Abstract
Popular conceptions view Mexican immigration as overwhelming, disruptive of the social order, and a threat to American values, ideals, and ways of life. However, Mexican immigration to the United States as it exists today represents the current manifestation of a historically-violent system occurring in a complementary pattern of domination wherein: (1) the violences which serve the accumulation of capital through American imperialist, neoliberal involvement in Mexico create the context of subjugation from which immigration occurs; and (2) the violences of the incorporation of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. as an inexpensive, exploitable labor source create the context in which immigrants are received. My approach combines violence theory with an examination of immigration patterns, as analyzed through the lens of Michael Taussig' s "Culture of Terror-Space of Death. Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture" (1984). Taussig's analysis of the rubber extracting system in British-held territories in South America offers a model which can be applied to analyze current and historical U.S. economic interactions with Mexico and the incorporation of immigrants into the United States. Narratives of immigrant illegality, evinced through letters to the editor and historical records, and the resulting violences they have instigated intensify the profitability of the immigration system. This has particularly produced the heightened vulnerability of undocumented immigrant laborers; increasingly, the narratives that facilitate this process have born violences that threaten their hegemony. This thesis illuminates these processes and interactions, functioning as a counter-narrative to those violences enacted through the immigration process.