Order Cruelty as Citizenship from your local indie bookshop or directly from the University of Minnesota Press!
More than a decade before the election of Donald Trump, vitriolic and dehumanizing rhetoric against migrants was already part of the national conversation. Situating the contemporary debate on immigration within America’s history of indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery, the Mexican-American War, and Jim Crow, Cristina Beltrán reveals white supremacy to be white democracy—a participatory practice of racial violence, domination, and exclusion that gave white citizens the right to both wield and exceed the law. Still, Beltrán sees cause for hope in growing movements for migrant and racial justice.
In the wake of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and seeing FBI wanted posters featuring the occasional nonwhite rioter, I wrote an op-ed-length essay on multiracial whiteness, an idea I've been mulling over for some time, and sent it to the Washington Post, which not only accepted it but ran it in print, on the front page of the Sunday opinion section! (Here's a link to the article; click on the picture below to read just the text as published.) A week later, Lulu Garcia-Navarro reached out to do a quick interview on the subject, and that aired shortly afterward—my first NPR appearance. (Here's a link to the audio.)
In between the two, I was reminded of what happens when one talks in the public sphere about the concept of "whiteness" (which is NOT the same as white people, BTW) or tries to discuss how the legacy of white supremacy has distorted our collective understanding of democracy: A bunch of right-wing pundits and their followers freak out! First, they post a bunch of outraged tweets. Then they write faux-news articles about the outraged tweets they've just written. It's a big dumb circle of silly, but it was far more negative attention than I've ever gotten from an MSNBC appearance—even the one time when Bill O'Reilly put a clip of me on his Fox News show. Fortunately, the insults and ugliness quickly peter out as the online mob moves on to a new outrage. The good news: A whole lot of people read real newspapers like the Washington Post. And that strikes me as a very good sign!
In the aftermath of the election, the Guardian asked me and several colleagues for a few thoughts on Latino voters. Check out the article here.
Had the pleasure of a long in-person interview with Mark Leviton of The Sun in June 2019, and the result is finally in print! Headlined, "Many Voices: Cristina Beltrán on What Unites and Divides Latinos," it's the lead article in the magazine's October 2020 issue. Was tickled to see copies on the newsstand at the nearby McNally Jackson bookstore, with a cover flap highlighting the story. Check it out—you can read me opining on Latino politics, my family history, and more.
For me, the only upside of the pandemic lockdown was that it finally gave me time to finish my book on migrant violence and Herrenvolk democracy. Turns out, the apocalypse can double as a super-scary writing retreat. Who knew?
The book—Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy—is forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press’s Forerunners series. The press assures me that the book will be out by October. Just in time for the election! . . . though given the rise in white nationalism, I suspect this topic will have relevance long after Trump is gone.
Her work has appeared in Political Theory, the Du Bois Review, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Political Research Quarterly, and various edited volumes. She is currently the co-editor of Theory & Event, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes work by scholars working at the intersections of political theory, cultural theory, political economy, aesthetics, philosophy, and the arts. She is also an occasional guest on MSNBC.
Her new book, Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy (University of Minnesota Press), explores the American right’s deep antipathy toward nonwhite migrants from Mexico and Latin America and examines why many in the Republican Party experience acts of cruelty against migrants as a form of democratic pleasure. Other book projects include The Right Kind of Difference: Aesthetics, Affect, and the Ideological Uncertainty of Race, a collection of essays that explores a variety of topics including Latino conservatism, and what it means to work ethically at the intersection of race and political theory.
Cristina and her husband, editor and writer Matthew Budman, live in New York City.