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Allegiant Subjects: Mandated Nationalism and the Global War on Terror (GWOT)
Well before the advent of US occupations in Afghanistan (2001-2013) and Iraq (2001-2011), young Latina/os were attracting the attention of military officials who observed that their rapid demographic expansion over the last three decades made them the fastest growing pool of military-age people in the United States. 1 For one former top US military official, the future of the US military rests with this youth population, as he noted that "our nation's ability to fill ranks in the future will depend on our ability to successfully recruit Latinos" (Caldera, 1999). In this article, I consider how the "Yo Soy El Army" (YSEA) /"I am the Army" campaign, a public relations recruiting initiative between the US Army and the Latino owned advertising firm, the Cartel Group, maps broad contours of citizenship, militarism, and race for Latina/o youth.
Central to this essay is a consideration of how the Cartel Group's deployment of Barrio Anthropology, a branded research strategy that claims to offer insight about Latina/o cultural identity and values, explicitly shaped the YSEA campaign by simultaneously mobilizing and muting Latina/o racial and cultural difference. I argue that this strategic management of Latinidad must be understood in relation to a post-9/11 logic of mandated nationalism - the overt, urgent, and compensatory acts of national belonging, civic participation, and expressions of fidelity to the state performed by immigrants and communities of color who were cast as potential threats to the national body politic following the declaration of the "global war on terror." For US born and immigrant Latina/os, the public's rising preoccupation with national security was complemented by an increase in anti-immigrant (read: anti-Latina/o) attitudes materializing in a spate of legislation criminalizing undocumented immigrants, escalations in deportation campaigns, efforts to revoke birthright citizenship, heightened racial profiling initiatives and a host of other punitive measures. Simultaneously, the US military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan inaugurated a renewed ethos of patriotic sentiment in American culture with special reverence toward the US armed forces. The YSEA campaign developed then between the political exigencies of the post-9/11 security state, with its exclusionary impulses against non-citizens and racial minorities, on the one hand, and on the other, a cultural milieu lauding US democratic...