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.