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Lisa Marie Cacho
New York University Press, New York, 2012, 236 pp., $24.00,
ISBN: 978-0814723760 (paperback)
In this compelling probe of comparative racialization projects in the contemporary United States, Lisa Marie Cacho offers an abundance of analytic tools that help make sense of the spaces of "social death," liminal positions from which the rightless struggle to assert their personhood. Relying on a broad range of materials - including news articles and other media products, official government reports and court transcripts - Cacho identifies three populations whose very being constitutes what she refers to as "de facto status crimes" - gang members, undocumented immigrants and un(der)employed African Americans. This form of preemptive criminalization produces, primarily through the coercive and ideological functions of law and the criminal justice apparatus, the sort of "impossible subjects" that Ngai (2004) referred to and that Cacho refers to as "persons ineligible to personhood." Cacho points out that these are always people of color, the same categories of people who were marked as ineligible to citizenship for most of American history.
From chapter 1, where Cacho traces the decriminalization of whiteness that was revealed in the case of the seven suburban San Diego white boys who brutally attacked Mexican immigrant men, to chapter 3, where she traces the post-9/11 temporary reconstitution of Latinos from threat (as the face of illegal immigration) to quasi -"protector[s] of the...