Abstract

Some of the first Marines to die in Iraq in 2003 were non-citizen Latinos who were given posthumous citizenship. I examine these unusual occurrences and use them to understand the location of Latino immigrants in American society. I argue that the ethnic and class character of the parties involved put in motion parts of the national machinery that helped legislators and journalists monitor symbolic membership and sovereignty in a racialized, gendered, and classed fashion. I find evidence of this in the way journalists and politicians placed the lives of the Latinos in ethnocentric narratives. In these, for instance, the armed forces are depicted as institutions that allow Latinos access to the American dream. These ‘ethnocentric fantasies’ were widely used and served to empty out the events of any critical potential. I use the work of Michel Foucault on genealogies and that of Lauren Berlant and Dana Nelson on citizenship.