Disposable Subjects: The Racial Normativity of Neoliberalism and Latino Immigrants

This essay argues that a defining feature of the rise of the particular form of neoliberalism in the United States has been the adoption of “technologies” of racialization that leads to the framing of Latino immigrants as disposable and vulnerable sub-jects. These practices emerged as a way of mediating the contradictions between neoliberalism’s ostensible commitment to the normative foundation of liberal democracy, the necessity of securing sources of cheap labor, and the need to contain the perceived threat of those “unruly” subjects who are necessary, but suspicious and assumed to be unassimilable. What results is a state of “precariousness” and “indeterminateness” that characterize both the objective and subjective dimensions of the quotidian reality of Latino immigrants. These are not accidental or natural outcomes of their immigrant status, but rather the result of deliberate policies adopted by neoliberal economic and political elites who have used the “technologies” of racialization to create and control this liminal societal space. After providing a description of what it is about neoliberalism that has led to these conditions, I explain the neoliberal deployment of racial technologies by delineating the relationship between the context of Latino racialization, and how conditions of structural vulnerability produce disposability as both an objective and subjective characteristic of the lived experience of a specific sector of Latino immigrants.