UC Riverside

Racial Passages: Central American Migrants and the Condition of Non-Belonging examines the link between U.S. hemispheric dominance and Mexican settler-colonial power. Through an examination of the lives and experiences of Central American migrants, I demonstrate that the exploitation and policing of Central American subjects by Mexican state agents reinforces and furthers the U.S.’s imperial, political, and economic reach Mexico‘s southern border, simultaneously facilitating the Mexican nation-state’s enforcement of its own physical and discursive borders. The collusion between the U.S. and Mexican governments in their respective and shared wars on drugs and terror results in dire consequences for displaced Central Americans. Rooted within the intellectual genealogies of decolonial epistemologies and anti-imperial social movements focused on the relation between US imperialism and Mexican, as well as Central American, colonial nation-building practices, Racial Passages maps the discursive and physical violence on Central American populations, highlighting historical continuities of colonial systems that produce hyper-vulnerable Central American subjects outside of space and time.