The Racial Violence Hub

Unit 6: Anti-Mexican and Anti-Latinx Violence in the U.S.

Featured Photo from The New York Times article, “Federal Hate Crime Charges Filed in El Paso Shooting That Targeted Latinos.” Photo by Tamir Kalifa

How has anti-Mexican violence and, more broadly, anti-Latinx violence shaped the landscape and national imaginary of the United States? How do immigration detention centers contribute to the carceral regime of the U.S.? How is state violence linked intimately to gendered violence?

View the following materials:

Click on photo to visit site
Click on photo to view collection

This shift to interpreting immigrants as terrorists and criminals, and therefore incarceratable humans, brought immigration firmly into the grasp of the carceral state. The emergence and consolidation of the US carceral state has been such an important political dynamic in recent decades that political scientists have argued it “rivals in significance the expansion and contraction of the welfare state in the postwar period” (Gottshalk, 2008: 236) and constitutes a “durable shift in governing authority,” (Orren and Skowronek, 2004: 123, cited in Gottshalk), in which the state began to exercise vast new controls over millions of people. These measures and the interpretation the accompanied them did much the same work that the 2008 Penal Reform in Mexico did in fortifying the carceral state.

Readings:

For additional reading, please see: