No one will soon forget that the rise of Donald Trump began with an attack on “bad hombres.” However, after reading John D. Riofrio's Continental Shifts, it becomes necessary to consider how this familiar Latino scapegoat has become more densely criminal as dominant ideologies of US nationalism have changed throughout the course of the ongoing War on Drugs and War on Terror. Both ambitious and comprehensive in scope, this book sheds new light on the discursive racism found in twenty-first-century media forms that has prepared the way for recent anti-immigrant movements. Taking an established discussion in a distinctly hemispheric direction, Riofrio unsettles dehumanizing images of immigrants through his criticism of three novels written by Latin American authors about Latinx characters in the United States, a discussion which culminates with a brilliant interpretation of Ariel Dorfman's Americanos: Los pasos de Murieta (2009). Through the analysis of varying forms of cultural production from across the Americas, this book unearths alternative narratives of migration and theories of being and becoming “Latino” in the United States.

Continental Shifts engages with discourses on migration and latinidad that include some of the most renowned works of Latinx studies, like Arlene Davila's Latinos Inc. (2001) and Juan Gonzalez's Harvest of Empire (2000). The book merges critical approaches from American studies, critical race theory, and, to a lesser extent, Latin American studies to assemble a theoretical framework matching the breadth of its study. Riofrio also draws on literature for theory. For example, the central lens of Continental Shifts is inspired by the metaphor of earthquakes in Alberto Fuguet's novel Películas de mi vida (2002). In the novel about a Chilean seismologist, earthquakes metaphorically parallel the ways in which migration fractures lives, as it transforms the geographical, cultural, and emotional ground beneath an immigrant's feet, often through precarious circumstances and frenetic movement. Riofrio retools Fuguet's geological metaphor in order to rethink latinidad through increased human movement and the advent of new media that have ruptured borders between the United States and Latin America.

Scholars in American studies will be interested in this book's focussed critique of the ways US American national identity in the post-9/11 era has been constructed through the increasingly criminalized image of Latinx immigrants. In chapter 2, “Dirty Politics of Representation,” Riofrio argues that tropes of animal behavior and subhuman status used to cast Latin American immigrants as dangerous, foreign invaders have become more prevalent since 9/11. One of the many voices included in the critique is the now infamous Iowan Congressman Steve King. In 2012, King proposed building a temporary wall with an electrified wire on the southern border, a method, as King pointed out, commonly used to contain livestock. Reviewing Congressional speeches, and a variety of media appearing on YouTube, the chapter tracks an alarming barrage of metaphors conceptualizing immigrants as animals or invaders, often under the monolithic and pejorative label of the “illegal Mexican.” The book illuminates how such dehumanizing rhetoric has made new kinds of humiliating and violent displays of power against black and Latinx bodies possible. In chapter 3, “Spectacles of Incarceration,” Riofrio questions whether “prison porn” (105) television shows, such as MSNBC's various Lockup series, are a form of “First World” torture (123). He argues that such excessive displays of punishment are readily visible because they simultaneously reaffirm the inhumanity of black and Latinx prisoners, as well as the moral superiority of the hegemonic viewer.

Feminists will feel conflicted about Continental Shifts because of its lack of critical readings of normative masculinity and heterosexuality. Also, the book presents too few works by Latina and latinamericana artists. Much to the book's credit, Riofrio brings needed attention to frontwoman Marisol Hernández and the alternative Latin rock group La Santa Cecilia's music video “ICE El Hielo.” Riofrio illuminates the ways Hernández's lyrics restore humanity to undocumented immigrants and estrange the immigration status that arbitrarily renders some of us “illegal.” Although Riofrio includes many glimpses of agency, his attention to hegemonic representations overwhelms his theorization of hemispheric latinidades, which is predicated on a derivative response to US hegemony. A closer reading of Francis Aparicio and Susan Chavez-Silverman's Tropicalizations (1997) and Juan Flores's From Bomba to Hip-Hop (2000), or engagement with Latinx performance theory, like José Muñoz's Disidentifications (1999) or Ramón Rivera-Servera's Performing Queer Latinidad (2012), might have addressed this project's blind spot regarding the importance of gender and sexuality to Latinx consciousness, a cultural consciousness that necessarily precedes any contestation of discursive racism.Footnote ¹

Continental Shifts presents a timely critique of the post-9/11 criminalization of Latinx people. It is a compelling study of how discursive racism and challenging racism affects the experience of being Latinx in the US, as well as Latin American perceptions of that experience. American studies scholars should consult this book for its most pressing and singular contribution – its astute critique of the ways US American identity has bound itself to a criminalized Latino Other.