Abstract
In Building Walls: Excluding Latin People in the United States, Ernesto Castañeda presents a comprehensive set of theory-driven empirical essays on the structural and experiential aspects of physical and symbolic boundaries between U.S.-native whites and Latin people. Through a methodological assortment of in-depth interviews, reflexive memos, survey data, and historical precedent, Castañeda illustrates how boundaries are shaped by normative frameworks, divisive discourses, and everyday interactions. From these data, he constructs the “border wall” as a mechanism of sociopolitical and racial exclusion that is both physically manifested at the U.S.-Mexico line and symbolically inscribed in the American imaginary.
Categorical thinking, anti-immigrant speech, immigration as an experience—these are the main conceptual and analytic categories Castañeda triangulates as his theoretical framework, establishing the book’s structure in three parts. The first conceptual component, categorical thinking, identifies how lived and imagined boundaries are created through nation-building projects and individualized self-understandings of citizenship. The second component, anti-immigrant speech, examines how boundaries are reinforced through divisive discourses within the realms of policy debate and media discussions. The third, immigration as an experience, personifies how boundaries are politically challenged and phenomenologically redefined.
Part One begins with Castañeda’s exposition on “categorical thinking” as the process enabling national, racial, and political boundaries. He evaluates how the nation-state normalizes its role as protector of a “race” of people through collective myth and shared customs. Having attained its durable character, categorical thinking self-reinforces as a mechanism of exclusion by which U.S.-native whites define themselves in opposition to “others.” Castañeda frames how the exclusion of Mexicans from American identity remains inscribed in political rhetoric and popular discourses that construct Mexicans as uneducated, violent, and undeserving criminals.
Beyond the state-sanctioned production of categorical groups and symbolic boundaries, Part Two discusses how these are discursively reconstituted through “anti-immigrant speech.” Castañeda illustrates how the Minutemen—a xenophobic border patrol group—used the space of an Ivy League to promote their ideological campaign against Mexican immigration. Decrying the elitist radical left as detached from the needs of authentic Americans, the Minutemen effectively used the setting to reframe progressive immigration reform as enabling the violent takeover of “America.” As we recognize the anti-immigrant anxieties manifest in the traditional public sphere, Castañeda also includes a chapter on white nationalist online communities.
The Stormfront white nationalist online forum forges the political identity of a white collective undergoing erasure from the American narrative. The categorical closure of an “us” versus “them” is animated by the following declaration: “White liberals actually enjoy when we tear blacks down as that validates their deeply held antipathy toward alien races, an antipathy that almost all whites share, regardless of what they say publicly” (p. 106). These data characterize the magnitude of symbolic boundaries between groups when white nationalists frame white liberals as essentially embodying their same racial biases.
Drawing from both the abstract and discursive dimensions of symbolic boundaries, Part Three analytically situates them at the micro level of lived experiences and everyday interactions. Framing “immigration as an experience,” Castañeda contextualizes participants’ narratives as they share their first- and second-hand experiences observing and overcoming the U.S.-Mexico border wall, both physically and symbolically. Regarding its physical aspect, border residents in El Paso differ in their experiences of the boundary. The multitude of perspectives expressed in their participant memos can be summarized by participant Laura López. She writes: “[the border wall] is the most emblematic and powerful element that exists to symbolize the interaction between the two countries and the way that this division is lived differently depending on the social situation in question” (p. 139). Discursive reality shows that in English the built divide was often referred to as a “fence,” whereas in Spanish the term “wall” remained consistent as the referent. Fact of the matter is that contemporary debate over the “border wall” alludes to the heightening of symbolic boundaries between Americans and Mexicans. This is observed when nativist white discourse deploys the referent of “wall” by their intent with increasing the border’s militant impermeability.
In his “Invisible New Yorkers” chapter, Castañeda uses survey data to explain how a symbolic border wall denies Mexicans recognition as New Yorkers. Although the border manifests even outside the American Southwest, Mexican migrants nonetheless express resilience in achieving integration in community life. By remaining autonomous in how they live and associate, Mexican migrants undermine the structural durability of symbolic boundaries, overcoming their marginalization in a city that is rarely ever associated with their presence.
Throughout the book, Castañeda effectively implicates the border wall as a semiotic reference point for the conceptual and practical construction of symbolic boundaries. It operates as a semiotic mediator shaping the categorical and behavioral boundaries that differentiate between U.S.-native whites and Latin people. In this manner, Castañeda both directly and indirectly contributes to the theoretical and analytical project of spatializing critical immigration studies. He does so by way of his conceptual application of the built wall as a metaphor signifying the social distance between Mexicans and whites.
While the book remains theoretically comprehensive, conceptually detailed, and analytically rich, it requires further development of Mexican migrant narratives as they are among the most affected by the nationalist and xenophobic context of the United States. In Chapter Eight, dedicated to the lived experiences of Mexican migrants, the discussion leans toward the sensationalized narrative of fleeing violence from Mexico. In itself, this reifies American exceptionalism as a real thing, which prompts further discussion on how Mexicans and Latin people are imagined and portrayed through North American scholarship.
Although Part Three does present narrative data from transborder and U.S. Mexicans as well as survey data from Mexican migrants, there are two aspects to consider: the former constitute a relatively privileged segment of the Latin population as college students who either possess U.S. citizenship or are able to cross from Juárez to El Paso to attend class. Concerning the latter, while survey data alludes to the types of relationships Mexican migrants sustain with other New Yorkers, a narrative perspective articulating the nuances of their lived experiences is lacking.
Extending from this observation, it would be empirically useful to see how white American majorities and Mexican-origin populations articulate their relationship to one another. When we do obtain a perspective from the American majority, the interview data is presented as an afterthought. Toward the end of the last substantive chapter, we witness white colleagues attempting to assign positive value to Mexican migrants through racialized allusions to patriarchy, family, restaurant work, soccer, Spanish, and a job well done in low-wage menial occupations. To understand how the “border wall” manifests in the hearts and minds of the democratic majority requires further examination of mainstream white perceptions of Mexican-origin and Latin groups under these increasingly ambivalent sociopolitical and racial climates.
Nevertheless, Castañeda presents a conceptually thorough and theoretically comprehensive account for understanding the structural, discursive, and experiential conditions that racialize and demean the life and presence of Latin people in the United States. We not only observe his contribution to the sociological subject matter but also witness an exemplar of where migration studies stands today. By introducing a framework on Latin racialization and Pan-American racial projects, Castañeda takes critical immigration studies in the direction that is most needed to assess the political, demographic, and racial future of the United States.