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Still Coming North from Mexico: Immigration Constraints and Contestations

Alma M. García

Whether they crossed the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, or La Frontera, immigrants leave their homeland in search of a new life.1 They make the journey to a “brave new world” with a sense of fear and wonder.² Mexican immigrants, like other immigrants, left their “old world” and entered a “new world.” Their nostalgia for Mexico was colored by their dreams of a better life for themselves, and, most importantly, for their children. Still, unlike other immigrants to the United States, such as those from Europe, Mexicans found that the “brave new world” into which they migrated bore indelible markings of the homeland they left behind. Mexicans left Méjico to travel north from Mexico but found palpable cultural evidence of Mexico in El Norte: preexisting Mexican immigrant and later-generation Mexican-American communities with all types and varying levels of Mexican cultural traditions.³ To understand immigration in general, like Oscar Handlin did in his classic, The Uprooted, scholars need to compare and contrast the experiences of one immigrant group with another.⁴

The border between Mexico and the United States is one in which cultures meet, collide, but also blend. The immigrant experiences pose gender-specific problems, with women often facing sexual violence along the border. Mexicans navigate through a contested terrain, one characterized by various degrees of prejudice, discrimination, and institutionalized racism. Yet, Mexican immigrants maintain a spirit of hope that they will survive in this often-hostile environment and pass on their survival skills to their descendants. Mexicans do not cross the Atlantic Ocean from Europe, nor do they come from a “different shore” by crossing the Pacific Ocean.5 Their journey to El Norte is one involving geographic crossings, but also one with many cultural continuities, changes, and contestations. The border is always a fluid one, which enables Mexicans—both authorized and unauthorized—to cross into El Norte and then, for many, cross back to Mexico and then back again to the United States. In his classic memoir Barrio Boy, Ernesto Galarza describes his family’s journey from Jalcococtán, Nayarit. After a long and arduous train ride, his family arrived at La Frontera and crossed into El Norte. Ernesto’s mother explained to Ernesto that they were now in El Norte, “Look the American flag.” [Galarza’s] mother said “We are in the United States, Mexico is over there.”⁶ The North was the same place as the United States. Like Galarza, Francisco Jiménez, in his book The Circuit, recalls his family’s dream of going to La Frontera:

“La frontera” is a word I often heard when I was a child living in El Rancho Blanco, a small village nestled on barren, dry hills several miles north of Guadalajara, Mexico. I heard it for the first time in the late 1940s when Papa and Mama told me and Roberto, my older brother, that someday we would take a long trip north, cross la frontera, enter California, and leave our poverty behind. I did not know exactly what California was either, but Papa’s eyes sparkled whenever he talked about it with Mama and his friends. “Once we cross la frontera, we’ll make a good living in California,” he would say, standing up straight and sticking out his chest.⁷

Unlike Galarza’s family, like so many other Mexicans at the time, who fled Mexico to avoid the upsurge in violence during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Jiménez family fled the rampant poverty of their homeland and crossed the border during the late 1940s. The stories of Mexican immigrants, like Galarza and Jiménez, represent a major component in the narrative of U.S. history. While Galarza and Jiménez depicted immigration from a male point of view, Chicana scholars and creative writers have illuminated this process from a woman’s vantage point. Chicana feminist writers, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, view the frontier, referred to as the borderlands, as a site for shifting ideologies of nationality, gender, sexual orientation, race, and social class. Anzaldúa describes this geographical and ideological spaces as an “open wound,” one in which women are likely to experience violence. Similarly, in her novels, Chicana writer Ana Castillo portrays the borderlands as a precarious geographical space where women who cross the border confront violence, particularly if they cross as unauthorized women immigrants.⁸

The United States has always faced a classic dilemma. On the one hand, the country has relied on the national trope of American exceptionalism embodied in the seventeenth-century Puritan hope of building a radiant “city on a hill,” one that would shine its light on the rest of the world for the philosophical and pragmatic political purposes of building a democratic new world.9 On the other hand, the country had to reconcile its belief in democracy and freedom with a long list of exclusionary practices (some more pernicious than others), including the massacre and near extinction of indigenous peoples; the establishment of the “peculiar institution” of slavery; the expansion of the country under the banner of “manifest destiny,” or the providential right to rule from “sea to shining sea”; the disenfranchisement of women until the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920; the institutionalization of jim crow laws developed to exclude African-Americans from participation in U.S. society; the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II; and, relevant to this study, a series of exclusionary de jure and de facto laws and practices implemented to deprive Mexicans and U.S.-born Mexican-Americans of their civil rights.¹⁰ The United States has witnessed periods in which various sectors of Congress initiated immigration reforms. Ironically, those measures often reflected the efforts by businesses to maintain a constant influx of a cheap labor force, specifically low and unskilled Mexican workers.. Some overarching questions raised by the passage of immigration laws include the following: (1) what combination of political, economic, and social interest groups either supported or opposed a specific immigration act? (2) Did such views change over time and, if so, why? (3) What impact did a given immigration act have on U.S.-Mexico relations? and (4) What impact did a given immigration act have on U.S. international relations, particularly in the post-9/11 period? and (5) How do relations between Mexico and the United States contribute to the debate over immigration?

While the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 addressed some key issues dealing with immigration, such as family unification, immigration reform remained a critical agenda item on the national, state, and local levels. The discourse on immigration is a long-standing issue with many components: liberalization of existing controls, increased restriction, the criminalization of the unauthorized and those assisting them, paths to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, health care, and violence along the border, particularly against women. These play out within the sociopolitical and economic relations between the United States and Mexico. Several key binational socioeconomic and political developments contributed to the dynamics of immigration in the post-1986 period. These factors created a migratory dynamic that allowed for the conditions for the movement of people north from Mexico to El Norte.

1. Maquiladoras: A Plan for Economic Development

A prelude to Mexico’s economic policies in the 1990s, the maquiladora program represented Mexico’s attempt to solve its increasingly grave economic problems. Adopted in the mid-1960s, this binational agreement between Mexico and the United States was intended to meet the needs of growing unemployment in Mexico and the rising costs of wages in the U.S. manufacturing sector, particularly the electronics industry. Maquiladoras are assembly plants in newly created export processing zones along the U.S.-Mexico border in such cities as Tijuana, Mexico. Companies in the United States shipped partially assembled parts to these zones, free of import taxes, where Mexican factory workers completed the production process; the finished products were then “imported” to the United States free of tariffs, thus increasing profits because of the decreased cost of wages.11

Two major factors led to the development plan’s questionable economic success. Although the unemployment rate did indeed decrease slightly for male workers, the maquiladora plants, like global assembly plants in other parts of the world, sought out the cheapest group of workers—young Mexican women, many of whom did not have experience in the paid labor force. These women worked under poor conditions, and owners preferred to fire women who developed medical problems rather than provide them with medical benefits. With an available pool of Mexican women willing to work in the plants, maquiladoras never experienced a labor shortage. An increased migration to the United States of young and mostly unauthorized Mexican women represented one of the unintended outcomes of the maquiladora program and a source of increased strain between the two countries. In addition, public perceptions of this migration fueled anti-immigrant sentiments.¹²

2. Demonization of Mexican Immigrants: The Context for the Immigration Act of 1990

President Ronald Reagan’s policies on Mexican immigration contributed to a demonization of the Mexican immigrant, a long-standing trend in the history of the United States. During his two terms as president from 1981 to 1989, Reagan faced a series of challenges that would ultimately cast Mexican immigrants as “threats” to the core of U.S. society: its values, culture, economic well-being, and national security. The Reagan administration and its supporters cast immigrants, both Mexican and Central American, specifically unauthorized immigrants, as a threat to the very fabric of “American” society. Mexican immigrants, like their late nineteenth and early twentieth century European counterparts, did not tear the national fabric: they wove it into it a different, more vibrant society.

Several factors shaped the Reagan period and its overarching antipathy toward immigrants, factors that became largely responsible for anti-immigration bills, state initiatives, and negative perceptions of immigrants. At the beginning of his first term as president, Reagan and his foreign policy advisers identified the rising upheavals in Central America as ones fueled by Communist insurgents. The fear, or near hysteria, of a Communist takeover of countries such as Nicaragua and El Salvador, shaped U.S. foreign relations with Latin and Central America. Moreover, political developments in Central America were believed to lead to unrest with Mexico, which the Reagan administration argued would prove catastrophic given Mexico’s shared border with the United States.

