Abstract

1. I use “Mesoamerican” to refer to Mexicans and Central Americans together, to underscore how mestizo and indigenous populations are racialized in the United States regardless of national origin. 4. Nicholas De Genova, Working the Bound aries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 242. See 213–49 for the detailed argument. 5. Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 43. 6. Activist co ali tions like the UndocuQueers have rejected this systemic privileging of heteronormative biological families. 7. For instance, the historian Richard White invoked Anthony Burns to argue that a highprofile Dreamer detention might similarly sway public opinion toward serious immigration reform (San Francisco Chronicle, March 5, 2017). 8. James A. Kraehenbuehl, “Lessons from the Past: How the Antebellum Fugitive Slave Debate Informs State Enforcement of Federal Immigration Law,” University of Chicago Law Review 78 (2011): 1465. 9. Lloyd Pratt, The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Lit er a ture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 62. 10. Ibid., 45.