UC Irvine

U.S. media has a history of constructing threat narratives about Latine people, impacting public opinion on immigration, crime, and foreign policy. This research explores the legal and media narratives that emerge about Central Americans as threats to national security in the U.S. between 1980 and 2010. The purpose of this research is to better understand the ways that Central Americans are constructed as threats in the major U.S. newspapers and U.S. law. This dissertation uses Salvadorans as a case study to disentangle a Central American Threat narrative that has since the 1980s constructed Salvadorans as terrorists. The data collected consists of immigration, criminal, and terrorism laws enacted between 1980 and 2010, and 200 newspaper articles collected between 1980 to 1989 and 2001 to 2010, in three newspaper publications: LA Times, Washington Post, and the New York Times. I find that the US has created imagined lines of connection between the violence in Central America and the Middle East that heighten the effects of anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-communist policies. These findings indicate an added layer of legal violence for undocumented Central Americans migrating to the US, who are labeled potential terrorists.