Relations between the United States and Mexico have been shaped by Mexico’s internal politics, particularly its economic ones. As the Mexican economy imploded, anti-immigration advocates in the United States called for more stringent, even draconian measures, to secure the border. The series of economic crises that crippled Mexico from 1970 through the 1990s exacerbated the widespread fear in the United States that immigrants would be “pushed” out of Mexico and set the stage for a new movement of people coming north from Mexico to seek redress from such conditions who would “take” jobs from Americans.

From 1950 to 1970, Mexico, like many countries in Latin America, such as Brazil, turned to a national import-substitution industrialization development plan that would increase domestic manufacturing and, as a result, decrease the country’s reliance on imports. Although some economic growth and limitation on imports did indeed develop, import substitution eventually experienced an economic bottleneck. As a result, Mexico sought foreign loans to shore up its economy, but the country paid a heavy price: slashing wages and reducing social services, which combined to increase social unrest among the poor and contempt from a growing middle class that had been experiencing limited, but gradual, levels of upward mobility and increased savings. In 1976, the devaluation of the Mexican peso to 50 percent of the U.S. dollar reflected a near demise of the national economy that resulted in a downward spiral of the middle class, cuts in wages and social services, and an increase in food prices, putting the working class in an even more precarious position.

The discovery of huge oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico in 1974 had raised the hopes of Mexicans that their country was on its way to economic recovery under the leadership of President José López Portillo. Mexico’s petrolization policy, however, would lead to further economic crises. Unanticipated costs of revamping Mexico’s infrastructure to bolster rapid and lucrative oil exports led Mexico to incur an astronomical foreign debt, one that the country could not repay. Mexico eventually—but not surprisingly—was forced to implement a draconian measure: the suspension of its debt repayment. Grave international consequences soon followed. In addition, corruption within the highest levels of the presidential administration and ill-advised national investment contributed to Mexico’s deteriorating economy. Mexico’s oil industry collapsed as the price of oil from other oil-producing countries decreased the price of oil overall. Mexico’s development bubble burst in 1982 when it declared bankruptcy. Later, between 1988 and 1994, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari initiated some reforms but, once again, political corruption, scandals, and growing urban violence led to Mexico’s further economic fall.13

In addition to Mexico’s severe economic problems, the Cold War intensified Reagan’s antipathy to Latin American immigration. The 1980s would become a high-water mark in the history of U.S.-Soviet relations. Reagan used every opportunity to remind the American people that the Kremlin continued to bolster Castro’s Cuba, although the Soviet Union had “winked” by removing its nuclear-armed missiles from Cuba in 1962. The political slogan that “Cuba was only ninety miles from the United States” had immigration implications. On the one hand, the United States welcomed Cuban refugees who fled as a result of the 1959 Cuban revolution and who mainly settled in Miami, later referred to as “Little Havana.” On the other hand, its fear that Cuba would “export” its Communist revolution throughout Latin America, particularly Central America and Mexico, intensified and further validated the demonization of immigrants because they were seen in conservative Reagan circles as both immigrants and Communists. As a result, the cry for increased national security measures and control mechanisms along the U.S.-Mexico border became a conservative mantra. Both the efforts to reform existing immigration laws, such as the Immigration Act of 1990, and a resurgence of anti-immigrant state initiatives such as California’s Proposition 187 of 1994, reflected the continuation of the national and state dialog on immigration.¹⁴

3. The Immigration Act of 1990

A brief review of the 1986 IRCA serves as a context for the Immigration Act of 1990. Passed by Congress in 1986 and signed on November 6 by President Ronald Reagan, the IRCA contained the following provisions: reduction of unauthorized immigration, implementation of sanctions against employers that hired unauthorized immigrants, and establishment of new amnesty requirements for individuals living in the United States without authorization.¹⁵

The IRCA did not answer all the immigration issues, and as a result, the debate over further immigration reform continued. Many legislators and immigrant rights groups called for greater reforms related to the process of obtaining a pathway to citizenship for the unauthorized. Some members of Congress maintained their opposition to immigration reforms out of their strident belief that unauthorized Mexican immigration, if left unchecked, would jeopardize the fabric of American society. Their pragmatic political considerations for being reelected in conservative, anti-immigrant states deepened their opposition to immigration reform.

Signed on October 27, 1990, by President George H. W. Bush, the Immigration Act of 1990 represented a significant change since the Immigration Act of 1965 and the Immigration Act of 1986. Sponsored by the late Senator Edward Kennedy and the late Bruce Morrison, the former Democratic congressman from Maryland, the 1990 act increased the number of authorized immigrants that entered the United States every year from 500,000 to 700,000. It also addressed one of the major criticisms of the 1965 act: its limitations regarding family reunification. The 1990 act defined family-based immigration of immediate relatives of U.S. citizens and added four preferences by increasing the number of family-based visas intended to facilitate increases in family reunifications in immigrant families, specifically in the United States. The IRCA of 1986 allowed unauthorized persons who had lived continuously in the United States for five years after 1982 to avoid deportation, become eligible for temporary resident status, and then, if all requirements were met, apply for permanent legal residence—a green card. Although this provision represented a significant reform, it failed to take into consideration family immigration patterns from Mexico: some members of Mexican immigrant families did not meet the residency requirement and as a result many families became had mixed legal status. In May 1988, the Immigration and Naturalization Service announced that spouses and children would be given special visas in order not to break up families. In an effort to address what many in Congress and sectors of the general public identified as a major weakness in past immigration laws, the Immigration Act of 1990 provided for a temporary halt to deportations of those family members who missed the cutoff date. In addition, it provided work authorizations for spouses and unmarried children of those who did not qualify under IRCA, although they were barred from receiving aid from some public assistance programs. The 1990 act also gave admission preference to immigrants with designated skills and occupations in response to the businesses that were experiencing a shortage of highly skilled and educated professionals, particularly those in high-tech industries. This provision reshaped the demographics and nature of immigrant communities in Silicon Valley, California, and other high-tech areas.

The 1990 act also included a provision that established visas that became known as Morrison visas after one of the bill’s cosponsors. This is also referred to as the “diversity” provision because it was designed to address immigration patterns since the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965. Under this provision, the attorney general was designated as the person to identify those countries and regions of the world whose admission rates were underrepresented within the total number of immigrants who were eligible for admission under the 1965 act. It allotted 40,000 visas each year for three years to countries that had been disadvantaged by the 1965 immigration legislation. To accomplish this, the Immigration Act of 1990 created the first permanent visa lottery program that would increase immigration from those countries whose admissions rates were low. Although these changes were called the “diversity” component, critics and supporters remained skeptical. Opposition to this section led to an increase in anti-immigration sentiments that would increase the political and social friction surrounding immigration, particularly in areas with large Mexican immigrant communities.

Another provision aimed primarily at Central Americans contributed to increased anti-immigration rhetoric. The act created a “safe haven” for individuals fleeing their homelands, such as El Salvador, for fear of persecution or even death. Those who met this criterion received protected status and were allowed to stay in the United States. As a result of the increase in immigration from El Salvador, historical Mexican immigrant communities such as the Mission District in San Francisco, California, were forever changed. Ironically, the passage and implementation of the Immigration Act of 1990 came at a time of a severe economic recession that began in the early 1990s. This economic downturn accompanied surging anti-immigration fervor. Many believed immigrants, authorized or not authorized, were taking jobs away from U.S. citizens.

The post-1990 era in immigration laws fueled a long-standing anti-immigration narrative that remained explicitly and implicitly the center of political discourse. At the state level, the smoldering anti-immigration climate in California resulted in the passage in 1994 of Proposition 187.

4. California’s Proposition 187 of 1994

Prior to the introduction of Proposition 187 in California, other states had already initiated various measures, such those stipulating that English be the official language for the state. By 1998, twenty-five states had passed “English Only” measures, but they were mainly “symbolic gestures with few practical consequences; they simply provided voters or legislators with a tangible means of registering their dislike of foreigners.”16

Several factors led to Proposition 187. Starting in the late 1980s and continuing into the years leading up to 1994, the state of California faced several problems that provided a context for the climate of support for the proposition. At the most general level, supporters of the proposition wanted to register their disgruntlement with President Bill Clinton and Congress not only over immigration but also other issues. During this period, California experienced a declining economy that future pro-187 supporters would attribute to the presence of unauthorized immigrants, mostly Mexicans, although the Central American immigrant population had also been increasing. Many of the supporters of the proposition resided in Orange County, one of the wealthiest and most conservative counties in California. Those supporters argued that the greater the percentage of unauthorized immigrants who lived in the state, the greater likelihood of more jobs being taken from “Americans.” Proponents viewed access to social services by unauthorized individuals as one of the major engines driving the California economy into a downward spiral. Other economic factors contributing to a once-thriving economy included several years of recession, the elimination of military bases, and a decline in the aerospace industry due to cancellations of contracts. In addition, the increased number of unauthorized and authorized Mexican immigrants living in California fueled a historical “fear” that California, and the United States in general, would be “taken over” by Mexicans, considered as racialized “others” who would unravel the country’s social fabric. The term “American citizen” became a racialized code word understood to mean “white Americans.” The process through which racial and ethnic groups were defined in inferior racialized terms was not a contemporary phenomenon; it prevailed in historical and contemporary circumstances throughout the United States.17

Supporters of Proposition 187 often referred to it as the “Save Our State” (SOS) initiative. Critics of the proposition quickly pointed out that SOS is the international code signal of extreme distress, an urgent call for rescue. As such, supporters of this ballot initiative saw themselves as coming forward to “save” California” from the surging “wave” of unauthorized immigrants, primarily from Mexico.

