White supremacy, settler angst, and Latine immigration to the US

ABSTRACT

Following the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, this article examines the manifesto written by the perpetrator, Patrick Crusius. I use critical discourse analysis to reveal some of the racial contours of white nationalist protestation, which I connect to the erasure of indigeneity by settler colonialism. I also use a moral, economic framework to discuss Crusius and other white nationalists’ deployment of affective structures to justify their violent actions. This unconventional nature of the mass shooting, which resulted in the killing of 23 primarily Mexican and Mexican American individuals, was based on rather ordinary arguments about white erasure, the fear of invasion, and anger over economic and environmental concerns. This was overall a cocktail of reasons and sentiments that Crusius used to justify lethal violence against brown bodies associated with indigeneity.

KEYWORDS:

• White nationalism
• Latine studies
• immigration
• violence
• moral economy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Patrick Crusius’s manifesto, titled The Inconvenient Truth, was published originally in 4chan, hours before the massacre. Here is a link to a site that also posted a few days after: https://randallpacker.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/The-Inconvenient-Truth.pdf.

2. Afro-Mexicanity is also a crucial type of racial mixing that constitutes contemporary Mexican ‘brownness,’ but given the region’s history, Afro-Mexicanity is less likely to have been a factor in the constitution of Mexican visual characteristics in El Paso in 2019. For a clearer understanding of the African roots of Mexican mestizaje and their regional influences, see Horacio Xaubet (2016) and H.L. Bennet (2009).

3. I used Lexis-Nexis to retrieve 3072 articles published between the day of the massacre, August 3, and October 1^st, 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hector Amaya

Hector Amaya has authored three books and has published dozens of articles on the issues of globalization, immigration, ethno-racialization, and Latine media studies. His most recent work, Trafficking: Narcoculture in Mexico and the United States (Duke UP), analyzes the way Mexico’s criminal drug violence and new media technologies structure publicness in Mexico and the United States. His previous book, Citizenship Excess: Latinas/os, Media, and the Nation (NYU Press), examines the mainstreaming after 9/11 of anti-Latino nativism in politics and in the media.