Abstract

This article seeks to outline the way that the Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, was used as a rhetorical device by politicians to criminalize the broader Salvadoran diaspora in the United States in the mid-2010s. I argue that as the legal definition of a “criminal” was expanded, primarily through 1996 immigration reform, immigrants who posed no threat to public safety were detained and deported because they were associated to the actions of MS-13 through speeches given during the Obama and Trump presidencies. It concludes by arguing that Salvadoran-American poet, Yesika Salgado, writes against this criminalization by reappropriating the image of the machete, an image frequently associated with MS-13. Looking at contemporary Salvadoran-American poetry then becomes a way of contra-dicting misleading, dominant political rhetoric about the Salvadoran diaspora.