At the time, an estimated 1.3 million undocumented individuals, including 308,000 children, lived in California, a number that further alarmed Proposition 187 supporters. Proponents referred to “SOS” as a call for relief from anticipated tax increases that would be used to provide social services for the undocumented, particularly for the education of undocumented children. However, Proposition 187 flew in the face of the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe that held that the Constitution guarantees all children, regardless of immigrant status, equal access to public education.¹⁸

Proposition 187 banned undocumented immigrants from receiving such social services as health care and education. Within a short time, then-governor Pete Wilson, a Republican, joined other supporters and integrated Proposition 187 into his bid for reelection hoping that his rapidly declining voter approval rate would experience an upward surge, building a wider base of voters for his campaign. Supporters represented a wide range of conservative groups who organized statewide functions to raise money for commercials and print advertisements. Elected officials and former officials became vocal advocates of Proposition 187. Challenging Pete Wilson in the race for governor, California state treasurer Kathleen D. Brown, the daughter of former governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown and the sister of the current governor, Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., went against the advice of her campaign strategists by urging voters to defeat Proposition 187.¹⁹ This support, and other factors, including the declining state economy, contributed to her defeat by Pete Wilson for California’s governorship.

A Los Angeles Times story on Proposition 187 captured the philosophy that led to its ultimate passage when it quoted William Dannemeyer, a former Republican congressman from Fullerton, California, who had served for seven years: “If this [Proposition 187] doesn’t pass, the flood of illegal immigrants will turn into a tidal wave, and a huge neon sign will be lit up above the state of California that reads, ‘Come and get it.’”20 Former president Bill Clinton opposed Proposition 187 and urged Californians to reject it. Clinton opposed the proposition based on the premise that only the federal government, not the states, could create policies to deal with immigration rather than focusing on the humanitarian aspect of the proposition.

Throughout the United States, religious groups, such as Catholics and Jews, worked with other groups, such as long-standing local and state grassroots organizations within the Latino community, to mobilize against Proposition 187. Many in the Asian-American community drew a historical parallel with Executive Order 9066, signed in 1942 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which ordered the removal of Japanese and Japanese-Americans from parts of the West loosely identified as military areas. A Japanese-American woman who participated in the anti–Proposition 187 campaign echoed the sentiments of many within her community: “I worry that the kind of anti-ethnic hysteria driving [Proposition] 187 is akin to the anti-ethnic hysteria that swept the country after Pearl Harbor.”²¹

On October 16, 1994, Los Angeles witnessed an anti–Proposition 187 march, with an estimated 100,000 demonstrators from diverse ethnic groups and backgrounds, specifically Latinos, Asians, and African-Americans. Mexican immigrants and opponents of the proposition took to the street to protest the state initiative and Governor Pete Wilson, one of the initiative’s staunchest supporters. Marching from East Los Angeles to downtown, the massive demonstration represented the success of various groups within and outside of the Latino community in mobilizing a wide swath of opponents of Proposition 187. Once at City Hall, a series of speakers, including politicians, activists, clergy, and everyday people, joined the surging backlash against this state initiative. Capturing the sentiments of the marchers who led everyday lives as hard-working parents with children who would be targeted by the state initiative, one Latino who protested against Proposition 187 said: “This proposition is not against the illegal (immigrant), it’s against children.”²² Joe Hicks, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, urged those present to rally together and make their opposition to Proposition 187 heard throughout the country: “We’ve got to send a message to the rest of the nation that California will not stand on a platform of bigotry, racism and scapegoating,”²³ A well-known community activist from East Los Angeles and one of the march’s key organizers, Juan José Gutiérrez, explained the larger significance of the march: “This is not a parade, this is a social movement.”24 As a sign of cultural hybridity, a mariachi band played the “Star Spangled Banner.”

A few days before the critical vote, Latino students, particularly high school students, walked out of their schools in protests reminiscent of the 1968 Chicano student “blowouts” in Los Angeles to protest segregated conditions and the inferior education system in East Los Angeles.²⁵ An estimated 10,000 students took to the streets in an attempt to mobilize other groups to join in this struggle, one similar to the Chicano movement for civil rights in the 1960s. A statewide anti-187 student coalition further mobilized students in cities throughout California.²⁶ University and high school students throughout California also staged protests rallies and demonstrations. In March 1994, students at the University of California at Berkeley organized a rally that was cosponsored by a coalition of student groups and community organizations.²⁷

On November 8, 1994, California voters passed Proposition 187 by a margin of 18 percent: 59 percent of voters were in favor and 41 percent were opposed. A large divide existed between supporters from each political party: 78 percent of Republicans voted for Proposition 187 while only 36 percent of Democratic voters cast their ballot in support. White voters overwhelmingly supported the proposition (63 percent), and 23 percent of Latino voters also voted in favor. Analysis of the support by Latinos came from both political parties. Republican strategists wanted to increase their party’s outreach to Latino voters while Democratic strategists wanted to bring them back into their party, a long-time magnet for Latino voters (with the exception of Cuban-Americans). Based on data gathered by voting behavior analysts, perceived economic threat influences Latino opinions on immigration issues such as Proposition 187. Those Latinos who supported the proposition, were more likely to believe that unauthorized individuals represented a personal threat to their economic status by lowering wages, taking away jobs, and increasing taxes to pay for social services, particularly health care. In addition, Latinos with higher incomes and occupational levels reported significantly greater support for Proposition 187.²⁸

Opposition to Proposition 187 continued to gain widespread support. Not surprisingly, the day after voters approved Proposition 187, organizations such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed lawsuits to overthrow the proposition. The California State Parent-Teacher Association opposed the proposition’s stipulation that parents would be required to provide the legal status of their school-age children. Denver’s mayor encouraged a boycott of California and discouraged Denver-based organizations from having their conferences in California. The leadership of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) announced that its 100,000 members would support the repeal of Proposition 187.29

On November 9, 1994, the ACLU and MALDEF filed lawsuits to challenge the constitutionality of Proposition 187. The plaintiffs wanted to prevent the implementation of all of the provisions listed in the proposition. A federal district court judge issued a temporary restraining order that prevented any implementation of Proposition 187. Meanwhile, tensions deepened in California as Mexican and Mexican-Americans experienced increased incidents of discrimination. Hotlines were set up to handle the growing number of complaints of discrimination. In March 1998, Judge Mariana Pfaelzer declared Proposition 187 unconstitutional citing the 1982 Supreme Court decisions in Plyler v. Doe that all children under eighteen years of age are entitled to public education regardless of their immigration status. Judge Pfaelzer also overturned Proposition 187 on the grounds that immigration law is a federal and not a state issue. Governor Wilson appealed this decision but his successor, Gray Davis, decided to send the issue into mediation. On July 29, 1999, after five years of legal battles, a court-approved mediation committee validated the court’s 1994 court injunction, confirming the federal government’s sole authority over immigration and therefore declaring Proposition 187 unconstitutional. The settlement prevented the enforcement of Proposition 187’s major provisions. The only provisions that were upheld involved the sanctions placed on making, using, distributing, or selling false citizenship documents.³⁰

Proposition 187 became a bellwether for the immigration debate that would continue in the decades after 1994. The anti–Proposition 187 campaigns set the stage for the continuation of a political rift between Republicans and Mexican-Americans and the Latino community in general. Mexican-Americans have had a deep allegiance with the Democratic Party. The Viva Kennedy campaign in the 1960 presidential election between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy showed to both Democrats and Republicans that the Mexican-American vote could not be ignored by politicians at any level. In the popular vote, Kennedy’s margin of victory was among the closest ever in the history of the United States, and Mexican-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Kennedy. This is most significant because the poll tax was declared unconstitutional in 1964 with the passage of the Twenty-fourth Amendment. The tax targeted eligible voters from low-income brackets, and Mexican-Americans were the group most likely to fill this category.³¹

