UC San Diego

“Citizenship” is conceived as an identity that confers certain rights—freedom from removal, violence, and injury; freedom of political opinion, social group membership, etc. However, for poor Honduran youth “citizenship” confers none of these rights. Rather, within the U.S. Latin American interstate regime, a transnational political structure dominated by the United States and Latin American elites and comprising Central America, Mexico, and The United States, Honduran citizenship combined with poverty produces the pervasive threat and fact of both violence and removal—in fact, the opposite of “citizenship”: illegality. Therefore, this paper denaturalizes the concepts of “citizenship” and “illegality” in order to show how illegality’s consequences—forced migration, labor exploitation, and a lack of public services provided by the state—are created not merely through the law as writing but by the law as tactics. In this sense, “illegality” is produced by the state through various practices that structure power, discipline actors, and channel capital within the U.S.-Latin American interstate regime. Through interviews with recently-deported migrants and members of Honduran civil society I show how such illegality is produced in Honduras by divestment in education, extreme unemployment, youth-targeted anarchic and state violence, structural violence, economic exploitation, deportee discrimination, a failure to reintegrate returned deportees, and a rhetoric of youth criminality. In doing so, I show how Honduran youth experience their production as illegal and exploitable subjects in a circular and compounded fashion throughout the U.S.-Latin American interstate regime.