TY - JOUR
AU - Sánchez, George J
AB - This past year has been a critical year for scholars interested in the fate of democracy in the United States. As president of the Organization of American Historians (Oah), I was faced with responding to almost daily crises of democratic practice as President Donald Trump tried desperately to hold onto power in his final year amid his failed responses to the pandemic and his electoral loss to Joe Biden. The valiant and ultimately successful attempts by grassroots activists in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada to turn the presidential election around, then upend the Senate in Georgia, showed the amazing power that dedicated electoral activism like that of Stacey Abrams can have on the ground. Of course, the white nativist insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, displayed the lengths to which violence, lies, and fear of “the other” continue to dictate one powerful direction of politics in this nation.1 This year has also produced assaults on the research, writing, and teaching of American history across the spectrum of K to 12 education and in college and university settings. Last summer's racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd forced all institutions of higher education to consider whether they had done enough for racial justice in this country and on their campuses, and college curriculum and scholarship were often redirected to try to address existing racial inequities. The subsequent movement to tear down monuments, buildings, and symbols of the nation's white supremacist past, especially those that celebrated the Confederacy, caused us to ask what public was being served by those commemorations. The 1619 Project by the New York Times made clear the impact of slavery on the founding policies, culture, and documents of the nation, but backlash against that factual interpretation of the past could also be brutal. The 1776 Commission, instituted by President Trump, issued its retrogressive report the Sunday before he fled Washington, D.C., but it didn't die with his ouster, as right-wing foundations resurrected the report and led several states to consider legislation to prohibit the teaching of “social justice” of any kind or face the cutting off of public funds.2 It seemed clear to me all year that assaults on contemporary democracy went hand in hand with attempts to narrow the teaching of American history to a single narrative. The multivocal U.S. history that has allowed more of us to feel included in groups like the Organization of American Historians was under assault for complicating the fundamentals of white supremacy and unabashed nationalism in earlier versions of stories that drove American history. In my own search on how to connect the political turmoil we have endured this year with lessons on democracy in the past, I returned to a fundamental text that I had come to know in college but thought might still have lessons for us in understanding today's democratic challenges. The classic text, Democracy in America by Alexis de Toqueville, has influenced the title of this talk and some of the central perspectives that emerge from my analysis. Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America uncovers the advantages of an outsider's view of U.S. democracy in understanding our own culture and society. Toqueville was a French aristocrat who wrote about democracy—or what he called “equality of condition among the people”—that he encountered in Jacksonian America on his first trip to the United States from May 1831 to February 1832. The new French monarchy of King Louis-Philippe was willing to send him with an official commission to study and report on the state of prison reform in the United States, but Toqueville used the trip to write his own book on how democracy was unfolding in the new nation. “I sought there the image of democracy itself,” wrote Toqueville, “with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.” He published his first volume of this work in 1835 and the second volume in 1840.3 Toqueville's vision of the boundaries of democracy involved only the Anglo-American population of the United States, and he wrote about democratic practice as being perfected in the New England town meetings, while being distorted in the American South because of the way slavery conditioned white southerners to greater arrogance, indolence, and violence. Toqueville saw the effect of slavery most profoundly by sailing down the Ohio River and noting the profound difference on each bank of the river that divides Ohio from Kentucky, or what he calls “to sail between liberty and servitude.” He goes on to say that in Kentucky, “labor is confounded with the idea of slavery … it is degraded,” while in Ohio, labor “is honored; on the former territory, no white laborers can be found, for they would be afraid of assimilating themselves to the Negroes,—all the work is done by slaves; on the latter, no one is idle, for the white population extend their activity and intelligence to every kind of employment.” For Toqueville, the power of white democracy, however, would eventually win out in the United States because he predicted that slavery could not survive in the nation for long.4 Moreover, his analysis of the place of the Black slave and the Indigenous residents of the United States was that neither group could ever be part of that American democracy that he so carefully analyzed, but instead would always stand outside of it. In the last chapter of his first volume, Toqueville wrote of the “three races, naturally distinct, and, I might almost say, hostile to each other.” His analysis of the U.S. racial dynamic was that “although they are mixed, they do not amalgamate, and each race fulfills its destiny apart.” The blatant racism of Toqueville's analysis depicted the Indigenous as running away from civilization to delight in “barbarous independence,” while the enslaved person is born lost and inferior, having fully