Facing the Genocidal Present

Abstract

This dissertation argues that genocide, in settler colonies like the US, is a processual and structural condition, not an event; one that does not require genocidal intent, since genocide is the background hum—the rhythm—that organizes and orients institutions and politics. Although my focus is, by and large, on violence directed and organized around Mexican and Central American immigrants, I argue that—not just anti-Brown violence, but racialized violence against nonwhite groups coded as “threats,” should be regarded as a form of structural genocide. This is because, if the settler colonial drive to “eliminate the native” is the background structure shaping politics and life in America, the dynamics this process unleashes are ones that can jump populations once these, like Indigenous people, get in the way or become surplus to the state’s requirements. In order to explain some of the dynamics of the ebbs and flows of genocide, in particular the demographic targeting of immigrant males for sequestration and removal, I argue that another dynamic inherent in the settler project of American empire must be accounted for, and this has to do with the aim, as DuBois put it, of securing the future for white people in perpetuity. It was these fears of the coming majority-minority nation, and phobias about Mexican males, I argue, that formed part of the background assumptions of the immigration enforcement strategy of Prevention Through Deterrence, which expanded and militarized border security. Read in this context, I contend, the strategy meets key elements of genocidal harbingers that begin with the targeting of subordinate males. Finally, I show how this genocidal tendency is part of an extended global system of racist and politicized violence characterized by torture—one whose construction is intended to destabilize the populations it targets as a method of racial control. I demonstrate this by arguing that the lynchpin for understanding this system is the old vision of American eugenicists, the vision, as I describe it, of a white settler empire, steered by an Anglo-supremacist racial elitism that recruits subject peoples and retools them for distinct purposes—as is happening, I claim, with the many Mexican Americans that staff immigration enforcement agencies.