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Framing Illegality: Sonic Culture, Power, and the Politics of Representation

Abstract

This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach and situates nation-building, ordinary culture, and racial formation within the context of the immigration debates during the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. Specifically, I argue that the historical and discursive significance of the term illegal alien stems from the ways in which society negotiates and challenges presupposed assumptions, privileges, rewards, and attitudes toward a segment of US society associated with undocumented immigration into the United States. The dissertation demonstrates the crisis the State faced in negotiating, on the one hand, the needs of capital (e.g., the availability of cheap labor) and on the other the social dilemmas of enforcing equitable immigration reform (e.g., the Immigrant Reform and Control Act of 1986 and Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act of 1996). My dissertation examines the convergence of race and illegality as flexible and continually evolving patterns of racial formation. To incorporate a Chicana/o and Latina/o perspective into the immigration debates, my dissertation examines Border and Norteño ballads. This form of sonic culture draws attention to nationalistic rhetoric and spaces. My dissertation shows that Norteños are engaged in the project of constructing a people as an audience and demonstrates how ordinary culture is a legitimate site of domination and resistance. The dissertation argues that the political economy of music cannot control the use-value or cultural value of political corridos. This genre of music and in particular the language of political corridos exemplifies an internal dialogue within the text that mirrors the social contradictions experienced by Latina/os in the United States. The crisis at the border (where and however it is being used by those in power and consenting society) works as a metaphor. It is a turning point in speaking about race, now enunciated along immigration lines. This is part of the convergence of race and immigration as flexible and continually evolving patterns of racial formation.

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