Abstract
Rather than focusing on deportation, Lisa Flores, a professor of Communication at the University of Boulder, Colorado, contends that we should focus on deportability, how we use language and performance to make certain human beings deportable and, ultimately, disposable. This is an important thesis, and Flores draws on important historical moments in the United States from the 1920s to the 1950s to make this case well. In Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant, which recently won the 2021 Book Award from the Rhetoric Society of America and received a major award for Outstanding Published Scholarship in Public Address from a division in the National Communication Association, Flores focuses on Mexicans in the United States.
The book has an introduction, conclusion, and four primary chapters that collectively look at how Mexicans became racialized in undesirable ways through the employment of racial language in regional and national media reports. Flores presents a genealogy of immigration discourse through four stereotypes: the “illegal alien,” a supposed foreigner and criminal who is associated with Mexican migrants; the “bracero,” a supposed docile and submissive Mexican contract laborer; the “zoot suiter,” a supposed delinquent Mexican American youth engaged in gang culture; and the “wetback,” the unwanted migrant who entered the United States by swimming across the Rio Grande. According to Flores, “If deportation is the legal act of removal, deportability is the condition of being liable to removal. A consequence of illegality, deportability is a regime, a global practice of regulation and surveillance that produces climates of vulnerability and exploitability.” Flores rightfully contends that the distinction between deportation and deportability is important. It “has been deportability, not deportation, that has ruled the lives of Mexican immigrants as well as migrants generally.” Indeed, before one can be subject to deportation, one must first be seen as deportable. This means devising logics to allow us to be at peace with ripping people from their families and loved ones in the middle of the night as their children bawl and scream at immigration officials, who are often of Latin American heritage themselves, to let them go.
However, as much as no book can discuss everything and be everything to everyone, to understand how certain human beings become disposable and deportable, we have to understand how certain human beings, like African Americans, became enslaveable, and ultimately exploitable. Also, to understand how certain human beings become disposable and deportable, we have to understand how others became conquerable, and ultimately eradicable. In short, to understand how certain human beings become disposable and deportable should ultimately involve attending to all the different ways that human beings become harmable and dehumanizable. However, Flores's analysis never extends that far, that deep. There is no discussion of the plight of African Americans and Native Americans. Yet Flores contends that deportability is all about race. It is constituted racially. Those who become deportable are not merely rhetorically constructed as racially different, but racially inferior in ways that supposedly threaten the health, safety, and prosperity of others. This is how Flores arrives at the relationship between deportability and disposability.
But again, what becomes of our understanding of how certain human beings become deportable without reckoning with how other human beings become enslaveable and eradicable? What becomes of any discussion of race that leaves out so much that is presumable about race? Indeed, is deportability really about race? That is, is race really the most effective frame to view this process? What of all the Latin Americans who view other Latin Americans as deportable and disposable, or all the Africans who view other Africans as deportable and disposable, or all the Asians who view other Asians as deportable and disposable, or all the West Indians who view other West Indians as deportable and disposable, or all the Europeans that view other Europeans as deportable and disposable? How effective is race as a frame in these other contexts? Where does race figure, for example, in the fact that many Jews sought to keep other Jews out of the United States? Indeed, when read next to other new books on the history of US migrants and immigration policy, like Erika Lee's America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States and Daniel Okrent's The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians and Other European Immigrants out of America, the shortcomings in Flores's analysis become glaring. Besides being targets of harsh and punitive immigration laws, many European migrants, like Mexican migrants, were also equally brutalized (and even sometimes lynched), commonly assumed to be racially inferior, subject to dehumanizing stereotypes, and seen as a threat to the nation's prosperity. Popular writers feared that “the low breeds of Europe” would soon form a “moron majority” and overrun American cities. Italian migrants were called a host of derogatory names, including “ditto”, “wop”, “dago”, “guinea”, “nigger wop”, and “white nigger”. The New York Times had no qualms about referring to Italian migrants as “wretchedly poor and unskilled,” “starving and wholly destitute.” In 1906, a Washington Post editorial writer said that Italian migrants—“the degenerate spawn of . . . Asiatic hordes”—were coming to the United States “to cut throats, throw dynamite, and conduct labor riots and assassination.” Indeed, the same Robert Ward who Flores quotes as saying that Mexicans were “as a rule, peace-loving, docile, and obedient”, said that “there are certain parts of Europe from which it would be better for the American race if no aliens at all were permitted.”
