Disposable Subjects: Staging Illegality and Racial Terror in the Borderlands

Abstract

Abstract:This article draws on Gloria Anzaldúa’s philosophy to analyze Latina/o cultural forms as responses to the lawful violence that renders migrants and other minoritarian peoples as disposable subjects. The article turns to Latina/o playwrights and undocumented poets whose art forms, produced under the deportation regime, express a desire for freedom from terrorizing governance. Focusing on Lydia (2008), a play by Mexican American playwright Octavio Solis, and poetry by an undocumented artist, Yosimar Reyes, it links these representations of “illegal” migrants to understand how minoritarian aesthetic practices respond to racial terror and lawful violence. It argues that if we are to map the present beyond terrorizing forms of law, we must center our philosophical thought on “illegal” imaginaries of freedom, not on the cultural forms sanctioned by legality—the latter risk reproducing the logic of state-sponsored violence, whereas the former enact freedom as a practice of everyday life.