This is a special issue of Bad Subjects, focusing on Arizona. All the Arizona Biopower chapters can be accessed at the website below.
Arizona Biopower:
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2011/81
This issue of Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life (http://bad.eserver.org/) provides insight into the acts of state-sponsored biopower in the Arizona-México borderlands.
81: Arizona Biopower Ya Basta! with State Sponsored Racial Thuggery
Arturo J. Aldama, Peter J. Garcia
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2011/81/aldama-garcia.htm
We find that when Arizona is brought up many scholars, educational and immigration rights activists across the U.S. just shrug and say “Arizona is crazy” or ”that is Arizona for you”. However we strongly believe that Arizona is a bas-relief to a matrix of racialized biopower that seeks to criminalize and denigrate subjects based on fear-driven paranoia about indigenous and mestiza/o peoples.
81: Arizona Biopower:
Outlaw Arizona: State Seceding from the United States and Humanity
by Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2011/81/rodriguez.htm
Over the past several years, Arizona has unquestionably become synonymous with reactionary politics and reactionary anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous legislation. Arizona’s image has been further tarnished during the past few years by being home to Operation Streamline in Tucson.
81: Arizona Biopower The Search for Reason
Roldolfo F. Acuña
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2011/81/acuna.htm
Last week I revisited Tucson, where my mother was raised and where at the age of five, when arriving by Greyhound, we stayed in an adobe house in nearby downtown.
81: Arizona Biopower No Somos Criminales: A Decolonial Response to Nativist Racism in the US
Arturo Aldama
For all those perceived as illegal, even if their ancestry predates by several generations the arrival of European immigrants, how do we read their harassment, deportation, assumption of illegality? Is this also a predictable outcome of the processes of nativism? Your racialized construction trumps claims to indigenous identity and ancestry?
81: Arizona Biopower On Arizona’s Failed Democracy: Where is Chicana and Chicano Studies?
Peter J. Garcia
The neoconservative backlash against civil rights and social justice is attempting to criminalize Mexican immigrants and is threatened by any form of decolonial activism or liberation movements that might have prevented the social implosion occurring in Arizona.
81: Arizona Biopower The Veils of the State: Contextualizing Political Affiliation, Acts of Violence and Illogical Justifications of the Rhetoric of Patriotism.
Doreen Martinez
When it came to light that Mr. Loughner failed to have any formal political memberships, a shift away from the deeper connection he embodied occurred and one veil of the borderlands was achieved. Therein is a critical failure to understand Jared’s racial and gender entitlements e.g., his context or what we could refer to as his borderland status.
81: Arizona Biopower Arizona: From Jim Crow to Juan Cuervo
Alberto “Beto” Gutierrez
Unfortunately, the paradigm of race has been historically framed as a Black and White relation, overlooking more subtle forms of anti-Mexican, anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, and anti-Native American local and national legislation and public policy.
81: Arizona Biopower Resisting a Mechanized Consciousness
Christopher Gonzalez
As cool as it may sound, no one in America should want to be a machine. To be a machine means you are expendable and exploitable. It means that you are just a number and that there are a hundred more behind you who are ready, willing, and able to do the kind of work you do. It means having a devalued sense of self-worth and adopted fatalism that speaks to your contribution to the world as being transient. We need to conceive of strategies that limit this sort of thinking in the Chicano/a community which aspires to move thinking beyond the attributes of labor.
81: Arizona Biopower Que Me Toquen un Corrido Pesado!!!: An Analysis of the Narcocorrido and Its Rise to Popularity in the United States
Jesus Acosta
The narcocorrido is a drug ballad, yet there is a great deal of multiplicity within these songs.
81: Arizona Biopower Danny Trejo's Body: Immigrant Males, the Border, and Citizenship in the American Imagination
Nohemy Solórzano-Thompson, Tia K. Butler
In this article, we discuss the symbolic and material forms this war against immigrants manifests itself in the United States. Using the films of Danny Trejo and most importantly what happens to his body in these films, we posit that it is possible to read the multiple forms anti-immigrant sentiments are performed and enacted in American popular culture since the late 80s.
81: Arizona Biopower Last Stand
Harry Gamboa Jr.
A man and woman are standing on soapboxes with their heads covered by black hoods while their wrists are bound behind them. A hangman’s noose is placed around each of their necks.
81: Arizona Biopower From This Side: Images on Immigration from the United States
George Rivera
The issue of immigration is evident in many parts of the world. It is part of the human condition. We must intervene on this reality. Artists must do their part too.
81: Arizona Biopower Allegory and Alterity: Regulating Labor, Immigration, and the Ruinous Emblems of Hate in Michigan
Mike Mosher
Michigan is the site for draconian laws from a Republican Governor and Arizona-copying cowboy legislators, yet perhaps the undead symbol of white supremacy should be legislated most of all.
81: Arizona Biopower “We Have Found New Homes for the Rich": The Underclass Won’t Wait to Join Obama’s "Everybody”
Joe Natoli
A “capitalist environment” has socially engineered us as demonstrably as whatever tradition centered gold earrings in the middle of one young Class Warrior’s ear lobes.
81: Arizona Biopower Arizona Inspired Artwork
Jake Prendez
Three works that comment on what's going on.
81: Arizona Biopower Normalizing Noncompliance: Militarization and Resistance in Southern Arizona
Geoffrey Boyce and Sarah Launius
Laws like SB 1070 are meant to divide people from one another by reifying fear, distrust and violent the exclusion of some. The We Reject Racism campaign worked to directly confront this process through cross-sector organizing that undermined pre-existing divisions in our communities and worked to mitigate the impacts of the law.
