Latino Threat Narrative Paper

Correspondingly, the oppressed are kept oppressed for beneficial reasons to sustain power. Gonzalez’s experience is not atypical, many undocumented individuals are detained and deported in public places in order to send a negative message to people of color. The oppressors’ goal is to cause more fear for the marginalized communities and silence them from challenging and fighting against the inequities and dehumanization of people of color. Likewise, the oppressors exploit people of color for profit. For instance, “money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal” (Freire, 58). In other words, throughout history the oppressors exert power over the marginalized to profit off of them. Similarly to Gonzalez’s case, where her arrested

The Latino Threat Narrative has excluded Latinx from the sense of national belonging of the United States. Nation is a product of nationalism, which is “an imagined political community– and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 6). In other words, nationalism is a socially, psychologically, and politically constructed community created and imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that community. It is social and psychological process that makes people believe they are connected to one another and share ties. However, nationalism is limited and exclusive, not everyone has the privilege of being part of that community. For instance, “the nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries beyond which lie other nations”(Anderson, 7). In other words, nationalism divides communities and creates restrictions and prohibitions that are similar to immigration laws. The hegemony of American nationalism include people who are only of European descent, born in the United States and speaks only English. Particularly, Gonzalez due to her illegal status she was not welcome to be part of the American nationalism. Therefore, she was forced out and excluded from the American narrative. In this case, nationalism is a form of oppression against marginalized groups. Nationalism divides those who do not fit in the status quo. As a result, the idea of nationalism divides vulnerable communities from entering the narrative. Thus, the American patriarchal form of nationalism transforms into American Exceptionalism in which the United States brands