Q&A with Elaine A. Peña on Celebrating Washington’s Birthday at the US-Mexico Border

Since 1898, residents of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, have reached across the US-Mexico border to celebrate this country's first president George Washington's birthday. The celebration can last a whole month, with parade goers reveling in American and Mexican symbols; George Washington saluting; and “Pocahontas” riding on horseback. An international bridge ceremony, the heart and soul of the festivities, features children from both sides of the border marching toward each other to link the cities with an embrace.

Elaine A. Peña's book ¡Viva George! offers an ethnography and a history of this celebration, which emerges as both

More info

symbol and substance of cross-border community life. Anthropologist and Laredo native Elaine A. Peña shows how generations of border officials, civil society organizers, and everyday people have used the bridge ritual to protect shared economic and security interests as well as negotiate tensions amid natural disasters, drug-war violence, and immigration debates.

Drawing on previously unknown sources and extensive fieldwork, Peña finds that border enactments like Washington's birthday are more than goodwill gestures. From the Rio Grande to the 38th Parallel, they do the meaningful political work that partisan polemics cannot.

This week, we will be attending the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting virtually, during which we will offer a discount on our new and award-winning anthropology books. Apply the discount code EXAA during checkout on www.utexaspress.com to receive 30% off the full list price of any book, plus free domestic shipping.

To celebrate the publication of her book, we asked Dr. Peña some questions about her research.

Please describe the WBC’s International Bridge Ceremony, and what questions you wanted to answer by focusing on this performance?

The ceremony features two children representing the U.S. and two children representing Mexico walking toward each other on the Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge to share a picture-perfect embrace and to exchange national flags. Other actors, mostly political figures and business leaders from both sides of the border, also share embraces and exchange well wishes. The ritual has taken place in some shape or form since the celebration’s inception in 1898.

Focusing on the bridge ceremony allowed me to trace shifts in cross-border cooperation across several decades and, more importantly, to see how Mexican actors have supported this ostensibly U.S.-centric celebration. I was interested to see if the balance of the ritual—two sides coming together with tight choreography annually for over a century—carried over to everyday border interactions or had an impact on how port-of-entry actors dealt with shared problems and/or opportunities linked to trade, immigration, and security. I took a specific interest in the history and uses of the international bridge because it is co-owned by the Mexican government and the city of Laredo. I thought, well, there are insurmountable inequities that affect that border in terms of poverty and documentation vulnerabilities, for example, but the international bridge—an exemplar of border infrastructure—is co-owned. Both sides share it and thus manage responsibilities and power. Having that conceptual ground to stand on allowed me to dive into the archives and into ethnographic fieldwork with greater attention to what border actors do—how they find innovative ways to cooperate during times of crisis. Focusing on how border actors have festively repurposed the International Bridge Ceremony not only challenges but also empirically denies popular narratives of border dysfunction.

What were your early experiences of the festival, and how has your impression/consumption/participation of it changed over several decades?

We moved around a lot and lived in different places downtown during my childhood so I was used to seeing and interacting with people gathering for the parade. I would work the parade sometimes, selling cold sodas and water. My favorite parade participants were the Mexican tumblers. They would do amazing tricks! Other than that, we would go to the carnival or to the jalapeño festival if we could afford it that year. This is all to say that I was aware of the celebration, and definitely of the beauty and glamour of the debutantes, but I didn’t wonder about it too much. I had other things on my mind as a kid.

Things changed once I got to high school because a lot of my classmates participated in the festivities as debutantes or as escorts. They worked so hard to get selected and they had so many commitments. It was intense.

I went to the Princess Pocahontas pageant in 1996 because my best friend was Pocahontas. That was a really weird moment for my sixteen-year-old self. It was the first time I had attended a “high-class” event and I was really confused by what I saw and heard about Native American tribes. I didn’t know what “playing Indian” was at the time and I didn’t have the vocabulary to work things out, so I was left with a lot of questions.

I began to attend a wide range of celebration events once I decided to work on the celebration as an academic, about ten years after that moment. I attended as many events as I could between 2006 and 2017, including the International Bridge Ceremony, the Pocahontas and Society of Martha Washington pageants, LULAC’s Noche Mexicana gala, the Caballeros de la República del Río Grande cocktail party, and the Mr. South Texas luncheon. I also attended WBCA events in Nuevo Laredo and celebration events hosted by the municipality of Nuevo Laredo. These upper-echelon gatherings gave me insight into why rituals persist, how they are practiced across generations, and how they benefit border business.

The era of paso libre is, as you say, a puzzle. Would you describe paso libre and the incongruous context in which it existed for twenty years?