conformed to his oppression. In Toqueville's racist analysis, “the servility of the one dooms him to slavery, the pride of the other to death.”5 While Toqueville's outsider perspective is able to accurately predict the demise of the institution of slavery, racism blinds him to see that those that were put outside of white male democracy during Jacksonian America could be the drivers of a multiracial democracy that would begin to manifest itself in Reconstruction America just thirty years later, albeit short lived. Indeed, the possibility of new pathways to democracy have both driven social movements of inclusion and provided the fodder for intense backlashes from those who wanted to maintain white male privilege and enact new measures of exclusion upon those fighting for a rightful place in the democratic traditions of the United States. What is clear to me about Toqueville's Democracy in America is that his uncomfortable thirteenth chapter of volume 1 speaks to the power of looking at liminal groups in U.S. society to understand both the future of a fuller, more realized democracy and the limitations of democratic practice in the present. There are many potential angles and histories of marginal groups through which to examine the reality and health of American democracy over time. Several previous Oah presidential addresses have focused on the history of African Americans that have, from the start of American history, so impacted the fate of democratic practice and clearly influenced Toqueville's own perspective.6 Ongoing problems driven by anti-Blackness continue to dominate contemporary pitfalls to democracy. The Indigenous peoples of America have exemplified the tortuous relationship of those that first lived on this land and yet had to endure the U.S. state and its partial citizenship. Anti-Asian American violence has exploded in the past year and is connected to a long history of anti-Asian immigration policy and racial practice. And certainly one can pay attention to the fate of the incarcerated, in a highly racialized system of justice, which not only removes individuals from society but often severely limits or bans them from engaging in democratic practice during and after their prison sentences. However, I want to feature another liminal group that vividly displays the rigid boundaries of American democracy today by focusing on the plight of the undocumented, largely originally from Latin America, in the United States. Eleven million residents who call the United States home have minimal political rights but are vital to the economy and the society of many urban and rural areas. Because their visibility puts them at risk for capture and deportation, many decide to stay “in the shadows.” But where I was born, grew up, and currently live is southern California, where undocumented people are an ever-present and visible part of the population. They live and work among other residents every day, often blending in with the overall Latino population, which itself accounts for half of the region's 24 million residents. To me, the experiences of the undocumented in U.S. society are a critical angle through which we can observe the limitations of U.S. democracy as well as the possibilities for future pathways that lead to a more complete democracy in our nation. Open in new tabDownload slide This image shows multiple flags flying in downtown Los Angeles in 2006. Photo courtesy of Jorge Leal. Open in new tabDownload slide This image shows multiple flags flying in downtown Los Angeles in 2006. Photo courtesy of Jorge Leal. For many of us who serve as college or university faculty members, our first (and possibly our only) encounter with the undocumented comes from college students who may reveal themselves to us as lacking legal documents during our classes or in office hours. These students, who collectively became visible as “dreamers” or as beneficiaries of Daca (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) programs in the last few years, often face immense hurdles in their attempts to succeed in school and as graduates after receiving their degrees. As a Latino faculty member who has taught at the University of Southern California (Usc) for the past twenty-three years, I have had mentoring relationships with several generations of students with this status and have often been asked to keep their status secret while attempting to provide them with additional networks for support and counseling. That brings me to Ana.7 One of the things I had done as a faculty member, then a vice dean, was to make myself available to student organizations and university offices that directly reached out to vulnerable populations of students. So I was not surprised when Tina, who directed a first-generation college student office at Usc, approached me about helping Ana, an incoming student who had had major problems settling into campus. It was the week before fall term, and her office regularly had a retreat with all their new and returning students, largely African American and Latino students who came from disadvantaged backgrounds and had overcome major obstacles to get to college. Staff member Tina asked me whether I could meet with Ana at the retreat, who was a transfer student from northern California from a community college but had tried to start at Usc during two other semesters unsuccessfully, leaving after the first few weeks of school. Tina worried that this third try might be her last, so she was calling for my personal help to see what I could do. When I first met Ana at the weekend retreat, I did not know the depth of the despair that Ana was feeling. Though she possessed all the academic skills to enable her success, in her first attempt to land at Usc she had left after the first week feeling out of place and full of anxiety about failure. This acute “imposter syndrome” had followed her in the next semester, when she lasted a few more weeks despite more attention from Tina, but ultimately returned home to northern