The Construction of Brownness: Latino/a and South Asian Bloggers’ Responses to SB 1070

The vernacular discourses of Latino/a and South Asian American bloggers in the context of SB 1070, legislation recently passed in Arizona, illustrate how their shared experiences of discrimination (re-)articulate “brownness” as a complex racial formation aligned with constructions of “illegal” immigrants. Bloggers' differentiation of their subjective experiences of alien citizenship and racialized belonging from white or black citizenship problematizes the rigidity of their “middling” positionality within the U.S. racial structure, encouraging a more contextualized approach. I consider the bloggers' varied constructions of brownness, its distinctive positionality within racial structures, and their contestations of the discourses that racialize brown identities.