This, despite living in our ancestral homelands. Don't you notice how indigenous the families enduring family separation right now look? We refer to our identities as having "el nopal en la frente," the cactus on the forehead, that cannot be denied no matter how much our history gets excluded or marginalized. And we're not really "Latino," either. All of us from this continent are either indigenous or mestiz@, of mixed blood—European and African, in particular. And the greatest part of our blood mixture is within ourselves given a presence, according to Canadian First Nations scholar, Dr. Paulette Steeves, that may date back as far as 100,000 years.
And we're not actually "immigrants," either. We're "migrants" that have traversed this continent for millennia. We didn't cross the border. The border crossed us. The European Americans are the true foreigners to this continent. They just don't know it—or want to know it. An inconvenient truth, to be sure. Hence, the importance of Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies, generally, a curriculum that liberates simply by being truthful.
Their unwillingness to engage this history, however, keeps the dominant group from seeing not only their culpability, but how this is a patterned response across the generations, as this article sadly demonstrates. This is so profound that when people think of race and race relations, a black-white paradigm is what often comes up. This continues to marginalize our experience as Mexicans, and Latinos generally, who have faced ongoing cycles of brutality that reveals our racialization, how we get constructed as a race—as the current moment vividly demonstrates.
You see, race is a dynamic, rather than static, identity. It comes into being for political, economic, and social reasons over time. It is historic and didn't always exist. Up until the beginning of slavery in the early 1600s in this country, you never enslaved a race; rather, you enslaved a people who could be of any hue.
Boy, could our ancestors have benefitted from Facebook and other social media to let the world know their plight. Awareness of my ancestors' suffering that comes from me knowing my history, fills me with great sorrow as much as it fills me with great strength and pride. That I even exist, that my lineage has not gotten wiped out by the campaigns against my ancestors or against us in the present, means that our lives have purpose, including speaking this truth to power and writing ourselves into history.
I contemplate how our very beings carry forward this genetic memory of generational trauma, even if we cannot pinpoint the specific pathologies to which they are connected. As a whole, Mexicans tend to live long lives relative to Anglos, but we're not as healthy living these lives as we could or should be.
Yet we must not despair. We must use our privileged statuses—all of us that can—to substantively change oppressive policies, practices, and priorities.
What could possibly be more important than the future that these suffering and traumatized children represent?
Peace/paz,
Angela Valenzuela
Since at least the 1850s, Latino residents, migrants and refugees have been rounded up, separated from families.
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Posted: 5:25 p.m. Thursday, June 21, 2018
This is not the first time in Texas history that Latino migrants and refugees have been systematically intimidated, detained or deported, nor the first time that the fate of their separated children became the central drama.
In April, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero tolerance” policy that has prompted the criminal prosecution of anyone caught crossing the border anywhere other than an official entry point. For families, that meant sending children away to shelters while their parents were sent to jail. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to stop the practice, but for at least 2,300 children, the order comes too late. The government so far has been unable to articulate a reunification plan for those families.
As always, longtime residents and citizens are affected, too.
Spanish and Mexican settlement of Texas predates Anglo-American, African-American and German-American arrivals. Many of those Latino families never left. For decades, they easily crossed back and forth across the long, loosely guarded border.
Nevertheless, they periodically were driven out, as during the 1850s, when Mexicans were banished from Austin under suspicion of sympathy with abolitionists.
The first great wave of Mexican refugees arrived during the chaos and strife of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920. Some of those families, especially those with valued skills, were welcomed into Texas cities, while low-paid farm and ranch laborers worked the lands of South and West Texas newly opened by railroads.
Others were treated in a more brutal manner. At one point, an estimated 4,500 refugees, mostly women and children, sought safety en masse on U.S. soil.
“They crossed at Presidio and walked 70 miles on foot in January 1914 to Marfa, where U.S. soldiers forced them to board a train,” said Monica Muñoz Martinez, professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. “At Fort Bliss, they were detained in a prison camp behind a barbed wire fence stacked 10 strands high and by some accounts electrically charged.”
During that same decade, unrest along the border led to mob violence and extrajudicial killings. The federal government sent soldiers to Brownsville, and the Texas Rangers, nominally in pursuit of bandits, committed some of their darkest misdeeds against civilians.
All this was carefully documented by the Refusing to Forget project and shown in the award-winning 2016 exhibit, “Life and Death on the Border,” put together by the Bullock Texas State History Museum. It was informed by the work of Muñoz Martinez at Brown and John Morán Gonzalez, director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas. A follow-up conference on the subject is slated for the Bullock in January 2019.
Despite those early waves of violence and intimidation — as well as expropriation of Mexican-American land — many families stayed and worked here into the 1930s. During that decade, another systematic program, dubbed “repatriation,” sent between 500,000 and 1 million immigrants and Mexican-Americans across the border, in part because they were blamed for economic stress during the Great Depression.
Some parents hid their children with families who stayed behind so that they could live in the only country they had ever known.
“And many children never saw their parents again,” Francisco Balderrama, a Chicano studies professor at California State University-Los Angeles and co-author of “Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s,” told The Associated Press.
Ironically, just a few years later, Mexican migrant workers were desperately needed during World War II. Starting in 1942, laws and diplomatic agreements allowed the importation of contract laborers known as “braceros,” so called because of the Spanish word for “arms,” as in “manual laborers who used their arms.”
The program lasted 22 years and employed as many as 5 million legal braceros, but labor agreements were often broken, while working and living conditions were miserable. Strikes were not uncommon in the late 1940s. The program was periodically renegotiated during the 1950s and did not end until 1964.
So many undocumented migrants followed behind the braceros that, in 1954, the U.S. government began “repatriating” the undocumented ones under an official program with an ethnic slur in its name.
The primary child issue of that time? Braceros, almost all men, were separated from their families in work camps. Again, some never saw their children again.
These themes recurred during subsequent cycles of migration, intimidation, detention, deportation and family separation.
“In the United States today, more than 8 million citizens live with at least one family member, often a parent, who is undocumented,” reports the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group. “Children make up the majority of these U.S. citizens; almost 6 million citizen children under the age of 18 live with a parent or a family member who is undocumented. Consequently, immigration enforcement actions — and the ongoing threats associated with them — have significant physical, emotional, developmental and economic repercussions on the children left behind.”
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