California. This third time, Ana's mother and grandmother decided to try and help Ana by driving her down to school, staying in a hotel with her before putting her on the bus to the retreat, where they could hand her off to Tina. But when they arrived at the Usc hotel, Ana froze and could not get out of the car, so her mother, grandmother, and Ana slept overnight in the car in the parking lot of the hotel, before waking up and putting her on the bus. I did not know this story when I met her at the other end of her bus ride at the retreat to try to make this time different for her. As a faculty member, my initial response was to see what classes she was scheduled to take that semester and make adjustments as needed. I encouraged her to reduce her load to the minimum allowed to remain a full-time student and to switch some of her courses to ones where I knew the faculty members involved would be more compassionate and supportive. But it was clear from talking to Ana that she needed connection, so I decided to offer her a one-on-one course with me, where we could meet every week and discuss readings and prepare a paper, but also have a dedicated time to talk about her other courses and how she was feeling about them. She agreed, switched her schedule, and we started off the semester. I suggested that we could read on any topic, and we could choose this together. Ana, not surprisingly, wanted to read about her own background, and I learned she was Guatemalan, having left that country with her mother and grandmother to California when she was a small child. Her all-female family had fled domestic abuse in Guatemala, and her mother had obtained a job at a candy factory before putting her daughter in public schools. So I put together a reading list in Guatemalan history, which included readings on Guatemalan migrants to the United States as well as classics from Guatemalan history and culture. Ana was excited about this and read these works with enthusiasm and passion. We met every week, and she displayed strong reading and writing skills in our course, which she eventually passed with a clear A grade. Because Ana was undocumented, I helped her take advantage of the university's law clinic and eventually apply for Daca status, which helped her legalize her position in the United States and opened up additional employment and educational opportunities. Ana would eventually graduate with honors from Usc and is now completing a master's degree in social work, wanting to help individuals like herself who are negotiating the complex and dangerous world of global conflict, which too often produces abusive relationships that leave a lasting legacy in a family's history and memories. Open in new tabDownload slide Immigrant vendors conduct business on Main Street in Los Angeles in 2021. Photo by George J. Sánchez. Open in new tabDownload slide Immigrant vendors conduct business on Main Street in Los Angeles in 2021. Photo by George J. Sánchez. But the vast majority of young people with this undocumented status never make it to college and certainly not to a private university like Usc.8 They struggle to find their own economic pathway to stability in the United States without higher education, and one can see their efforts in the entrepreneurship activities that surround working-class districts all over Los Angeles. From T-shirt designers to food trucks, they utilize their ingenuity to trade and barter their connections to the consumer desires of Angelinos and their low-cost networks of suppliers in the United States and abroad. Working long hours for little pay, they drive much of the economy of southern California, through thick and thin, pandemic or no pandemic, weekdays and weekends. Twenty-three-year-old Geidi currently works ten-hour days, six days a week, in a downtown Los Angeles T-shirt shop, owned by her mother.9 But she still remembers her upbringing in a small village in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, before her mother put her on a plane at age four to the United States with a borrowed passport and a coyote while her mother embarked on the journey by foot crossing the Sonora/Arizona desert. On an unsuccessful search for Geidi's biological father and given the absence of economic mobility in Mexico, they lived and traveled for years through Arizona, California, Idaho, and Texas until settling in southern California when Geidi was twelve and entering sixth grade. By then, Geidi's mother had started a family with another man who became Geidi's stepfather, giving birth eventually to three other children, all of whom were U.S.-born citizens. This early period was “awful,” according to Geidi, because they often had to sleep on other people's couches, living in other people's houses. Like many other undocumented children, Geidi did not realize she did not have legal status in this country until high school, when she transferred to a charter academy in Los Angeles and counselors there started to prepare her for possible applications to college. With feelings of confusion and shame, Geidi struggled without a social security number and few options for health care or other basic services. With little money or connections, her family did not pursue either legalization or Daca, which was available by 2015. Playing soccer in high school gave her a chance to try junior college, but five-hour daily practices and constant traveling to games gave her no time for course work and she left after one year. To get to the junior college in West Los Angeles, however, Geidi learned how to drive but without a driver's license. Scared of getting stopped by police for minor traffic violations, Geidi realized that something trivial could easily result in her being deported to Mexico. Feeling “really held back” with a lack of independence and finances, Geidi eventually convinced her mother to pay her for working at the T-shirt shop her mother owned and that Geidi had worked at since high school. Geidi now works long hours both