UCLA

Despite an enduring reverence for our armed forces our nation has deported countless veterans. Government sourced data proves that veteran deportation is a factual and lived reality. Veterans who have served our nation since the Vietnam War and more recently the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq have been subject to removal and deported by our nation’s legal and immigration enforcement apparatuses. Many of these veterans are of Latino descent, were heavily recruited in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, and enlisted as non-citizen green card holders with the promise of an expediated path to U.S. citizenship. Despite this many have been physically removed from the nation they served and defended in war. Why does our nation deport veterans? In what why does the experience of deported Latino veterans parallel that of other soldiers who utilized military service as a means to secure full membership in our society? What prompts the state to adjudicate the removal of veterans who have answered the call to service in moments of crisis and monumental geopolitical pressure? The argument advanced in this dissertation is that the experience of deported Latino veterans is unique, mediated by a racial project and discourse that harkens back the sociopolitical contours of the Mexican American War in 1848. Perceived illegality, perpetual foreignness, and an ambiguously defined relationship with state membership are consequences of this conflict and have defined the membership status of Latinos in the U.S. since 1848. Exogenous geopolitical pressure, as manifested on September 11, 2001 prompted the state to react by loosening the boundaries of membership in order to recruit additional soldiers needed for the military campaigns that would follow. Latinos, because of their tenuous status and claims on membership, became the most viable recruitment demographic by which to maintain the fighting readiness of our armed forces. The methodological framework of this dissertation was qualitative and consisted of semi-structured interviews with deported veterans residing in various cities México.