Precarious Citizenship: The Cruelty of Immigration Policies

Precarious Citizenship identifies the groundwork used by the Trump regime around immigration law enforcement, detention, and deportation. Reflecting on memories of her nephew’s violent death by an anti-immigrant racist, Mary Romero contextualizes her family’s private pain to acknowledge the public pain and community trauma resulting from decades of xenophobic political campaigns and increasingly draconian immigration policies. Drawing on years of research on law enforcement’s portrayal of Mexicans as a national security and demographic threat in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, Romero explores the collective trauma of communities of color who are held as the root cause of social issues such unemployment, lack of educational opportunities, insufficient social benefits, and health care.

Romero argues that slow violence and weathering are the collateral damage of trauma that Latino families and communities encounter in everyday incidents that characterize migrants from the global south as threatening the American “way of life”. Ultimately, Precarious Citizenship narrates the history of U.S. colonialism and imperialism alongside narratives of migration to reveal the ongoing damage inflicted on Latinos and other communities of color caught in the web of military, legal and bureaucratic structures and practices used for policing the other.