CHAPTER 10

The United States: Undocumented

For Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, the summer of 2015 will be remembered as the Summer of Trump. The real estate mogul and TV personality declared war on immigrants from Mexico when he announced his presidential bid on June 16. In a now infamous speech, Trump proclaimed: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” In the following weeks, he refused to apologize for his statements and even, in the parlance of the TV talk shows on which he made frequent appearances, doubled down on his attacks. By mid-August, Trump’s platform included promises to force Mexico to pay for a wall that would stretch across three thousand kilometres to “keep itself out” of the US. He also claimed that if elected, he’d ban remittances from illegal immigrants to their families in Mexico and deny children born on US soil their “birthright,” or claim to citizenship, even though that right is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Not to be left out of the Mexican-baiting games, other Republican candidates—including Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal (the only brown man among them)—echoed Trump’s policy statements in their own campaigns, or at least agreed with the sentiment behind them. Ben Carson, at the time Trump’s closest rival for the Republican Party nomination, suggested that only Mexicans working in the agricultural sector should be allowed to stay in the US. “After we seal the borders, after we turn off the spigot that dispenses all the goodies . . . people who had a pristine record, we should consider allowing them to become guest workers primarily in the agricultural sphere,” he said during a Republican presidential debate in September. In the 2016 race to the White House, it looked like Mexicans (and Latinos in general) would be the scapegoat of choice, perhaps knocking their fellow brown people, Muslims and Arabs, from their perch as America’s favourite ethnic group to hate. As a member of the latter group, I breathed a sigh of relief—even if, deep down, I knew our (next) turn would come. (Sure enough, by the end of 2015 Trump said he would consider requiring Muslim-Americans to register in databases or carry special identification cards, among other measures to combat terrorism.)

Sitting in a corner booth that doubles as his office in one of two Mexican restaurants he owns in the Bronx, New York, Antonio laughs off the Republican candidates’ demonization of undocumented Mexican immigrants. “Republicans know that immigrants make them money,” he tells me on a Sunday morning, just before the brunch crowd descends at noon. Many tycoons, including Trump, built their fortunes on the sweat and tears of immigrants. But maybe Mexicans have allowed themselves to be boxed into this corner, he adds. “We come from somewhere else, so we accept lower wages. It’s the price immigrants pay to come to the States—work hard and get paid less. . . . We’re less educated. That’s why we came here. We get paid by the hour and we’ve accepted that.” Restaurant owners and fast food chains depend on this system of exploitation. In 2008, the Pew Hispanic Center released a study suggesting that about 20 percent of cooks and chefs in America were illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico.

Antonio fits into his own profile of the hardworking and exploited immigrant, but he also stands out as a prime example of a capitalist success story: those illegal immigrants who bust their humps for years, save enough money to start their own businesses and offer employment to others—all while paying their taxes ($11,000 every three months, in Antonio’s case) and remaining undocumented, subject to deportation or criminal charges for living illegally in the country. After a number of years when the net immigration rate—the number of Mexicans who left the United States versus those who came in—fell to zero due to the weaker US economy and an increase in deportations, the trend reversed in the first half of 2015. Latest immigration data show the number of Mexican immigrants to the US rebounded to 740,000 in 2014–15, or 44 percent of the 1.7 million newcomers. According to 2015 figures, nearly 12.1 million migrants live and work in the US illegally, and just over half (52 percent) come from Mexico.

In 1997, twenty-two-year-old Antonio joined this six-million-people-and-counting club. Looking back, he’s not sure why he immigrated. “It was an opportunity. I just packed and left.” His first impressions of New York City didn’t match the images he saw on TV growing up in his hometown of Puebla, in the centre of Mexico. “I found it dirty. It wasn’t the city I expected,” he says, adding that he envisaged a city that looked more like Central Park and the Upper West Side than the Bronx or Harlem. He spoke very little English at the time and lived in Corona, Queens, but commuted to Upper Manhattan for his first job: stocking fruit and vegetables in a delicatessen. The job didn’t require much interaction with customers, which suited him just fine. Despite the long shifts, he carved out a few hours a week to take English classes at a community college in Queens. “I wanted to learn how to speak, how to write. I was watching lots of English channels and programs.” He sharpened his colloquial English through dialogue he heard on soap operas and afternoon talk shows, including the peak years of the Oprah Winfrey Show. (He remains a big believer in Winfrey, whose gospel of self-help and reinvention he follows to the letter.)

As his spoken English improved, Antonio felt comfortable seeking work in the restaurant business. He started as a dishwasher alongside a rotating brown cast of Hispanic and South Asian illegals. In a few years, he’d climbed the restaurant ladder by working first as a busboy then as a bartender and a waiter at an Italian joint in the theatre district. “Whatever I wanted, I worked hard for it. It was hard with the long hours and not having the education. I watched everybody and tried to learn the business.”

Despite the pressure of juggling three part-time jobs and working eighteen-hour days, Antonio knew that once he’d learned the ropes of managing a restaurant, it wouldn’t be long before he opened his own. The fact that he was still undocumented after more than ten years in New York didn’t stop him from investing his entire life savings in his first restaurant in the Bronx in 2008. That taqueria—“I wanted to bring a piece of my Mexico to New York”—fell victim to the Great Recession and closed its doors within two years. Antonio regrouped and learned his lessons, and in 2011 he opened a new restaurant on 149th Street in the Bronx that was successful enough to finance a second outlet in the more residential area where I caught up with him.

Americans love tales of self-made men, and Republicans adore small-business owners. But they seem to draw the line when the self-made man is made in Mexico or Central America, and when his business becomes an extension of that identity. Federal agents routinely raid businesses in the food industry—chicken farms, doughnut factories, ethnic (especially Mexican) food chains—as part of a crackdown on illegal labour. I don’t need to guess at the level of angst that Antonio feels from a possible immigration raid; I saw it with my own eyes. When I showed up at his restaurant for our scheduled meeting, I asked a cook in the semi-open kitchen to let him know I’d arrived. A few brown men were cutting vegetables and preparing guacamole, and they included Antonio, who was within earshot of my conversation with the female cook. Only when she and Antonio were satisfied that I was indeed the writer with an appointment and not an undercover immigration officer did he identify himself, asking me to wait for him in the corner booth.

The possibility of deportation weighs heavily on a man who says he feels he’s “home” and “very integrated” in New York City. “I would be very sad if I left. It’s unfair because I worked so hard. For the moment, I’m not planning on going anywhere else. I feel like I’ve achieved something. . . . If I die tomorrow, I can die very happy.” I tell him that he’s living as close a version of the American dream as I can think of, a perfect example of that can-do spirit so essential to the country’s perception of itself and its history. That endorsement does little to alleviate his anxieties. “I don’t know about the American dream,” he shoots back. “Everybody has his own version of it. My American dream is giving jobs to twenty people, feeding their families.”

As soon as the clock strikes twelve, the restaurant begins to fill up. Although weekdays attract multi-ethnic workers from nearby businesses and factories, the Sunday brunch draws an exclusively Latino crowd. Waiters take orders or answer questions about the specials in Spanish despite the English-only menu. As the kitchen is short one cook, Antonio lends a hand between taking phone orders for delivery and checking in on me. No wonder he looks older than his forty years. As a fellow gay man who is a decade older, I don’t share that last observation with him. However, I do ask him how and if his sexuality and race ever intersected. “I felt more discrimination as a gay man from other Mexicans because of their machismo,” he reveals, “than I felt from white people because of my skin.”

Earlier in our conversation I had asked Antonio to identify his own skin colour; to me, he fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of light to dark brown. After saying that he never thought about his own colour (and opting for “mulatto” when pressed), he added that he “very much refer[s] to other Mexicans as brown”—at least in a political sense, in order to verbalize ongoing tensions between Hispanics and blacks. He recalls being on friendly terms with the black community during his early years in New York. “African Americans were more welcoming [then]. But when Obama came to power, they became very aggressive.” Latinos—and in particular day labourers working off the books and receiving their wages in cash—became a favourite target of gangs of (predominantly black) youth. Many African Americans believe that the influx of Mexican immigrants has changed the texture of traditionally black neighbourhoods—erasing personal histories and diluting political legacies.

The community of Port Richmond in Staten Island bears witness to this ethnic shift. Between 2000 and 2008, the number of Hispanics living on Staten Island grew by about 40 percent, and many of them relocated to the Port Richmond area, once a predominantly black and low-income community. Within a few years, according to local news reports, the area became known as Little Mexico, with bars playing Spanish-language heavy metal music and shops selling chillies and tomatillos. Local black businesses closed their doors. Encounters between the two communities ranged from the indifferent to the tense to the deadly as the number of racially motivated assaults increased—at least according to Hispanics; many black commentators describe the crime wave as opportunistic. (Latin gangs also operated in many formerly black neighbourhoods, perpetuating a cycle of black-on-brown and brown-on-black crime.)

Staten Island became the latest setting for a long-simmering dispute between African American and Hispanic communities over the issue of illegal immigration. Many blacks believe that Hispanic newcomers undercut their chances at finding employment by accepting lower wages. Sociologists use the term “black flight” to describe how African Americans are ceding ground to Hispanic immigrants in places such as Los Angeles, where between 1993 and 2008 the black population fell by about 125,000 while Latino numbers rose by nearly half a million. Studies suggest that blacks in neighbourhoods with a large Hispanic presence tend to vote more consistently for anti-immigration politicians than those in mainly black neighbourhoods. A study from Harvard suggested that between 1980 and 2000, immigration from Latin countries caused black employment in the low or unskilled sectors to decline by about 7.4 percent. Work in sectors such as construction underwent a general lightening of complexion at the turn of the twenty-first century, with Hispanic workers replacing blacks. As an op-ed in the New York Post in 2008 described it, “The rising tensions between African-Americans and Hispanics render the old hopes of a black-brown coalition chimerical, especially as blacks realize that Latino political gains come at their expense.”

