Wrong Place, Right Pigment
Sandi is harassed, humiliated, arrested, and detained on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant from Mexico solely on the basis of skin color and proximity to the Mexican border. Meanwhile, her companion in the car when this entire series of events begins with a policeman approaching them for doing nothing suspicious but occupying a parked car completely ignores the young white man with her who actually is an illegal immigrant from Canada.
Cockroaches
Right-wing talk radio host Lou Becker very casually dehumanizes an entire culture by referring to illegal Mexican immigrants as coming to infest America like cockroaches. Ironically, this casual lack of empathy and compassion will come back to literally bite him in the butt. He will later be abducted and tortured in part because of the specificity of this degrading insult which is repeated on a voicemail recording by two white racists inflamed the infestation of by his rhetoric into killing an innocent Mexican man.
Pink Underwear
Real-life Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s penchant for degrading and insulting his Hispanic prisoners by making them wear pink underwear is also ironically turned against Becker. Early on, one of his callers praises this predilection of Arpaio, but Becker finds himself on the wrong side degradation when his abductors strip him naked and force him to wear pink underwear before releasing him into the Arizona desert to find his own way back home.
Arizona Bar-be-cue Sauce commercial
His abductors also coat Becker’s body in barbecue sauce in order to darken his skin before leaving him to his own devices in the desert. This is itself an example of irony because the flaming racist is now in a desert known to be a route for illegal entry into the country with pigmentation that could easily get him confused as being an illegal immigrant himself. Ultimately, Becker’s ordeal forces upon him a raised in consciousness as well as more tender conscience and he quits his radio show on air. As he leaves, the station manager orders a commercial to fill the dead air and it turns out to be a commercial jingle for Arizona Bar-be-cue Sauce.
Becker’s Not American
Becker is a veritable cornucopia of irony. Perhaps the single defining ironic element to his story is that his infamous radio show is titled “Take Back America” is mostly notable for his never-ending screed against immigration. Only late in the story is it finally revealed that Becker is himself an immigrant from Scotland whose U.S. citizenship results from the applicable laws of a native of a foreign country marrying a U.S. citizen.