It is easy to frame deportability and disposability in terms of race. But this perspective is narrow, and much more so when we remove the history of African Americans and Native Americans from its purview. In fact, the problem with any perspective that is premised on race is that race was invented by those who sought to oppress other human beings. It is a tool of oppression and subjugation. It was never meant to be a tool of liberation and emancipation. To view the world from the prism of race is to view the world from the prism of those who sought to oppress and harm other human beings. However, what does the oppressed gain from doing so? That is, how does viewing the world similarly to those who have made for so much misery and death help us make for a completely different world? What becomes of Audre Lorde's warning that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house? Evidently, the oppressed are obligated to view the world differently, to create a new set of tools. So Flores wants us to look at race rhetorically, meaning performatively and constitutively. This is arguably in contrast to those who view race biologically, as a supposed fact of biology. However, as much as Flores does a nice job making this case, Flores is still all about race. So as much as Flores’ discussion of deportability is interesting, it is by no means mind bending. The reason being that race, as Toni Morrison once said, was meant to be a distraction. We should never have taken it seriously as a justification for anything. But as seen in Flores’ discussion of race and deportability, it continues to function as an effective distraction, such as having us believe that race can somehow reliably explain why we brutalize others. Race will never allow us to achieve this goal because it was never meant to serve the cause of the oppressed. The oppressed needs to get to a world where there is no harming and brutalizing of others. This project is much larger than ending our viewing of certain human beings as deportable and disposable. It is ultimately about how we stop seeing any group of human beings as harmable and brutalizable. This is the work that certain groups want to distract us from doing by having us remain obsessed with race. For this is the work that poses the most serious threat to any system of oppression, meaning any system that impedes human flourishing in all its diversities and possibilities. Thus, in keeping us obsessed with race, Flores is unwittingly sustaining a distraction that impedes this kind of liberatory and emancipatory work.
What the oppressed needs is a new moral, ideological, and epistemological imagination that recognizes the recursive nature of the human experience—to harm others is to always harm ourselves. As Frederick Douglass poignantly observed long ago, ‘No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.’ So yes, we can no doubt view deportability and disposability from a racial perspective, but we can also view both from a relational perspective. The latter would expose all the harm that falls back on us when we treat others as deportable and disposable. We can also view deportability and disposability from an ecological perspective. Such a perspective would highlight the relationship between our brutalizing of others and our brutalizing of the planet.
Of course, no one perspective can show us everything. But, on the other hand, certain perspectives can give us richer and deeper understandings than others. The challenge for the oppressed is to be always arriving at perspectives that promise a richer and deeper understanding of things. For this work to be possible, every perspective must be seen as creature of human forces, meaning that no perspective will ever be final and perfect. Our perspectives are us, reflecting our limits and weaknesses. Consequently, for our perspectives to become larger, we must become larger. For our perspectives to see more, we must be willing to believe more. Everything begins with what we believe, and without us being willing to believe something new, revolution is impossible. We are our understanding. Rather than from outside of us, our understanding of things comes from inside of us. Thus, the oppressed must always be willing to believe new things.
But it is hard to believe differently because our beliefs frame our understanding of everything. If we are to change what we believe, then we will have to change everything. This is the problem with race. It is easy to frame things in terms of race. Those who sought to brutalize and enslave others knew this well. Race will always be a distraction. Thus, as much as moving from a biological to a rhetorical view of race is important, the distraction continues, and this does nothing good for the oppressed. It is now time for us to heed the words of Cornel West and move from being ‘race-embracing rebels’ to ‘race-transcending prophets’.