Thursday, April 24, 2014

Quantum Representation : Partisanship as Nightmare

It's time to change the topic.... anyone notice how repetition of peace leads to more peace? John Stuart Mill said that the truth of the individual is lost when a group assembles. His premise is that representation is erroneous by quantum. A ratio. Ratios are ratios not fractions so much as money makes to be. A working economy would have a working humanity, if the mathematics alone were improved. We're not talking statistical math, the only math allowed in public education, but predictive even aesthetic mathematics. Just 1 thing to say that will be a stone with water rings. The moment of life is here to be lived. I ask my Gov to free these students I call mine because when I was evicted they were deported. Lots of the stuff we'd be doing would help many Americans but those who are comfortable with failure, fail the future, past, and present.


Since we are such a large voter's block, we diminish ourselves if we go the partisan way instead of with our youth. You all know it's true. Why defy ourselves to stave off a wrong instead of to gather our hearts and souls, and bind them to a future without a yoke around the neck, whatever the dictates of any? We have rights whether By Brth or By Being Born to Live Here, we prosper to our demise in exposing truths inherent and as when we walk with the overapologetic righteous and peaceful not merely agreed by vicarious expedient but prolonged path by overdue example of refusal to represent people in discussion of these thoughts without Disrespect to our historical worth and our lives faith given were given to love liberty first and its pursuit of prosperity as an expression without regulation or restriction, enacted in the 1st Amendment to free speech. We ask that all people hear that we need delivery from the Democratic party's monopoly on justice and the GOP negligence on it. Together they consist of a mutually-beneficial abuse against people for despite their citizenship status or because of it, are robbed of their humanity as its common expression is disposed as political agendas teeming with ill intent even bad faith. What more must we do to serve the government's authority to serve us if it is not inherently granted it must always do the best for itself and the world, then it doest not merit obedience. On these grounds alone, the national policy is a baneful result of a product hardly designed to fail or be misused. Even with Checks and balancces, they have offended the world by their blaming each other. We may call them Crooks and Pedants but the world thinks they are Nebulous or Quizzical. Not two goods things to be in a big world you alienate. Who does this? Just who does this?

Friday, April 4, 2014

"I Believe in My Heart," Sanctuary of Elvira Arrellano, or Censorship is All you Got? 2007 manuscript-in progress


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]
           
This important study of transnational motherhood clearly spells out the redefinition of family given the need to migrate.  A compelling gender analysis is offered which can be applied to Arellano as well as other parents presently undergoing separation from minors due to deportation and forced relocation.  The impact of forced separation on definitions of motherhood will be studied by scholars equipped to do so [is this statement necessary?].  It is important to bear in mind that for now it is clear that transnational parenting, in the case of Arellano, broke signficantly with the private and domestic boundaries normally prescribed for family dynamics[R2] .  This separation was intentionally made public and politicized for the sake of bringing much needed attention to the issue of parental separation for U.S. citizen minors.  Separation, a term largely used to define clear rules of American socio-political engagement, often depends on the underlying assumptions of American exceptionalism.[R3] 
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 ethnicityare 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 20th 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)
                                                                       
Thus, the discourse on immigration gradually accumulates and becomes augmented through repetition and ultimately synchronous invocation of metaphors form a disguise leading into a familiarity in tone and content which the reader will increasingly come to share with the media source.  The construction of meaning takes place between reader and text within a particularly persuasive bond built upon the legitimating language of metaphor.  “Consequently, the shaping of the message is as important as selecting its content,” (55) states Santa Ana.
As this compelling analysis illuminates, anti-immigrant discourse is powered through a disguise maintained by familiarity and allusion.  Each act of newspaper writing paired with newspaper reading enters into and builds upon an ever-expanding nexus of a totalizing discourse with the power to shape policymaking and electoral politics as well as we have begun to spell out here, national identity—the basic beliefs in who belongs and who does not.
Strikingly, Santa Ana discovers that the most prevalent metaphors which operate within immigrant discourse with the first one occurring at nearly 60% of usage in the L.A. Times over the given period in descending order refer to immigrants as:  dangerous water, as war, as animal form, a bodily entity (as disease or burden), and, less frequently, as air, weed, criminal, machine or fire (Santa Ana, 69).  The key to the operation of the most dominant metaphor as well as several of the others is that these are noncount words which come to imply an unknown total.  Additionally, as with the most dominant metaphor of water, control and power are contested at the level of metaphor which becomes naturalized through repetition, to accrete into a political urgency and prevalent basis for fear and action to prevent loss of control;
Greater volume and movement of water imply greater
need for safeguards and controls, and more powerful
human agency to control the water (which of course, is
not a human force. (Santa Ana, 75-76)

Santa Ana’s analysis provides one prescient examination of how anti-immigrant discourse saturates the national consciousness through a familiar trust-gaining tone and demeanor. 
Because they are both in and of themselves non-human (water and other non-sentient or bestial entities) as well as indexical, for while they refer back to human constituency, they are temporarily disembodied through a linguistic disassembly, metaphors provide a recurrent ellipses which can be infused with powerful apparent truths; even if momentarily, the elliptical truth forms the basis of its repeatability.  The threat is made more real each time the metaphor replicates its approximating function:  when a whole community is referenced through comparison with nonhuman forces, especially potent natural forces like water, the threat magnifies in a Freudian manner.  Representing the immigrant community as a tidal wave, for example, makes the presence of immigrants resemble threatening and harmful weather patterns.  Thus, in one sense, the demographic shift puts the national terrain at risk for symbolically it may contain the ability to dissolve, efface, or erode the known, comfortable, or settled way of life in unpredictable or unforeseen ways. 
On the other hand, representation of immigrant communities can also imply a sense of the subhuman.  So while in the above paragraph, one might view water in particular storm water or tidal waves, as overpowering, the opposite may also though contradictorily hold sway.  In other words, by comparing immigrant persons to nonhuman forces of nature, their basic humanity is effectively cast aside.  The lapse of the humanity of the immigrant person thus hinges on the fact that they are undocumented, illegal, paperless, alien, and ultimately not a category worthy of citizenship, a second or third class race of persons. It follows that a person whose humanity can be so tenuous as to occupy linguistic spaces of nonexistence, illegal spaces, is perhaps not a person at all but a noncount entity of dubious worth and function in American society.  By all means such a population, it is reasoned, must be controlled by political and physical means (border enforcement and a wall).  While this rhetoric leads in one direction, the experience of living in extra-legal or undocumented status points to a new version of American citizenship. 
Hayes-Bautista shares the premise that the multicultural heritage of Latinos made them a more culturally adaptable group; a new America was surely to be ushered in when Latinos of all walks would come to lead by example in the project of a new multicultural America. The U.S. had after all always been destined to become a truly pluralistic society.
[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.


           

             

Comments:
I think the article is insightful and critical.  I guess the only recommendation I can come up with would be to develop it further; sociology journals usually want 30-40 pages. 
By the way, have you thought about submitting this to the journal “Latino Studies”?


 




[i] Saldierna, Georgina and Becerril, Andrea, “Condena la permanente deportacion de Elvira Arellano y exige reaccion de la SRE,” La Jornada, August 23, 2007, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/08/23/index.php?section=politica&article=014n1pol,
(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.

[vi] “Oscar Villalon Talkes with Ilan Stavans,” Believer Magazine, http://www.believermag.com/issues/200608/?read interview_stavans_villalon,
(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.






 [R1]unclear


 [R2]unclear


 [R3]I might need to create a better transitional sentence.


 [R4]unclear


 [R5]Here we need to expand and write about movements of resistance and how immigrants are creating new forms of identity and how pedagogies are important to these identities/