Abstract
Much has been written about the Trump presidency—his meteoric rise as a candidate, his embrace of white extremism, and his attack on science and the so-called deep state. However, surprisingly, few scholarly books have focused on Trump and his administration’s dehumanizing depiction and treatment of the Mexican immigrants and Mexican American population. As readers may recall, Trump infamously announced his campaign by declaring Mexican immigrants criminals, drug traffickers, and rapists.
Trumpism, Mexican America, and the Struggle for Latinx Citizenship importantly centers Mexicans and Mexican Americans and issues of belonging, racialization, and citizenship. Trumpism, editors Phillip B. Gonzales, Renato Rosaldo, and Mary Louise Pratt argue, “represented a new phase in the old struggle to achieve a sense of belonging and full citizenship” (p. xvi). The editors enlisted an excellent set of contributors— anthropologists, historians, journalists, sociologists, political theorists, and scholars working in education, Latino Studies, and ethnic studies—that provide an insightful range of vistas and arguments about Trumpism.
The book’s first three substantive chapters broadly explore the origins of Trumpism, emphasizing related but distinct aspects of the political, rhetorical, and affective dimensions of this populist, white supremacist political project. Sociologist Phillip Gonzales’s chapter uses Samira Saramo’s notion of “meta-violence” to reflect on how Trumpism—through both rhetoric and policy—sought to undermine Mexican and Mexican American belonging in U.S. society and politics. In her provocative chapter, political theorist Cristina Beltrán interrogates the affective, galvanizing potency of Mexican and Latin American immigration for white conservatives. For such actors, Beltrán argues, immigrants—actual and imagined—provide a state-sanctioned opportunity to “access and revisit the power and pleasures of Herrenvolk democracy” (p. 37). Historian David Montejano explores how Trump and his collaborators mobilized longstanding tropes about U.S. national decline, the “browning of America,” and Mexico as a failed state to scapegoat Mexicans and Mexican Americans.
The remaining chapters focus their attention on specific topics and tensions. Journalist and filmmaker Michelle García interrogates the subjection of Mexican Americans, past and present, to a surveilling, often physically and structurally violent, “white gaze.” The chapter encourages and enacts a critical counter-gaze that rejects assimilatory narratives that normalize the otherings of Mexicans and other Latinxs. Juxtaposing distinct dystopias, anthropologist Renato Rosaldo reads Trumpism through Chicana novelist Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them and white supremacist political scientist Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? Latinx Studies scholar Alyshia Gálvez thoughtfully reflects on the political decision of many undocumented activists to embrace silence during the Trump presidency, now convinced that “no amount of storytelling will make this country love them enough to give them (full) citizenship.”
The one departure from the book’s focus on Mexican Americans is Latinx Studies scholar Arley Zimmerman’s chapter. Zimmerman considers how Central Americans have been historically excluded from immigration reforms and positioned, by and large, as threatening and undeserving of citizenship. Sociologist Tomás Jiménez revisits the conclusions of his influential book within the context of Trumpism, arguing that anti-Mexican rhetoric may replace demography as the major replenisher of Mexican ethnic identity. Finally, education scholar Ángela Valenzuela contributes a call to action based on the struggle to institute Ethnic Studies in Texas. Ethnic Studies, Valenzuela charges, has the potential to decolonize citizenship and produce new history- and life-affirming forms of knowledge.
Valuably, the book challenges the treatment of Trump and his administration as exceptional or an aberration in U.S. politics. For instance, Valenzuela notes that “what we know as ‘Trumpism’ today was already manifest in Arizona long before Donald Trump became president” (p. 177). Similarly, the editors write in the introduction, “far from propounding new ideas, Trumpism greatly reenergizes attitudes and ideas with long histories in U.S. politics” (p. xvii). As a result, the book historicizes and contextualizes Trumpism. Equally important, the book also devotes attention to how some Mexicans and Mexican Americans—along with other Latinx folks—have responded to and resisted the Trumpian project, from the decisions of individual activists and educators to organized local and national opposition.
In an otherwise expansive volume, one surprising omission was the lack of discussion on Mexican American conservatives and Latino Republicans, more generally. Although Trump angered and antagonized large swaths of the Latinx electorate, a significant number endorsed his candidacy and were interpellated into Trumpism. As works like Geraldo Cadava’s The Hispanic Republican illustrate, our understanding of Latinx politics is impoverished without an account of Latino conservatives.
Notwithstanding, Trumpism, Mexican America, and the Struggle for Latinx Citizenship deserves a wide readership. The editors wisely assert that Trumpism will likely have a lasting presence in U.S. politics. With the prospects of a second Trump presidency on the horizon, the relevance of this volume could not be higher. The book is highly recommended, especially for observers of and participants in contemporary U.S. politics, racial politics, and Chicanx and Latinx politics.