Central Americans in the US: The Politics of Belonging and Non-Belonging

This project makes humanities-based concerns - national belonging and exclusion, questions of social justice, and the construction of ethnic and cultural identities - central to broader contemplations of immigration, migration and movement. Cultural narratives (novels, films, popular media, and street art) provide insight into the ways in which Central American immigrants and subsequent generations construct collective identities within the US, thereby fostering a sense of "belonging" as an ethnic minority group and as "Americans." These narratives also call attention to the different ways in which dominant discourses of US nationhood, based on exclusionary notions of citizenship, construe Central Americans as "not-belonging" or "undesirable" subjects.

This research will contribute toward the completion of a chapter on filmic and journalistic representations of Central Americans in the US for a book-length work tentatively titled: "Central Americans in the US: The Politics of Belonging and Non-Belonging".