Paso libre coincided with the International Bridge Ceremony in February 1957. That year, the ritual doubled as the public inauguration of the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge. Dangerous water levels created by Hurricane Alice had destroyed the existing bridge at the end of July 1954. Paso libre was part of an agreement to make the newly constructed bridge operational, and it extended free bridge crossing privileges during the celebration in either direction. In practice, this meant that Mexican citizens could cross the border into the U.S. without having to show documentation every February between 1957 and 1976. Thousands of people crossed the border peacefully and safely during that time.

It took me quite a long time comparing uncatalogued documents in the archives, but I finally figured out that paso libre was a peace-building/port business–securing gesture initiated by U.S. actors, including the INS and the State Department, to persuade Mexican officials to formally open their side of the international bridge. I spoke with as many people as I could who remembered that time and I was lucky enough to locate photos of paso libre at different moments during the phenomenon. I remember coming across photos from the early 1960s showing families walking hand-in-hand across the bridge as well as Mexican military cadets. Photos of the early 1970s are absolutely spectacular because they feature thousands of people walking across the border as part of the bridge ceremony. By that time, anti-immigrant narratives were not only becoming more widespread in the U.S. but were also being politicized as part of the War on Drugs campaign launched by President Nixon in 1969.

It is just mind-blowing to think that paso libre persisted, with lots of fanfare and without incident, for almost twenty years. It is also incredible that paso libre was covered (negatively) by major newspapers like the Los Angeles Times during that period (early 1970s) but was never questioned by academics or mentioned in the history books. ¡Viva George! is the first study to do so.

What aspect of the ceremony does the cover of your book depict, and what is its historical and also logistical significance?

The cover depicts a transformative moment in the bridge ceremony ritual. The children’s embrace in the middle of the bridge is the culmination of months and months of cross-border collaboration between Mexican and U.S. actors. This coordination is sometimes conducted under extreme duress—political pressure to secure the border, etc.—but still, in that moment, the ritual makes visible and palpable the fact that both sides can work together.

You embedded yourself in both archival and ethnographic research. What kinds of activities and participation did your ethnographic research entail?

In addition to conducting archival research in Waco; San Antonio; Austin; Washington, DC; Mexico City; Laredo; and Nuevo Laredo, I spent a lot of time in the field—during the celebration, of course, but also during summers, academic breaks, and sabbatical years. The celebration unfolds in February, but planning happens year-round. I met with WBCA actors, past and present, individually and in groups on several occasions. I attended the planning meetings of bi-nationally focused organizations like the International Good Neighbor Council–Laredo, the Consejo Internacional de Buena Vecindad–Nuevo Laredo, and LULAC Council #12, but I also attended special committee meetings with city officials focused on border security and celebration logistics. I went to dress fittings and rehearsals with the abrazo children and their families. I traveled to Washington, DC, with WBCA actors headed to the annual Laredo Day event on the Hill in early March.

It was also important for me to participate in the International Bridge Ceremony as often as possible and from several different vantage points. One year I headed out to the bridge at 5:00 a.m. to help set things up and to get an up-close and personal take on how international bridge personnel do not close but “redirect” traffic while the ritual unfolds. Another year, I traveled from Nuevo Laredo with Mexican representatives to the bridge ceremony.

Elaine A. Peña is an associate professor of American Studies at George Washington University and author of Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Her work has been recognized by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists.

www.utexaspress.com

On Publishing and Racial Justice

June 10, 2020 - This week George Floyd is being celebrated in Houston, where he grew up. In our home state of Texas and throughout the country, protestors have raised their voices against the systematic suppression of Black voices, the excessive use of force against protestors, and the murders of named and unnamed Black people. The University of Texas Press joins these condemnations and supports the essential and urgent work of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Our publishing mission is to serve the people of Texas and knowledge seekers around the world by publishing valuable and relevant information to educate, advance scholarship, and deepen our understanding of history, current events, and contemporary cultures. Our authors reveal the connections between law enforcement along the US-Mexico border and the militarization of the police in this country. They study how cultural trauma is disproportionally inflicted upon and suffered by communities of color, the severity of which is compounded by white systems of power. And they examine the personal histories and the cultural impact of art created, transformed, and advanced by Black creators.

We believe deeply that these kinds of books, and the historical and cultural perspectives they foster, have an important role to play in the broader conversations now taking place. At the same time, we acknowledge that the book publishing industry itself, with a Black workforce of only 5 percent, has a very long way to go. Without the opportunities for meaningful and gainful entry-level jobs, barriers remain for young publishers of color. Unpaid internships; poor oversight of recruitment, promotion, and retainment; and a broad lack of equity training and accountability systems have made publishing an unwelcoming field for Black professionals.

