Posts Tagged With: Politics

Alienating Laws: How Mexican Migration Became Illegal, Pt. 1

Posted on June 27, 2018 by Guest

By Diego Mulato-Castillo

Note: I was fortunate to teach “The History of Mexican Migration” Spring 2018 at San Francisco State University. I say “fortunate” because never during my lifetime has the need for an accurate, historical, evidence-driven understanding of the movement of Mexican peoples across the U.S.-Mexico border been more important. With the Trump administration’s attacks on the migrant community in the United States, students were eager to find out the history behind the violent rhetoric and policies that characterized Trump’s rise to power. Needless to say, students were all overwhelmed with the long, ugly
xenophobic history of the United States. At the beginning of class I informed my students that I co-managed a blog focused on the history and politics of the Southwestern borderlands. As the course progressed students suggested that whoever wrote the best final paper should have their work published on the blog. What an excellent idea!

There were many excellent papers written about diverse topics relating to racism, labor,
environmentalism, eugenics, and more. But, in the end, only one would get the honor. I am pleased to announce that Diego Mulato Castillo’s essay titled “Alienating Laws: How Mexican Migration Became Illegal,” is the winner of our mini-contest. A timely piece, Mulato Castillo examines the legal history and the various social turns that drove the U.S. to make the migration of Mexican people and by extension Latin Americans “illegal.”

Diego Mulato Castillo is an undergraduate student at San Francisco State University and is majoring in literature with an interest in the Central American diaspora, specifically from the so-called northern triangle. He finds the history of Mexican migration interesting for it sheds a distinct light on the migration of Central Americans to el norte, and migration from all of Latin America as a whole. 

This essay will be presented in two parts. Enjoy! -Lina Murillo

Mexican immigration into the United States is perceive as an illegal act in the twenty-first century warranting expulsion, however, historically this has not always been the case. The ebb and flow of Mexican migration has been influenced and framed differently throughout the complicated and intertwined history of the United States and its neighbor to the south, Mexico. The U.S. and Mexico not only share one of the most militarized borders in the world, but also a shared history fraught with tension and vast inequality. It is this historic tension and inequality that has served as a catalyst for the vast migration of Mexicans to the United States, which has possessed a historical ambivalence towards these immigrants, at times welcoming them as cheap labor hands to then call for their return to their native land. This paper will focus on the history of Mexican migration and the law beginning with the first Mexican Americans after the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the events leading up to the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border in the late twentieth century in order to understand how Mexican immigration became illegal in twenty-first century. Continue reading →

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BHIP13: The Dr. Laura Gómez Interview

Posted on March 22, 2018 by Lina-Maria Murillo
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Dr. Laura Gómez. Photo credit: Dr. Ernesto Chávez

I interviewed Laura Gómez for the Borderlands History Interview Project late last year, but had been waiting for just the right moment to release the interview. In celebration of Women’s History Month and within weeks of the 170th year anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, March was just the month.  In fact, with my co-contributors, we decided we would dedicate this week to celebrating Dr. Gómez and her scholarship.  With the recent political focus on Trump’s border wall and his venomous rhetoric against undocumented immigrants—the racially bound “Mexican menace”—Dr. Gómez’s landmark book Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race is more important now than ever.  Recently, she spoke at the University of Texas at El Paso to commemorate the second edition of her groundbreaking book and to talk with students, faculty, and community members about its significance. Last Monday, Blanca Garcia-Barron reported back about her experience at the talk for the Borderlands History Blog.  It is in the spirit of understanding the legacy of Mexican-American racialization and in celebrating the women scholars who have worked tirelessly for decades to recuperate and expose this history that I would like to present my interview with Dr. Gómez.  Her insights on race, racism, Mexican-Americans and law reveal the power of her research in the era of Trump.

Currently, Laura Gómez is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles where she teaches Civil Procedure and Criminal Law in the first-year UCLA School of Law curriculum and has taught courses in law and society and the Critical Race Studies Program in the law school’s upper-year curriculum. She received her A.B. at Harvard College in 1986, and then went on to earn a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University, in 1988 and 1994 respectively. As she worked toward her Ph.D., Gómez obtained a J.D. from Stanford University’s School of Law in 1992. She has written and edited several books including:  Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure, published in 1997 by Temple University Press; Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race, first published in 2007, New York University Press. (Celebrating its 10th Anniversary NYU Press is ready to release the second Edition of the book in 2017), and Mapping “Race”: Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research, Co- Edited (with Nancy López), published in 2013 by Rutgers University Press.  She has written numerous articles for scholarly as well as general readership about race and the law. Professor Gómez has had extensive experience outside of academia as well. As a law clerk for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (1992-93) and later as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico (1996-97), Gómez’s portfolio included Central American policy, South African policy, and Armed Services (for the latter, she held a top-secret government clearance).

