108.
57. Asen, "A Discourse Theory," 204.
58. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 33.
59. Asen, "A Discourse Theory," 194.
60. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed.
61. Jeffrey A. Bennett, Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 6.
62. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed.
63. Vanessa B. Beasley, "The Rhetoric of Ideological Consensus in the United States: American Principles and American Pose in Presidential Inaugurals," Communication Monographs 68 (2001): 169-83.
64. Angela G. Ray, "The Rhetorical Ritual of Citizenship: Women's Voting as Public Performance, 1868-1875," Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 1-26;
65. Angela G. Ray and Cindy Koenig Richards, "Inventing Citizens, Imagining Gender Justice: The Suffrage Rhetoric of Virginia and Francis Minor," Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 375-402;
66. Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning Antislavery & Women's Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
67. Condit and Lucaites, Crafting Equality;
68. Robert E. Terrill, Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004).
69. Jeff Bennett's analysis of the tensions between passing and protest involved in the politics of blood donation illuminates this point.
70. Jeffrey A. Bennett, "Passing, Protesting, and the Arts of Resistance: Infiltrating the Ritual Space of Blood Donation," Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): 23-43.
71. D Bennett, Banning Queer Blood;
72. Daniel C. Brouwer, "ACT-ing up in Congressional Hearings," in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 87-109.
73. Asen, "A Discourse Theory," 203.
74. Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders;
75. DeChaine, "Bordering."
76. Marwan M. Kraidy, "Hybridity in Cultural Globalization," Communication Theory 12 (2002): 316-39;
77. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995);
78. May Joseph and Jennifer Fink, ed., Performing Hybridity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
79. Asen, "A Discourse Theory," 206.
80. Here I am referring to what Richard Gregg calls the inward-directed, "ego-function" of protest. Richard B. Gregg, "The Ego-Function of the Rhetoric of Protest," Philosophy & Rhetoric 4 (1971): 71-91.
81. In this sense, the hybrid function of citizenship enactments suggests more than just a dual purpose. Hybridity refers here to the intersection of the different functions of a rhetorical act so that, as an enactment of civic identity, they are indistinguishable from one another and create something new. For example, buying fair trade coffee is comprehensible as an enactment of citizenship only insofar as the acts of consumption, political expression, and civic engagement blend together into a hybrid action. Another example is found in Phaedra Pezzulo's discussion of toxic tours, which fuse tourism, spectacle, and protest, among other forms and functions, to constitute counterpublics. Note
82. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).
83. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, "Rhetorical Hybrids: Fusions of Generic Elements," Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982): 147.
84. Darrel Enck-Wanzer, "Trashing the System: Social Movement, Intersectional Rhetoric, and Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization's Garbage Offensive," Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 191.
85. Bennett, "Passing, Protesting";
86. Kevin Michael DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: Guilford Press, 1999);
87. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, "Resisting 'National Breast Cancer Awareness Month': The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 345-65;
88. Ray, "The Rhetorical Ritual of Citizenship."
89. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987);
90. Bernadette Marie Calafell, "Disrupting the Dichotomy: 'Yo Soy Chicana/o?' In the New Latina/o South," Communication Review 7 (2004): 175-204;
91. Isabel Molina Guzman and Angharad Valdivia, "Brain, Brow, and Booty: Latina Iconicity in US Popular Culture," Communication Review 7 (2004): 205-21;
92. Shane T. Moreman, "Hybrid Performativity, South and North of the Border: Entre La Teoria Y La Materialidad De Hibridacidn," in Latina/o Communication Studies Today, ed. A. N. Valdivia (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 91-111.
93. Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders, 72.
94. DeChaine, "Bordering," 50.
95. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994);
96. May Joseph, Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
97. DeChaine, "Bordering," 50.
98. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
99. C Joseph, Nomadic Identities, 17.
100. May Joseph, "Introduction: New Hybrid Identities and Performance," in Performing Hybridity, ed. May Joseph and Jennifer Fink (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 1-24.
101. Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 44.
102. V Shugart, "Counterhegemonic Acts";
103. Angharad N. Valdivia, "Latinas as Radical Hybrid: 'Transnationally Gendered Traces in Mainstream Media,"' Global Media Journal 3 (2004): http://las.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/gmj/sp05/sp04/gmj-sp04-valdivia.htm
104. The distinction I am drawing in this analysis between verbal, visual, and embodied rhetoric is meant for purely analytical purposes and is not meant to posit an a priori distinction between these forms of rhetoric. Later, the essay also shows how diverse types of discourse were fused into a hybrid rhetorical form.
105. Lisa A. Flores, "Creating Discursive Space through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland," Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 142-56.
106. This sign was distributed by the LA chapter of the left-wing protest organization the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition. Gonzales, "Mega Marchas."
107. Jacques E. Levy and Cesar Chavez, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa (New York: Norton, 1975), 464;
108. Stacey Sowards, "Rhetorical Agency as Haciendo Caras and Differential Consciousness Through Lens of Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class: An Examination of Dolores Huerta's Rhetoric," Communication Theory 20 (2010): 224.
109. C Navarro and H Mejia, Latino Americans and Political Participation, 70-1;
110. Enck-Wanzer, "Trashing the System."
111. Michael C. McGee, "In Search of 'the People': A Rhetorical Alternative," Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 245.
