In the United States, border tropes have long held a close relationship with nationalism, particularly in regard to the country's southern border with Mexico. In recent years, however, both nationalism and talk of the US-Mexico border have become increasingly salient in discussions regarding culture, belonging, and identity. Oftentimes, too, discourses centering on border tropes and nationalism draw on hyper (Anglo) masculinity as a resource to combat perceived social ills. In the 2016 Donald J. Trump presidential campaign, these tactics proved especially effective. In fact, Trump's use of border imagery and anti-Mexican stereotypes played a critical role throughout his campaign, delineating a call to defensive action that found its footing in his own brand of aggressive masculinity. Trump configured overdue brawn, exceptional resilience, and unfettered strength as solutions to rectify real or imagined social problems emanating from Mexico or beyond, and the aggressors were often assumed to be Mexican men—or “bad hombres,” to use his terminology.

Invoking the US-Mexico border as a rallying point for political ends is a strategy as old as it is effective. This chapter examines anti-Mexican stereotypes used by Trump throughout his presidential campaign and explores how the discursive construction of Mexican men as criminal and sexually predatory reifies US nationalism through a binary gendered logic. Trump's disparaging comments pit an imagined Anglo body politic against a criminally invasive brown specter, contrasting the civic duty and law-and-order respectability of the former against the alleged malice, criminality, and sexual predation of the latter. Of equal importance is the gendered imagery that permeates Trump's comments. The alleged porosity of the United States’ southern border with Mexico renders the United States a vulnerable and feminine entity, a revelation that proves even more alarming when Latino/a (im)migration is then represented as an invasive and penetrative force. The closed-masculine/open-feminine dichotomy would play a critical role in shaping national politics and anti-Latino/a discourse, doing so with an impressive ideological force that embroiled fear, anxiety, gender, and questions of American identity at the heart of the 2016 US presidential race.