This study traces U.S. ritual murder—redefining lynching as a practice that aims to torture, murder, terrorize, and manifest a visual symbolic language. This visual language races and constructs bodies outside of the nation, outside of the privileges and protections of U.S. citizenship. Fundamentally, the project traces how ritual murder has been used—and continues to be used—to make and re-make raced bodies; with a focus on the construction of ‘The Mexican.’ I argue the U.S. production of race relies on violence and the threat of violence. Further, I set forth the critical import of Coahuila y Tejas/The Republic of Texas/The State of Texas in understanding the ways in which the ‘The Mexican’ has been constructed and raced. The study utilizes newspaper accounts, photography, and film to engage in a relational analysis of the narrative and visual culture of racist violence. I focus on not only colonialism and Manifest Destiny, but also Native massacre, The Texas Revolution, The Mexican Revolution(s), The Great Migration, and the shifting social and political dimensions of World War I. I argue the México-Texas border has been a site where the conditions of war have been constructed. I propose an intervention for the study of racist violence that focuses on what I have termed “nostalgic militarism.” This place of hyper-vigilance and imagined boundary maintenance has been a potent location in which racist violence has been conducted in a pattern of victory and victimhood re-enactment. Asserting the México-Texas border as a race-making, ideological site of meaning, I explore the mobility of the ideologies and practices of racist violence against hose figured as Mexican. I assert anti-Mexican violence is a tool of colonial occupation and a continuing technology of terror and dominance. I argue for the rich possibilities that follow from rehistoricizing anti-Mexican violence, re-defining lynching, and recognizing violence as a tool of racialization.
Rodriguez, Annette M.,
"Recognition of Social Murder: How Lynching the Invented 'The Mexican'"
(2016).
American Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0GH9GB8