The University of Texas Press is committed to asking difficult questions of ourselves and our institution to purposefully seek solutions. We are committed to the ongoing work of increasing staff diversity while providing professional development opportunities, training all staff to participate in an equitable work environment, and regularly reviewing our acquisitions and peer review practices to ensure broad representation. We are committed to advancing the works and expertise of Black scholars and artists, decentering whiteness when celebrating Black cultural production, and investing deliberately in our outreach to share publishing opportunities and market Black authors.

It is crucial for us to reckon with privilege, gather our peers, and actively protect and advance the rights, lives, and self-determination of Black people. In the coming weeks and months, we will be joining with others in listening, amplifying voices, sharing resources, and centering the work that must be done. In a time of uncertainty, precarity, and division, our ears and our inboxes are open.

As we continue to educate ourselves in efforts to dismantle white supremacy, we also want to do our part to elevate Black voices. We have compiled a list of our staff’s favorite books by Black authors who have made an impact on us, especially at a time when context and deep thinking are necessary.

• Affrilachia, Frank X Walker
• The Age of Phillis, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
• Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
• American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assasin, Terrance Hayes
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
• The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle
• Becoming, Michelle Obama
• Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Birds of Opulence, Crystal Wilkinson
• Blackberries, Blackberries, Crystal Wilkinson
• Black Bone: 25 Years of Affrilachian Writers, edited by Bianca Spriggs and Jeremy Paden
• Black from the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Fiction, edited by Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle
• Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson
• The Black Poets, Dudley Randall
• Black Skins, White Masks, Franz Fanon
• Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, Hortense Spillers
• Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, bell hooks
• Book of Hours: Poems, Kevin Young
• The Book of Night Women, Marlon James
• A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland, DaMaris B. Hill
• Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, Trevor Noah
• The Bridge of Beyond, Simone Schwarz-Bart
• Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James
• Broken Earth series, N. K. Jemisin
• Brown: Poems, Kevin Young
• Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, Kevin Young
• Cane, Jean Toomer
• Can't Escape Love, Alyssa Cole
• The Century Cycle (plays), August Wilson
• The Changeling, Victor LaValle
• Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Zadie Smith
• Clotel, or the President's Daughter, William Wells Brown
• The Color Purple, Alice Walker
• Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Khalil Gibran Muhammad
• Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, Michael Twitty
• Dawn, Octavia Butler
• Delicious Foods, James Hannaham
• Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, Marisa Fuentes 
• Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems, Danez Smith
• The Edna Lewis Cookbook, Edna Lewis and Evangeline Peterson
• Eight Men: Short Stories, Richard Wright
• Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Brittney Cooper
• For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, Ntozake Shange
• Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts
• Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
• Gather Together in My Name, Maya Angelou
• Get a Life, Chloe Brown, Talia Hibbert
• Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
• Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Ruth Wilson Gilmore
• The Good Lord Bird, James McBride
• The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
• Head Off and Split, Nikky Finney
• The Heart of a Woman, Maya Angelou
• Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon
• The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter
• Home, Toni Morrison
• Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
• How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Kiese Laymon
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
• In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era, Richard Iton
• Insurrections, Rion Amilcar Scott
• Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic, Shatema Threadcraft
• Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
• Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride, Frank X Walker
• Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson
• The Known World, Edward P. Jones
• Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice, Dr. Willie Parker
• Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman
• Loving Day, Mat Johnson
• Men We Reaped: A Memoir, Jesmyn Ward
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander
• No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, Sarah Haley
• On Beauty, Zadie Smith
• On the Come Up, Angie Thomas
• The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo
• Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration, January 20, 2009, Elizabeth Alexander
• Prelude to Bruise, Saeed Jones
• The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, Daina Ramey Berry
• Pride, Ibi Zoboi
• Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields
• Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, Robin D. G. Kelley
• Rafe: A Buff Male Nanny, Rebekah Weatherspoon
• Recyclopedia, Harryette Mullen
• The Sellout, Paul Beatty
• Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, Maya Angelou
• Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
• A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid
• Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
• The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, Junauda Petrus
• Sula, Toni Morrison
• Summer Lightning, Olive Senior
• Swallow the Fish, Gabrielle Civil
• Tar Baby, Toni Morrison
• Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
• They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib
• Thick: And Other Essays, Tressie McMillan Cottom
• The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
• The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
• The Venus Hottentot: Poems, Elizabeth Alexander
• The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson
• We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays, Samantha Irby
• We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The works of Stuart Hall
• The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon
• You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
• Zone One, Colson Whitehead

www.utexaspress.com

Q&A with C.J. Alvarez on His History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide

From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet.

Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences

More info

and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction—“compensatory building” designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.

Give us the elevator pitch for your research and the resulting book.

The US-Mexico border is at the center of an unprecedented national debate, yet very few people from either the United States or Mexico have ever been to the international divide. This book explains the complex history of construction projects on the border that have been underway for over 100 years.

How did you get interested in the subject of your book?

I thought this was an important subject to write about not because it has become especially controversial but because I grew up in the border region. To us border dwellers, the international divide and the various ecosystems through which it passes have always been relevant.

Why is it important to study the built environment on the US-Mexico border?

Government policies—whether we’re talking about the “drug wars” or immigration law—are often enacted through physical construction projects. Fences and walls are the most obvious examples of this, but it’s important to understand other, less-obvious kinds of building, such as border survey markers, roads and highways, surveillance infrastructure, bridges, and massive storage dams.

In what ways did engineering and police projects affect the geography, environment, and communities on both sides of the international divide?

One of the most surprising conclusions I came to through my archival research was that the Rio Grande border has undergone a far higher degree of environmental transformation than the land border. There is almost nothing “natural” about the Rio Grande watershed, and this has produced fascinatingly complex results in border communities. On one hand, some of these river modifications made it easier for immigration police to surveil the international divide, and on the other hand, an untold number of people have been saved from disastrous floods.

What context might be missing from contemporary debates about the ongoing “drug wars” of the border region and border enforcement policy?

Government and business interests in both the United States and Mexico have spent over a century painstakingly building connective tissue between our two countries. First it was the railroads of the 1880s, then, with the invention of automobiles and trucks in the early twentieth century, more complex road networks were introduced: after the 1950s, that meant the interstate highway system, and after the free trade agreements in the 1980s and 1990s, superhighways and port-of-entry expansions. These were all bilateral projects; you can’t build only half a port of entry. The US-Mexico border is designed to be open to commerce, which means you can’t cherry pick those who cross it, weeding out illicit business and the unauthorized movement of people, no matter how many fences you build.

C. J. Alvarez is an assistant professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

www.utexaspress.com

Q&A with Xóchitl Bada and Shannon Gleeson on Migrant Rights

Immigration policy, enforcement, and reform has dominated national discourse in the United States for many years. Vital research on trends, institutions, and policies that could be most impactful in this national discourse are often underrepresented or deliberately obfuscated for political reasons.

Scholars Xóchitl Bada and Shannon Gleeson have brought together a timely, transnational

More info

examination of the institutions in Mexico, Canada, and the United States that engage migrant populations in becoming agents of change for immigrant rights while holding government authorities accountable in the new book Accountability Across Borders: Migrant Rights in North America.

Collecting the diverse perspectives of scholars, labor organizers, and human-rights advocates, Accountability Across Borders is the first edited collection that connects studies of immigrant integration in host countries to accounts of transnational migrant advocacy efforts, including case studies from the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

We asked Professors Xóchitl Bada and Shannon Gleeson to answer a few questions about their research and how their findings can inform both policy makers and rights activists.

Give us the elevator pitch for your research and the resulting book.

In the last thirty years, immigrant advocacy organizations have demanded protections in various arenas, including employment, health, and education. They have used a variety of strategies that transcend the container of the nation-state as they work to hold local, national, and global bureaucracies accountable to the needs of migrant populations. But we do not yet well understand the relationship between these organizations and the countries of origin and destination whose systems of governance they are lobbying for change.

In our ongoing collaboration, we seek to analyze the advocacy practices of transnational civil society organizations so as to advance and implement protections afforded to migrants in North America. We argue that these practices are not uniform; rather, they are constituted at different scales, ranging from the local to national and the transnational. Advocacy organizations also pursue various cross-border strategies to build power beyond sovereign states. This volume examines the perspectives of a range of actors, including national and binantional bureaucracies, local consular offices, educational institutions, and a variety of civil society groups.

Taking Canada, Mexico, the United States as entry points, this edited collection includes several case studies addressing efforts to ensure Mexican migrants’ basic rights and their access to the protections those rights should afford. The contributors analyze the multiple mechanisms for accountability from governments of the countries of origin and countries of destination, in both domestic and international legislative frameworks. The chapters discuss a range of institutional arenas where migrant rights matter, such as global governance, labor rights, health-care access, schooling for indigenous migrants, and returned and undocumented immigrant youth.

How do you define migrant civil society?