On this Sunday in July, most black residents simply walk by Antonio’s restaurant. They know that Sunday brunch is Latino family time. Even I, as a brown-skinned man, feel like an intruder, and so I leave this little slice of Mexico in the Bronx for another slice of Mexico in Queens.

LETICIA AND HER BROTHER Daniel both started their respective one-child families on money earned while working off the books in the service industry. They sidelined their creative aspirations in order to survive in one of the most expensive cities in the United States.

Both moved to New York in the 1990s—Daniel in 1993 and Leticia two years later. They came from Mexico City, where the family ran an upholstery and furniture business. Daniel, now forty-one, specialized in sofa covers, while Leticia, thirty-nine and a trained graphic designer, managed the company’s advertising and promotion. When an older brother invited Daniel, a self-taught artist, to join him in New York, he thought of it strictly as an “experiment.” When no jobs opened up in the furniture business, Daniel joined the long line of fellow undocumented, for whom the cash-only payments of the restaurant business provided a way to earn a living without leaving a paper trail. “Italian, Greek, Mexican [restaurants]—I worked in all of them.” Eventually he settled on Italian, working at pizzerias in Manhattan and Queens for fourteen years. Leticia initially worked as a seamstress at a clothing factory in Brooklyn, but she quit that job—“I didn’t like how they treated the workers”—and found herself in the kitchens of several restaurants in Manhattan. When she became pregnant, the daylong shifts no longer suited her, and she returned to her first love of graphic arts, finding work as a tattoo artist, a career she has been practising for sixteen years now.

I met each sibling separately on two different days and in two different work environments. Leticia and I chatted in the Jackson Heights smoke shop and tattoo parlour where she works the day shift during the week. Daniel picks up the late-night and early-morning shifts at the same place. During the day he works on large-scale ceramic and papier mâché creations inspired by Mexico’s pre-Hispanic history; he rents studio space in an artists’ warehouse in Long Island City, and that’s where he and I met to talk. Each sibling now has one child: Daniel a fourteen-year-old daughter from a previous partner, and Leticia a sixteen-year-old son from a husband who died in an accident in 2006.

At first, Daniel thought that art would bring in enough income for him to quit restaurant or tattoo work. It didn’t. “I keep trying,” he says as we sit in his studio, surrounded by his unsold creations. Despite some critical acclaim and support from folk art curators, buyers remain scarce. Some pieces rent out to festivals and decorate altars in Mexican community centres, but that hardly covers the cost of moving them around town in a truck. So why does he insist on working with this art form and these cultural references if the market is limited? “I have to bring my own Mexico here,” he responds. “I miss it.” This statement of national pride doesn’t mean that Daniel and his daughter—who waited in the lobby while her father and I chatted, despite my best attempts to bring her into the conversation—have cut themselves off from the multicultural aspects of life in New York City.

“Here you see people from everywhere. I have friends from everywhere—black, brown, white.” Most of the buyers (and curators) are in fact white Americans who collect Mexican art and “appreciate it more.” At home, Daniel celebrates Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July because they’re “good holidays.” With his burly physique and long beard, he looks identifiably Mexican, but his daughter passes for white, since her mother is very light-skinned. If the daughter makes a decision to distance herself from her Mexican heritage and opt for mainstream white American culture, Daniel says he’ll be cool with that. “That’s her life,” he remarks, before pointing out that she’s “kind of curious about Mexico.”

When the daughter turns eighteen, she’ll be able to sponsor Daniel, giving him his best shot at changing his undocumented status. In November 2014, President Obama announced a series of immigration reforms, including the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA). This gives parents of children born in the US a three-year work permit and an exemption from deportation. Daniel seems as indifferent to the immigration debates within the Republican Party as he is to the Band-Aid solutions coming out of Washington. After twenty-two years without leaving New York City, he’s carved out a new hybrid identity for himself: “A Mexican but a New Yorker. A new identity.”

Leticia shares some of her brother’s hesitancy around citizenship laws. Moving from undocumented to legal would be a welcome step, but it wouldn’t solve all her problems or change her life priorities. “It depends on circumstances,” she explains as she shows me sketches of some of her tattoo art, including Aztec, Mexican and traditional American ink. “With my son, it’s more important that he grows to be a good person. If I do that, then I’m happy.” This is why she works Monday to Friday, sacrificing the busier weekends to spend time with him. Like his cousin, Daniel’s daughter, the son is light-skinned. He’s also more than six feet tall and passes for white on the street—which is more than can be said for his mother. “I don’t think I can pass for white. I start talking and people know I’m Mexican,” she says, pointing out her accent and also her black hair. She’s even wearing a dress that features embroidered flowers typical of traditional Mexican garments. But she’s aware of a generational and cultural gap growing between American-born children and their migrant parents, and she goes through it with her son. “He wasn’t born in Mexico, but his parents were. His blood is purely Mexican.”

