Growing up as a Central American in the US and as a college student, Yajaira Padilla wished she had found a book that could help her better understand the sense of belonging and not belonging in the US. She had to write it herself.
The result is From Threatening Guerillas to Forever Illegals: American Central Americans and Non-Belonging (UT Press), a book that examines how our country has historically stereotyped Central Americans.
Padilla, who is now a professor of English and Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, as well as the director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program on campus, began researching and writing her book nearly 10 years ago. before. At the time, as reported by the UARK website, she was “primarily interested in looking at the ways in which Central Americans, particularly immigrants, were visible in the US literary and media landscape and what such visibility communicated for this community”.
The experience of Central Americans in the United States is marked by a wild contradiction. In the entertainment and news media, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are overrepresented as menacing guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and “lifelong illegals.”
Central Americans are invisible within the broader concept of the Latino community, barring avenues of recognition.
Central Americans are invisible within the broader concept of the Latino community.
In her latest book, Padilla explores how this regime of visibility and invisibility has emerged over the past forty years—bookended by the right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump—and how Central American immigrants and subsequent generations of have objected to their rhetorical transfiguration.
Drawing on popular film and television, news reports, and social media, Padilla shows how Central Americans in the United States have been created as permanent refugees outside the boundaries of even minority representation. However, in documentaries about cross-border transit through Mexico, street murals, and other media, Central Americans have contested their exclusion in ways that challenge dominant paradigms of citizenship and integration.
WRITTEN IN “REAL TIME”
“Writing this book was challenging, as the political landscape changed drastically from the time she first started researching the book to the time she finished writing it, which was during a pandemic and when she was closed,” she told UARK. “I also felt I was writing in ‘real time’ as Central American migration and drastic policies aimed at addressing this ongoing phenomenon took center stage in American politics and media in recent years.”
Asked what impact she hopes her book will have, Padilla replied, “I hope that Americans/Central American scholars like myself will read this book and want to further the conversation started within. I also hope that those who read the book will better understand the nuances that exist between the various Latino communities in the US. because of long histories of US foreign policy in Latin America and discriminatory immigration policies”.
Padilla hopes her book’s audience will see that[s] how connected immigration issues are to issues of racial injustice, policing and incarceration, and economic inequality, among others. “We tend to discuss the latter as separate issues or as affecting only certain communities, but the history of immigration in the United States and the ongoing issues that this process brings are very much connected to other struggles for greater diversity. , inclusion and equality. ” she said.
This is Padilla’s second book. Her first, Changing Women, Changing Nation: Female Agency, Nation, and Identity in Trans-Salvadoran Narratives, was published by SUNY Press in 2012.