to help her mother's business and to begin to assert her own economic future. Talented as a designer, she takes orders on the side to make additional money for individualized clothing for teams and groups. The shop in downtown Los Angeles exists inside a large community of undocumented entrepreneurs that make money through hard work, long hours, and networks of ethnic suppliers and building owners. But Geidi wants to start her own business, her own clothing line, and make her own “place in the world.” She has secured her own “brand” because it is the first time she has created something that is her own. That independence and control is something she has desired all her life, and her passion as an entrepreneur is linked to her status as undocumented and her frustration at being held back in her life. What Geidi most wants for her family of the future is for them to live “a fearless life.” Geidi emerged out of a family that we euphemistically call “mixed status,” which means that some living under the same roof may be undocumented, while other, often younger, members are U.S. citizens by virtue of being born on this side of the border, and others may be legal permanent residents. According to one study, there were about 2.3 million mixed-status families in the United States in 2013, living in this particular position. Sociologist Joanna Dreby has found another way of putting the enormity of the situation for us to consider: 4.5 million U.S. citizen children had at least one undocumented parent in 2010. In comparison to another form of blended family we talk about, 4.1 million children in that same year in the United States were living with a biological mother and a stepfather. One mixed-status family can have members from a wide range of legal statuses that make their overall social and economic existence precarious in all sorts of ways. Some may have access to jobs, education, and health care, while others may not. Some may carry the burden of support for their entire families because they have been blessed with citizenship, while others have often been restricted to only the most menial of jobs and pay scales because of their status. This diversity within the family can have lasting and damaging results for family dynamics and relationships. But it can also lead to something that has been much too common in Trump's America: withering family separations across borders and boundaries.10 Ethnographer William Lopez details the effect of one November 2013 immigration raid in a stunning new book focused on a mixed-status Mexican family and wider Latino community in Washtenaw County, Michigan. After one week of surveillance of an auto repair business, Ice (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents convinced the local sheriff to obtain a no-knock warrant to raid the taller for drugs or firearms. Instead, Ice spent the day detaining Latino men who came by the business for immigration violations, before raiding the apartment above the business with guns drawn to frighten women and children associated with the men but enacting no arrests. Lopez's study focuses on “those left behind, who are not the targets of immigration enforcement actions, who may not even be undocumented themselves, [but] must nonetheless deal with a militarized, traumatic, and profoundly violent deportation machine, the repercussions of which are both gendered and painfully familial.” Lopez demonstrates how the immigration raid, although targeting a single individual, led the entire Latino community, made up of U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, and undocumented residents, to change their behavior to avoid interaction with local police and government officials, severely endangering their health and well-being. With deportations affecting everyone, it also displays the long-standing elements of family separation as a recurring pattern in communities across the United States over the past few decades.11 If an outsider to American society entered our nation in the past four years to report on the fate of democracy today, he or she would be struck by the cruelty faced by those venturing to enter the United States during the Trump era as refugees. Indeed, we have lived through a recent presidential administration in which base cruelty was official U.S. policy toward refugees and immigrants, all in an attempt to keep newcomers from attempting to enter the United States. A fundamental part of that policy of cruelty was the separation of children, some as young as infants, from their parents at the border. What many saw as an ongoing humanitarian tragedy would be described as blatant torture by physicians and pediatricians that would leave long-term traumatic injury in those families, at the same level as the domestic abuse that Ana's family fled from in Guatemala. At least seven migrant children died in the custody of Customs and Border Protection in the Trump era, while none had perished in the previous ten years. When influenza and mumps ran rampant through the overcrowded Border Patrol shelters that housed thousands of children set up by the Trump administration, government officials publicly announced that they would not offer vaccinations. Over 4,310 children had been separated during the official and unofficial periods of the zero-tolerance policy, with plans to separate as many as 26,000 children more before legal judgments and bad publicity forced the Trump administration to stop in May 2018. At the time of this writing, 506 children have still not been reunited with their families.12 When downloaded pirated audio of young children crying in these shelters for their parents was released, many media commentators expressed shock that the American government would participate in this cruelest of familial brutality. But historian Laura Briggs has written a stunning book—Taking Children—that documents how the practice of separating children from their parents has long been a standard practice in the United States toward people