While Laura Gómez is the first “non-historian” I interview for the BHIP, her research has done so much to advance the work of Chicanx and Latinx historians and scholars across fields in understanding the racialization of Mexicans in the United States. Indeed, her work has been foundational in complicating the black-white racial paradigm in the U.S. and providing the history of the legal framework used to racialize Mexicans and Mexican Americans.  Her book outlined the genesis of Mexican-American racial formation beginning in the nineteenth century and has allowed for relational discussions for other Latina/o history in this country.

With her diverse academic background in law and sociology, I asked Professor Gómez how she approached her research for this book.  She explained that as she worked on her Ph.D. in sociology and her law degree concurrently, she was very much thinking about the ways in which critical race theory and the law could be applied to understanding the history of Mexican-Americans in a state like New Mexico. Gómez stressed that the questions she asked drove her to search for answers in different fields and with the support of thoughtful advisors she was able to weave together methods and theories from sociology, anthropology, law and, of course, history in order to address the overarching political scope of her study.

In many ways Manifest Destinies is about contesting and complicating established historical narratives in the United States. Describing the North-South/black-white paradigm that has characterized nineteenth century racialization, Dr. Gómez stated that in her book she sought to complicate this narrative by foregrounding the connections between the U.S. war with Mexico that started in 1846 and the tensions that led to the Civil War fifteen years later.  Gómez wanted to reorient the story of race-making in the United States to include the invasion of Mexico and the “uneven incorporation” of Mexico’s territories and its people into the United States after 1848.  Moreover, she underscored the manipulation of the narrative of westward expansion—powerfully enshrined in the ideology of Manifest Destiny—that she explained shrouds this historical moment in invisibility. One, westward expansion is depopulated, but for the white settlers coming from the east, Native communities and Mexicans are erased. Second, the violence of the war and the expropriation of land is also unceremoniously removed from history books, making westward expansion seem inevitable and ordained for white Americans.

From this historical position, Professor Gómez explained that she unraveled the thread of race-making for Mexicans in New Mexico. As conquered people, Mexicans, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, were considered legally white. While Mexicans attempted through the courts systems to assert their legal whiteness and their federal citizenship, socially they were treated as a racial minority.  Many Mexicans sought to align themselves with whiteness—as a Spanish-speaking ethnic group— in order to contest Anglo-American claims that Mexicans were a “mongrel race.” According to Gómez, however, from a sociological vantage point, race and not ethnicity could best explain Mexican and later Mexican Americans “inequality that became rooted in the Southwest” in the years after the war.  “To describe it as ethnic is a misnomer…and that doesn’t capture the dimensions of racism and racial segregation that Mexican Americans had and continue to experience,” she said. “My project was to try to make this a conversation about racial inequality and have an open and blunt conversation about race.”

Our conversation continued from there to discuss the current situation in the United States and why the second edition of her book will be flying off the shelves.  Laura Gómez is thrilled that her book continues to be salient today—especially in the Trump era. We must “seize this moment of reactionary politics” she said, because the numbers are in our favor. Latinx are a young and growing population and we must be ready to expand our educational horizons in order to push back against this president’s agenda and the conservative forces feeding it. Her current project will certainly help with this as she is writing about the racialization of Latinx in the twenty-first century United States.

It was a fantastic conversation with Dr. Laura Gómez and I encourage our Borderlands History Interview Project audience to enjoy the entire interview via this link. Thank you again for joining us and we look forward to a new episode of BHIP soon.

Special thanks to Marko Morales for the great work with audio editing and to Mike Bess for some additional technical support.

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Laura Gómez’s Manifest Destinies: Ten Years Later

Posted on March 19, 2018 by Guest

By Blanca Garcia-Barron, Doctoral student, Department of History, University of Texas at El Paso

This week at Borderlands History Blog we’re excited to be featuring posts celebrating the career and scholarship of Dr. Laura Gómez whose book, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race celebrates ten years. We asked Blanca Garcia-Barron to write about Dr. Gómez’s recent talk at UTEP’s Department of History. Later this week, on Thursday, we’ll be publishing Lina’s interview with Dr. Gómez as the next episode of the Borderlands History Interview Project!