We use “migrant civil society” to refer to migrant-led membership organizations and public institutions. These can include membership organizations, nongovernmental organizations, media, and other autonomous groups. Migrants organize around a variety of often overlapping identities, as workers, say, or as members of a neighborhood, a village of origin, an ethnicity, or a religion. These multiple identities and allegiances can in turn fuel civic and political leadership. In other words, the notion of a migrant civil society refers to the capacity of migrants to represent themselves rather than having advocates speak on their behalf, although they may collaborate with allies as well.

How did first the Obama administration and then the Trump administration alter the course of your research and writing?

Our efforts to bring together a group of North American scholars interested in migrant rights and accountability began in the spring of 2016, close to the beginning of Donald Trump´s presidential campaign. We had received generous funding from the Cornell University ILR School’s Pierce Memorial Fund to organize a workshop on transnational migrant advocacy, and by the time we met in December, it became clear that our work was not only relevant but urgent. By mid-December of 2016, we had secured an invitation to submit our edited collection to the UT Press, and we encouraged our collaborators to engage with current immigration policy changes as much as possible. Of course, the constant evolution of this policy field always presents immigration scholars with challenges in their research and writing. On the one hand, the current president has undoubtedly produced an unprecedented number of executive actions on immigration that make it difficult to produce up-to-date research and analysis. On the other, many of the policies that threaten immigrant communities have a deep foundation in previous Republican and Democratic administrations. So there is a continuity in many of our core themes.

Your book focuses on three areas of migration governance: education, labor, and health. Can you broadly cover your findings in these respective areas?

It is always difficult to tackle several institutional arenas of migrant rights at once, especially in more than one country. But we attempt to do so here with a focus on education, labor, and health across Mexico, Canada, and the United States.

Undocumented immigrants and returned migrants have demanded increased support for and investment in education from their countries of origin. Accordingly, Alexandra Délano discusses the new roles that Mexican consulates in the United States have played in securing rights for Mexican migrants and facilitating US protections. For example, Mexican consulates have helped facilitate the application process for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration program, which opens important educational and professional opportunities. With respect to Canada, Patricia Landolt and Luin Goldring consider the importance of grassroots activists in demanding educational access for all students in Toronto, regardless of immigration status. And regarding Mexico, Mónica Jacobo finds that returned and deported Mexican youth have organized to eliminate the highly expensive and bureaucratic procedure to validate their US education and gain access to Mexico’s higher education institutions.

In a moment of significant discussions about the future of NAFTA, we find that migrant labor-rights protections may at long last be meaningfully addressed in regional trade negotiations thanks to the dedicated efforts over the past two decades by labor unions and transnational labor-advocacy organizations. While the portability of migrant labor-rights protection is far from being fully implemented in the region, the chapters by Bada and Gleeson and by Gálvez, Godoy, and Meinema find that civil society has taken an increasingly visible role in demanding accountability from public officials for guestworkers in bilateral agreements, trade negotiations, and labor enforcement initiatives.

Access to health care remains one of the most difficult challenges for migrants in the United States. The Affordable Care Act enacted during the Obama administration prohibited undocumented immigrants from acquiring federally subsidized health insurance in the newly created health markets. This kept migrants in an already overburdened system served primarily by local community health centers. The chapter by Osorio, Dávila, and Castañeda offers the first historical overview of the Binational Health Week, sponsored by Mexico´s Ministry of Health, which provides access to free preventive care for underinsured migrants. The program has existed for more than a decade and is now replicated by a dozen Latin American consulates across the United States.

How can your research contextualize immigration-based fear and racism in the United States?

Migrants workers are disproportionally represented in precarious work and face significant structural vulnerabilities, violence, and human- and labor-rights violations during their transit, settlement, and return in countries of origin, transit, and destination.

Yet for over three decades, the federal government has failed to reach a bipartisan compromise on comprehensive immigration reform. As a result, state and local governments in the United States have had to take up the slack, playing a substantial role on issues ranging from enforcement to benefits and services. In 2017 alone, states enacted 206 laws on all sides of issues ranging from so-called sanctuary policies to refugee resettlement, education/civics, and in-state tuition.

In this context, immigrant civil society plays a significant role in enacting and implementing local immigrant policies. Our research documents how migrant civil society organizations engage civic and political institutions in countries of origin and destination to demand better enforcement and implementation of Mexican migrant rights across borders. These groups also serve as cultural brokers that help immigrants navigate local bureaucracies and help advocate for the rights of migrants in—sometimes welcoming, sometimes hostile—destination communities.

Can you highlight major gaps or inconsistencies in immigration policy and enforcement that your findings reveal?

