Lisa Flores's Deportable and Disposable discusses how public discourse reflects the constitution of Mexican identities, as they are racialized against U.S. nation-state xenophobia and economic needs. The book analyzes racialization in the early twentieth century, illustrating how Mexican migrants became “perpetually returnable,” “temporary, cheap labor,” understood as “deportable and disposable,” while racialized into “illegality” (4). Flores explores how the tropes of “illegal alien,” “zoot suiter,” “bracero,” and “wetback” do the “critical rhetorical work of racialization” in legal, cultural, and political practice between the 1920s and 1950s (4). Flores expertly argues “race as rhetorical” through “narratives of racialization” circulating local and national discourses that “brings about the effect of race” (11). Thus, she understands race to be rhetorical and the “performative effect of discourse” (14). For students and scholars interested in race, migration, and rhetoric within the U.S. imagination, this book conceptualizes race as rhetorical in its effect on the public, influencing lawmakers’ and citizens’ political practices. Furthermore, scholars interested in studying race as intrinsically tied to rhetoric and communication, Flores provides an interdisciplinary approach that considers for racialized histories and performances of othered bodies with a “theory of racial performatives . . . materialized in its discursive making and doing” (28).In the book, Flores engages with concepts of racial disposability, racial performativity, Blackened violence, and rhetorical racialization. She elaborates on rhetorical racialization “as the public, or discursive, seeing and sensing of race” (13). The sensing of race takes into account the “body logics” characterized by an assumed phenotype of Mexicans by U.S. racial logics and its relationship to “mobility logics,” constructed by “spatial and temporal dynamics of borders, movement, and confinement” (13). Flores attends to “moments of rhetorical crisis” concerning the ambivalent nature of racial discourses attached to Mexican and Mexican Americans. These discourses racialized the Mexican body through border logics—where criminality is rhetorically bonded to undocumented entry into the United States.Chapter 1 covers the U.S. border and immigration legislation in the 1930s, which was specifically directed at Mexican migrants as “illegal aliens.” The Mexican “problem” prompted racial discourses through a perceived and threatening saturation of Mexicans within the nation-state, as shown by repatriation campaigns throughout the decade. In particular, the Los Angeles campaign raided Olvera Street to strike fear into the Mexican population. These social and political efforts created by local and national leaders “inspired repatriation,” pointing to what Flores calls the “rhetorical climates of deportability” (23). Flores argues that the discursive crafting of Mexican “illegality” is tied to the spatiality of Mexicans within the nation-state beyond the border. In addition to the racialization of the body, “illegality” was focused on mobility, and the “bordered logic of spatiality” made Mexican migrants into criminals after crossing the border (45). Thus, “illegal alien” did the “rhetorical work ‘of racialization’” as they were transformed from “useful peons” to “criminal interlopers” stealing jobs and resources (45). The U.S. public was exposed to news of Mexicans being identified, located, and arrested making them deportable through discourses of threat that “compelled” citizens and “political leaders to become invested in seeing . . . their race and their alienness,” coercively encouraging Mexican migrants and U.S.-born to leave “voluntarily” (45).In chapter 2, Flores argues that race is rhetorically constructed and seen through violence. She details the Los Angeles June 1943 “zoot suit riots” of U.S. servicemen searching Mexican American neighborhoods, hunting zoot-suit-dressed youth to beat and strip them of their garb. National media represented military men as participating in a “‘cleanup campaign’ to rid the city of its gang and delinquency problems” (48). For Mexican American, Black, and Asian American youth, wearing a zoot suit celebrated “jazz, urban, and nonwhite cultures” as a counterculture to conservative parents and dominant culture of the 1940s (53). Flores explains that raced, gendered, national, and sexed articulations of violence from non-Black men of color connects with racial scripts about Black masculinity, illustrating them “along nodes of agency, control, and containment” (59). Her concept of “Blackened violence,” recognizes the oppositional relationship between Blackness and whiteness in the “anti-Blackness” resistant to zoot culture with accounts “akin to larger histories of the spectacles of lynching and rape” (59). In addition, news media illustrated zoot suiters as a “queer/feminine depravity” that most be humiliated and defeated (78). Zoot suiters were feminized as “cowardly,” or ridiculed as a “queer joke,” easily contained by white servicemen that protected the femininity of white women and a white nation-state at war (75). White masculinity and violence was depicted as “cultivat[ing] community and nation” through attacks that performed patriotism with “violent containment of racial, sexual, national, and gendered otherness” (76). The layered association with Blackness and alienness slides into the gendered/racialized/sexualized alienation, making Mexican American zoot suitors disposable.Chapter 3 elucidates contradicting discourses of celebration about the Bracero Program between 1942 and 1947. Flores draws from Sarah Ahmed's notion of the “promise of happiness” to discuss the bracero figure's rhetorical racialization as a “neighbor and friend,” who is backward and simple to dehumanize them as a “willing laborer” connected to happy slave narratives (84). These narratives naturalized the “whiteness of the nation,” confirming raced hierarchies of superiority and labor (84). The discourses lauding the Bracero Program's benevolence and control over migrants constructed the sovereignty of the U.S. nation-state, by taking war, crisis, nation, race, and labor to be controlled by a modern white nation.In Chapter 4, the “wetback” figure in the late 1940s and early 1950s was concerned with fears of being overwhelmed by Mexican undocumented workers. Mexican laborers were offered jobs by U.S. growers, while also being lambasted for possibly getting jobs outside of agriculture. National sentiment led to the deportation campaign “Operation Wetback” in 1954. Flores posits “wetback” as aligned with racialized meanings in “illegal alien,” “zoot suiter,” and “bracero” created by “racial accumulation” drawing power from “intersections of deportability and disposability” (120). Flores turns to “wetback” as a racial performative in arguing that bodily logics of race and mobility logics of the border craft “racial recognition.” Racial recognition allows for the “seeing and knowing of race,” ascribed from public discourses securing racial difference of Mexicans and Mexican Americans being “perpetually wanted and abhorred, recruitable and returnable, deportable and disposable” characterized by excesses of labor and race (144). Flores concludes the book by thinking about contemporary “moments of rhetorical crisis” that continue to advance deportability and disposability in new accumulations within immigration legislation post 9/11.Flores's impressive use of archival documents about Mexican and Mexican Americans, as an othered identity characterized by transientness and impermanence within the U.S. nation-state, benefits queer theory scholars by making connections with legal and social discourses that act as political practices of racialization, gendering, and sexualization to alienate those deemed outside parameters of normalized heterosexual white U.S. citizenship. For example, the consideration of the politics of style through zoot suit culture as a queer form of resistance against straight white U.S. patriarchal culture is important to the sexual politics of the early twentieth century. The political and physical attacks on difference as queerness through pachucos showcased the violence of a whitened state brandishing the cisheteropatriarchal myth of the patriotic serviceman. Flores identifies border logics and mobility through the movement of physical bodies and discourses that shift ambiguously to facilitate the nation-state's racist, sexist, homophobic, and heterosexual ideologies.