If Anyone Hears This: Confronting Discourses of Immigration in South Mississippi

Abstract

Latino immigrants are subject to circulating discourses that produce processes of inclusion and exclusion, and inform expectations of future encounters with local native populations. However, they rarely have an opportunity to answer back. This paper draws on two projects in which immigrants were invited to use photography and writing to document the messages they would like to send to native-born Mississippians to examine how they mobilize discourses of inclusion and exclusion as they deal with "stranger fetishism" (Ahmed 2000), the notion that immigrants are recognized, but are cast as individuals who do not belong. Immigrant messages show that they at once contest and draw on hegemonic discourses of race and US national identity in their efforts to lay claim to legitimate spaces of belonging. [immigration, discourse, stranger fetishism, representation, Mississippi]