Since the election of Donald Trump, MS-13, the Salvadoran street gang, has become a national security and foreign policy concern for his administration. Due to the violence of street gangs like MS-13, El Salvador has become a country with the highest rates of homicides, alongside forced migration. Like much of the mainstream media and personal accounts of asylum seekers, the arguments about violence emerging from street gangs in El Salvador from the Trump administration are based on actual material conditions, but what is often missing are the root causes. This article argues that the production of a moral panic over MS-13 has been transnationalised between the United States and El Salvador to displace the contradictions of global capitalism in El Salvador to a local and deported relative surplus population. It argues that the spectre of MS-13 in El Salvador and throughout US cities must be placed within the limits of a Salvadoran revolution, the insertion of the Salvadoran political economy into the global capitalist system in the 1980s, the development of a neoliberal Salvadoran state, and the US sponsoring of law-and-order polices in the country as a response to regulate a relative surplus population.
In the last 30 years, the mass transnational migration of Salvadorans and Mexicans to the U.S. from their countries due to changes in the world capitalist system, and its specific effects on their homelands, has made Los Angeles the most Mexican and Salvadoranpopulated city in the United States. Within the everyday struggles of the working class in Los Angeles, an internal antagonism between these two Latina/Latino communities has developed that has divided them yet, dialectically, a sense of solidarity between them vis-à-vis the dominant racialized regime of the U.S. has also emerged. This paper investigates this dialectical interplay of tension and solidarity between Salvadoran and Mexican communities in Los Angeles through qualitative interviews with 20 young adults who are children of mixed Salvadoran-Mexican migrant families. This paper will contextualize their families' experiences within a larger theoretical, analytical, and historical framework of the global capitalist system and recent transnational processes, including neoliberalism, migration, and the racialization of Latina/Latinos in the U.S. The exploration of the participants' families and their relationships to a series of structural and cultural factors that ground both communities, such as racialized labor market competition, migration, and national belonging, may assist in explaining this dialectical interplay of tension and solidarity.
This article argues Mexico’s war on drugs was a tactic by elites in both the United States and Mexico to legitimate the Mexican neoliberal state’s political, economic, and ideological governance over Mexican society. Through tough on crime legislation and maintenance of free market policies, the war on drugs is a “morbid symptom” that obfuscates the crisis of global capitalism in the region. It is a way of managing a crisis of legitimacy of Mexico’s neoliberal state. Through arguments of Mexico as a potential “failed state” and a “narco-state,” the United States has played a leading role by investing in militarized policing in the drug war and securitization of Mexico’s borders to expand and maintain capitalist globalization. In the twenty-first century, the ideology of manifest destiny persists, but instead of westward expansion of the U.S. state, it serves as the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism.
When I was a graduate student, Clyde Woods welcomed me to Black studies and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He told me I would be okay, and he made sure to knock me upside the head when I was not paying attention. He also debated with me about the merits of the Wu-Tang Clan. He was not too fond of them. From the day I met him in 2009 to the night I said goodbye in 2011, Clyde was an important part of my intellectual development, and he continues to be part of the organic intellectual I am continuously becoming.
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