Another gap is growing within the Mexican community in New York. Some migrants, like Daniel and Leticia, hold on to aspects of their culture out of a desire to bring part of Mexico into their daily lives. Others, especially middle-class Mexicans and those with lighter skin, focus their energies on passing for white or adopting a more all-American lifestyle of baseball and suburban living, avoiding Hispanic media and, in extreme cases, forbidding their children from speaking Spanish in public. People in this category tend to look down on the likes of Leticia, and she has some words for them: “If you want to be American, that’s fine. But never forget where you’re from. That’s part of you. I don’t know why you want to hide it.”

Perhaps some acculturated Mexicans struggle with women like Leticia because of her status as a single-mother breadwinner in a community where men call the shots. Keeping a roof over her own head and her son’s gets harder as the years go by and their needs change. The siblings don’t earn a regular salary from their work as tattoo artists; they get paid by the client, with the Bangladeshi shop owner taking a cut from each job. Some seasons are busier than others, with the winter generally slow. “The winter is long,” Leticia tells me. “We have to save money for rent and bills.” I notice that no customer has set foot in the shop for at least an hour, and when I sneak a peek after lunch, the place looks just as empty. This is on a Wednesday afternoon in July, the peak of the busy season.

Daniel and Leticia face tremendous financial hardships, but they pale next to the fear that the lives they’ve built up over decades may vanish if hardline politicians are successful in deporting the parents or denying the children their citizenship rights. That’s a very brown experience in the United States. Whatever problems African Americans face—and they are legion—deportation will never be one of them. Still, the mood of the undocumented in New York, like the city itself, struck me as resilient, defiant—optimistic in the face of doom and gloom from the Republican candidates and even Obama, on whose watch deportation figures have shot up. (In some Latin corners, Obama is known as Deporter-in-Chief.)

For the flip side of the brown undocumented life, I head to Phoenix, Arizona, a city and state that have turned anti-immigration legislation into a blood sport. I wanted to experience for myself the differences in the lives of brown Mexican migrants in New York, the ultimate blue state, and those in red states that are geographically closer to Mexico. Recently, Phoenix has also witnessed a “mysterious surge” in illegal immigrants from India, according to the Arizona Republic’s immigration reporter, Daniel Gonzalez. They fly from India to Central America before setting off on a five-thousand-kilometre journey through many countries and entering the US via the Arizona–Mexico border as asylum seekers. Arizona is becoming a gateway to America for more than one brown group.

FRANCISCA PORCHAS KNOWS HOW to whip her audience into activist shape. To the sixty or so Mexicans and a handful of white and African American supporters in the auditorium of Puente, a migrant justice organization based in Phoenix, her wishes and her commands go hand in hand. After all, her business card says “organizing director” for a reason. And there’s a lot to organize during this weekly Monday night membership meeting.

But first, Francisca asks everyone in the room to stand up, identify themselves and share their idea of a perfect summer day. This breaking-the-ice-in-the-desert exercise may seem so high school or so corporate retreat, but to an outsider like me, it reveals the simple dreams of a community of predominately undocumented Mexicans in one of the most anti-immigrant cities in the United States. No one here dreams of a spa retreat or a shopping spree. They will settle for a quiet day at home in the comfort of the A/C. It’s July and the daytime temperature hovers around the mid-forties.

“I’d like to be locked away in my house, doing nothing. Not to go out at all into the street,” one woman in the second row tells a room full of people who understand instantly why someone’s idea of perfection is self-incarceration. The chances of being racially profiled and taken into a detention centre increase when you step outside your front door. Another woman—and the majority of those present are women—says she wants to be “tucked away” at home (also with the A/C on) with her children, whom she doesn’t get to see enough of because she works long hours. The recurrent motif of the air conditioning is partly about the heat, but it also betrays the fact that some members of this community can’t afford to keep it running twenty-four hours. It remains a luxury.

If this is the “pleasantries” portion of the evening, I wonder what the heavy stuff will sound like.

Sure enough, Francisca moves on to tonight’s real agenda, which is about organizing her base over the last week of September and the first week of October to attend a high-profile trial involving Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Known as America’s toughest sheriff, Arpaio, over six terms in office, has earned a reputation among brown people in Phoenix as their biggest enemy. Francisca asks members to think of the kind of presence they’d like to have outside the courthouse. Perhaps some artwork and music to draw media attention? How about a legal table where people can come and ask questions about their immigration status? Do they need one week of activities or two? And should they do it daily or only at the start of each week, when the media are most likely to cover court procedures?

The trial rests on the allegation that Arpaio and his officers conducted several racially motivated inspections and traffic raids between 2011 and 2013, despite a federal court ruling that declared such moves unconstitutional. A man in his thirties tells the crowd that, the previous week, he recorded on his mobile phone an incident in which a policeman pulled over a Mexican driver simply because of the way he looked. Other people in the room chime in, suggesting that racial profiling of drivers continues unchecked. The tone of the discussion changes even more dramatically when Francisca explains the details of Kate’s Law, just passed by the Republican-dominated House. Representative Matt Salmon introduced the law after the death of Kate Steinle, a thirty-two-year-old white woman who was killed by a stray bullet while walking along San Francisco’s waterfront with her father. The shooter, a Mexican illegal who spent sixteen of his twenty years in the US in jail or addiction treatment centres, had been deported several times but always managed to sneak back in. The law establishes a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for illegal re-entry to the United States. It also challenges city-level immigrant-rights policies in three hundred municipalities—commonly know as sanctuary cities—and punishes them for not cooperating with federal immigration forces.

It was the “perfect crime” in terms of stirring up anti-immigrant hysteria, Francisca tells the room: a white victim and a brown shooter with a history of mental illness, a long criminal record and multiple violations of the immigration laws. (When Francisca and I talked about this incident the previous week, she told me that her first thoughts upon hearing about the shooter were: “Please be white, please be white.” It’s the same reaction that Muslims in North America or Europe have whenever stories of lone-wolf attacks break. We brace ourselves for the inevitable backlash.)

“If he [the Mexican shooter] had been an American, they would have said, ‘He’s just crazy,’” opines one attendee, earning a round of applause from the room. “How many Mexicans have died or are on death row?” Such laws don’t protect victims but separate families, a sad but familiar experience for some people in the room. Indeed, this otherwise humbly furnished room is filled with children’s artwork emblazoned with slogans like “Don’t Separate Our Families.”

And all that before the name Trump comes up! But inevitably the presidential hopeful makes his way into the conversation. Not surprisingly, the reactions are visceral. “I feel humiliated,” says one woman, referring to Trump’s comments about Mexicans as rapists and drug pushers. “I was really mad. We try to help them [Americans] and work for them. We came to this country not to take anyone’s money. We work hard for what we have. Lots of people humiliate us.” Only when a particularly large woman says that she’ll do anything to fight social injustice except go on a hunger strike does the mood in the room revert to the pre-Trump, pre-Arpaio lightness.

When I speak one on one with Francisca, I learn more about her personal stake in the social justice movement. Like many in the room, she came to the US with her family as a child, in 1988. “Phoenix has always been a very racist place, always been reactionary,” she tells me as we sit in Puente’s administrative office. “I remember thinking I would like to go back to Mexico or go somewhere else.” The somewhere-else wish came true, but not until she’d finished her degree in Phoenix in justice studies. In 2003, she landed in Los Angeles, where she spent a decade learning the theory and practice of community organizing. In 2013, she returned to Phoenix and started volunteering for Puente, taking over the role of organizing director in 2014.

As I talk to Francisca, I remember hearing a caution about Puente from Daniel Gonzalez of the Arizona Republic. He described its politics as falling on the “radical left” of migration activism when I met him for a chat. That does seem to be a fitting description of the organization, but the tilt to the left can also be explained as a defence mechanism against what has come to be known as “respectability politics”—the idea that the way to earn acceptance and understanding from mainstream Americans is to convince them that immigrants are “nice” people just like them, and to avoid engaging in any activities that perpetuate ethnic stereotypes. This approach dates back to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s but has largely fallen out of favour. Despite having some champions—and several see President Obama as a perfect product of it—respectability politics has been criticized by the likes of author Ta-Nehisi Coates and Georgetown University’s Michael Eric Dyson as, respectively, one of the “most disreputable traditions in American politics” and the misguided belief that “good behavior and stern chiding will cure black ills and uplift black people.” Within the Hispanic community, advocates of respectability politics tend to distance themselves from the criminality of other members.

“What we’re saying is that we’re not throwing anyone under the bus,” Francisca tells me. “We’re not going to buy into the ‘undeserving’ and ‘deserving’ politics.” The divide, echoing the ones I saw in New York, is not just between the middle- and working-class immigrant but also between the recent and long-established one. As Francisca explains, acts of racial profiling go beyond picking on people with brown skin. How someone is dressed, what car he drives and what accent he has all play into whether he gets stopped, and once stopped, if he is arrested or let go. “Our members are aware of the fact that the way we look is why we’re targeted,” she says, adding that the darker a person is, the greater are his or her chances of getting stopped.

But there are other issues and people to engage with at the moment, and Sheriff Arpaio tops the list. “He terrorized the community for a long time. He created a culture that’s racist. It’s time for him to go, time for his legacy to go.” Puente would also like Arizona to shut down all the immigration detention centres and stop cooperation between the police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security with, according to its website, “a unique combination of civil and criminal authorities to better protect national security and public safety in answer to the tragic events on 9/11.”

Puente’s list of demands seems long and uncompromising, but as Francisca points out, the organization has seen some progress—or at least signs of progress—on several of these issues, including the election of several Latinos to the nine-member city council. (Phoenix is the sixth-largest city in the United States, but its entire council consists of one representative for each of its eight districts, plus the mayor.) And at eighty-three, Arpaio can’t run for office much longer, so what activism can’t accomplish, the Grim Reaper will take care of. The next leaders of the city—and by extension the state—are being identified and groomed. Twenty-four-year-old Viri Hernandez is making sure of that.

WHEN VIRI LOOKS BACK at her life as an undocumented immigrant, one encounter of the many she’s had with authorities stands out. It happened when she was in high school and living with her family in a barrio in West Phoenix. When she and her siblings opened their front door after school one day, they immediately realized that they had been broken into. Even though the family lived modestly in a neighbourhood of largely poor migrants and day labourers, the number of burglaries had been rising over the years. When Viri knocked on the doors of twelve neighbours, nine of them admitted that they, too, had been robbed. No one reported the incidents to the police because they feared that any encounter with law enforcement, even as victims of crime, could lead to detention or deportation. The Hernandezes could either follow their neighbours’ example and let the incident go, or break the pattern of fear and report it to the police. They chose the latter.

“I never realized how afraid I was until that moment,” Viri tells me as we sit down for a lunchtime conversation in the offices of the Center for Neighborhood Leadership, an organization that develops civic leaders in brown and black communities. When the police officer asked her for proof of identity (her parents were at work), she handed him an ID card issued by the Mexican consulate, a red flag for the police. Her fate and that of her family rested on the officer’s reactions in the moments that followed. Fortunately, he handed her back the card without pursuing the immigration line of inquiry. Viri breathed the biggest sigh of relief in her life. However, it soon became clear that the officer also wouldn’t do more than write a report of yet another burglary in a bad neighbourhood—one reason crime rates remain high. “They [criminals] go to our communities because we are poor and brown. And because we live in fear. These stories weren’t unique. In every neighbourhood, people are afraid, being targeted and not calling the police.” For all Viri knows, the thieves were also brown and undocumented. “We’re left fighting for the crumbs.”

Until 2014, when she got married to a US resident and attained her legal status, Viri lived her life in constant fear. And it was fear of a different kind that brought her to Phoenix in the first place. When Viri was just one year old and still living in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City, her mother woke up one morning, packed a few things, grabbed her daughter and left a violent and abusive husband. The mother didn’t let stories of women getting raped while crossing the Mexico–US border dissuade her from trying to create a new life for herself and her daughter somewhere else. Fortune, if you can call it that, smiled on her, and she managed the crossing without incident. A few years later, the repentant father joined them, and the family grew by more children born in the US. Both parents worked as office cleaners at first, but the mother eventually quit to look after the children while the father, like many undocumented, went into the construction business. To this day, only Viri lives in the US legally, which means she belongs to a mixed-status family. Currently, immigration rules do not offer the Hernandezes any reasonable way out of their situation. “The only possibility is if they are detained, arrested, stopped,” Viri explains. “Then they can petition to stay here.”

In January 2014, that nightmare scenario-cum-only hope almost came to pass when Sheriff Arpaio’s men raided the construction company where Viri’s father worked, arresting people with no IDs and confiscating files with employee information. Her father happened to be working off-site that day, but he knew that the company kept his home address and contact information on file. “Within three days, my family moved,” she tells me, adding that her father has not held a full-time job since. Because he didn’t have (and wouldn’t have qualified for) any employment insurance, the family relied on their home-based business renting party supplies—chairs, plates and cutlery, and the like—to survive. Both parents refuse to go back to working under the table because they can no longer tolerate employers who take advantage of the undocumented. During her stint as an office cleaner, Viri’s mother complained to her bosses about the toxic cleaning products she was forced to use. They did nothing, knowing very well that if she continued to complain, they could find another Mexican illegal who would do the job quietly.

The narrative of fear and exploitation is one that the Center for Neighborhood Leadership wants to change by “empowering” members of the Hispanic and black populations on a community level. The centre works on several concurrent initiatives, including an anti-bullying and safe schools campaign; a community policing program that is focused on changing police relations with the community; and the “Good Things Grow” campaign, which aims to increase access to fresh food and vegetables in barrios with no places to buy fresh groceries. The centre also campaigns for blacks and Latinos running for positions in city hall and on school boards. At the time of our conversation, Viri and her colleagues at the centre were immersed in a campaign for a city-issued ID that Phoenix residents (legal and illegal) can carry as proof of identity. Not having ID prevents many vulnerable citizens—homeless, domestic abuse victims, runaways from the LGBTQ community—from accessing such essential services as housing or food stamps. While it sounds like a no-brainer, even a simple initiative like this can’t be untangled from Phoenix’s colour lines.

