Quid Pro Quo Citizenship: Weight Loss, Fitness, and the Desirable Latino Subject-Soldier

For Latina/o communities, military service has historically maintained a dual function characterized by the exchange of the Latino body as soldier for a claim to citizenship and belonging (Ramos-Zayas 2011, 351-353). This is... [ view full abstract ]

For Latina/o communities, military service has historically maintained a dual function characterized by the exchange of the Latino body as soldier for a claim to citizenship and belonging (Ramos-Zayas 2011, 351-353). This is especially true of the U.S.’s ongoing military operations as part of the War on Terror in which, as Hector Amaya notes, “[t]hree of the first coalition soldiers to die in Iraq in 2003 were non-citizen Latinos who were given posthumous citizenship” (2007, 3). Thus, First Lady Michelle Obama’s assertion in a 2013 address to the National Council of La Raza that childhood obesity prevents fat Latina/o children from “fulfilling their boundless promise” must be contextualized in terms of a war that requires the bodies of Latina/o youth to continue and holds the possibility of eventual belonging to the nation-state. The “boundless promise” of Latina/o youth during wartime is their potential to fight for the nation-state, again highlighting the ways in which Latina/o citizenship is contingent upon the desirability of certain bodies over others. In this case, the physically “fit,” combat-ready body presents an opportunity for future citizenship, as it can be converted to capital that is potentially exchanged for the rights and privileges of belonging.

This paper takes as its focus rhetoric surrounding the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, arguing that discursive focus on both sides of the debate relies on a narrative of contingent futurity in which DREAM eligible students or DREAMers must first prove their worth and desirability to both higher education and the nation-state. Amongst other sources, I examine the 2013 documentary “The DREAM is Now,” focusing on the filmmakers’ use of achievement, goal, and “before/after” narrative structure to produce and comply with the specter of the deserving subject. In particular, this project highlights the use of exercise and bodily comportment/transformation arising from the makeover genre in constructing a citizen body. Furthermore, this paper introduces a discussion of the role of weight loss narratives in calls for racial uplift in Latina/o communities, arguing that in attempts to shift narratives of Latinas/os as lazy, greedy, and “overweight,” these communities engage—to borrow from Neil Foley—a “Faustian pact” with thinness and white American bodily ideals. Through the identification of fatness or “obesity” as marking Latinas/os as undeserving of citizenship, DREAM Act proponents and opponents reify the notion of the ideal imagined citizen body while exacerbating the role of anti-obesity rhetoric in the debates surrounding Latina/o immigration and the value of Latino youth to the nation-state.