Reading to a packed classroom of students, faculty, and community members at the University of Texas at El Paso, Dr. Laura Gómez focused on the overarching themes of Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race. She spoke of traditional interpretations of New Mexico history as exceptional, much like U.S. history, and her book pushes back against this idea. New Mexico serves as a microcosm of the trajectory of the history of race in the U.S. Its racial dynamics established much of the legal trajectory of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States later in the twentieth century. She also discussed how occupying multiple spaces is embodied in the idea of “double colonization.” Indigenous and native Mexicans first experienced colonization by the Spanish and then a second colonial experience in what became “the Southwest” by white colonial settlers. Dr. Gómez asked us to reconsider American racial ideology of the nineteenth century. She went on to say that the extensive racism in the American Southwest intersects with that of the racist ideology of the North and South. These ideologies should not be treated separately, but rather as converging ideas working together that continue to shape racism in the U.S.

Another point that Dr. Gómez emphasized is that Manifest Destinies reached audiences beyond academia. She spoke about federal judge Jack B. Weinstein citing her book in a case where a Latina mother sued on behalf of her son over lead poisoning, where he ruled that her son’s constitutional rights were violated. She credits the success of her book in part to Albuquerque’s high schools adding it to their reading lists. She believes that this is much a cause to the expanding audiences that are demanding Latino/Hispanic histories. Due to the shifting demographics of Latinos, where Mexicans account for the majority, demand for books like Manifest Destinies is not only part of her success, but accounts for the growing number of programs dedicated to Critical Race Theory and Chicana/Latina Studies. Dr. Gómez credits the younger generation of Latina/o and Mexican American students for putting pressure on universities for the inclusion of these programs.

Ten years ago, she wrote this book at a seminal point in Modern U.S. History. Her work highlighted the history of nineteenth century Mexicans in New Mexico as simultaneously occupying the legal designation of white while socially treated as non-white. Mexicans after 1848 engaged and negotiated between two different spaces. At the time, in 2008, the election of Barack Obama coupled with the growing political power of Latino-Americans gave credence to the idea that the U.S. inched towards a post-racial society. This ideal of a truly diverse society moving forward from hundreds of years of social and political oppression towards racial minorities seemed to culminate in that election cycle. However, Obama’s banner of progressive “Hope” slowly emboldened those that yearned for an American past where non-whites did not threaten white homogeneity so explicitly as today.

Now that Manifest Destinies is out in its second edition this year, Dr. Gómez’s work comes at another critical time in US history with the Trump presidency. Specifically, the transition of power to the Trump administration asks us to reconsider what the construction and history of race in the U.S. means in today’s society. These themes were precisely on Dr. Gómez’s mind as she gave her talk on campus this month. She emphasized how younger generations of activists, students and scholars of color are changing the face of academia and this point was not lost to those of us who joined her for coffee before her talk. It was incredibly clear that she values the experiences of struggling graduate students. She took the time to listen to our various projects and research interests that were very different from one another, but that she still ultimately connected between race and law. Both the coffee talk and her lecture were a testament to the strong force that Dr. Gómez represents as a Latina scholar working to disrupt not just exceptional narratives of U.S. history, but also to remind Latina/o and Chicana/o graduate students that we belong in academia.

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Dr. Gómez speaking at UTEP.

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Mass Migrant Deaths in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and the Politics of Mexican-Americanism

Posted on January 30, 2018 by Guest

By Joel Zapata, PhD Candidate, Clements Department of History, Southern Methodist University

While the Trump Administration and Congress negotiate the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, the family visa system, along with border security and border fencing, millions of immigrants’ lives remain in limbo. The negotiations ensue as partisan lines harden on immigration and xenophobia increases in the public domain. However, the too often ignored story of mass migrant deaths in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands tells us that no one political party or social group holds a historic monopoly on either side of the immigration debate or on the treatment of immigrants. Indeed, the mass deaths of migrants partly originate with policies created and supported by Mexican Americans attempting to prevent Border Patrol abuse of U.S. citizens. In the borderlands, migrant lives and the struggle for U.S. citizenship rights along with the claiming of Americanism by Mexicans Americans have come to a head, leaving the promise of social justice for all ethnic Mexicans and other Latina/os in the United States unfulfilled. And as debates about immigration, border security, and border barriers continue, migrants are still dying in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands’ arid terrain while seeking to fill job openings in the growing U.S. economy.

