Media, Ideology, and Myths of East–West Difference: Constructing<scp>A</scp>merican Ideals through Images of a “Red‐Hot”<scp>R</scp>ussian Spy

In this article, we trace shifting representations of a US-Mexico border region in national mainstream news media during the rise of Donald Trump. We argue that the border is an American concept-metaphor that circulates and reshapes in media in response to political actors. We compare articles published in 2015, 2016, and 2017 about the Texas borderlands where the majority of Central American asylum seekers arrived. Crucial to Trump’s success, the narrow, racialized rendering of the border inadvertently provoked a wider array of representations in national news media but remained rooted in how Americans think about Others, sovereignty, and immigration. Our work contributes to scholarship that connects discursive regimes and statecraft with life in borderlands to lay bare underlying social tensions and potential violence. Analysis of concept-metaphors can open spaces for new articulations of key cultural domains and interrogate hidden assumptions about places, crucial during times of surging populism and nationalism.

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“…We used qualitative content analysis (e.g. Honey, 2013; Lincoln, 2014; Udupa, 2012) with iterative coding (e.g. Luque et al, 2013).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Media, place-making, and concept-metaphors: the US-Mexico border during the rise of Donald Trump

Fleuriet

Castellano

2020

Media, Culture & Society

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“…We used qualitative content analysis (e.g., Honey ; Lincoln ) with iterative coding (e.g., Luque et al. ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Risky Place? Media and the Health Landscape in the (In)secure U.S.‐Mexico Borderlands

Fleuriet

Castañeda

2017

J Anthropology North Am

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In this paper, we consider how news stories about one area of the U.S.‐Mexico borderlands, the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, further propagate notions of a region filled with people characterized as dangerously noncompliant with American ideals of citizenship, prosperity, and security. Using Ethnographic Content Analysis, we conducted a systematic analysis of Valley, state and national mainstream news media stories from 2010–2016 about health or health care in the Rio Grande Valley. Ethnographic research with Valley leaders, residents, and journalists completed the media analysis. We argue that the Rio Grande Valley is framed as both an unruly internal colony as well as a racialized periphery, due to its proximity to Mexico. We detail how these news stories are received and acted upon by seasoned local journalists who use their trade to offer different scripts, rooted in actual lives and experiences of residents. We conclude with alternative versions of the U.S.‐Mexico border region from borderlands scholars to reflect on how dominant media representations of places and people can be weathervanes for political discourse that shape state and national action about “the border.”

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How We Tell the Stories We Tell

Fleuriet

2021

Rhetoric and Reality on the U.S.—Mexico Border

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Media, Ideology, and Myths of East–West Difference: ConstructingAmerican Ideals through Images of a “Red‐Hot”Russian Spy

Cited by 3 publications

References 31 publications

Media, place-making, and concept-metaphors: the US-Mexico border during the rise of Donald Trump

Media, place-making, and concept-metaphors: the US-Mexico border during the rise of Donald Trump

A Risky Place? Media and the Health Landscape in the (In)secure U.S.‐Mexico Borderlands

How We Tell the Stories We Tell

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