of color. Briggs's extensive body of work shows that we got to detention camps of separated children on the Southwest border through a long history that included “the taking of children under slavery, in Indian boarding schools, in to the foster care system as punishment visited upon ‘welfare mothers,’ in anti-Communist civil wars in Latin America, in the moral panic about ‘crack babies,’ and in the context of mass incarceration.” According to Briggs, “stripping people of their children attempts to deny them the opportunity to participate in the progression of generations into the future—to interrupt the passing down of languages, ways of being, forms of knowledge, foods, cultures.” Briggs convincingly argues that child taking is a “counterinsurgency tactic” used by governments to respond to demands for rights, indeed participation in democracy, by communities of color in an effort to induce hopelessness and despair.13 But as Briggs also acknowledges, the legacy of child taking has also been met by fierce resistance by those who refuse to be shamed by their poverty or forced into submission by the grief over missing children. This form of social bravery is indicative of the resiliency of those who fight for their children's return at the southwestern border today; it is also evident in the social movements created by the family members of the “disappeared” who were arrested and kidnapped by paramilitary forces in Latin America and by the mothers of Black and Latinx youth shot by police and vigilantes in this country. In my own recently published book on the history of Boyle Heights, a neighborhood in East Los Angeles, I tell the history of one group, the Mothers of East Los Angeles (Mela), who decide to name themselves after the Argentinian group of mothers, Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who organized to find the children who had been taken away from them by the military junta trying to suppress opposition by young people.14 Mothers of East L.A.'s politics centers on their efforts to protect their neighborhood from the ill effects of prison building projects and various toxic refineries nearby. However, it is the form of their politics that I want to focus on. Mela is rooted in the protection of the neighborhood by all mothers—citizens and noncitizens—through affiliation with the local Catholic Church parishes by putting pressure on local and state officials who have too long neglected local residents' concerns. By using motherhood and residency—and not citizenship status—as the centerpieces of their mobilization, Mela actively encourages undocumented individuals to participate in their politics of community protection. This is a form of democratic practice much needed in the neighborhoods of southern California, where undocumented residents can often be near majorities in communities and where mixed-status families are the norm. Open in new tabDownload slide Mothers of East L.A. march for community rights on the Olympic Boulevard Bridge in 1986. Photo courtesy Los Angeles Public Library. Open in new tabDownload slide Mothers of East L.A. march for community rights on the Olympic Boulevard Bridge in 1986. Photo courtesy Los Angeles Public Library. Why is it so hard for us to see this form of democratic practice as the future of American democracy? Would it take a “Toqueville perspective” in 2021 looking for the liminal boundaries of American democracy to see the possibility of this future out of today's rhetoric of voter fraud and reality of voter suppression? It is time for historians of the United States to contextualize the fate of American democracy as tightly wrapped together with the way we treat newcomers to this nation, especially those that arrive without benefit of the rights of citizenship or legality. As historian Mae Ngai wrote seventeen years ago, “the illegal alien crosses a territorial boundary, but, once inside the nation, he or she stands at another juridical boundary,” one “we might paradoxically locate [at] the outermost point of exclusion from national membership.” Because the individual deemed an “illegal alien” was intimately tied to notions of citizenship in modern America, according to Ngai, that individual was “a person who cannot be and a problem that cannot be solved”—in other words, an “impossible subject.”15 Various historians have described how xenophobia and racism have marked immigrants and people of color from the beginnings of American history.16 But Ngai's work makes clear that the construction of the “illegal alien” was specifically tied to the creation of massive federal efforts at immigration restriction that were not put into place until the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which set up the national origins quota system, creating a hierarchy of desirability, and excluded Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and other Asians on the grounds that they were racially ineligible for naturalized citizenship. But it was the enforcement provision of restriction, especially the creation of the Border Patrol, that profoundly affected Mexicans and identified them as the largest group of illegal aliens in the United States by the late 1920s. According to Ngai, it was the legal racialization of Mexicans and Asians that cast them as “permanently foreign and unassimilable” and produced racial formations that framed U.S.-born descendants as “alien citizens”—formally citizens of the United States but treated as foreign in American society.17 It took the onset of the Great Depression to solidify this dual nature of racial nationalism that made both the foreign-born permanent “aliens” and the U.S.