ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the sociopolitical antecedents of the anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric commonly associated with Trump-era politics. Drawing on articles, archival records, and ethnographic data collected between 2015 and 2020, this chapter exposes the relationship between overt and covert forms of racialization, showing how different forms of bigotry reinforce and feed off of one another. By investigating the deployment of settler-colonial ideologies in the US-Mexican borderlands, this chapter argues that understanding and responding to particular invocations of nativist logic requires a more expansive historical framework that takes account of the interaction between hyper-local instances of discrimination and the political systems in which they are situated. This chapter addresses themes of linguistic and phenotypic stereotyping, digging into the ways in which the southern expansion of the US empire has not only stretched and squiggled the geopolitical borders of North America, but has also iteratively recreated historically situated specters of organized subversion that are compounded by generationally entrenched notions of national identity.