“How do we not make it into a scarlet letter?” Viri says. “How to make older, white communities want to have it?” The answer was to load the ID with value-adds to streamline city services: library card, museum card, public transportation pass, etc. So far, there seems to be little support for the card from those in the white Phoenix community or from Hispanic people who have lived in Phoenix for decades and have worked hard at building a fence between themselves and the illegals. Viri finds their attitude understandable but frustrating. Invoking the “white privilege” mantra to describe members of the Hispanic community who are light-skinned, she believes that their lack of accent and more sophisticated vocabulary give them licence to be less sensitive to newer immigrants, whose accents and mannerisms give them away. Viri is rephrasing Francisca’s “deserving and undeserving” divide within the community. The more people I talked to in Phoenix, the more of these internal divides I noticed.

Lydia Guzman, a sixth-generation Mexican-American, shifts the blame from her own community and places it where she thinks it belongs: on white voters who have moved to Arizona in the past few decades from states where little racial mixing existed. “They have this thing about brown people,” she tells me. “They don’t know what to do with them. Just by looking at the colour of my skin, they think I have no rights.” Lydia and I are meeting at the headquarters of Chicanos Por La Causa, a Mexican- and immigrant-rights organization in Phoenix with more than four decades of social work in the housing and employment sectors. She volunteers a few days a week to suggest solutions to or recommend experts for immigration problems or employment discrimination cases.

More recently, she has started to focus on issues of youth alienation. Hearing her speak of the experience of Hispanic youth reminded me of the many conversations I had in Paris about French Muslims and in London about their British counterparts. There’s a brown continuum of disaffected youth. “Some of the kids from the barrios have a chip on their shoulder. They’re always harassed by the police. They want to push back. They have the anger, and it victimizes them even more.” The combination of combativeness and being brown can be explosive, she says. Lydia then takes me on a tour of Guadalupe, a barrio that she feels captures how lives in the city are divided along colour lines. The barrio is literally segregated by a stream and a purpose-built wall that separates it from Tempe, home to the main campus of Arizona State University. With street signs in Spanish and hardly a white person anywhere in sight, the barrio looks more like a Mexican border town than part of a city as prosperous as Phoenix.

Of all the divides in the Mexican community, the one that operates along the lines of sexual orientation most hits a nerve with me, since it echoes a similar argument I’ve always heard about Muslims’ intolerance of sexuality. Brown people are often presumed to be reactionary or homophobic.

THE FAIR TRADE CAFÉ in Phoenix offers its progressive and alternative clientele a refuge from a city known for its reactionary and mainstream politics. It’s the kind of place that hosts weekly poetry slams and serves organic, ethically sourced coffee. On a late Monday afternoon, the branch off Central and Roosevelt was teeming with students, NGO workers and the tattooed, bearded and pierced. Finding the two working-class Mexican gay men I’m supposed to meet may be harder than I thought. As I scan the large indoor and patio spaces, I notice but look past two men talking. One of them is too all-American and preppy to be my interview subject. But the white-looking man, Jonathan, waves me over to his table, and soon I realize that I had bought the stereotype that all Hispanics are brown, especially the working-class among them. (The friend, Dago, looked more traditionally Mexican.)

I apologize for being late, but I’m not sure that’s really what I’m apologizing for. “Sorry, I thought you were a white guy,” I blurt out, “and I was expecting someone with dark skin.” Jonathan has heard this before. While both of his parents are Mexican, his ancestry includes mixed Spanish and Italian blood. His brother and sister, he tells me, are darker in skin colour. He is white, even though he works outside in the agriculture and forestry sectors. The family grew up on the eastern shores of Maryland and in Virginia in multicultural, working-class neighbourhoods where a person’s skin colour determined his or her social progress.

“My sister is nine years older than me. She took care of me when I was born,” Jonathan tells me, adding that casual observers often assumed her to be his Hispanic nanny. “There was a stage in my life when I realized I was white. We talked about the idea of brown a lot. That’s something important to me. . . . It’s important for [those of] us who are white or light-skinned to understand the privilege of our skin colour.” When the darker-skinned brother visited Phoenix, he was arrested on Jonathan’s front lawn by a police officer patrolling the neighbourhood. “They didn’t feel like he should be there.”

Jonathan also believes that his status as an out gay man within the Mexican-American community hews him closer to the white label. “Gay has been identified as white” in American society, he tells me. This can sometimes give mainstream America licence to pat itself on the back as enlightened and point the finger at minorities for their perceived reactionary views. “We forget that there are places in the US where I can be beaten to death for being gay.”

The marginalization of LGBTQ members within the undocumented community traps them further in a brutal immigration system. That’s why both Jonathan and Dago volunteer for the Arizona Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project and the Arcoíris Liberation Team, two organizations trying to keep a spotlight on LGBTQ people who face immediate deportation or have been in detention centres for years. Many illegal LGBTQs have come to Phoenix without families and can’t count on that system of support. For Jonathan and Dago, simple acts of moral support for detained LGBTQ people go a long way toward sustaining their hope and spirit. Members of both groups write letters to the detained and pay them visits on some Saturdays. I had hoped to tag along with Jonathan and others, who were scheduled to visit the infamous Eloy Detention Center the previous Saturday, but unfortunately, the trip was cancelled.