As various scholars and public intellectuals have argued, migrant deaths are primarily rooted in the funneling of unauthorized workers and their families through inhospitable desert terrain that is meant to act as a natural wall outside of closely monitored urban areas.[1] The channeling of migrants towards dangerous dessert terrain, “where they [have] succumbed to dehydration, hyperthermia, or heat stroke,” in the thousands, can be traced to the inception of Operation Hold the Line, which the El Paso Border Patrol Sector Chief, Silvestre Reyes, implemented in 1993 along the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border.[2] Reyes, a Mexican American who was born and raised in the El Paso area, stationed Border Patrol agents “every several hundred feet directly along the border…effectively build[ing] a human wall between” the two cities.[3] Such Border Patrol operations soon extended across other urbanized sections of the U.S.-Mexico border. Since the 2006 passage of the Secure Fence Act, these Border Patrol operations have been further supplemented by monumental border walls, guard towers, infrared cameras, and aerial surveillance—a “manufactural landscape with a single purpose….to halt illegal immigration into the United States.”[4] Because of Border Patrol’s accumulation of resources in urban areas, seventeen hundred migrants died between 1994 and 2000 while traversing remote desert areas where urban Border Patrol policing funneled them.[5] In the desolate desert areas of Arizona’s Pima County alone, the yearly number of migrant deaths through much of the first decade of the twenty-first century averaged at one hundred and fifty.[6] The natural wall effectively stopped migrants through death. Ultimately, migrant deaths are rooted in state policies that Border Patrol agents and other government agents enforce.

Through Operation Hold the Line, Border Patrol originally intended to move its agents away from the streets of El Paso and thus reduce harassment of Mexican American who looked “illegal” (ethnically or phenotypically Mexican) to its agents. In essence, “Reyes attempted to protect the citizenship rights of Mexican Americans by focusing Border Patrol resources on the physical boundary” of the Rio Grande. As a result, grievances by Mexican Americans against the Border Patrol significantly declined.[7] The El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce gave Reyes a “Moving Forward Award” for his efforts to decrease Border Patrol abuse of Mexican Americans, but those same efforts have also caused the death of over seven thousand migrants since 1994 (this number is likely far below the actual body count if one considers the unnamed bodies that have not been—or never will be—found in the desert Southwest).[8] In addition, when Reyes became a U.S. Representative, the League of United American Citizens gave him a Lucy G. Acosta Humanitarian Award for his work on behalf of Mexican Americans.[9]

How can Chicana/o scholars and their allies interpret Reyes as well as Mexican American Border Patrol agents? Such a question is especially pertinent when considering that “by 2008, 51 percent of all Border Patrol officers were Hispanic—primarily Mexican Americans.”[10] In search of an answer, we can turn to Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández’s arguments, informed by transnational feminist perspectives and critiques of Mexican, U.S., and Chicano nationalisms (particularly male-centered nationalism), within Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries. In this study, Guidotti-Hernández contends that “violence is and was the one factor that determined how racial position, gender, and class alliances played themselves out in contest over citizenship and resources” in the borderlands.[11] According to Guidotti-Hernández, “the formalistic reporting of these events follows a similar pattern of using repetition as a way of denying violence as a foundation of national history, making these events unspeakable.”[12] Through such lines of reasoning, the author questions the silence within resistance narrative proposed by traditional, nationalistic Chicano scholars as well as official Mexican-mestizo and Euro-American narratives of borderlands violence.

Overall Guidotti-Hernández contends that nationalisms—whether tied to nation-states or ethnic groups—silence history. However, if we “abandon celebratory, uncritical discourse…and concentrate more on the socially constructed nature of gender relations as they produced racialized systems of power and capital,”[13] we can attempt to get at why many Mexican Americans have allied with Euro-American power structures, such as the Border Patrol. Thus, we can better understand the “economic and communal desires” of these ethnic Mexicans.[14] We may then examine “history with a critical eye that challenges monolithic representations with Chicano identity.”[15] In so doing, a more complex picture of Mexican Americans as well as their fulfilled and unfulfilled civil rights movement(s) can also emerge. Perhaps, then, Mexican Americans can better grasp where their social justice efforts have failed.

