^aSouthwestern University, Georgetown, TX

Abstract

Three of the first coalition soldiers to die in Iraq in 2003 were non-citizen Latinos who were given posthumous citizenship. This essay places the discursive contexts of the events against the backdrop of liberalism. The central argument is that giving posthumous citizenship to the soldiers was an illiberal practice because (1) it meant naturalizing the Latinos without their consent and (2) the debates obscured the illiberal ways in which the armed forces in America are staffed. These two illiberal elements were supported by ethnocentric discourses on citizenship and nationalism that assumed the soldiers desired naturalization and that reproduced the idea that the volunteer army equally targets all Americans as potential conscripts. Because of this, the honor of posthumous citizenship is reinterpreted as belonging to the American history of imperialism, class, and racial stratification.