Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Despite the claims of the U.S. being a post-racial nation, Mexican immigrant women are still subject to racialized portrayals of the hypersexual Latina woman who lacks self-control and is not fit to have a child on U.S. soil. Dehumanizing language is used to describe them as “baby machines,” “welfare queens,” or “breeders” who are leading the “Reconquista” by invading the land Mexico lost in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Their children are defined as “anchor babies” who are used as weights that permanently anchor them in the U.S. Consequently, there has been a discursive struggle over the definition of citizenship which participates in the campaign to keep strengthening the U.S.-Mexico border. Accordingly, these individuals are at the center of the “Latino Threat” and the “Anchor Baby” narratives of invasion. How can storytelling contribute to conversations about dominant ideology and provide opportunities for other(ed) perspectives to re-position themselves as experts who re-frame U.S. history, immigration, and racialized gender violence? To capture the underlying dynamics of the borderlands and to provide narratives that are lacking in the hegemonic circulating discourse, Mexican immigrant mothers and their children propose alternative perspectives through storytelling and artistic interventions as they aim at engaging the audience into active listening so that they can see past what is presented to their “eye” and focus on the “I.” Storytelling is thus used as an epistemology in which the story, the storyteller, and the audience all propel the production and reproduction of cultural, regional, community, and personal knowledges.