112. Randall A. Lake, "Enacting Red Power: The Consummatory Function in Native American Protest Rhetoric," Quarterly Journal of Speech 69 (1983): 127-42
113. Charles J. Stewart, Craig Allen Smith, and Robert E. Denton, Persuasion and Social Movements, 4th ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2001).
114. Mark Mattern, Acting in Concert: Music, Community, and Political Action (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), Chapter 3.
115. Kathryn M. Olson and G. Thomas Goodnight, "Entanglements of Consumption, Cruelty, Privacy, and Fashion: The Social Controversy over Fur," Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 249-76.
116. Lynn Stephen, Zapata Lives!: Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
117. Monica W. Varsanyi, "The Paradox of Contemporary Immigrant Political Mobilization: Organized Labor, Undocumented Migrants, and Electoral Participation in Los Angeles," Antipode 37 (2005): 787. Emphasis in original.
118. James Crawford, At War with Diversity: US Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety (Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters, 2000).
119. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, "Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima," Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 363-92.
120. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 100.
121. Pineda and Sowards, "Flag Waving as Visual Argument."
122. Chavez, Latino Threat, Chapter 7.
123. Pineda and Sowards, "Flag Waving As Visual Argument," 168-70
124. Quoted in Chavez, The Latino Threat, 158.
125. Chavez, The Latino Threat, 158-9.
126. Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation" in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 300.
127. Flores, "Constructing Rhetorical Borders," 381
128. Anne Norton, Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 120.
129. Kevin Michael DeLuca, "Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation," Argumentation & Advocacy 36 (1999): 18.
130. See the video "Immigration March Draws Thousands of Protestors."
131. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 116.
132. DeChaine, "Bordering," 49.
133. Summers Sandoval, "Disobedient Bodies."
134. The videos of LGM available at the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/LaGranMarchaLosAngeles) are particularly telling on this point.
135. Jose Esteban Munoz, "Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs)," Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 69-70.
136. In the same way that queer public kissing represents a "coming out" that flouts the heteronormativity and homophobia surrounding public expressions of intimacy by gays and lesbians, immigrants flouted the racialized affect of citizenship with a "coming out" of the shadows.
137. Charles E. Morris, and John M. Sloop, "'What Lips These Lips Have Kissed': Refiguring the Politics of Queer Public Kissing," Communication & Critical/ Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 12.
138. Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders, 37.
139. Barreto et al., "Mobilization, Participation, and Solidaridad."
140. Hasian, and Delgado, "Trials and Tribulations," 257.
141. Bernadette Marie Calafell, Latina/o Communication Studies: Theorizing Performance (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 33.
142. Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 4-5.
143. Bhabha, "DissemiNation," 293.
144. Teresa Watanabe and Hector Bercerra, "How DJs Put 500,000 Marchers in Motion," Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2006, http://articles.latimes.com/2006/mar/28/local/me-march28
145. DeChaine, "Bordering," 49.
146. DeChaine, "Bordering," 59. Emphasis added.
147. Raymie E. McKerrow, "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis," Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91-111.
148. Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, "The Critique of Vernacular Discourse," Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 19-46.
149. DeChaine, "Bordering," 61.
150. For further development of this point see Calafell, Latina/o Communication Studies, Chapter 1.
151. Enck-Wanzer, "Trashing the System," 191.
152. Darrel Enck-Wanzer, "A Radical Democratic Style?: Tradition, Hybridity, and Intersection-ality," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11 (2008): 459-65.
153. Ronald Walter Greene, "John Dewey's Eloquent Citizen: Communication, Judgment, and Postmodern Capitalism," Argumentation & Advocacy 39 (2003): 189-200.
154. DeChaine, "Bordering," 60.
155. Eric King Watts, "'Voice' and 'Voicelessness' in Rhetorical Studies," Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 192.
156. Quoted in the video "Immigration March Draws Thousands of Protestors."
157. Robert L. Ivie, "Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5 (2002): 279.
158. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993).
159. For a discussion of these events and the news coverage surrounding them, Otto Santa Ana, Laya Lopez and Edgar Munguiya, "Framing Peace as Violence: Television News Depictions of the 2007 Police Attack on Immigrant Rights Marchers in Los Angeles," Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 35 (2010): 69-101.
160. Valeria Fernandez, "A Year After Arrest, Immigrant Family Marches Against SB 1070," Feet In 2 Worlds: Telling the Stories of Today's Immigrants, May 31, 2010, http://news.feetintwoworlds.org/2010/05/31/a-year-after-arrest-immigrant-family-marches-against-sb-1070/.
161. Randal C. Archibols, and Anna Facio Contreras, "The Two Sides Intersect in Immigration Debate," The New York Times, May 30, 2010, p. 14, http://www.lexisnexis.com
162. Nicholas Riccardi, "Thousands Protest in Arizona," Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2010, p. A-16, http://www.lexisnexis.com
163. [118] See, for example, the website of the group jAlto Arizona! (http://www.altoarizona.com/).
164. Quoted in Riccardi, "Thousands Protest in Arizona."
165. Quoted in Fernandez, "A Year After Arrest, Immigrant Family Marches Against SB 1070."
166. Fernandez, "A Year After Arrest, Immigrant Family Marches Against SB 1070."
167. Barreto et al., "Mobilization, Participation, and Solidaridad," 757.
168. For another early assessment of the effects of the 2006 demonstrations see Mara Cohen-Marks, "Look Back in Anger?: Voter Opinions of Mexican Immigrants in the Aftermath of the 2006 Immigration Demonstrations," Urban Affairs Review 44 (2009): 695-717.