Latinos from different countries of origin, specifically Mexican-Americans, who represented the largest population within this group, transformed their political activism against Proposition 187 into increased participation in the polls. The overwhelming support for Democrat Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election showed that the Republican Party and its candidate, Mitt Romney, failed to win even a small block of these voters. California remains the “bluest” state. In 2014, twenty years after the passage of Proposition 187, Antonia Hernández, a former head of MALDEF, assessed the impact of the anti–Proposition 187 activism: “It was [Proposition] 187. . .that unified the community.”32

Despite the repeal of Proposition 187, its introduction, passage, and successful challenges in the court fueled anti-immigrant sentiments not only in California but also in other states across the county. This climate pushed many immigrants to begin the necessary steps toward U.S. citizenship, although for many their unauthorized status precluded such efforts. In December 2000, President Bill Clinton signed a new immigration law that eased the existing residency criteria for naturalization, which disqualified immigrants if they left the country during the application process. Clinton also attached an amendment to a pending budget bill to allow for changes in the immigration law. Clinton’s amendment eliminated the requirement stipulated by the 1986 IRCA that stated that undocumented immigrants who wanted to apply for citizenship had to leave the country and apply for readmission to the United States, a process that could last as long as ten years. The immigration reforms signed into law by President Clinton represented important developments for Mexicans. During the election year of 2000, both Democratic and Republican candidates competed for the votes of Mexicans who were naturalized citizens and U.S.-born Mexicans. Immigration reform represented a key to winning their votes. Anti-immigration groups, however, continued their efforts to defeat immigration legislation that, according to them, would create increased immigration. They opposed establishing more lenient naturalization requirements, fearing a potential influx of undocumented immigrants who might become citizens. The Coalition for Immigrant Reform led the opposition to Section 245(i) of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which removed the requirement that undocumented immigrants had to leave the country before applying for citizenship. With the election of President George W. Bush in 2000, supporters of continued legislation for further leniency in the naturalization process feared that the conservative wing of the Republican Party would pressure President George W. Bush into vetoing immigration reform laws.

While he was governor of Texas, Bush maintained a record that demonstrated his political goal of establishing “good neighbor” relations with Mexico by not pressing for strict anti-immigration policies. From the earliest months of his presidency, Bush continued this policy, favoring the path of binational cooperation between the United States and Mexico. Bush and his Latin American foreign policy advisers maintained that increasing Mexican economic development would be the best way to curb illegal Mexican immigration. As a result, Bush moved closer to a centrist position regarding immigration than many conservative Republicans in the House and Senate by focusing more on the status of the millions of undocumented Mexicans living in the United States. Bush established a task force on immigration that would give legal status to the growing population of unauthorized Mexicans living in the United States.33

5. Unauthorized Immigration: Persistent Struggles

The issue of unauthorized immigration from Mexico has always represented one of the most highly charged issues in the United States. Elections have been won or lost as a result of a candidate’s platform on immigration, specifically unauthorized immigration to the United States. On the one hand, immigrants have been the hallmark of American society, one symbolized by the classic inscription on the plaque on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” On the other hand, anti-immigrant sentiments persist, often resulting in violent episodes. Unauthorized Mexican immigration has fueled a general antipathy toward immigrants in general, but given the large population of U.S.-born Mexicans of immigrant ancestry, specifically those living in the Southwest, Mexican-Americans are often seen as immigrants at best and “illegal” at worst. A key question remains: What does the United States “do” with unauthorized immigrants, many of whom have been living in the country for decades.³⁴

Data on the total number of undocumented individuals living in the United States is difficult to obtain, making it necessary to rely on estimates. The Department of Homeland Security and the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau, among others, are sources for estimates of the total foreign-born population. By subtracting the number of legal residents, naturalized citizens, asylees, and refugees from the total number of the foreign-born living in the United States, estimates of the unauthorized are reached. This estimate, however, is most likely to be skewed in the direction of an undercount given the difficulty in counting the undocumented population because of the fear of deportation if they interact—much less answer questions—from census takers. The Department of Homeland Security defines the category “unauthorized immigrants” as referring to foreign-born persons who entered the United States without inspection or who violated the terms of a temporary admission and who have not (1) acquired the status of a legal permanent resident or (2) acquired the status of temporary protection against removal by applying for immigration benefits. The following foreign-born persons are not considered to be unauthorized residents in population estimates: refugees, asylees, and parolees who have work authorization but have not adjusted to legal permanent resident status; and aliens who are allowed to remain and work in the United States under various legislative provisions or court ruling.³⁵

The issue of civil rights questions can be illustrated with two major questions. How can unauthorized immigrant parents be deported if some of their children are American citizens by birth? How can U.S.-born children be deported along with unauthorized parents? Although the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” a political movement to challenge this birth citizenship clause resurfaced as a result of anti-immigrant sentiments. By adhering to a strict and narrow interpretation of the citizenship clause, the anti-birthright citizenship supporters assert that children born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants are not protected under this amendment. Central to their position is one phrase in the Fourteenth Amendment: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Proponents of the anti-birthright citizenship movement maintain that U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants, such as those from Mexico, are indeed subject to the “jurisdiction” of, in this case, Mexico because their parents entered the United States without authorization. Bills continue to be introduced in Congress to address the debate questioning the automatic citizenship for persons born in the United States to parents who are unauthorized immigrants.36

Other demographic characteristics establish the need for specific immigration reforms and the development of public policies to address some of the specific issues facing unauthorized immigrants. Out of the entire population of unauthorized immigrants, Mexico has long been the major sending country. During the first decade of 2000, unauthorized Mexican immigrants made up close to 60 percent of the total unauthorized immigrants. Nevertheless, their yearly influx has been declining since 1990. During this same time period, unauthorized immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean, and Central America have all seen increases, albeit small. In rank order, the following countries that have the next largest number of unauthorized immigrants after Mexico are El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and China. Unauthorized immigrants are distributed throughout the United States, but some states rank highest, far surpassing other states. States with the highest percentage of all unauthorized immigrants are California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois.³⁷

Although unauthorized immigration rates to the United States have been declining, some states with historically low numbers of unauthorized immigrants have witnessed increases in this population. Between 2009 and 2012, states experiencing increases included Florida, Idaho, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. States showing decreases included Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and Oregon. In addition to knowing the states in which unauthorized immigrants have increased or decreased, their participation in the paid labor force continues to be a source of anti-immigrant near hysteria. Although some politicians, television and print journalists, and news pundits claim that unless unauthorized immigrants are deported, “legal” workers will continue to face unemployment. The view that unauthorized immigrants “steal” jobs from American workers has been used historically against immigrants, not only those from Mexico.

States with the largest number of unauthorized immigrants in the paid labor force are Nevada (10 percent), California (9 percent), Texas (9 percent), and New Jersey (8 percent). However, these numbers tend to be undercounted due to the informal labor sector that unauthorized immigrants inhabit. Unauthorized immigrant women are most likely to work in the informal labor market as a result of a concentration in such jobs as domestic workers, caregivers for homebound elderly, and child care workers. These jobs are largely unregulated leaving unauthorized immigrant women in an even more precarious situation than unauthorized male immigrants.

