Uncovering the racism of nativism in the US

Recent reports about the murder of Marcelo Lucero in the TUPOCC Yahoo! group prompted me to ask us to consider how legal activists of color, and our friends, might use critical legal theory and our experiential insights to uncover the racism of US nativism and and change popular understandings of today's anti-immigrant movement.

I referred to a Facing Race conference workshop that some of us attended on this subject last week, and a compañero in New York just mentioned today's Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI)'s conference on Galvanizing our Power for Action: Building Bridges between African-American and Immigrant Communities.

BAJI does great work, and I think we should all learn and talk about the relationship of US racism and nativism. In my Chicanos, Law, and Criminal Justice class at UC Berkeley, I teach about how the US has historically racialized Latinas/os vis-a-vis Indigenous and African peoples. In this post I share some resources and sketch my understanding of the racism of US nativism.

Let's start with the Anglo seizure of Tejas and the US invasion of México in the first half of the 19th century.  

(N.B. Before continuing, it's important to acknowledge that all history is highly complicated, and we have imperfect means from fragmented sources to know the past.  Certainly some Tejano elites joined Anglos in establishing Texas as an independent republic in 1836; similarly, the US-Mexican War had multiple factors.  However, as I have asserted, my critical analysis of these past events has led me to frame them as the Anglo seizure of Tejas y the US invasion de México.)

As many have written, relations between the US and México soured in that early to mid 19th century period.  In particular, numerous influential US congressmen railed against México as a nation of degenerate mongrels and expressed fear about incorporating territories with substantial numbers of them (us, colored folks).

I use a few excerpts to teach about this history, including Chapter Four, "Latinas/os" of Perea, Delgado, Harris, Stefancic & Wildman's Race and Races: Cases and Resources for a Diverse America, 2d ed. (2007), and the excerpt of Ian Haney López's The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice in Davis, Johnson & Martínez's A Reader on Race, Civil Rights, and American Law (2001).

The important point vis-a-vis conventional ideas about the "black-white binary" of race in the US today is that Latinas/os--particularly Mexicans and Puerto Ricans--in the 19th century challenged the US Anglo imaginary with a somewhat different dilemma than that posed by "the peculiar institution" of slavery.  

Instead of an internal non-white "minority," México y Porto Rico presented the specter of already racially-mixed societies.  And, according to the US Anglo conceptualization of race in the 19th century, the inferiority of a racially-mixed mongrel was even greater than that of a non-white Indian or African.  Contemporary ideas promulgated at that time held that mixing the races produced an inferior breed to any of the "pure" races.  

(Contrast these ideas with the 1990's celebration of multi-racial minorities, or the (re)discovery of bi-raciality.  In turn, understand that always already, folks be hella mixed.  Racial purity is a lie and an invidious illusion.)

From these first moments when the US incorporated of parts of México (starting with Tejas from 1836 to 1845, then including the lands ceded under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and finally those later acquired in the Compromise of 1850 and the Gadsen Purchase of 1853), the idea of US nativism became even more complexly tied to racism.  Previously the notion of US nativism was already fraught with contradictions given the genocide of Indigenous people and the situation of "native-born" African Americans, who were nonetheless legally excluded from enjoying their (our) human rights, including of course U.S. and state citizenship.

In the two decades prior to the Civil War and Reconstruction, however, the US incorporated a massive new territory inhabited by a substantial new "minority," which demaned an evolution in the means of subordination, i.e., the racialization of "Mexicans," first as "Greasers" (as in the infamous California anti-vagrancy law of 1855) and later as "cheap labor."

A foundational resource for understanding this history is Tomás Almaguer's Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (1994, new edition forthcoming 2008).  Chapter One, "'We Desire Only a White Population in California' - The Transformation of Mexican California in Historical-Sociological Perspective," is particularly useful.  Another useful resource is Gilbert Paul Carrasco's Latinos in the United States: Invitation and Exile in Juan Perea's Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States (1997).  

A new book that I will likely incorporate into this section of my class is Laura Gómez's  Manifest Destinties: The Making of the Mexican American Race (2008), which provides critical insights into this history beyond the California context.  Understanding "Mexican" racialization in New Mexico is particularly important because that region remained a territory for 62 years -- from 1850 to 1912 -- until the Anglo population outnumbered the Hispano population.  New Mexico is also important en la conciencia xican@ (in Chicana/o consciousness) because the New Mexico Territory was broken into parts to form Arizona, parts of Colorado and eventually New Mexico; it also has great importance as a site of centurial armed resistance to Anglo domination, from Las Gorras Blancas of the late 19th century through the efforts of Reies López Tijerina y La Alianza Federal de Mercedes in the 1960s.)

As Almaguer argues persuasively, using archival historical sources, the racialization of "Mexicans" in the US extended and evolved earlier forms of US racism against Indigenous and African people.  In turn, Carrasco's chapter details how the racialization of "Mexicans" was particularly linked to the evolving labor demands of the 19th and 20th century, e.g., the Gold Rush, agricultural work, World War I, the Great Depression and the so-called "repatriation" campaigns of the 1930s, World War II and the second Bracero Program, "Operation: Wetback" and the H-2 visa program.  (Gómez's arguments complement these by advancing her notion of Mexican Americans being "off-white," meaning sometimes defined as legally white but almost always defined as socially non-white, and grounding her concept in the particular history of New Mexico.)

Here is the take away point for folks open to understanding (and interested in articulating clearly) how racism is at the root of US nativism: Anglos evolved and extended US racism from the history of Indigenous genocide and African slavery as the US conquered and annexed the vast Mexican territory now known as the Southwest.  In so doing, the US force a terrible Faustian pact onto Mexican Americans (and by implication all Latinas/os): deny your Indigenousness, denigrate your Blackness and aspire to racial Whiteness, or be ready for subjugation like an African and slaughter like an Indian.

Geography, region and social space is the critical factor that blinds some of us from seeing the connections between historical and contemporary racism(s) and nativism(s).  Without understanding the foundational historic racialization of "Mexicans" (and the also salient historic racialization of Puerto Ricans) vis-a-vis Anglo American government, citizenship and political economy, it might be confusing to hear me say that US nativism is a form of racism, or and to understand how these ideologies overlap substantially.

However, to one who knows this history, today's nativism--whether it be in Congress, en la frontera or in Long Island--looks like it clearly continues the sorry past.

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I'll end by citing two more important texts about these ideas.  See Robert S. Chang & Keith Aoki, Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination, 85 California Law Review 1395, 10 La Raza Law Journal 309 (1997) (published simultaneously in both journals).  While I have not taught it yet, I read Chang & Aoki's explanation of "nativistic racism" during law school and recall it being rich with insights on this subject.

Second, Juan Perea's, Demography and Distrust: An Essay on American Languages, Cultural Pluralism, and Official English, 77 Minnesota Law Review 269 (1992) is a well structured history of the hidden past of US multilingualism, e.g., French, German, Spanish and English, at the founding and throughout the history of the US and its various states.

Facing Race

Responding to a call by TUPOCC founding co-chair Renée Sánchez, and organized by USF 3L and NLG-SF Student Vice President, Aliya Karmali, about ten TUPOCC members and our friends attended the Applied Research Center's Facing Race: A National Conference in downtown Oakland, California this past weekend.

Attending plenary panels and workshops from Thursday's opening keynote by Sherman Alexie to Saturday's closing plenary on Race and the Global Economy, TUPOCC was present and representing radical "queer, colored" legal activism, as we connected with our friends and allies from other organizations dedicated to interracial justice, as a critical dimension of the people's intergenerational movement toward social justice.

While there were many interesting panels and workshops, I found two workshops particularly helpful to my interests in helping us build TUPOCC and creating community in Oakland.  

BYOB: Build Your Own Blog was led by Liza Sabater of CultureKitchen.com and Chris Rabb of Afro-Netizen.  Beyond an introduction to blogs and blogging, Liza and Chris provided great information about technologies that could substantially help us represent our racial justice work like Utterli (mobile audio/video sharing) Shoebox (photo management) and Drupal.

That last software, an open source package (as in GNU and the free software movement) seems particularly promising in helping us build TUPOCC's infrastructure beyond our previous and present attempts with Yahoo! Groups, the TUPOCC website and our Legal Activists of Color blog.  Liza particularly indicated that Drupal has a module that can realize my idea of literally mapping TUPOCC's membership, by integrating Google Maps with a membership database that we could create based on the 141 folks in our Y! group.

While I have yet to download Drupal and likely won't start learning it until mid-December, I am very excited about its potential for TUPOCC and the several other organizations for which I volunteer, e.g., Latina & Latino Critical Legal Theory, Inc., the East Bay La Raza Lawyers Association, the Berkeley Law Foundation and the National Latina/Latino Law Student Association (NLLSA).

It's been a while since I've focused my energies on non-law and non-text learning and culture making, and I miss photography and film-making a great deal.

The second workshop I attended, Creating a Culture of Racial Justice, was powerfully synergistic.  Moderated by Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Rebelde and Taller Tupac Amaru, this workshop also featured Favianna Rodriguez, co-founder del mismo taller, Tumi's Design and the Eastside Arts Alliance; and DJ Phatrick and Samantha Chanse -- popular educators, community builders and radical cultural workers of color who are (or in the recent past were) based in the SF Bay Area.

Melanie's prompts and questions were particularly stimulating and merit mentioning three of the most memorable:

• How do people create a racial justice culture to support social justice movement(s)?
• How do folks who have become artists inspire and materially support others who desire to make art but feel unable to do so vis-a-vis their racial subordination and other forms of oppression? 
• How can artists serve as visionaries for the racially just world we want to create?

By themselves these questions may not seem revolutionary to some, but witnessing Favianna, Melanie, Patrick and Samantha share how they have made their lives and their art into living visions of racial, immigrant, gender and sexual justice was deeply inspiring.

I have lived, loved and worked hard to develop mi conciencia (a radical racial, political, sexual and spiritual awareness of my place in people's history), but to study law I stopped making photographs and films, dancing, journaling and writing poesía.  While I tried to remain aware of the importance of "in xochitl, in cuicatl, flor y canto, flower-and-song" (art, poetry, dance, singing), my daily practice of making art basically stopped, as I focused on learning the law, reading critical legal scholarship and organizing students.

Witnessing Favianna, Melanie, Patrick and Samantha, reminded me of the crucial necessity to make soul and face as our elder compañera Gloria Anzaldúa and other radical lesbian Chicana poetas, artistas, scholars y filósofas have written.

While directly serving the people as a community lawyer in West Oakland's Homeless Action Center is a powerful practice of transgression against class norms and teaches me daily about solidarity across the many dimensions of power and identity (especially interracial and gender justice), Creating a Culture of Racial Justice reminded me that I also need to regularly practice love-inspired art-making -- in order to feel joyful and strong enough to serve nuestra lucha por justicia para el pobre (our struggle for justice for the poor), as the old La Raza Law Students Association slogan goes.

I have a lot more to write but more has already been reported.

I will end by mentioning four mujeres with whom I spoke briefly on the last day of Facing Race.

First, I briefly saw Tiny, aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, the fierce and fearless poverty scholar and co-founder of San Francisco-based POOR Magazine / Poor News Network.  Tiny mentioned that POOR is on the move to the Mission District, after having resisted its threatened eviction, naming "development" for the 21st century colonization that it recapitulates and organizing the people to take back the land by holding a ceremony that calls upon the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

I also caught a glimpse of Evelyn Sanchez of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition (BAIRC), whom I spoken with briefly at Friday afternoon's plenary on The Race Debate: Challenging Colorblindness with Race Conscious Solutions.

Next, I took the opportunity to speak with Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez, who was book-signing at the AK Press table and whose sixth book, 500 Years of Chicana Women's History / 500 Años de la Mujer Chicana, was recently published.  

I first read Betita's work while surviving law school: as I did at least once a semester, I left campus and got lost until I found myself in a bookstore, seeking words to nurture my spirit against the profound alienation of formal legal education.  

In San Francisco's Mission District, I came across De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century, which introduced me to Betita's profound writings on mujerista and youth activism from New Mexico a California and across much of the twentieth century.  I had most recently seen Betita across the table during La Raza Centro Legal's 35th anniversary dinner earlier this year, and when I mentioned it, she told me that she recalled how I was sitting to her right and asked about my work in West Oakland and the meaning of my middle name, Tizoc.

As she carefully composed the brief inscription she wrote on the book's frontispiece, I waited, kneeling before the table and feeling ever more deeply the significance of our brief momento conjuntos.  I thought of my dad y abuelitas and my mom y tías and knew I was exactly where I should be.  

Afterwards, thanking her and moving on, I was pleased to share the book con alguna de nuestras compañeras, Teague Briscoe (an El Paso homegirl and president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild - San Francisco Bay Area Chapter).

Finally, I had the fortune of seeing Tommy Escarcega, another El Paso Tejana and long time community activist who was organizing in support of the voting rights of people in county jails this past election.  

We first met four or five years ago when she knocked on the door of La Raza Law Students Association at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), saying she had heard there were Raza law students and asking for our support of her work in Proyecto Common Touch, which she founded to protect the due process rights of convicted women on parole or in custody.   

Since then I've seen La Tommy a few times over the years, like when her project was based at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland's Fruitvale District.  We spoke briefly about her recent work on the voting rights of people in jail, and I introduced her to other TUPOCC xicanas as the conference ended.

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As I've tried to show, the ARC's Facing Race was a powerful meeting of what Liepollo L. Pheko, of The Trade Collective, dubbed "the manys" who remain committed to the compact for racial justice.  I encourage you to read more reporting on Facing Race.

Muchismas gracias a Renée y Aliya for motivating and organizing TUPOCC to represent at Facing Race.  We did good outreach work in identifying allies and nurtured relationships con nuestr@s compañer@s across the law / non-law divide.

As Betita wrote, "Thank you for your good work, ¡Adelante juntos!"