“Conditions are so bad [in Eloy]. People lose hope; they give up and want to go back. When they feel that way, they open our letters and read them,” says Jonathan. “It helps us, too, because we believe these places should be shut down.” According to Jonathan and Dago, internees at the Eloy Detention Center recount horror stories of rape, guard abuse, medical neglect, food and clothing shortages. At least five detainees have committed suicide since 2003 (the average rate, nationwide, is one per detention centre). Eloy also accounts for 9 percent of all deaths in detention centres across the country since 2003, with 14 out of 152.

The idea of starting a conversation between the family-oriented and Catholic anti-deportation groups and the gay ones came to Dago about two years ago, when he noticed that the two solitudes, so to speak, had campaigned separately against Bill 1062, which gives individuals the right to refuse services on religious grounds. (It was passed by the Arizona legislature but vetoed by the state’s governor.) By combining the energies of sexual rights activists and brown rights activists, “something more powerful” can be created, Dago says.

I tell Jonathan and Dago that racial politics in Arizona strikes me as extraordinarily toxic. Jonathan agrees that it’s a “fair assessment” but doesn’t think the wave of anti-immigration laws of the past ten years is exclusive to the state. It’s just that the laws here come fast, furious and crazy enough that they make other states look reasonable. “I don’t think we should underestimate racism and xenophobia in other places,” says Jonathan. Dago chimes in, citing Alabama as a state that has its own race-based laws but doesn’t make the news as often as Arizona. “Arizona plays the Donald Trump of politics,” he says. “We always need somebody that’s loud. That opens space for other states” to do the same (or worse) but quietly.

Dago’s life in Arizona is representative of the ongoing struggles in the life of the undocumented. He arrived in Phoenix in 1994 or 1995—he can’t remember which—when he was seven or eight. The family “walked through the desert” from their hometown of Guerrero, in southwest Mexico, and snuck across the border, eventually making their way to Phoenix. Although Dago had a brother and some relatives in Georgia, the family found it easier to stay in Phoenix (crossing state borders would have made them vulnerable to police inspection). At the time Arizona’s economy was booming, and employers in the service and construction industries, struggling to keep up with demand, often overlooked the immigration status of new hires. Once Dago was admitted to a local elementary school, he stayed in the system until his high school graduation.

Access to higher education was not so automatic, however. Shortly after he started a program in transborder studies (sometimes known as Chicano/Chicana studies) in Phoenix College, Proposition 300 came into effect. The referendum, approved by Arizona voters in 2006, denied in-state tuition or financial aid to students who were not US citizens, permanent residents or lawful immigrants. Two years earlier, Proposition 200 (the Arizona Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act) restricted voting rights and access to public services for anyone without legal status. It in effect cut off health insurance for large numbers of immigrants. Regardless of the language these propositions used, they clearly targeted Mexican immigrants. To Dago, this singling out of his people carries historical echoes of other migrant groups that had “to put up a fight to find a place” in the American story. “I suffered so much, I experienced so much discrimination. But I’m committed to continue working to have a space for [Mexico] here, to have access to basic human rights and resources. My biggest issue is not having access to basic needs.” Living in Phoenix without health coverage means that any trip to a doctor—or worse, a hospital—can lead to financial ruin. Despite all these obstacles, Dago sees himself living in Phoenix for quite some time. “I was brought up by a woman who is a fighter. If I want something, I have the power to create it.”

Some of that resolve shows up his passion for performing in drag on the political-cabaret circuit. It’s how he chose to come out to his parents. “I came out of the shadows as a Mexican and from the closet as a drag queen.” After his first performance, he knew that he had to come out. He suspected that his parents knew he was gay because of the telltale hint whenever he snuck home after his shows: “They heard the heels going down the hallway.”

I SPENT JUST UNDER a week in Phoenix, but by the end of my time there, I felt like I had internalized some of the fears of the brown community. I was late to my meeting with Jonathan and Dago because I got confused between First Street and First Avenue in the downtown core. As I was making my way through the main downtown bus station, a police cruiser pulled up and the officer waved to me. For a second, I thought that I was being racially profiled and automatically reached for my wallet to fetch my Canadian ID. But the officer was simply motioning for me to cross the street before he drove on. It was an innocent—gentlemanly, even—gesture.

When I returned to Toronto, I made a point of looking at police cars and even smiling at some officers during a local food festival in the neighbourhood known as Greektown. It became my way to wash the confrontational relationship between the authorities and the brown community in Phoenix out of my hair. But as the next chapter will show, things in Canada aren’t always that rosy either. Living while brown carries risks even in my liberal hometown of Toronto.