6. Immigrants, Dual Nationality, and Voting in Mexican Elections

The question of dual nationality represents another issue in the immigration debate. Dual nationality for Mexicans living in the United States involves the question of whether Mexicans can cast absentee ballots in Mexican elections, particularly presidential elections. Historically, Mexican politicians considered Mexican immigrants living in the United States as potential voters. Anti-immigrant advocates, growing more vocal, viewed dual nationality as problematic, a status that would lead to divided loyalties. The U.S. government saw the potential danger of dual nationality under conditions of a war between the two countries. The Cold War exacerbated this fear. Beginning with the dramatic tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War lessened the fear that immigrants holding dual nationality had the potential to destabilize the United States from within its borders.38

Facing pressure from various sectors, Mexico passed a law in 1996 that allowed Mexicans to hold dual nationality. The law stipulated that Mexican nationals living in the United States who became naturalized American citizens did not have to relinquish their Mexican citizenship. The 1996 law allowed people born in Mexico, or with one parent born in Mexico, to hold dual nationality but they would not be allowed to vote. Mexican immigrants living in the United States could maintain Mexican property rights, travel to Mexico without a visa, and invest in Mexico without the restrictions placed on foreigners. Mexicans born in the United States could apply for dual nationality by registering in any Mexican consulate. The law also stipulated that Mexican nationals living in the United States who became naturalized American citizens did not have to relinquish their Mexican citizenship. For both Democratic and Republican politicians, this law marked a key development in electoral politics primarily because it would “lift barriers that keep millions of Mexicans living north of the border from seeking American citizenship and becoming a powerful voting bloc in border states in the United States.”³⁹ Eventually the Mexican government amended the law to provide dual nationals with the right to vote in Mexican elections, usually through absentee ballots.⁴⁰

Over the next few years, the law’s implementation stalled as the mechanisms and general logistics for a smooth absentee voting process proved almost insurmountable. Mexican nationals voiced their frustration as their attempts to vote in Mexican elections proved difficult. As noted in the Los Angeles Times, one Mexican immigrant expressed his frustration in the delays in setting up a reliable system of absentee voting when he said, “We are part of [Mexican] society, and we should have a vote.” Echoing these sentiments, another immigrant expressed his visceral feeling for Mexico long after he came to the United States north from Mexico: “When we lived there [Mexico] we worked the land. We say the land got in us and we can’t get it out.”41 Mexican politicians recognized the importance of this voting bloc estimated at about 15 percent of the Mexican electorate. Some politicians considered such a bloc as a windfall if their political party could only rein in those voters. Mexican nationals represented a powerful voting bloc because remittances sent back home enabled them to keep a foothold in each country. Mexican politicians running for office, including presidential candidates, organized community events in California in attempts to garner votes. The Mexican presidential election of 2006 marked the first time Mexicans living abroad could vote. Of the 12 million Mexicans in the United States, only approximately 55,000 registered abroad, and only 28,000 voted. Two main factors account for this low voter turnout: difficulty understanding all the eligibility requirements and lack of public interest. According to a Pew Research study, only 55 percent of Mexicans living in the United States were not aware that that a presidential election was taking place in 2006.⁴²

In the 2012 Mexican presidential election, Mexicans living in the United States could vote if they were a Mexican citizen by birth or naturalization, 18 years of age, registered on the Federal Electoral Institute’s Federal Registry of Voters, and had a valid voter registration card.⁴³ Dalia Moreno, general coordinator for overseas voter outreach at Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute, the public and independent organization that oversees Mexican elections in Mexico, noted that in a change from the 2006 presidential elections, eligible Mexican voters, including dual nationals residing in the United States and other countries would receive their ballots by mail and that they would not have to pay return mailing fees. To eliminate much of the confusion in voting, Mexican immigrants apply to vote at the nearest Mexican embassy or consulate. For those with access to the Internet, a Web site, Voto Extranjero (Foreign Votes) allowed for online registration. To be eligible to vote online a person had to be a Mexican citizen, be at least 18 years of age, be registered Federal Electoral Institute’s Registry of Voters, and have a valid voting identification card.⁴⁴ Approximately 40,000 Mexicans living abroad, mostly in the United States, cast their ballots in the 2012 presidential election that brought Enrique Peña Nieto, a member of Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI), to office. The PRI controlled the presidency from 1929 until 2000–2006, when Vicente Fox Quesada of the Partido Nacional Accion served as president, and between 2006 and 2012 with the election of Felipe Calderón. The return of the presidency to the PRI disturbed many Mexican immigrants who viewed it as a return to “corruption as usual.”⁴⁵

In addition to the struggle to cast absentee ballots in Mexican elections, some Mexicans living in the United States initiated electoral campaigns to seek office in Mexico. For example, some immigrants from the state of Zacatecas channeled their preexisting community activism into political campaigns. Such Mexican immigrants have had a long-standing history of organizing social clubs and mutual aid societies. These mutual aid societies functioned to maintain strong cultural ties with their countries of origin and, perhaps most importantly, provided immigrants, particularly newly arrived immigrants, with economic assistance as they attempted to make a new life in El Norte. As such, immigrants from the state of Zacatecas turned to Mexican electoral politics, in addition exerting pressure on the Mexican government, to continue to streamline the process of absentee ballots. Interestingly, the Zacatecas state legislature created two seats for Mexicans living in the United States, referred by many Mexicans as Mexicanos de afuera [Mexican from the outside].46

7. The Immigrant Spring of 2006: Mass Demonstrations

On December 16, 2005, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (H.R. 4437), introduced by Judiciary Chairman Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Homeland Security Chairman Representative Peter King (R-NY), passed the House of Representatives. Three specific sections of H.R. 4437 created panic, anxiety, and ultimately a mobilization of Mexican immigrants and others throughout the country. First, the bill further criminalized the status of those who were in the United States without authorization by changing the violation from a civil offense to a felony criminal offense. For many, this would lead to the permanent separation from their families. The issue of family reunification became an impossibility and contributed to mass opposition for H.R. 4437. Second, H.R. 4437 criminalized anyone who assisted an unauthorized immigrant. The bill stipulated that individuals “who knowingly aid or conspired to allow, procure, or permit a removed alien to reenter the United States to criminal penalty, the same imprisonment term as applies to the alien so aided or both.” This applied to members of religious organizations, nonsecular humanitarian groups, lawyers, and legal aid associations. Third, the Department of Homeland Security would be able to detain undocumented persons stopped at the border even if they could be placed with family members during the time those apprehended had their cases heard in the courts. Fourth, H.R. 4437 increased the penalties and established minimum sentences for undocumented persons who failed to leave the United States when ordered by immigration authorities.⁴⁷

Although the Senate never passed, H.R. 4437, at least 3 million, or as many as 5 million people, marched in 150 cities to protest H.R. 4437. From February to March 2006, in an effort to put pressure on the Senate to vote no on the bill, opponents of the bill, both inside and outside immigrant communities, explained that the bill’s tenor, substance, and overall intent was intrinsically anti-immigrant. Together, these specific sections of the bill gave rise to an ideology of collective activism and a spirit of solidarity that cut across social groups from different racial, ethnic, nationality religious, sexual orientation, age, gender, education, occupation, income, immigration status, and many other sources of diversity. Their common goal was clear: to prevent the Senate from passing H.R. 4437.

Millions of immigrants and their supporters took to the streets throughout the United States in a passionate effort to issue a collective cry: “Ya Basta! (“Enough!”) From the second week of February to early May, demonstrations erupted in cities with long-standing immigrant communities and in many others with a new, but growing, immigrant population. Numbering between 3.7 and 5 million, people from all walks of life joined together and marched in solidarity in forty-two states including future president Barack Obama. For many participants, the marches during the spring of 2006 became their initiation into a mass political event. More seasoned demonstrators had memories of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s rights movement, and, for many Latinos, the August 29, 1970, National Chicano Moratorium, an anti-Vietnam protest that ended with police violence and the killing of Los Angeles Times journalist Rubén Salazar. On that day, 30,000 Chicanos and their supporters marched through East Los Angeles, a day commemorated every year.48

In February 2006, waves of protests took place across the United States. Participants came from diverse backgrounds, including documented and undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants, students, workers, clergy, journalists, broadcast news reporters, radio and television personalities, labor union members and activists, community and grassroots groups, and faith-based groups, including the Catholic Church. As demonstrations spread throughout the United States, they grew exponentially with expanded media coverage, including Spanish-language radio, television and newspaper. On February 11, over 500 Latino community leaders met in Riverside, California, to organize the March 6 demonstration scheduled to take place in Los Angeles. The National Alliance for Human Rights, an organization of Latino activists and college and university professors, became one of the main driving forces in bringing together representatives from a variety of organizations. Community organizations, university student organizations, labor unions, and members of the Catholic Church and other religious organizations came together to develop mobilization strategies for nationwide demonstrations.⁴⁹

With most of the participants wearing white shirts or T-shirts, the development of mass demonstrations crystallized the discontent among many immigrants, specifically unauthorized Mexican immigrants who had maintained a level of community invisibility for fear of deportation. Thus, they had been largely precluded from joining marches and other public forms of protests. Interestingly, one well-known scholar and journalist whose research on Latino immigration spans decades, points out that the English word “protest” does not accurately capture the nature of these protests. Roberto Suro suggests that the mass action is best described by using the Spanish word manifestaciones [manifestations]:

People manifested themselves [in the spring of 2006]. They rendered themselves visible. They did not have to say anything. They only had to be there. By simply appearing, and especially because they appeared with their children, they made an existential statement, powerful for its simplicity. “We are here. We are human. Flesh and blood, parents with children…We are many.”50