In the United States, Mexican migrants make up nearly a third of all immigrants and more than half of the undocumented population, estimated at 11 million. Even so, “lawfully present” Mexican immigrants vastly outnumber the undocumented. In fact, the estimate of Mexican migrants living in the United States without authorization declined from 6.9 million in 2007 to 5.8 million in 2014. Many undocumented immigrants have resided in the United States for more than a decade; the typical unauthorized immigrant has lived there for a median of fifteen years. A variety of factors have led to this decline, including Mexico’s changing demography and decreasing fertility rates, improved conditions in Mexico’s labor market, higher levels of education, dramatic increases in the costs of crossing the border, the Great Recession of 2007, and decreasing family remittances that could finance new border crossings. However, family remittances to Mexico were at historic new highs between 2016 and 2018, possibly because of President Trump’s anti-immigrant measures and his threat to tax family remittances.

Nevertheless, Mexican migrants have been a major target for immigration enforcement actions under Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and even more systematically and brazenly under the Trump administration. More migrants from Mexico were deported in fiscal year 2018 than from any other country: 141,045 of 252,405 removals (56%), not including voluntary returns. President Trump even declared a national emergency at the border by falsely claiming that the Democratic Party is leading an assault on the United States by inciting large flows of people from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to cross Mexico and continue to the United States. Although total apprehensions at the southern border by Customs and Border Protection (CPB) reached 521,090 in fiscal year 2018, CBP had apprehended a total of 569,237 people in 2014, during the Obama administration. In fact, the United States has for decades increased border militarization in an attempt to stem the northward flow that began before US borders were even drawn. The Trump administration’s current policy of separating families in detention is a further manifestation of this state violence, given that there are literally now thousands of children lost as a consequence to this punitive measure, which many international scholars agree is a violation of human rights. Conversely, the children held in detention have also reported a range of abuses, including sexual assault, an alarming reality for which the administration has yet to be held accountable.

Restrictive immigration policies and harshly punitive deportation measures have been accompanied by ill-informed public perceptions about what contributions migrants make. Mexican migrants embody a narrative about Latino migrants in the United States that is at once contradictory and reductive. They are frequently held up to be hard-working people, a criminal threat, a drain on the welfare state, a cultural stain on democracy, and resistant to assimilation. These perceptions are further fueled by Trump’s racist rhetoric, coupled with a series of repressive measures that include a vast expansion of the groups prioritized for deportation, arrests of subjects at places previously considered safe, a plan to hire 15,000 more immigration agents, a broad ban on refugees and even on basic travel for migrants from several majority-Muslim countries, and the creation of a Victims of Immigrant Crime Enforcement Office.

The United States is facing these difficult conversations around immigration while simultaneously grappling with declining fertility rates and population decline. By 1980, eighteen of the twenty-five most populous cities in 1950 had lost residents. Of the twenty-five largest cities in 1980s, seventeen gained residents over the subsequent thirty years, largely because of a rapid increase in the Latino population. Of the twenty-five largest US cities, twelve have populations that are more than one-quarter Hispanic; Latinos make up over one-third the population in eight of those, and they constitute the majority in two. In other words, Latinos, and especially Mexicans, are a part of the fabric of US society. The continued inaction on immigration reform and the absence of inclusive local policies toward immigrants is therefore of serious consequence.

Could you establish an approach to your book for both policy makers and rights activists? How can readers best utilize the research-based tools for improvement that you present?

Our book offers a multidisciplinary institutional analysis of migrant rights through a cross-sectoral, multisited, and multiscalar lens. We highlight the cross-border relations between government actors and civil society, across a variety of policy arenas, including global labor regulation, public education, health care, and criminal justice. Given our limited regional focus, we have knowingly overlooked several sectors and binational relations, such as sustainable trade and rural development, environmental justice, development and violence-induced internal displacement, and voting-rights coalitions. To fill this gap, policy makers, scholars, and migrant rights activists should pay more attention to variations across specific policy arenas at local, state or provincial, federal, and transnational scales.

For example, the experiences of traditional destination countries like the United States and Canada are not likely to mirror those of other destinations that lack the same bureaucratic capacity for immigration enforcement and migrant integration, such as Mexico. The Mexican government’s failure to offer immediate access to public education (a result of byzantine bureaucratic obstacles) to thousands of Mexican American children caught in the US deportation regime illustrates the urgent need to interrogate such policies affecting returned migrants. Conversely, the Mexican government’s unwillingness to offer even minimal access to basic health care and other resources to thousands of Central Americans waiting their turn in temporary shelters to request asylum to the United States on the Mexican side of the border is equally shameful. It is unclear whether states closer to the border have fared any better than those in central and southern Mexico.

We also know surprisingly little about the educational outcomes of US-born Mexican American children who return to Mexico and continue their education in public schools that have no programs dedicated to integrating students whose first language is English or other nonindigenous languages. Studying these and other outcomes will become increasingly important under Trump-era immigration enforcement policies in the United States.

