The Dehumanization And Deviant

Deviant, meaning to stray away from the accepted standards or norms. Being Latino in the United States already makes you a marker of what it means to be deviant, especially if you are a Latino male. The United States constantly undervalues the lives and labor of Latina/os and other racial minorities (Cacho, 183). In this process the determination of whose lives are viewed as acceptable and whose life is deemed worthless is a hierarchy that one cannot escape. In order for someone who is a racial minority to gain “worthiness” one must assimilate to the United States norms (Anzaldua, 1987). Your worth becomes determined based on your productivity and contribution to reproduction and capitalization. Based on your race and ethnicity the world determines whether your acts should be punishable by a “deserving death,” punishment by the law, or placed into the prison industrial complex. The criminalization and

Family members and friends use the “deviant” person to make moral lessons out them. They say “Don’t be like so and so or you are going to end up like that.” Violence becomes recreated into the lives of those mourning people who have been marked as “deviant.” The reason is people blame themselves for not being able to straighten out their deviant behavior or to make them see that their purpose was so much more. The problem was that so much more meant to adhere to the “American dream,” something unrealistic for many. People are put in between two walls, mourning the characteristics of a person who is seen as no good yet devaluing the person’s life because of those same characteristics that they miss. It is hard to recognize that we constantly do this amongst the death of our loved ones and we constantly set others as examples of what not to be. This is violent because we are teaching ourselves and others that some lives are not worth