Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Introduction

      Toward the end of the Great Depression, DC Comics launched its fantastic tale of an orphaned infant alien who grew up to become an American hero named Superman. The Superman saga begins with the young superhero’s dramatic arrival on earth. Just moments before the destruction of his home planet, Krypton, Superman’s parents rocket their infant son toward salvation in Kansas. Adopted by a childless but moral and God-fearing couple, Superman spends his early years as nothing more than an average Anglo-American boy coming of age in rural America. But beneath his external appearance, he is different. Unlike his neighbors, Superman can fly, melt steel, and see through walls. And, unlike his neighbors, Superman is an illegal alien.

      Thirty-one years before Superman landed in American folklore, the United States Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1907. This law required all immigrants entering the United States to pass through an official port of entry, submit themselves to inspection, and receive official authorization to legally enter the United States. Dropping from the sky and failing to register with the U.S. immigration authorities, Superman entered the United States without authorization. According to U.S. immigration law, the incorruptible leader of the Justice League of America was an illegal immigrant. Yet the tale of Superman evolved free of any hint or consideration of his illegal status. Surely, Superman was just a fantasy and, as such, the character and the narrative were not subject to the basic realities of U.S. immigration restrictions. But in the same years that Superman’s popularity soared, the United States became a nation deeply divided over the issue of illegal immigration. From Congress to school boards, Americans decried what many described as an “immigrant invasion” and a loss of control over the country’s borders. These debates swirled around the issue of unsanctioned Mexican immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border. By the mid-1970s, vigilantes were patrolling the border, and Congress was hosting explosive debates about how to resolve the socalled wetback problem. As the issue of unauthorized Mexican immigration rippled across the American political landscape, Chicano activist and songwriter Jorge Lerma asked his listeners to consider the irony of Superman’s enormous popularity. “It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No man, it’s a wetback!” shouted Lerma. But few people took note that the iconic Man of Steel was an illegal immigrant.

      Lerma’s provocative interrogation of Superman as America’s forgotten illegal immigrant was a critique of the U.S. Border Patrol’s nearly exclusive focus on policing Mexican immigrant workers despite many other possible subjects and methods of immigration law enforcement. Established in May 1924, the Border Patrol was created to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions comprehensively by preventing unauthorized border crossings and policing borderland regions to detect and arrest persons defined as unauthorized immigrants. With Asians, prostitutes, anarchists, and many others categorically prohibited from entering the United States and with a massive territory to police, Border Patrol officers struggled to translate their broad mandate into a practical course of law enforcement. Soon, however, in the U.S.-Mexico border region, the officers began to focus almost exclusively on apprehending and deporting undocumented Mexican nationals. Then, during the early 1940s, the entire national emphasis of the U.S. Border Patrol shifted to the southern border. Since the end of World War II, the national police force, which had been established to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions broadly, has been almost entirely dedicated to policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. With his song, Jorge Lerma offered a sharp criticism of the racialization and regionalization of U.S. immigration law enforcement. Superman was an undocumented immigrant who flew across the cultural landscape but, cloaked in whiteness, he escaped capture, while Mexicans in the borderlands, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, were subject to high levels of suspicion, surveillance, and state violence as Border Patrol officers aggressively policed not only the U.S.-Mexico border but also Mexican communities and work-sites.

      This book tells how Mexican immigrant workers emerged as the primary targets of the U.S. Border Patrol and how, in the process, the U.S. Border Patrol shaped the story of race in the United States. It is, in other words, a story of how an American icon lost his illegality and how Mexicans emerged as the “iconic illegal aliens.”¹ Framing the contours of this story are the dynamics of Anglo-American nativism, the power of national security, the problems of sovereignty, and the labor-control interests of capitalist economic development in the American southwest. But this book unfolds at the ground level, presenting a lesser-known history of Border Patrol officers struggling to translate the mandates and abstractions of U.S. immigration law into everyday immigration law-enforcement practices. When the working lives of U.S. Border Patrol officers are considered, and when the chatter of big men in big debates in faraway places is taken as the context rather than the content of U.S. immigration law enforcement, the Border Patrol’s turn toward policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration emerges as a process that evolved in far more complex and contingent ways than indicated by the master narratives that typically frame our understanding of U.S. immigration control. In particular, this book explores U.S. immigration law enforcement as a matter of state violence in community life, unearths the cross-border dimensions of migration control, and explains the U.S. Border СКАЧАТЬ