The media has played an instrumental role in broadcasting anti-immigrant and migrant sentiment, from politicians and citizens alike. Mass media, for the last few years, has taken reign of broadcasting and facilitating communication between not only governmental forces (politicians, organizations, institutions, etc.) and the public, but vice versa and exclusively among the public. While this does allow for reckoning with ideas and policies, it also creates a specific language for doing so. This language is often dangerous to specific ethnic and racialized groups, as they are the targets of the ideas and policies being created, enacted, enforced, and experienced. Drawing from the lived experiences of the women in Josefina Lopez’s play Real Women Have Curves (1996) and the legal analysis provided by Mai Ngai in her book Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004), and the Media, I will be engaging in a discourse analysis method to discuss language is used to criminalize ethnic and racialized human bodies creating “otherness”, a lingering sense of fear, and how this manifested trauma impacts life.
Ngai’s prescription calls for two epistemic channels. The first being about colonialism and conquest. Since America is a nation formed on stolen Indigenous land there was an inherited politic around the legal citizen, the illegal citizen and borders, making these terms part of American national identity and understanding (7). The second being about sovereignty and how those who have territorial, social, or political sovereignty create the bounds of and determine who is allowed sovereignty (12). Nationalism aligns people with a higher power. In this case, it is the United States. Not only does nationalism reproduce alliance, but it is a signifier of membership which Ngai urges us to critically think about. During Ana’s opening scene, as she writes in her journal for the very first time mentions:
I just graduated from high school… Most of my friends are in college… It’s as if I'm going backwards. I'm doing the work that mostly illegal aliens do… (Scratches “illegal aliens”) No, “undocumented workers”… or else it sounds like these people come from Mars… Soon I will have my temporary Residence Card,”, then after two years, my “Green card”… I’m happy to finally be legal, but I thought things would be different… (12)
Ana is a unique character. She knows what illegality looks like: it’s fear while waiting for the bus (48), it’s not feeling comfortable calling your boss to reasonably request an extension (48). She knows what illegality sounds like: your mother telling you that if you do get deported they will figure out a way to smuggle you back (49). She has been exposed to the trauma accumulated from the years those around her spent being undocumented. She understands what being an “illegal alien” means. Even then, the life she knows is the life of a Mexican-American. She may physically look “Mexican”, and she may be able to roll her r’s because of her native spanish tongue, part-take in Mexican holidays or festivities, but she has an American education, an American outlook on what success looks like and how to attain it. She has an intrinsic alliance to her family because they are her family, but adopted an alliance to America because it is her home. Finding the right terminology for her personal diary, which no eyes other than her own are meant to see, show us her internal dilemma. Even she, who navigates the territory on either side of the hyphen between Mexican-American comfortably, does not have the proper words to describe who her sister, her mother, her people are. She does know that she is different; she knows her legal status does not make her the “other”.
One of the most circulated terms in discourse be it in the media or intimate interactions is “illegal alien.” Mai Ngai’s emphasizes that she uses this term not with the intent of perpetuating its disparaging connotations which affect Mexican or Latinx peoples, but to trace its historical origins (xix). Following Ngai, I use the term “illegal alien” not to propel the denigrating connotations most commonly tied to Mexicans or Latinx folk, but rather as a label encompassing a verbal wound pierced on to the brown body by the White American. Ngai explains how the passing of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in 1924 “remapped the nation” by developing a broad-based immigration exclusion which not only magnified the sense and use of national borders, but intensified the state’s surveillance of the border helping produce an “illegal alien” (3). Since the term was framed around the US/Mexican border, the spotlight on Mexican bodies intensified. However, Mexican/Latinx bodies have markers other than color. They have accents, they have garb, they have music, etc,. This means not only is the brown body criminalized, but Mexican/Latinx accents are criminalized. Mexican/Latinx garb is criminalized. People eating Mexican/Latinx music is criminalized, and so on. As Mexican and Latinx diaspora began to transcend the borderlands, the surveillance did as well, threatening areas with a large volume of brown bodies.
Illegality is a status, not an identity. Since illegality is associated with a Mexican/Latinx looking body, the term “illegal alien” becomes synonymous with phenotypic descriptions of previously mentioned bodies. This makes criminalizing bodies with the previously mentioned markers second nature even to the President of the United States. Following the 2017 Presidential election, the then president-elect Donald Trump told “60 minutes” correspondent, Lesley Stahl during an interview “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate.” President Trump associates undocumented folk with criminality. He transitively links criminality to criminal records, gang members, and drug dealers. The interview was aired by CBS, a news media outlet that streams not only through TV, but is accessible online. Since it was released at a time when most Americans eyes were on Trump and most ears were selectively open to his words, it reached a large audience of people on all parts of the political spectrum. Thus, whenever folk share space with a brown body, enter a brown community, or identify a marker associated with the brown body, they are inclined to question whether they have a criminal record, are part of a gang, deal drugs, and/or are undocumented. This heightens the public anxiety folk who are undocumented have because they are aware of how they can be perceived and in turn are forced to be hyper aware of how they navigate daily life in their body. Now, not only are their neighborhoods heavily surveilled and policed, but so are their actions.
