EVENT DETAILS

"Liminal Legality: Cold War Regulation of Salvadoran Immigration to the U.S." - A Talk with Cindy I-Fen Cheng; University of Wisconsin

This talk argues that the federal government’s refusal to admit Salvadorans on humanitarian grounds despite its heavy involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War revealed Cold War refugee and asylee provisos to be foremost political tools used to favor groups fleeing communist countries or regimes that the U.S. did not back, advancing the belief that the U.S. is the land of the free, superior to communism.  Likewise, the federal government employed the status of “illegal” to disenfranchise Salvadorans, where an estimated 90 percent of the 800,000 Salvadorans in the U.S. were undocumented by the late 1980s, for exposing how the nation’s involvement in the Cold War often resulted not in the spreading of democracy but of violent repressions.

This event is sponsored by:
                                                Department of History
                                                Department of Asian American Studies
                                                Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies