I believe in my heart that the
people of this nation do not in their hearts want to destroy our lives, our
families, and our communities.
Elvira
Arellano
On August 19,
2007, the Department of Homeland Security arrested and promptly deported
32-year-old Elvira Arellano
, an undocumented Mexican single
mother who worked cleaning airplanes at Chicago O’Hare airport—one of several
airports raided in the post-911 immigration sweeps.
The most prominent figure of today’s sanctuary movement,
Arellano who had publicly announced her plans to travel to Washington to urge
reform, was forced to separate from her young son Saul, an American citizen, as
the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained her and ushered her out
of the U.S. by way of the nearest border at Tijuana.
[i] This paper probes how the changes yet
ever spectral nature of immigration policy, and enforcement, informs ethics
surrounding parental rights and child welfare, and pedagogy.
In particular, we seek to explore how
individuals such as Arellano have created conditions for a North American
trans-border and maternal citizenship in the face of American exceptionalism,
how critical pedagogy permeates classrooms and spills into other public
institutions such as mass communication, and how both institutions marry to
create an immigrant deficit model. Inversely, however, we investigate how
Latinos and individuals like Arellano have created paths to supportive border
and other identities in the wake of baneful public discourse.
Arellano’s
case is illustrative of the changed nature of national identity and represents
one configuration of transnational and politicized citizenship. On the one
hand, increased controls on U.S. citizenship which was once more or less
optional for legal residents, for example,
[ii]
and the harshening of enforcement of laws not rigorously upheld previously,
national identities which once reflected a quality of citizenship
status—immigrants had the option of taking the vow to be American or not—now point
to a quantification of citizenship.
This quantification, we would argue, is exemplified in the fact that
immigration was a process that had up until recently always left the door to
the home country open.
However, in
the context of today’s immigration politics, the door to the home country has
been shut.
[iii] [should elaborate on
this “shutting of the door; what does it mean/entail?]
Arellano’s case is especially
noteworthy. In a video slideshow
produced by The Chicago Tribune,[iv] Arellano articulates a complex form of
trans-border citizenship, to follow the reasoning initiated above, which is a
sum of separate parts. Instead of
a pluralized citizenry, today we may also speak of a pluralized citizenship,
perhaps. [R1]In other words, one’s
citizenship may be legally contained within the native country and
simultaneously invoked while living extra-legally in the U.S.
Appealing in different quantities to
each of the two nation states—the U.S. and Mexico—an undocumented worker, in
this case Arellano, constructs her civil rights within a formulation that is
not only bi-national but composite.
[should cite
literature on transnationalism, which makes similar points].
To
make this point, we turn to Arellano’s story which she begins by stating that
once an undocumented person crosses the border, he or she automatically becomes
a criminal to the U.S. government.
Notwithstanding the truth of this assertion, Arellano both admits of the
vilification of immigrants and invokes her rights as proto or part citizen to
appeal to the U.S. authorities for resolution of her case: “In my country,” she
says, “the government does not do enough to offer opportunities for us. The U.S. must do something to help our
families stay together.” Appealing not only on her own behalf, but on that of
the twelve million other undocumented persons, Arellano is the first
international spokesperson to effectively, publicly construct a transnational
maternal citizenship identity which stresses the role of responsible
government. Not only did her case
reveal the pragmatic exigencies of being an immigrant in U.S. but her
articulation of her situation in the limelight of the press and media may be
seen as an important erosion of the shame and fear instilled in the condition
of being an undocumented worker.
In
effect, because the Mexican government fails her as Mexican citizen, the U.S.
must take up the role of responsible government.[as if the U.S. were
any better!! Sorry, I just had to say it!] Because global economic structures work
through extra-national configurations, so too, Arellano insists, must
government be extra-nationally responsible for keeping its citizen families
intact. So it is that in the
appeal of a mother’s right to parent a U.S. citizen, a new global citizenship
or at least a bi-national citizenship takes shape. The fact that she is a woman and a mother of a U.S. citizen
is not a minor detail but a major factor.
Separation from children is not a new trend for immigrant mothers, but
it is more often the case that children remain in the native country while
mothers seek employ across the border.[should cite sources
here, such as Hondagneu-Sotelo’s work]
In
their discussion of transnational motherhood, Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo and
Ernestine Avila in the article, ““I’m Here, but I’m There”: The Meanings of Latina Transnational
Motherhood,”” the authors highlight the preponderance of reevaluation of
maternal practices which takes place in the context of gendered labor
migration:
How
do women transform the meaning of motherhood to fit
immigration
and employment? Being a
transnational mother
means
more than being the mother to children raised in another
country. It means forsaking deeply felt beliefs
that biological
mothers
should raise their own children and replacing that belief
with
new definitions of motherhood.
[v]
American
execptionalism—the idea that the U.S. occupies a special designation among all
world nations, in historical, political, religious, and other evolutions—is now
reaching a fever pitch in populist rhetoric which has seeped into a nationalist
and wartime America.
While the
case of Arellano would appear to be one end product of policies, beliefs, and
attitudes stored up inside a new form of exceptionalism spouted from the
highest levels of administrative command of both foreign and domestic affairs
and creating a trickle effect through the congress and
pooling up [R4]in the farthest
reaches of the anti-immigrant grassroots activism and militia contingents.
Certainly, the refusal to agree to
international protocols on the environment and human rights, the go-it-alone
philosophy in the war against Iraq, the re-invention of state agencies in the
Homeland Security and the excessive wielding of executive, legislative, and
judicial power were actions which yield repercussions.
Former
U.S. president Clinton’s bequest and the nation’s onus is the immigrant community’s
rock-and-a-hard-place—the dual action foreign and domestic policies—North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and border militarization (Operation
Gatekeeper)—that have created the equivalent of an internally displaced people
(IDP) in the advanced capitalist state of the U.S. While this may seem an exaggeration, (a more accurate term
is presently lacking), immigrants in the U.S. exist in a nowhere land of
nationalist histrionics and global economic interdependence which would not
appear to be near resolution anytime in the foreseeable future. President George W. Bush has followed
suit and has explicitly announced that he would trump legislation that reads
amnesty.
As
mentioned above, neither, Democratic or Republican executives have had the
courage to fix the “broken” immigration system. Similarly, the legislature and its take on immigration never
bode well with its bipartisan botched policies. The efforts of the Gutierrez-Flake and Kennedy-McCain bills
were ill intended. Both parties disagreed to agree and a broken law splintered
into a million little pieces. 12
million little pieces, we would say.
Any legislative attempt to alleviate the “immigrant problem” had at its
core malicious intents and purposes.
As
Justin Akers Chacon and Mike Davis argue in No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on
the U.S.-Mexico Border (Haymarket,
2006) the backlash against immigrants began on the fringe, moved into government,
and has become a veritable cultural norm with virulently racism and anti-Latino
sentiment at its core:
The
new racism that runs throughout the nativist movements,
which
under the aegis of “opposing illegal immigration” declare
total
war on Mexican culture and Mexican people, documented
or
not. The same groups that have led
the debate against
immigration
have been working for years to overturn bilingual
education
and multicultural programs, and have underwritten
legislative
proposals that seek to deny social services to all
immigrants.
(Akers
Chacon and Davis, p.256)
Here, Chacon and Davis accurately unmask Americans racist
agendas under the guise of nativist or exceptionalist movements.
To exemplify judicial angst, a good deal of recent legal
literature focuses on the role that judges play in transnational dialogues
occurring in the wake of the adoption of constitutions and of international
human rights conventions. From reported decisions to conferences and listservs,
judges in different countries are exchanging views on the meaning of law.61 However, U.S. Justice Scalia’s
relationship to those discussions are sour. He objects to “foreigner’s views” for example, and insists
on “American Justice for American Citizens,” thus taking execptionalism as a
license for unilateralism (Resnik, J Yale Law). As we’ve seen, the branches of government serve to privilege
the Western on one hand, while simultaneously repressing and marginalizing the
voices of those who have been deemed subordinate and/or subject to relations of
oppression because of their color (Giroux, H 1998), thus, channeling public
hysteria and discourse through public domains. Examples of these public outlets include schools,
television, and other forms of mass communication, which in-turn inform public
pedagogies.
Public domains such as educational institutions we
consider to be spaces where marginalization and suppression can continue to be
taught or be interrupted.
Similarly to those hard-line Constitutionalists who strive to preserve
authenticity, schools have historically contended with two schools of
thought. The first fundamentally
believes in an education that is general; original; centralized; classical;
Western; dogmatic; aristocratic; of gentlemen. The second considers schools should be multicultural;
proletariat; egalitarian; of women and men; of the human spirit, however, often
the “purist” philosophy prevails.
Freire (1972) contends that education either serves
to domesticate or liberate the masses.
Domestication education or what we consider educational “purists,”
reduces educational endeavors to a prescribed method of instruction where
knowledge transfers and fact memorization are the goals. This traditional view of education
relies on exhorting the young to do the “proper” thing and punish them when
they fail. Known as the “banking”
method, teachers are responsible for depositing knowledge into students. In liberatory education, on the other
hand, teachers utilize problem solving methods that encourage students to ask
critical questions, create and own knowledge, and work to realize democratic
processes in classrooms and society.
This Socratic way of thinking seeks to teach people to know the good by
provoking them to think about fundamental and moral aims and dilemmas (Bok,
1990). This pull between
traditional and liberatory education creates a binary felt by students and
educators and in many instances immigrant and marginalized students are often
set-up for failure. To this end,
hooks (1994) argues, then, we need to move beyond binaries to create
borderlands for marginalized students, spaces where they “creatively invent
ways to cross borders” and “alter the bourgeois settings they enter” (p.
183). We question the role schools
play in shaping students, particularly those at the margins of borders or those
who offspring of trans-national parents such as Saul.
In what Giroux
(1998) calls border pedagogy, “critical pedagogy is located within those
broader and cultural and political considerations that are beginning to
redefine traditional views of community, language, space, and possibility. It is a pedagogy that is attentive to
developing a democratic public philosophy that respects the notion of difference
as part of a common struggle to extend the quality of public life. In short, the notion of border pedagogy
presupposes not merely an acknowledgement of the shifting of borders that both
undermine and reterritorialize different configurations of power and knowledge,
it also links the notion of pedagogy to a more substantive struggle for a
democratic society.” Further,
Giroux (1991) describes border pedagogy:
… a pedagogy of difference
provides the basis for students to cross over into diverse cultural zones that
offer critical resources for rethinking how the relations between dominant and
subordinate groups are organised, how they are implicated and often structured
in dominance, and how such relationships might be transformed in order to
promote a democratic and just society. Difference in this case does not become
a marker for deficit, inferiority, chauvinism or inequality; on the contrary,
it opens the possibilities for constructing pedagogical practices that deepen
forms of cultural democracy. (p. 509)
Although border scholars prescribe
pedagogy to educational systems, additionally, institutions of mass
communication serve as incubators of anti-immigrant pedagogies and are
inextricably linked.
Analogous to the baneful nature of U.S. immigration
policy, public pedagogy has led to pathological immigration discourses that
shape current immigration policy.
Arguably, public beliefs about how immigration policy should shape
national politics are conducive to behaviors and actions that marginalize, oppress,
and induce violence toward oppressed groups.
Here we claim that discourses on immigration politics in
public domains can either facilitate conditions of ant-democratic or democratic
national missions.
This can either
mean combining learning with everyday life in order to create the conditions
for greater participation of workers and use of their skills within our context
of an “increasingly willfully ignorant society” or create conditions where
public domains including education institutions use relevant, meaningful, and
caring pedagogies to liberate peoples.
California state propositions such as 187—
prohibit “illegal
immigrants” from using health care, public education, and other
social services in the state—and 209—
prohibit public institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity—are
clear examples of how education and communication institutions marry to invoke
hatred towards the “other.”
In a similar vein,
Stavans (2001) sees a new specter taking shape in form of media and its power
to shape public discourse, political ideology, and policymaking:
It’s
no longer important to report; the objective now is to
persuade.
But what I’m fascinated with isn’t the trite, repetitive
tête-à -tête
between liberals and conservatives. That tension goes
back
to the founding of the republic. I’m concerned with the ethnic
wars.
Mainstream media doesn’t inform nonwhites—it simply
typecasts
them. By the time they realize this segment of society
also
wants a piece of the pie, it might be concluded that the
dissemination
of information cannot be unrestricted.
[vi]
As Stavans says here, ethnic wars
are a real concern in the U.S. where raging verbally and espousing hatred
against immigrants is common parlance.
New
provisions announced by the Department of Homeland Security on August 10, 2007
reflect a new savoir in federal policy directed at the immigrant community.
[vii]
In particular, the “Interior Enforcement” provisions which are only a fraction
of the new mandates, will train local law enforcement agencies to enforce
federal mandates; remove the legal grounds for temporary stays of residents and
resident undocumented persons identified for deportation; the number of ICE
teams will have quintupled within three years.
These particular provisions will dramatically alter the
day-to-day lives of immigrants and their communities in ways not seen since the
earlier 20
th Century.
As
several recent books on the topic of immigration and race prove unfortunately
real, the present hostility toward immigration is perturbing in a twofold
manner: this is not a discussion
on immigrants alone but a new and foreboding racial systematic which pairs
federal might with rightwing political ideologies derived out of increasingly active
fringe movements with ties to militias and hate groups, staged in the popular
media, and appearing on congressional records; driving immigrant communities
into a dystopia of nighttime and workplace raids, family separations, and ICE
ambushes, workers undocumented or no, become an ever more exploitable
class.
Policies
such as those approved in August do not come about overnight but progress
through increments surely hastened through pivotal events such as the 911 twin
towers destruction but reflective of a progressive and cumulative logic whereby
increasing hostility to immigrants becomes more and more palatable for
political consumption. It is
important to appreciate how the discourse on immigration became what it is
today. Linguist Otto Santa Anna provides a painstaking analysis of the
recurrent and baneful metaphors with which Latinos are discussed in print media
in his study Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary
American Public Discourse (University
of Texas, 2002). Santa Ana examined
the most prevalent metaphors utilized in the Los Angeles Times over the period
of years from 1992-1998. Over
more than ninety months, Santa Ana found that there was very little variability
in metaphor selection; this limited variability, he argues, works to naturalize
a particular ideology on immigration.
As
the institutionally legitimated view of a social issue is
repeated
over time with minimal variation, the media
portrayals
become the accepted view… one metaphor
becomes
the dominant means by which the public and
policymakers
comprehend the issue. (53)
[R5]
“Where
would the United States be without its ilegales?“ Ilan Stavans mused in The Hispanic Condition: The Power of a People (HarperCollins, 2001). Stavans’ book was teeming with
confidence that a capacious America was bound to be seduced by irresistible and
malleable Latinos whom it would ultimately if haltingly admit into its
ranks. Inclusion seemed to be only
a matter of time. Even if relations had historically resembled an unrequited
love affair Latinos were bound to become the new ethnic Americans par excellence.
By
accommodating ourselves to the American Dream, by
forcing
the United States to acknowledge us as part of its
uterus,
we are transforming ourselves inside El Dorado and,
simultaneously,
reevaluating the culture and environment
we
left behind.
Stavans’ prophecy
was remarkably celebratory, even mythic-sounding with its reference to El
Dorado. The pliability of Latino identity—a very useful catchall one whose
absorption went far and wide in popular culture--had safely contained the dying
embers of the counter cultural nationalisms of the early 20th
Century, he reasoned. Certainly, America had only been playing hard-to-get and
would soon see things anew.
(accessed on August 23, 2007).
[ii] Not until
California’s Proposition 187, did significant numbers of legal residents choose
to undergo the process for becoming a U.S. citizen.
[iii] For a
discussion of what I call this “shutting of the door,” its outcomes, underlying
premises, and methods as well as its impact on sending communities see: Cornelius, Wayne A. and Lewis, Jessa
M., eds., Impacts of Border Enforcement on Mexican Migration: The View from Sending Communities,
San Diego: University of
California, 2007.
[v] Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierette and Avila, Ernestine, “I’m
Here, but I’m There”: The Meanings
of Latina Transnational Motherhood,” in Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierette, ed., Gender
and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends, Berkeley: University of
California, 2003, p. 325.
(accessed on August 17, 2007.)
Judith Resnik
Law’s Migration: American
Exceptionalism, Silent
Dialogues, and Federalism’s Multiple Ports of Entry
Analogous to the baneful nature of U.S. immigration
policy, public pedagogy has led to pathological immigration discourses that
shape current immigration policy.
Arguably, public beliefs about how immigration policy should shape
national politics are conducive to behaviors and actions that marginalize, oppress,
and induce violence toward oppressed groups—Latinos. Here we claim that discourses on immigration politics in
public domains can either facilitate conditions of anti-democratic or
democratic national missions. This
can either mean combining learning with everyday life in order to create the conditions
for greater participation of workers and use of their skills within our context
of an ‘‘increasingly willfully ignorant society’’ or create conditions where
public domains including education institutions use relevant, meaningful, and
caring pedagogies to liberate peoples.
We draw on egalitarianism and Freirian ideas to create spaces where immigrants might
disturb new everyday rituals of public institutions through which they
are commonly positioned as potentially dangerous outsiders—the anti-citizens—in
the new world order.
Freire
contends that education either serves to domesticate or liberate the
masses. Domesticating education
reduces the educational endeavor to a prescribed method of instruction where
knowledge transfer and fact memorization are the goals. Known as the “banking” method, teachers
are responsible for depositing knowledge into students. In libratory education, on the other
hand, teachers utilize problem solving methods that encourage students to ask
critical questions, create and own knowledge, and work to realize democratic
processes in classrooms and society.
