The Trouble With Unity

"Cristina Beltran's powerful book The Trouble with Unity is timely for our age of Obama in which an ugly anti-immigrant spirit looms large. Don't miss it!"---Cornel West, Princeton University --

Over the past decade, much attention has been given to the growing political influence of Latinos in the United States in order to define the so-called ""Latino vote."" But the existence of a coherent Latino political agenda is highly debatable and likely unviable, as electoral and protest politics erase diversity and debate in favor of images of unity. Situated at the intersection of political theory and Latino studies, this book is the first comprehensive critique of civic Latinidad, analyzing the relationship among participatory democracy, public speech, and racial identification.

Why are immigrants from Mexico and Latin America such an affectively charged population for political conservatives? More than a decade before the election of Donald Trump, vitriolic and dehumanizing rhetoric against migrants was already part of the national conversation. Situating the contemporary debate on immigration within America’s history of indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery, the Mexican-American War, and Jim Crow, Cristina Beltrán reveals white supremacy to be white democracy—a participatory practice of racial violence, domination, and exclusion that gave white citizens the right to both wield and exceed the law. Still, Beltrán sees cause for hope in growing movements for migrant and racial justice. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.