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.
"If conservatives are uncomfortable confronting our violent and complicated past, we progressives struggle with how to celebrate this place we also love. Indeed, such political speech makes many of us skittish: How can we express civic pride in an era of right-wing backlash? How can we speak love of country when that country was built by stolen labor on stolen land?"
For the Fourth this year, I pulled together some thoughts on patriotism for an essay for Politico.
My first New York Times guest essay is headlined, "America's Increasingly Diverse Security State Is Changing Communities." The ways in which America’s prison culture and military commitments have transformed the nation's cultural and economic landscape—particularly among communities of color—is a subject I had been mulling over for a couple of months and finally put into op-ed form. Great to be able to launch it into the world in the most prestigious opinion forum there is!
Was an honor to have Cruelty as Citizenship named one of two recipients of the APSA Latino Caucus's 2020 Best Book Award, alongside Holding Fast: Resilience and Civic Engagement Among Latino Immigrants by James A. McCann and Michael Jones-Correa. (Thanks to Betina Cutaia Wilkinson for tweeting this photo, with Angela X. Ocampo.)
With Spanish-language activists targeting Latino voters in particular, manipulating communities with mis- and disinformation, Providence College professor Tony Affigne and I wrote an op-ed explaining the problem and offering some ideas for addressing it. This version of our essay was published in the Sunday, July 31, Providence Journal. (Click on the op-ed to read a larger version.)
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.