the Female Body GOVERNING

Disciplining the Ethnic Body 211
organized under the category). Latinidad is something constructed
from without and within. Thus, it becomes inescapably dynamic, celebratory
and contested—and functions simultaneously as multiplicity, as
singularity, and as organized similarity. As Juan Flores (2000) describes,
nearly every Latina and Latino individual traces his or her identity to
a particular country—that is, Latinidad is nearly-always a subjectivity
that is only ever partially completed such that one is identifi ed always
as a multiple: a Mexican American Latina or a Chilean Latina or a
Puerto Rican/Dominican Latina. María Lugones (2003) argues that
such multiplicities or impurities of identity become a point of resistance
because it vexes governmentality through its unclassifi able nature.
Governmentality depends not on blood and violence for its power, but
on its ability to perpetuate and normalize classifi catory discourses that
“qualify, measure, appraise and hierarchize” (Foucault, 1979, p. 266).
Consequently, bodies that rupture hierarchical classifi cations expose
disciplining binary logic and exploit essentialist divisions to problematize
the norm.
Nevertheless, despite the hybrid and multiple nature of Latina and
Latino identity, as a U.S. collective we share a colonial past, the formation
and construction of a syncretic ethnic culture, and a life connected
to the homogenizing categories constructed and mobilized through
mainstream culture (Aparicio, 2003). Moreover, Achy Obejas (2001)
proposes that a growing proportion of Latinas and Latinos ethnically
classify themselves primarily and exclusively as Latinas and Latinos,
an identity that is a potentially homogenous panethnic category and
as a result more susceptible to data collection and government surveillance.
For most government policing agencies and agents, such as law
enforcement offi cials, no or little differentiation exists among Latinas
and Latinos or within Latinidad—just the normalizing discourses of
Latinas and Latinos as potentially illegal immigrants, diseased border
crossers and, more recently, terrorist threats (Saldivar, 1997). The
normalizing discourse places Latinas and Latinos on the social and
moral margins making them more vulnerable to government disciplining
through surveillance activities such as racial profi ling. These
two discursive strategies (Latina and Latino hybridity/multiplicity and
Latina and Latino homogeneity/fragmentation) productively illustrate
a long-standing Latina and Latino presence in the United States as
well as the complicated infl ections, background, and affi liations that
contribute to the formation of collective identities. As such, Latinidad
epitomizes and emblematizes contemporary formations of bodies and
selves as the product of real and imagined mobility, as global, hybrid,
and multiple.