The Catholic Church contributed to the organization of these manifestaciones. Although tensions between the Catholic Church and the Latino community in Los Angeles and other parts of the United States existed, these tensions were tempered during the spring of 2006. Indeed, the Catholic Church became an active participant in the struggle for immigrants rights, a role based on religious doctrines and the acceptance, particularly among Jesuits, of the need to embrace and participate in social justice movements in the United States, Central American, and other parts of the world where human suffering resulted from repressive governments. The Catholic Church’s role in supporting its parishioners, mostly Latinos, parallels its role in the 1980s sanctuary movement designed to protect unauthorized immigrants by offering them refuge in churches, a historical tradition found in most places of worship for centuries.⁵¹ On June 1, 2005, a year prior to the demonstrations of 2006, Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles published an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, “A Nation That Should Know Better,” which foreshadowed the Ash Wednesday Lenten sermon he delivered on March 1, 2006:

Providing a clear route to legal status for longtime residents and providing legal entry to migrants would not only help cure the excesses of a flawed system but ensures that our nation benefits from the contributions of immigrants participating as full members of their communities. Although some in the public square consider any such rule changes a reward for lawbreakers, we should look at the issue holistically and realistically, and understand that the current law is unjust and must be changed.⁵²

The Catholic Church in Los Angeles, and other parts of the United States, became one of the staunchest supporter of immigration reform, particularly with the development of the “Justice for Immigrants: A Journey of Hope” campaign started by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).” Through this strategic measure, the USCCB identified and, most importantly, embraced its role as a source of mobilization in the struggle for immigrants’ rights, opposition to H.R. 447, and reform of immigration laws. In addition to attending Sunday Mass, parishioners listened and, in most cases heeded, the call for participation in collective activism preached from the pulpit. In addition, the Church assembled informational booklets for its parishioners: a primer for immigrants detailing the process of civic participation such as writing letters to their government officials. In sum, the Catholic Church, under the leadership of Cardinal Mahony, made a direct connection between dogma and social activism for social justice.

Perhaps the most significant example of the activist role in the fight for immigrant rights involved the timing of the demonstrations and the Catholic calendar. The Lenten season, the forty days of fasting and prayer leading to the celebration of Easter on April 16, began on March 1, Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent in Catholicism and five days before the march scheduled for March 6. Cardinal Mahony used his Lenten sermon to establish the religious tone for the upcoming demonstrations. Although some Catholic clergy and parishioners questioned the activist role of the Church, Cardinal Mahony used this sermon to explain how the immigration march represented an extension of the religious belief in good works and sacrifice. Similarly, the majority of the members of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) throughout the United States underscored the need for Catholics to move themselves from places of worship and participate, at whatever level possible in the movement for immigrant rights.

Waves of demonstrations took place across the United States. Demonstrations erupted in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nebraska, New York, Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin, and many other states. A demonstration largely organized by the National Capitol Immigration Committee brought together somewhere between an estimated 20,000 and 40,000 protesters to Washington, D.C. On March 10, an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 demonstrated in Chicago. In other parts of the country, students, who had already jointed demonstrations in their hometowns and others who had yet to participate, engaged in both organized and spontaneous school walkouts. These “blowouts” represented a continuation of those that took place in East Los Angeles on March 6, 1968, a coincidence not overlooked by veteran activists from the Chicano Civil Rights Movement.53

On March 25, Los Angeles witnessed its largest demonstration in the city’s history with protesters numbering anywhere between 500,000 and 1 million. In a strategic move to maximize the number of protesters, organizers turned to the Spanish-language media, particularly Spanish-language radio. Well-known radio personalities such as Renán Almendárez Coello and Eduardo Sotelo, who used the monikers “El Cucuy” and “El Piolín,” respectively, hit the airwaves providing their listeners, mostly Latinos, with information regarding H.R. 4437, immigration reform, and, most importantly, details about the march.54 Radio and television stations in Mexico, whose broadcasts reached Los Angeles and other cities in California, broadcast their support.⁵⁵

Hometown associations also contributed to the mobilization of the Mexican immigrant community. Fashioned after mutual aid societies, members joined together to send money to assist their hometowns in Mexico, often rural cities and villages, in building schools, roads, churches, and other types of hometown infrastructure. These associations, interestingly often offshoots of soccer clubs, brought immigrants together, increased their solidarity, and, when needed, such as during the spring of 2006, contributed to the mobilization efforts in cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago.

Mass demonstrations also developed in cities without long-standing immigrant communities such as Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Omaha. Such new destination cities experienced mass demonstrations and rallies similar to those held in primary destination cities such Los Angeles, San Jose, and New York City, cities with well-established Mexican immigrant communities. These new destination cities stunned the media and, indeed, protesters across the country, as they came together from different community organizations, unions, and churches to protest anti-immigration legislation. In Nebraska, groups such as the Chicano Awareness Center, the Lincoln Hispanic Community Center, the Union of Food & Commercial Workers, and various Catholic Church organizations used their established infrastructure to facilitate the demonstrations. Although immigrant communities were composed of a diversity of backgrounds, based on legal status, nationality, gender, age, occupation, and education, Latinos made up the vast majority of the immigrants. Many new destination cities had only a burgeoning network of immigrant community support networks. Nevertheless, a combination of anti-immigrant sentiments and behavior and, in addition, the passage of H.R. 4437 produced a rising collective solidarity among immigrants with roots in the United States and those recently arrived. As in other immigrant communities, the traditional Spanish-language and print media; Spanish-language television news broadcasts, such as those on Univision; and social media, such as e-mails and text messages facilitated the mass participation in demonstrations during the spring of 2006. Demonstrators in new destination cities, like their counterparts in other cities, created a narrative of protest. Protesters carried both American and Mexican flags after television and radio station journalists and pundits criticized marchers for being un-American because they only carried the flag of Mexico. Protest organizers quickly insisted that people carry both flags and display them prominently when the media approached the line of protesters.

In addition, posters carried by the demonstrators contained various messages such as “Hoy marchamos. Mañana votamos” [Today we march, Tomorrow we vote], “We love America,” and “We are hard-working immigrants not criminals.”56

Between March 27 and March 31, Mexican and Mexican-American students staged protest or “blowouts” by walking out of their classrooms and schools. Using blowouts as a protest strategy dates back to the famous 1968 East Los Angeles student blowouts.⁵⁷ Other blowouts followed in San Diego, Oxnard, and Santa Ana, the latter in conservative Orange County, which had a large Mexican community. Police and other law enforcement officers moved in quickly and arrested, and in some cases deported, student protesters. On April 10, 2006, after the student protests had, for the most part, ended, a mass march and demonstration took place in Los Angeles while other cities, including Chicago, New York City, and Phoenix, participated in their own marches. Together, this national protest action became known as the National Day of Action.⁵⁸

On May 1, known as International Workers’ Day, a remembrance of the 1886 Chicago Haymarket protests when 35,000 workers walked off their jobs, various groups mobilized and organized a “Great American Boycott” in which some 400,000 marchers joined together and marched to the Los Angeles City Hall. Protesters took to the streets across the country: Atlanta (2,500), Las Vegas (10,000), Los Angeles (1 to 2 million), Milwaukee (70,000), and New York (200,000). Workers, including students, truckers and dock, garment, restaurant, and hotel workers, staged a labor slowdown or complete boycott. Across the country, supporters of the boycott pledged that on this day—International Workers’ Day—they would refrain from making any purchases, attending schools, and working. Despite its success in Los Angeles, some unions and the Catholic Church voiced their disapproval with the boycott arguing that it would only serve to alienate individuals and groups that had significantly contributed to the past marches.⁵⁹

It seemed to many as if cities across the country came to an almost virtual shutdown, May 1 had become a “day without Mexicans.” A transnational dimension developed when the Catholic Church, guided by Monsignor Renato Ascencio of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, came to the support of the boycott by Catholics living in along the U.S.-Mexico Border.⁶⁰ His show of solidarity with the boycott and the solidarity expressed by Mexicans living in Mexico dramatically illustrated the fluid nature of the border, a place where Mexicans lived in communities sin fronteras, communities without borders.