In examining Mexican American history through Guidotti-Hernández’s proposals, it becomes clearer why Mexican Americans have participated in and have supported increased patrolling of the border. If stationed along the U.S.-Mexico borderline, away from the streets of border cities, Border Patrol agents cannot question the citizenship—the Americanness—of Mexican Americans. By having Mexican and other Latin American migrants funneled away from the streets of El Paso and other border cities, Mexican Americans were able to claim a non-Mexican national or a non-“illegal” social status. They moved closer to becoming (within a border context) ethno-racially, socially, and nationally American.

As Mexican Americans experienced less Border Patrol harassment, agents mostly began to pursue and arrest unauthorized migrants attempting to cross the militarized border. The increased solidification of the urban border has benefited some ethnic Mexicans while driving other ethnic Mexicans towards dangerous desert terrain, causing government-made mass deaths. Considering the awards given to Reyes by Mexican American organizations—including a civil rights organization—and his election to the U.S. House of Representatives seven times between 1996 and 2010 by the majority Mexican American electorate of El Paso, it seems many Mexican Americans were fine, or ignored, the deaths Reyes’s policies caused to other ethnic Mexicans that happened to have a differing citizenship status.

In probing why some Mexican Americans join the border enforcement apparatus, it is telling that Reyes was in the armed forces and that he joined the Border Patrol in 1969 immediately after his tour in Vietnam. In one of my anthropology classes on contemporary Mexican culture during the early 2010s at the University of Texas at El Paso, a Mexican American Border Patrol agent came to speak to the class over his job and his reasons for joining the agency, which by then had become part of the Department of Homeland Security. The agent’s reasoning for entering the Border Patrol was two-fold. Considering his skill set, there were few well-paying jobs in El Paso outside of the Border Patrol for him. In addition, after leaving the military, he wanted to continue his work as a patriotic American. In short, the Border Patrol fulfilled his “economic and communal desires.”[16]

Joining Border Patrol can be attractive in a region with limited job opportunities, a socioeconomic reality in much of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The desire to claim U.S. citizenship rights and prove patriotism may also lead Mexican Americans to join the Border Patrol or to support the agency’s policies. Nevertheless, in that search for economic gains, citizenship rights, policy or political victories, along with satisfying feelings of patriotism by some ethnic Mexicans, thousands of other ethnic Mexicans and Latina/os have died in the borderlands.

As the nation looks at immigration reform and border security once more, mass migrant deaths and their political and structural causes should be part of the public conversation, especially within communities, such as the Mexican American community and the broader Latina/o community, still seeking social equity. Until then, migrant deaths in the borderlands remain remarkably silent within the nation’s political and public discourse.

Notes

[1] Daniel Martinez, Robin Reineke, Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, Bruce Anderson, Gregory Hess, Bruce Parks, “A Continued Humanitarian Crisis at the Border: Undocumented Border Crosser Deaths by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, 1990-2012,” Binational Migration Institute, Department of Mexican American Studies, The University of Arizona, June 1, 2013, link. (Berkley: University of California Press, 2010), 229.

[2] Lytle Hernández, 229.

[3] Ibid, 228.

[4] Char Miller, On the Edge: Water, Immigration, and Politics in the Southwest (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2013), 149.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Reineke.

[7] Lytle Hernández, 228-229.

[8] Ted Hesson, “No More Deaths, The Crisis on the U.S.-Mexico Border in Arizona,” May 24, 2011, link.

[9] “The Arena: Rep. Silvestre Reyes,” Politico, accessed January 25, 2018, link.

[10] Lytle Hernández, 227.

[11] Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 4.

[12] Ibid, 5. The episodes of violence Guidotti-Hernández elucidates upon include the 1851 lynching of Josefa/Juanita in Downieville, California, the 1871 Camp Grant Indian Massacre, the erasure of sexualized and racialized violence in the work of anthropologist Jovita González—the first Mexican American woman to graduate with a masters in Anthropology form the University of Texas at Austin, and the Mexican government’s attempted genocide of Yaqui people and their culture from 1880 to 1910.

[13] Guidotti-Hernández, 84.

[14] Ibid, 87.

[15] Ibid, 84.

[16] Ibid.

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