-born Mexicans “alien citizens.” Congressman John C. Box of Texas led the anti-Mexican campaign of the era, arguing that Mexicans were a dangerous cocktail of the “low-grade Spaniard, peonized Indian, and negro slave mixe[d] with negroes, mulattoes, and other mongrels, and some sorry whites.” Utilizing the rhetoric that first emerged after the Mexican-American War, then developed in the late 1920s to identify Mexicans as a threat to U.S. racial, cultural, and social integrity and push them to be included under the quota system (while building on existing anti-Black and anti-Indigenous stereotypes), white supremacists seized on the threat to American jobs amplified by the economic downturn. It took the Immigration Act of March 4, 1929, to first officially classify entering the United States without documentation as a punishable crime, and Congress passed Public Law 1018 that same year, which made crossing into the United States without a visa a misdemeanor with a penalty of up to one year in prison. While these new laws were specifically aimed at Mexican immigrants, the federal government also utilized new deportation techniques to begin to use this form of punishment widely, with Mexicans making up at least 85 percent of all deportees during the 1930s. Little distinction was made between foreign-born “aliens” and U.S.-born citizens in these efforts, nor in the various methods used by local governments to repatriate the racialized Mexican population “back” to Mexico, sometimes to a land they had never seen before.18 This legal slippage in immigration enforcement continued to play itself out when Mexican workers were needed amid the economic expansion of World War II and the mid-twentieth century. In 1942 the United States signed an agreement with Mexico to legally send Mexican workers to fulfill the labor needs of agriculture and railroads as a wartime emergency measure, but the program—known as the bracero program—would be extended until 1964.19 Over 6 million Mexican workers were recruited to participate over the life of the program, and many never returned to Mexico after the expiration of their contract or once they decided to venture on their own as undocumented workers. Indeed, in the middle of the program's tenure, the U.S. government launched Operation Wetback to apprehend the growing number of undocumented people, often first recruited by the same government as braceros. Most importantly, the dual nature of recruitment and selective enforcement created networks of migration conduits deep into rural and urban Mexico that would continue long after the bracero program ended in 1964. It was during this bracero period that my own family migrated to the United States and was intimately tied to this transnational history. My grandfather on my father's side abandoned his Mexican family and came to California from Guadalajara in the late 1940s as a bracero, leaving my father to start supporting his family at age thirteen as a bus driver. To support himself, he drove buses throughout Mexico as a young man, including on routes to bring more braceros north to the United States. With economic opportunity beckoning to the north as my parents married in Guadalajara, they migrated north through El Paso to Los Angeles to start their family in the United States. After I was born in Los Angeles in 1959, my mother took out an identity card for me from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (Ins) that identified my toddler self as a U.S. citizen, fearful that the Ins might pick me up and deport me when she left me with a sitter while she went to work.20 The fears and liminality of being Mexican American continued to haunt my parents even though they were legal immigrants and their children were U.S.-born citizens. Open in new tabDownload slide This identification card was issued by the Immigrant and Naturalization Service in 1963. Photo by George J. Sánchez. Open in new tabDownload slide This identification card was issued by the Immigrant and Naturalization Service in 1963. Photo by George J. Sánchez. My parents clearly benefited from the timing of their migration, a period in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the annual “legal” Mexican migration included some 200,000 braceros and 35,000 regular admissions for permanent residency. The 1965 Immigration Act (and 1976 amendments) established a 20,000 per-country quota on Mexico and all other nations, and, for the first time, a 120,000 hemispheric quota on the Western Hemisphere, a 40 percent reduction from pre-1965 levels. Not surprisingly, the number of “illegal” migrations from Mexico skyrocketed, with deportations of undocumented Mexican nationals increasing by 40 percent in 1968, to 151,000, then continuing upward to 781,000 by 1976. Apprehensions for all others from around the world, combined, were below 100,000 in 1976. Historian Ana Minian has estimated that approximately 28 million Mexicans entered the United States without papers between 1965 and 1986, compared to 1.3 million legal immigrants and 46,000 contract workers.21 Thirty-five years ago, the last serious attempt to rewrite comprehensive immigration reform and change the fate of the undocumented in the United States occurred with the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (Irca). Approximately 2.3 million Mexicans legalized their status in the United States because of the amnesty provisions of Irca for undocumented persons who had been in continuous residence in the United States since January 1, 1982. But Irca also placed employer sanctions for those hiring undocumented workers in the law for the first time, along with enhanced border enforcement and an expansion of temporary workers' programs. Because Irca did not engage the central causes of undocumented Mexican migration to the United States, while making circular migration back and forth more hazardous, the actual number of undocumented in the United States climbed from 3.2 million in 1986 to 5 million in 1996 and peaked at 11 million in 2006. And the number of undocumented that settled permanently in the United States increased dramatically.22 Rather than engage in another attempt at comprehensive immigration reform to deal with these increasing numbers of undocumented, the federal government since 1986 has adopted a pattern of criminalization of immigration that