Ngai reinforces the idea that because of undocumented aliens’ legal status, their position in the lower strata of society is fixed as by being excluded from polity, they are formally without social membership and legitimacy (2). In Act 1 Scene 2 of Real Women Have Curves, Estela, Rosali, Pancha and Carmen are take turns flipping through the dirty book Carmen finds:
(ANA enters with her hands full of food.)
PANCHA. Estela, calm down.
ESTELA. I thought it was la migra!
ANA. Sorry! I kicked the door open because my hands are full…
ESTELA. From now on these doors are to remain closed and locked at all times, OK? If
You go outside, you knock on the door like this…(she knocks in rhythm.)… so we
know it’s just one of us. Don’t ever kick the door again. (1.2.29-30)
Ana’s innocent yet bold entrance into the room not only scared Estela, but incited so much panic in her that a logical solution for Estela was to create a new rule for entering. The door for Ana, who is waiting for her Temporary Residence Card, is just an entrance to her sister’s humid little factory, and the streets of Los Angeles. Ana is no longer burdened with the fear of hiding because of her lack of legal status. Estela does not have this privilege. The walls confinining Estela inside her sweatshop haven meant safety. However, open windows, unlocked doors, and using them meant danger. Estela knew she was different than her sister or her workers, not because of her body build or age, but because of her legal status. Estela was an “Alien”. She did not as much fear the familiar bodies in her neighborhood, but the bodies dressed in black with ICE stitched into the upper left chest area, large vans with an ICE sticker, bodies dressed in blue with a combat belt and distinctive hat, these were the bodies that threatened the undocumented folk, these were the bodies she feared. Survival was more important to Estela than giving into fear. Not only was Mrs. Glitz counting on her order being completed, but Estela needed the money she would be getting from Mrs. Glitz to continue making her payments and see to freeing herself from debt. Ngai reminds us that while her labor as an undocumented immigrant is important to the economic fabric of America, she is cheap and disposable (2). This is partly what makes her so compliant to Mrs. Glitz’s harsh hand. Mrs. Glitz does not see her as a person, she is a cheap and insignificant service. Though Estella and the other women know this is not true, Estela’s legal status hinders her from doing anything about it, keeping her trapping her in the lower strata of society.
Having a routine way of life can lead to normalizing behaviors, ways of thinking, and reflex actions even if they are not healthy. Normalizing trauma can be a way of interfacing with it, and trying to work through it. When one officially breaks from whatever links one to the trauma, readjustment takes time. Even then, some of the triggers linger. When the women are huddles in the garment factory, they overhear the news on the radio:
ANA. Cállense, I heard something on the news about a raid.
(the WOMEN listen to the radio)
RADIO. (voice-over) NNXW News all the time… The time is now 2:35 p.m. The temperature is scorching hot. A record breaking 102 degrees. Twenty illegal aliens were captured today at the goodnight pillow factory…
PANCHA. That’s only a few blocks away!
RADIO. (voice-over) The INC was given a tip by anonymous sources yesterday of the factory’s illegal hiring of aliens. The owner was fined up to 2,000 dollars per alien…
(PANCHA, CARMEN, and ROSALI do the sign of the holy cross) (1.5.47)
The radio host did not mark the raid as urgent. Instead, he threw the news in as one would with a casual announcement. The only ones who seemed to have an emotional reaction were the mujeres. Even then, it was the mujeres who knew all too well what living with that fear was like. The anonymous tip part may have thrown them off. Perhaps it is why their reaction was to sign the holy cross, because when you’re an illegal alien that’s all it takes: one anonymous tip. Sometimes it’s not the garb, the accent, the melanin on one’s skin, it’s just an anonymous tip because at the end of the day they are: illegal aliens.
Criminalization works by taking an action, thing or status, and associating it or making it illegal. In doing this, it allows for a large group of people to identify and mark a person, an action, or a thing, as unlawful. In contemporary times it is easy to see this happen by virtue of our current political climate and administration. Historically, Ngai reminds us it is rooted in the creation, expansion, and legislation of America. Before it was written into American legislature or social culture, it was part of the anglo habitus because the anglo reigned and ranked superior. Lopez gives us a work of art that commingles struggle and learning. While there is no silver lining in the struggle, there is opportunity for marginalized folk to form alliances within their marginalized communities, and for others in their periphery to learn from it. Though language is often used a tool for understanding, it can also be used for “othering”. When exposed to a new word by virtue of the mass media, or any other institution, laboring to understand it and its connotations fully, matters.