The mass demonstrations in the spring of 2006 signaled the crystallization of collective activism triggered by growing xenophobic and racist anti-immigrant sentiments that were being translated into proposed anti-immigration legislation, such as H.R. 4437. Both the English- and Spanish-language media described the marches as a combination of organized and spontaneous political behavior but often overlooked other examples of well-established forms of civic engagement within Mexican immigrant communities. Mexican immigrants, like other immigrants, had been building and participating in various forms of formal and informal political associations. Hometown associations; church groups; immigrant newspapers, such as El Observador in San Jose, California, which publishes stories in Spanish and English; nonprofit organizations; and grassroots organizations attest to a growing civic engagement among Mexican immigrants. Together these organizations became sites of political mobilization that became instrumental in increasing the participation of Mexican immigrants in the 2006 demonstrations. In such types of organizations, specifically hometown associations, Mexican immigrants maintain ties to their communities of origin and, in addition, increase their participation in community activism aimed at improving conditions within their communities in the United States for both immigrants and U.S.-born Mexican-Americans: a “civic binationality.”61

8. Gendered Journeys: Mexican Immigrant Women and Transnationalism

The narrative of Mexican immigration to the United States is not complete unless it integrates the gender-specific experiences of Mexican immigrant women whose collective histories have, until relatively recently through the efforts of Mexican-American/Chicana and other historians and social scientists, been subsumed under the umbrella category of “Mexican immigrants and their families.”⁶² Historical and contemporary studies of immigrant women focus on specific questions to address the fact that “gender matters.” How do women’s lives change if only their partners migrate and they remain in Mexico with or without their children if they have any? Under what general conditions do women take on the journey—with or without children—to come north from Mexico? What type of family structures and power relations between men and women in families are more likely to lead women to migrate? What categories of immigration, such as temporary, permanent, undocumented, are most common among women? How do power relations with families change after arriving in the United States? In sum, “[a]nswering these questions . . .requires showing how a seemingly gender-neutral process of movement is, in fact, highly gender-specific and may result in differential outcomes for men and women.”⁶³

Mexican immigrant women face similar obstacles as their male counterparts but experience the immigration process in different ways. For the most part, Mexican women, particularly those in lower socioeconomic positions, find themselves in traditionally patriarchal families of origin and those of marriage or partnership. The decision to immigrate is, in fact, a process through which family gender patterns come into play. Most studies focusing on the decision-making process have kept “women in the shadows” largely because of the assumption that males are the prime movers in making the decision to migrate to the United States. Although most studies of Mexican immigrants tend to focus solely on heterosexual unions, a growing research specialization within immigrations studies now examines the experiences LGBT immigrants, specifically their often problematic relations with border law enforcement agencies.64

The experiences of Mexican women who remain in Mexico while their husbands or partners immigrate to the United States and later either return to Mexico or relocate their families to the United States vary but some trends have developed. The likelihood of a Mexican woman immigrating to the United States is based on a combination of individual and societal factors. Historically, Mexican men have been more likely to leave Mexico for the United States with dreams of a better life for their families, who might not accompany them but may eventually join them. Some immigration agreements between the United States and Mexico, like the bracero program (1942–1964), gave rise to a labor force population of men who were contracted as agricultural laborers and unable to work in any other industries. As stipulated in the program, braceros could not bring their families to the United States, although some eventually did with or without documentation.⁶⁵

Individual factors related to the sole migration of Mexican women include age, birth order, rural/urban origins, marital status, educational status, occupation or skills level, and experiences in the paid labor force. Family factors include family size, age/sex composition, life-cycle stage, family network, and family structure. Societal-level factors include community values and norms as well as gender role expectations. In addition, Mexican women, like Mexican men, make a decision to immigrate as a result of perceived opportunities in the United States with the recognition of the precarious world within which documented and undocumented immigrants live. For example, the demand in the United States, particularly in the Southwest, for Mexican women to work as domestic workers and child care providers has generally remained constant and with it the likelihood that women’s migration will remain an option. An existing network of Mexican immigrant women who are already living in the United States serves as a critical factor in the decision of Mexican women to leave Mexico.⁶⁶ Thus, “the culture of the sending society [Mexico] determines the likelihood that women in various positions will migrate.…[A] woman’s position in the sending community not only influences her ability to autonomously decide to migrate and to access the resources necessary to do so, but also the opportunity she has to migrate at the point when the decision is being made.”⁶⁷

Although many issues confront the daily lives of Mexican immigrant women, one of the most recurrent developments in the study of Mexican immigrant women is that of their experiences as transnational mothers.68 Unlike traditional motherhood, where mothers usually live with their children, transnational motherhood is one in which immigrant women come to the United States but leave one or all of their children in Mexico, usually with their grandparents, relatives, or, in some cases, friends. Thus, transnational motherhood is described as a situation in which “immigrant women who work and reside in the United States while their children remain in their countries of origin constitute one variation in the organizational arrangements, meanings, and priorities of motherhood. . . .[The] meanings of motherhood are rearranged to accommodate these special and temporal separations.”⁶⁹

In 2012, Mexican women (26 percent) made up the largest group of immigrant women. Ironically, they had the made the least income of all female immigrant groups. Between 2008 and 2012, women were 46 percent of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. California ranks third in having the largest number of unauthorized women. In general, Mexican women and other immigrant women who come to the United States alone seek employment so that they can send remittances back to Mexico to support their families, specifically their children. As a result, they redefine “motherhood” by excluding the traditional view that “mothering” is done in close proximity, such as in a household. Instead, transnational mothers stress that they are not “there” to raise and nurture their children on a day-to-day basis, but they are indeed good mothers because they are “here” working in the United States in order to provide financial support for them in the best way they can. Such immigrant women migrate to the United States in hopes of earning more income than they could ever hope to obtain had they stayed in Mexico. Such a redefinition of motherhood does not outweigh an immigrant woman’s feelings of guilt, despair, and longing for their children. The choice to leave their children in Mexico to prevent them from facing the dangers of crossing the border with them, or at a later time with others, is a heart wrenching one for transnational mothers. It is common for transnational mothers to believe they will only be staying in the United States temporarily until they can save enough money to enable them to begin a better life than they had before they migrated. By seeing themselves as good mothers, because they are indeed providing for their children, transnational mothers attempt to reconcile their predicament of “I’m here, but I’m there.”⁷⁰

9. The Border: Mexican Women Confront Violence

The U.S.-Mexico border will always be a symbol for Mexican immigrants of the possibility of beginning of a new life. Still, for many, the border and its surrounding area is also a place of violence, specifically violence against Mexican women. Examples of such violence include the largely unsolved murders of hundreds of women along the Juárez-El Paso border, a threatening climate for lesbian Mexican immigrants and the violence endemic in “drop houses” along the border, specifically in Arizona, where undocumented women are held for ransom until a sum of money is paid by family or friends. These same women are often sexually assaulted after crossing the border.

Ciudad Juárez, in the northern state of Chihuahua, shares the international border with El Paso, Texas. While the city’s crime rates were already among the highest in Mexico in 1993, events would unfold that caused ripples across both countries and internationally. During the decade between 1993 and 2003, the Juárez murders of women shocked Mexico and the United States. The General Prosecutor’s Office of the state of Chihuahua recorded the deaths of 268 during these years, while the Chihuahua Institute for Women recorded 320 murders during this time period.71

The murders that began in the early 1990s became more alarming when law enforcement, city government, the press, and the city’s residents learned that the murdered women shared common characteristics. Victims were young Mexican women who, for the most part, had been employed in the city’s maquiladoras (assembly plants) and had little or no family in the area. Since the introduction of global assembly plants in Mexico and other parts of the world, workers have been mostly young, unaccompanied women, most of whom had migrated from rural areas. They were vulnerable to the vagaries of a workplace in which the work culture reflected a carryover from the private world: a system of explicit patriarchal dynamics. Although Mexico had long been an industrialized country with women forming part of the formal and informal paid labor force, an ongoing tension within families and society at large simmered below the surface. A traditional cultural belief persisted that questioned the morals of single, independent women, particularly if they were from rural areas, who set out to earn a living on their own. Sensationalized feature stories in the city’s tabloids established a not-so-subtle connection between the murdered women who worked at assembly plants and what was considered “their dangerously non-traditional behavior.”⁷²

The murders are examples of gender-based violence and bear some resemblance to the murders that took place during the prolonged civil wars and military dictatorships in Central and South America in the 1970s and the 1980s when women were targeted for rape. Many believed the Juárez murders were not receiving the necessary attention and investigation by law enforcement and the city government. The president of the Mexican Congress’ Committee on Sexual Equality asserted a commonly held position among feminist organizations on both side of the border: “Authorities haven’t cared because the victims are women and they’re poor, and many times they have no family in Ciudad Juárez.73

The narrative of the murders of young, Mexican women in Ciudad Juárez is constructed out of a combination of many factors: the failure by law enforcement and political figures to develop a more effective and sustained effort to solve these cases, the lack of concern by the general public as the murders occurred less frequently, the growing lack of investigative reporting by the media, the ongoing fear of the drug cartels and, sadly, an ideology of blaming the victim—the murdered women. Juárez was considered the most violent city until 2012 when it was surpassed by San Pablo, a city in northwest of Honduras.⁷⁴ It does, however, remain the city with the highest rate of domestic violence in Mexico. This border city became notorious as being a place of generalized fear and violence for women both at home and in the workplace. The murders spread to other areas close to Juárez and across the border to El Paso, Texas, Referring both to Mexico City and Juárez, one of Mexico’s representative to the United Nations committee for gender equality stated that “Violence against women isn’t an epidemic, it’s a pandemic in Mexico.”⁷⁵

In addition to the murders, about 4,000 women disappeared in Mexico in 2011–2012, mostly in Chihuahua and the state of Mexico, according to the National Observatory Against Femicide. Studies have shown that violence against women increases in those areas where drug wars escalate. According to a study by Mexico’s National Commission to Prevent and Eradicate Violence against Women, the number of women slain increased dramatically between 2001 and 2010 in northeastern Mexico, an area of intense rivalry and war between drug cartels. Human rights groups say security forces are often involved in sexual abuse and disappearance of women. One-fifth of all murders of women in Mexico in 2012 took place along the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly in Ciudad Juárez where hundreds of women were murdered in the 1990s. In all probability, these statistics represented an undercount as many murders go unreported.⁷⁶

Even as the murder rate declined beginning in the late 1990s, human rights organizations, the United Nations, a wide range of nongovernmental organizations established national, state, and local feminist organizations and other grassroots organizations that have argued that these violations are gender-specific and violations of human rights. In several reports, the Inter-American Commission’s investigation listed several reasons the commission railed against Mexican authorities and their responses to the murders. First, the Mexican government failed to conduct an expeditious investigation when the murders began. For example, the press reported a case when a woman called the local police to report a woman screaming near a drainage canal, but police did not respond. Similar reports surfaced soon after this event. Although many of the women who were eventually murdered had been listed as missing by friends and relatives, police delayed their investigations or, in many cases, even failed to act on such reports. At another level, although state officials in Chihuahua arrested some person or persons believed to be responsible for some of the murders, critics soon pointed out that many of them were never prosecuted. The Mexican National Commission on Human Rights called for a review of both administrative and criminal investigations. Lastly, human rights organizations and others criticized authorities for being less than forthright with the families of the murdered women. International pressure over the tide of killings persuaded Mexican lawmakers in 2007 to approve new legislation aimed at preventing violence against women. It formed a national committee to investigate the killings and developed prevention programs for domestic violence, condemning and recognizing the relationship between the two types of violence against women. Due to many factors, including insufficient and sustained funding, the committee fell short of its intentions.77

A subject for more research on violence against women involves the experiences of Mexican lesbians living in the borderlands, where race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual orientation collide. The murdered women were often labeled as lesbians who were engaging in dubious and “sinful” behavior. One researcher explains that Mexican lesbians living along the border “travel” through various geopolitical spaces, navigating along the way, always hoping to reach a point where their self-identification as lesbians, is a space free of violence.⁷⁸ Not only do undocumented lesbians face deportation they must also deal with a climate permeated by homophobia, one that can easily translate into violence. In addition, these immigrant women often maintain some ties with their families who have not left Mexico. As they gain more sexual autonomy, the price is often a deep rupture with their families in Mexico. Those that knew of their daughter’s sexual orientation usually did not acknowledge this within the family since discussion about sexuality remains a difficult one within Mexican families. Silence is substituted for open discussions surrounding female/male sexuality. Nevertheless, research shows that Latina lesbians, immigrant or not, have created “imagined communities” in which they join together to share their lived experiences, struggle, survival skills, and strategies for publically confronting anti-gay immigration laws and policies: a “space that serves as a home to the marginalized.”⁷⁹

The story of the Ciudad Juárez murders is not complete without a discussion of the mobilization efforts and activism of Mexican women to raise awareness of the murders and the subsequent flawed investigations. Women’s activism in Latin America has taken many forms: protests, rallies, hunger strikes, petitions, labor strikes, and the formation of grassroots organizations, many of which eventually developed into formal organizations. Women leaders emerged as women’s activism spread through regions and countries in Latin America: for example, Rigoberta Menchú in Guatemala and Elvia Alvarado in Honduras.80 From the beginning, existing Mexican feminist organizations, such as those that focused on improving women’s health and protecting reproductive rights, took up the fight against violence against women. Some groups had already been functioning as lobbying groups for women’s rights but soon turned their specific attention to the Juárez murders, calling for increased investigations and prosecutions. In 1997, a group called the Citizens Committee against Violence worked with other women’s organizations and together they drafted a letter of protest to the governor of Chihuahua. Their demands called for the creation of a fully funded and staffed special prosecutor’s office, the establishment of community programs to address domestic and workforce violence, and the development of mechanisms whereby law enforcement agencies keep the families of the murdered women updated on the status of the investigations. After a surge of murders in 1998, the mothers of some of the victims started the group Voces sin Eco (Voices without Echo) and later, as more murders were discovered in 2002, other mothers started the group Justicia para Nuestras Hijas (Justice for Our Daughters) in an attempt to pressure authorities to increase their investigations. Similar groups emerged and together they bore witness that the women had succeeded in mobilizing to confront these tragic cases.⁸¹ Noted filmmaker and director Lourdes Portillo produced Señorita Extraviada, a documentary that brought to life the horrific murders, almost all of which remain unsolved but not forgotten. Portillo describes her goal in producing this film: “With over 270 girls raped and killed and another 450 missing, we felt we had to investigate these disappearances and attacks specifically directed toward young, brown, unprotected, poor women. This film is mostly about deciphering the silence [surrounding these murders]…putting an end to the terror.”⁸²

The development of “drop houses” represents still another example of the gender-specific violence experienced by unauthorized Mexican women who make the dangerous border crossing into the United States, primarily along the Arizona border with Mexico. For the most part, the Department of Homeland Security’s policy of increased border security produced an unexpected outcome—the proliferation of such “drop houses.” Drop houses are also prevalent in other cities, including Houston, San Diego, and Los Angeles. The intensification of such border security and local law enforcement has been exacerbated in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where mass “criminal sweeps” took place. Arizona passed a series of measures aimed at intensifying the state’s “zero tolerance” for those crossing the border into Arizona without documents. Proposition 200, passed in 2004, required social service agencies to check a client’s immigration status. Other measures followed in the next couple of years. For example, H.B. 2008 required proof of citizenship for anyone applying for federal, state, or local benefits. In addition, S.B. 1070, perhaps the most vilified bill, provided that law enforcement agencies could stop and detain anyone to ask for proof of legal residence. It led to nationwide protests and demonstrations. As with other state bills, like California’s Proposition 187, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the bill based on the right of the federal, not the state, government, to regulate immigration. Nevertheless, a virulent anti-immigrant climate flourished in Arizona that, as in the past, demonized all immigrants and people of color who were automatically assumed to be not only immigrants but also undocumented ones. With increased border security checks along traditional crossing points, such as El Paso, Texas, undocumented migrants started crossing the border at isolated places in the desert where migrants hoped that the likelihood of apprehension was less than in the usual border crossings. The result proved tragic as almost 2,000 bodies have been found in the desert and areas in close proximity since 2005. Drop houses developed as more migrants, in an attempt to avoid desert crossings, turned to paying organized smugglers. Generally, migrants pay about $5,000, a long-standing practice, but one that has become more expensive in recent years. This fee includes being brought across the border by smugglers, usually referred to as coyotes, and “dropped” at a house for pickup by relatives or friends who are forced to pay a ransom in order to have their relatives, mostly women, released. In many cases, payment of ransom still did not secure release.83

While trapped in drop houses, undocumented Mexican women become victims of violence, including torture, rape, and, in some cases, murder. A generalized fear of escaping is not an option for these women because they fear deportation or violence, even murder, at the hands on their kidnappers. Sexual assault or the threat of sexual assault represents a frequent source of terrorization of migrant women who are forced into drop houses. Those women whose relatives pay the ransom for their release or the few who manage to escape, also face social services that “victimize” them for a second time. Understaffed and underpaid, many social service workers have been responsible for “blaming the victim,” in this case those migrant women who report that they were sexually assaulted while at drop houses.⁸⁴ All this contributes to a “culture of cruelty” that makes the journey in search of a better life north from Mexico a precarious one for all Mexican immigrant women, and, indeed all Mexican immigrants.