The University of Arizona Press
Jane the Citizen
Conditional Belonging and Latinx Representation on TV
What does it mean to belong in the United States—and what does it cost? Jane the Citizen confronts one of the most urgent questions in contemporary cultural life by turning to an unlikely archive: the CW’s celebrated telenovela-inspired series Jane the Virgin (2014–2019).
Litzy Galarza argues that beneath the show’s warmth and wit lies a sustained interrogation of citizenship’s limits. Building on Hector Amaya’s framework of citizenship excess and extending it to theorize reproductive citizenship excess and deficit, the book exposes the widening gap between citizenship as formal legal status and citizenship as livable, protected belonging—a gap that Jane the Virgin maps with extraordinary precision.
Across five seasons and two presidential administrations, Galarza demonstrates how the series tracks the lived costs of immigration policy, racial hierarchy, and gendered control over reproduction. She shows how Latinx characters experience belonging differently as political conditions shift in real time.
“Wonderfully written and researched, Dr. Galarza expands our understanding of the connection between long format televisual texts, citizenship cultures in the United States, and the shaping of Latine identity by culture for citizenship. The book is an intervention into a forming literature that connects the best of Latine studies to ethnic studies and media industry studies. The through-line in this literature is the evolving question of culture, politics, and identity, in an era in which matters of citizenship and national membership are routinely redrawn by nativists and ethnonationalists. For these reasons, Dr. Galarza’s work becomes essential reading to anyone interested in understanding the complex and rich relationship of Latines, culture, and media industries.”—Hector Amaya, author of Trafficking: Narcoculture in Mexico and the United States