President Trump’s anti-immigrant rethoric and policies have already stranded thousands of migrants in Mexican border states. These groups may hold out hope for a new administration in 2020 that is more sympathethic to those fleeing criminal violence from state and nonstate actors alike. Thus far, Mexico has only begrudgingly accepted its new role as a transit country and has agreed to receive Central Americans while they wait their turn to request asylum.

However, those immigrants may decide to stay in Mexico, taking advantage of the positive rethoric of a recently inaugurated center-left government. Mexico, a country with a foreign-born population of 1.2 million (0.99% of the total population)—the vast majority coming from the United States (899,311)—will likely be forced to incorporate a large group of Central Americans with little precedent for doing so on a large scale. While Trump’s famous campaign promise of a border wall is only partially funded 2.5 years into his presidency, his declaration of a national emergency already faces multiple lawsuits in several state courts. Further, the xenophobia and racism coming out of the White House and targeted at Latinos and immigrants fuel anxiety and amplify uncertainty among migrants and would-be migrants alike.

Our volume admittedly focuses on primarily positive examples of collaboration. Further work should continue to examine more contested efforts to enforce rights across borders, especially in varied federalist contexts such as Canada, where provinces have more control over certain policies—such as collective bargaining—that impact migrants. Moving forward, we will continue to examine consular advocacy on behalf of migrant worker rights across traditional and new migrant destinations in the United States. Our findings also lay the groundwork for future research in other areas of policymaking (beyond immigration) that implicate state-society collaborations and contestations.

Xóchitl Bada is an associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán: From Local to Transnational Civic Engagement and a coeditor of two forthcoming works: New Migration Patterns in the Americas: Challenges for the 21st Century and Handbook of Latin American Sociology.

Shannon Gleeson is an associate professor of labor relations, law, and history at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She is the author of Precarious Claims: The Promise and Failure of Workplace Protections in the United States and Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston. She also coedited Building Citizenship from Below: Precarity, Migration, and Agency and The Nation and Its Peoples: Citizens, Denizens, Migrants.

www.utexaspress.com

Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Militarization in the Age of Trump

By Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera

The rapid growth of organized crime in Mexico and the government’s response to it have driven an unprecedented rise in violence and impelled major structural economic changes, including the recent passage of energy reform. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera’s new book, Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico, asserts that these phenomena are a direct and intended result of the emergence 

More info

of the brutal Zetas criminal organization and the corporate business model they have advanced in Mexico. Since the Zetas share some characteristics with legal transnational businesses that operate in the energy and private security industries, she also compares this criminal corporation with ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Blackwater (renamed "Academi," and now a Constellis company).

Combining vivid interview commentary with in-depth analysis of organized crime as a transnational and corporate phenomenon, this book proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding the emerging face, new structure, and economic implications of organized crime in Mexico. Arguing that the armed conflict between criminal corporations (like the Zetas) and the Mexican state resembles a civil war, Correa-Cabrera identifies key beneficiaries of this war, including arms-producing companies, the international banking system, the US border economy, the US border security/military-industrial complex, and corporate capital, especially international oil and gas companies.

Dr. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (Brownsville campus) and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. We asked her to comment on the effects of President Trump’s border policy on what she identifies as the beneficiaries of organized crime in Mexico, mainly the US border security/military-industrial complex and corporations.

Criminal Corporations, Militarization, and Energy in the Age of Trump

Mexico’s so-called drug war can be characterized, in some way, as a modern war relating to the control of energy production. In the present context, it is possible to identify groups that seem to have benefited the most from a novel criminal scheme (directly or indirectly) introduced by the Zetas organization, the Mexican government’s reaction to it, and the resulting brutality. The primary (or potential) winners of this armed conflict appear to be “corporate actors in the energy sector, transnational financial companies, private security firms (including private prison companies), and the US border-security/military-industrial complex.”[1]

Moreover, Mexico’s violent spiral coincides with strengthened US border security and has had positive effects on the US border economy. Official numbers at the national level show that crime rates in US border counties are relatively low and have decreased in the past few years due to enhanced border enforcement. Similarly, forced displacements in Mexico have modified migration patterns from this country to the United States. Irregular migration flows from Mexico have declined and “a greater number of relatively more skilled and wealthier Mexicans have been legally emigrating from afflicted border areas in Mexico to the United States. Overall, the effects of the war on Mexico-US migration dynamics seem to be positive for the US economy.”