has only left this population more vulnerable as long-term residents of U.S. communities. First, the growth of refugee populations from Central America as a result of U.S. foreign policy in the region since the Reagan administration of the 1980s has been met with wholesale denial of refugee status for El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras migrants. This development culminated in the obliteration of the distinction between political refugees and economic migrants in the administration of U.S. law under the Trump administration. Secondly, unauthorized crossing of U.S. borders has been extensively criminalized, especially after the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. What had previously been seen as misdemeanors in U.S. laws were changed to felonies, and people were more often subject to arrest and imprisonment. Therefore, the options available to previous generations of immigrants from Europe to improve their family's future by moving to the United States were increasingly narrowed and criminalized when those immigrants came from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, or Asia. When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for U.S. president in 2015 by coming off an escalator to claim that Mexico was sending “rapists and criminals” to the United States, he did not start a newly unique campaign of anti-immigrant rhetoric, but instead energized it with direct links to white supremacy and overt calls for violence and trauma as immigration deterrence. When he went after a Mexican American judge born in Indiana as being biased against his immigration and anti-Muslim policies because of the judge's birth parents, Trump once again married long-standing anti-immigrant sentiments with a racialized understanding of twenty-first-century newcomers. When Trump enacted draconian policies at the border that denied refugees any way to present their case for political asylum and instead forced them to “remain in Mexico,” he was extending enforcement provisions first used at sea to restrict Haitian immigrants attempting to land on U.S. soil from having any rights to present their case under international law. And when he took children away from their parents at the U.S. border, he created torture and trauma as open U.S. practical applications of law, intended to publicly deter others from coming to the United States for fear of personal and familial harm. Open in new tabDownload slide Activists hold signs such as “We Are Immigrant Workers, Not Criminals,” at this protest in Los Angeles in 2006. Photo courtesy of Jorge Leal. Open in new tabDownload slide Activists hold signs such as “We Are Immigrant Workers, Not Criminals,” at this protest in Los Angeles in 2006. Photo courtesy of Jorge Leal. Clearly, the last five years have illuminated the threat to U.S. democracy that takes place when our leaders are allowed to use those with few rights among us—“impossible subjects”—as fodder to rile up one's own bigoted political base. And the way that those without documents are treated in our public discourse reveals larger assumptions about the volatile nature of democratic practice among those of us with citizenship rights in U.S. society. Indeed, in retrospect the assault on democracy that we experienced on January 6, 2021, and Trump's refusal to recognize his electoral loss were signaled earlier in the era by both his claims of electoral fraud in 2016 generated by “alien” votes and by his call to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in 2020. Historian Kathleen Belew has demonstrated how the white power movement in the United States learned to cut its paramilitary teeth against immigrants and refugees after the Vietnam War, including in vigilante surveillance and violent militarization along the border.23 But I also see the lives that Ana and Geidi are creating for themselves in the United States to be critical in understanding possible new paths to democracy for this nation. Their determination to contribute to the American economy and to provide much-needed services to heal the wounds of our collective past bode well for democratic practice, as does the innovative ways organizations like Mela have incorporated noncitizens into their political practice on a local level. Democracy has always meant so much more than voting and elections but has always also incorporated how the “strangers” among us are included in communities of belonging, what Martin Luther King Jr. referenced as “beloved communities.” Today, as in the past, creating these new “beloved communities” has often required violating laws that are unjust, forcing institutions in the United States to recognize the humanity that exists among all our neighbors.24 Commitment to democratic practice is at the core of restoring the United States to a commitment to the “beloved community” of the future. The historian of the American Revolution Gordon Wood has claimed that the revolutionary generation, our Founding Fathers, were uniquely cosmopolitan, and this perspective gave them the ability to envision a grander republican democracy. “One's humanity was measured by one's ability to relate to strangers, to enter into the hearts of even those who were different,” wrote Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution. He continued: “But even love of country was too contracted for a truly cosmopolitan person. America, by uniting the different kindred of the earth, had a duty to eradicate national prejudices and to make all humanity members of one extensive family.”25 It is in this return to humanity and expansion to a true cosmopolitanism that the United States can most effectively restore its democracy and ensure multiple pathways to a democratic future for all who reside in its land today. Note This article was the presidential address from the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians on April 17, 2020. Footnotes 1 George J. Sánchez, “To Form a More Perfect Union,” American Historian (no. 6, Dec. 2020), https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2020/loss-and-learning/to-form-a-more-perfect-union/. George J. Sánchez et al., “Oah Issues Statement on the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol,” Jan. 12, 2021, Organization of American Historians, https://www.oah.org/insights/posts/2021/january/oah-statement-on-the-assault-on-democracy/. 