The globalization literature spotlights the way that the experiences of transnational actors are refracted through lives inhabitable elsewhere. In this article, I examine this process in spoken discourse about U.S.‐bound migration produced by nonmigrants in the Mexican city of Uriangato. This talk is organized around a “modernist chronotope” that pits “progress” against “tradition,” producing images of space–time grafted onto images of persons, or social personae. I show that acts of position taking vis‐à‐vis these social personae are fundamentally expressed through the ways speakers deploy the modernist chronotope and, thus, become emplotted in its imaginative sociology—a practice that constructs speakers as certain gender and class types. [discourse, chronotope, transnational migration, modernity, social positioning, gender and socioeconomic class]

Using two discourse‐analytical lenses, one genealogical and the other textual, this article traces the interdiscursive history through which the social categories “Mexican immigrant” and “illegal alien” have become conflated in the United States, effectively criminalizing Mexican immigrants as dangerous Others. Today, this conflation is a prime source for the racialization of not only Mexican immigrants, but other Latin American immigrants as well, where racialization is understood as a form of social differentiation that marks people as inherently threatening and foreign. This article focuses on the ways this conflation has been established and circulated in U.S. immigration policy. After offering a genealogy of the relevant federal policy, I provide a textual analysis of an anti‐immigrant ordinance penned in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. I trace the interdiscursive strategies used by municipal officials in constructing the ordinance, showing that they extend the “legal racialization” in federal code by expanding the categories of behavior associated with immigrant illegality. [Legal discourse; racialization; interdiscursivity; performative nomination; Latin American immigration; Hazleton]

The ethnographic study of migration into the United States has shown that the culturally specific ways people are made into distinct and hierarchically ranked kinds are a key force organizing human movement. Among migrants, such people-making is transnational, unfolding across nation-state borders and involving encounters with regimes of social difference produced at multiple scales of interaction. This article explores the influential role language ideologies and practices play in transnational people-making, concentrating on orders of indexicality: the ways language creates and stratifies personae (images of people associated with patterned ways of using language). Orders of indexicality offer a useful way to conceptualize how regimes of social difference are generated and challenged. I examine, first, the indexical orders that erect nation-state borders, focusing on U.S. linguistic nationalism and covert racializing discourses. I then consider the scholarship on the indexical orders generated by migrants, emphasizing how they complicate those of the nation-state.

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