The main losers of Mexico’s new criminal model and severe armed conflict essentially seem to be the country’s most vulnerable people—those who did not have the resources to flee or defend themselves against extortion, kidnappings, and other forms of brutality carried out by criminal groups, paramilitaries, and government forces—and the national oil industry, represented by the once oil monopoly Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX). Their spaces are being (or will be) occupied by private companies, many of them transnational and often very powerful. In the recent years, “[f]orced displacements, massive disappearances, and militarization in key parts of the country have emptied strategic lands and left them available for future investments, mainly in the energy sector.”[2]

It is worth noting that disappearances, forced displacements, and depreciation of land values in key areas of Mexico have not halted investment in energy and commercial infrastructure. Energy contractors have not curbed their activities; “the expansion of large investment projects continues despite the high risk posed by organized crime and the large number of disappearances. It is also interesting to observe that while Los Zetas and groups following the same criminal paramilitary model have affected small and medium entrepreneurs [related to] the hydrocarbon industry as well as Pemex, they have hardly touched transnational interests.”

President Donald Trump being sworn in on January 20, 2017 at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. 

In January of the present year, Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. His electoral campaign was unique in the sense that it put Mexico, for the first time in history, at the center of the US electoral discourse and foreign policy agenda. Trump asserted that Mexican immigrants in the United States are, “in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” Therefore, he proposed to build a “big, beautiful, impenetrable” wall, bolster border enforcement significantly, and arrest and deport vast numbers of undocumented immigrants. Trump has pledged to get Mexico to pay for this wall—potentially, he has said, through tariffs. Indeed, the White House communicated that a 20 percent tax on imports from Mexico was being considered as a form of payment for the construction of the proposed southern border wall.

Imposing those border taxes would violate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as it is known today. It is also worth mentioning that Trump “ran a campaign somewhat based on NAFTA.” In his quest to “Make America Great Again” and for putting “America First,” Trump pledged in a statement to negotiate "tough and fair" trade agreements with the aim of further generating jobs for the American people. Under this new context, as soon as Trump assumed his role as President of the United States, he signed an order abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership: the largest regional trade accord in history that once involved the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations and represented roughly forty percent of the world’s economic output. Following this same logic, the new US President has set his sights on renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.

UT Press at the San Antonio Book Festival

On Saturday, April 2, the University of Texas Press and four of our authors will enjoy the 4th annual San Antonio Book Festival at the Central Library and environs in downtown San Antonio. We'll have a booth in the Exhibitor Tent with tons of titles for sale at a great discount. There are a lot of great authors in attendance (Jamie Brickhouse! Nathalie Dupree! Sonia Manzano!), so we’ve distilled our authors' appearances into a single UT Press schedule.

Get The SABF App For Your Smart Phone. Just go the App Store on your device, download "Eventbase Free" and click on the San Antonio Book Festival tab.

More info

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande
Location: Auditorium, 1st floor of Library
Author: George T. Díaz

George T. Díaz is an assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University. His award-winning book, Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande, was published with the University of Texas Press. Recently he served as the Visiting Scholar at the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston where he designed and taught a course on smuggling in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Díaz's research is informed by investigations in Mexican and U.S. archives as well as a lifetime of living on the border.

More info

12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

It Starts with Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing

Location: Café Commerce, 1st floor of Library

Author: Clark Davis

Clark Davis is a Professor of English at the University of Denver. He is the author of It Starts with Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing, Hawthorne’s Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement, and After the Whale: Melville in the Wake of Moby-Dick.

Click here for more info about Clark Davis.

More info

1:15 PM - 2:00 PM

Variations on a Rectangle: Thirty Years of Graphic Design from Texas Monthly to Pentagram

Location: The Studio, SW School of Art, McAllister Building

Author: DJ Stout

DJ Stout was the art director of Texas Monthly between 1987 and 1999, and he has been a partner in Pentagram’s Austin office since 2000. He is the author and designer of The Amazing Tale of Mr. Herbert and His Fabulous Alpine Cowboys Baseball Club: An Illustrated History of the Best Little Semipro Baseball Team in Texas. He lives in Austin, Texas.

More info

3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
A Love Letter to Texas Women
Location: West Terrace, 3rd floor of Library

Author: Sarah Bird

Sarah Bird is the author of ten novels, including Above the East China Sea and The Yokota Officers Club. She has been a colum­nist for Texas Monthly, a storyteller for NPR’s Moth Radio Hour, and a writer for the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, Salon, and the Daily Beast, among others. A former Dobie-Paisano Fellow, a 2015 Meryl Streep Screenwriting Lab winner, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers pick, she is the 2016 recipient of the Texas Institute of Letters Lifetime Achievement Award.

Click here for more info about Sarah Bird.

www.utexaspress.com