2 George J. Sanchez and Beth English, “Oah Issues an Open Letter to the Biden Administration on the 1776 Report and the ‘Future of the Past,’” Feb. 18, 2021, Organization of American Historians, https://www.oah.org/insights/posts/2021/february/oah-issues-an-open-letter-to-the-biden-administration-on-the-1776-report-and-the-future-of-the-past/. 3 Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America: A New Abridgement for Students, ed. by John D. Wilsey (Bellingham, 2016), 42. 4 ibid., 221–22, 194, 195. 5 ibid., 174, 177. 6 See, for example, Darlene Clark Hine, “Black Professionals and Race Consciousness: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 1890–1950,” Journal of American History, 89 (March 2003), 1279–94; or Ira Berlin, “American Slavery in History and Memory and the Search for Social Justice,” ibid., 90 (March 2004), 1251–68. 7 I am using a different name for this student and staff member to protect their anonymity. 8 Indeed, recent literature contests the “Dreamer narrative” as being both unrealistic and oppressive for most of the undocumented youth in the United States. See this entire edited volume, but especially, Leisy J. Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, “Introduction,” in We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States, ed. Leisy J. Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales (Durham, N.C., 2020), 8–16. 9 The following story is from an interview I conducted with Geidi A. on February 27, 2021, in Los Angeles, California, for this essay. 10 William D. Lopez, Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid (Baltimore, 2019), 20; Jeffrey S. Passel, “Demography of Immigrant Youth: Past, Present, and Future,” Future of Children, 21 (Spring 2011), 19–41. Joanna Dreby, Everyday Illegal: When Policies Undermine Immigrant Families (Berkeley, 2015), 5. 11 Lopez, Separated, 4. For similar recent ethnographic work on communities as disparate as central New Jersey, rural Ohio, and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, see Dreby, Everyday Illegal; and Heide Castañeda, Borders of Belonging: Struggle and Solidarity in Mixed-Status Immigrant Families (Palo Alto, 2019). 12 Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (New York, 2020). Laura Briggs, Taking Children: A History of American Terror (Berkeley, 2020), 1. On the number of separated children, see Soboroff, Separated, 356, 365. Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff, “Lawyers Have Found the Parents of 105 Separated Migrant Children in Past Month,” Nbc News, Feb. 24, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/lawyers-have-found-parents-105-separated-migrant-children-past-month-n1258791. 13 Briggs, Taking Children, 4, 8, 12–13. 14 George J. Sánchez, Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of Democracy for the United States (Berkeley, 2021), 226–31. 15 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, 2004), 6, 5. 16 See, for example, Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York, 2019). 17 Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 7. For the best single-volume history of the Border Patrol, see Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley, 2010). Ironically, the European restrictions had placed thousands of immigrants from Europe in the “Illegal” category, but they were not labeled as aliens because of their whiteness. See Libby Garland, After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 (Chicago, 2014). Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 8. 18 Gary Gerstle defines “racial nationalism” as an ideology “that conceives of America in ethnoracial terms, as a people held together by common blood and skin color and by an inherited fitness for self-government.” See Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), 4. “Statement of U.S Representative John C. Box,” Congressional Record, 70 Cong., 1 sess., 1928, p. 69, pt. 3:2817–18, taken from Lee, America for Americans, 156. See also ibid., 160–62, 172–80. 19 For some of the finest and latest historical scholarship on this program, see Ana Elizabeth Rosas, Abrazando el Espíritu: Bracero Families Confront the US-Mexico Border (Berkeley, 2014); and Mireya Loza, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom (Chapel Hill, 2016). 20 For my first recognition of the importance of this liminal document in my own life, see George Sanchez, “Working at the Crossroads: American Studies for the 21st Century: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 9, 2001,” American Quarterly, 54 (March 2002), 9. 21 Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 261. Ana Raquel Minian, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2018), 3–5. 22 Sánchez, Boyle Heights, 225; Minian, Undocumented Lives, 183–230. 23 Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, Mass., 2018), 40–52, 98–99. 24 Martin Luther King Jr., “‘The Birth of a New Age,’ Sermon Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,” April 7, 1957[?], Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/birth-new-nation-sermon-delivered-dexter-avenue-baptist-church. 25 Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991), 222–23. © The Author 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Democracy in Trump's America: Through the Looking Glass of Family Separation and the Undocumented
JO - Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaab121
DA - 2021-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/democracy-in-trump-s-america-through-the-looking-glass-of-family-WDQQgi6moC
SP - 255
EP - 269
VL - 108
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -