Barrio Libre

Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New FrontierBy Gilberto Rosas

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5225-9

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………………….ixINTRODUCTION The Criminalizing Depths of States and Other Shit………………………………………………………………..3CHAPTER 1 Other Nightmares and the Rise of the New Frontier…………………………………………………………………..29CHAPTER 2 Against Mexico: Thickening Delinquency of the New Frontier…………………………………………………………..55CHAPTER 3 Low-Intensity Reinforcements: Cholos, Chúntaros, and the “Criminal” Abandonments of the New Frontier…………………73INTERLUDE Post-September 11 at the New Frontier……………………………………………………………………………..89CHAPTER 4 Against the United States: The Violent Inaugurations and Delinquent Exceptions of the New Frontier……………………….95CHAPTER 5 Oozing Barrio Libre and the Pathological Ends of Life……………………………………………………………….115INTERLUDE Nervous Cocks at the New Frontier…………………………………………………………………………………133CONCLUSION The New Frontier Thickens……………………………………………………………………………………….137Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..147Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….163Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..183

Chapter One

Other Nightmares and the Rise of the New Frontier

and so it was with the Major sheriff of the county of el Carmen. Just as the words “Gringo Sanavabiche” come out of Román’s mouth, the sheriff whipped out his pistol and shot Román. He shot Román as he stood there with his head thrown back, laughing at his joke. The sheriff shot him in the face, right in the open mouth, and Román fell away from the door, at the Major sheriff’s feet. —AMÉRICO PAREDES, With His Pistol in His Hand

Be they the barbarous Apache or other native people, “illegal aliens,” cholos oozing under the international boundary, or terrorists, nightmares or dense anxieties about porous boundaries and Other bodies weigh on the Mexico-US border region and its latest permutation as the new frontier. They involve a certain political utility that global mechanisms and economic systems colonize and exploit, always dialectically and in relation to local, historically constructed power relations. These “dark” iterations—today’s “wetbacks,” “anchor babies,” terrorists, and drug traffickers—speak to anxieties among race, nation, and punitive governance, and to the fictions of state sovereignty in a zone of international flows and movements. That is, the history of this particular international boundary highlights the multiple contingencies of and competitions over sovereignty, its shifting configurations, fragility, and historical contingencies. Questions of bodies oozing between Mexico and the United States, be they migrants generally or the specificity of Barrio Libre, attest to how nation-states, in the words of Ramón Gutiérrez, render “a virtuous body from a sinful one, a monogamous conjugal body regulated by the law of marriage from a criminal body given to fornication, adultery, prostitution, bestiality, and sodomy.”

What I call old and new frontiers bracket the history of the modern international boundary between the United States and Mexico. I situate the old frontier in the settler colonialisms and their projects of sovereignty of what was to become the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, late in the nineteenth century, and questions of race and criminality began to emerge as key strategems of rule. This period is followed by the consolidation of the modern border (1920 to the mid-1990s) and its paramount expression in the creeping militarization of border law enforcement, as is evident in the development of the US Border Patrol; this section also highlights the centrality of Mexico in organizing documented and undocumented migrant flows. The chapter then turns to the third epoch of the new frontier (1990 to the present). This period consists of the consolidation of neoliberalism in Mexico and its amplification in certain managements of migration in the United States and warlike exercises of an incomplete sovereignty characterizing this period’s Border Patrol campaigns.

These three moments are not meant to constitute an exhaustive, totalizing, teleological account that affirms the history of the international boundary, much less the new frontier. On the contrary, the old and new frontiers accentuate the warlike signification of sovereignty at these moments in comparison to the relative stability of the epoch of the institution of the modern border. Thus this history looks at the jagged ends of state formations, how governments and people mutually constitute borders in the complexities of daily life in a region where the extreme wealth of the United States confronts the extreme and intensifying poverty of the Global South.

The chapter likewise complicates certain traditions of scholarship. It disrupts those that frequently monumentalize the Border Patrol or the US empire or those that privilege the machinations of US agribusiness with respect to undocumented crossings and border enforcement. Instead, it foregrounds the imprints of Mexico’s political economy. Certain policy decisions and relations of power affect the distribution of resources and multiple accompanying relations that are foundational to rendering Mexican nationals as migrants. Moreover, the chapter necessitates drawing on bodies of scholarship rarely put into conversation: histories of the border, which largely emphasize the US Southwest; the history and historical ethnography of northern Mexico; and the history of migration between the two countries. The chapter ends with the rise of new frontier and certain origin narratives about Barrio Libre.

The Old Frontier

Mexican and US projects of colonization constitute what I refer to as the old frontier. Nightmares of native savagery were mobilized in both the United States and Mexico to justify genocidal regimes of the respective settler colonialist projects. Moreover, as I will retrace in this section, Mexican colonial communities in the country’s north would adopt the pathologized tactics and practices of the native warfare during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarly, in Texas in the nineteenth century, a settler colonialist project, and accompanying techniques of racialization and criminalization, was used to justify violent rule in Texas, and later across the southwestern United States. Of course, these projects were vastly different. They were complicated by a political economy that desired others to be deeply subjugated but ultimately living people.

Long-standing conventions and attitudes in Mexican historiography consider the inhabitants of Mexico’s northern states as marginal to the formation of the national consciousness. Sonorans and other norteños have been regarded with suspicion and skepticism given their proximity to and presumed domination by the United States. They have been paradoxically cast as both semi-American and semi-Mexican.

Yet, the country’s northern states—those along what was then becoming the international boundary between the United States and Mexico—played a crucial role in the assertion of Mexican sovereignty and the colonization of the northern territory at the expense of the barbarian Apache and other native peoples. These colonizer communities in the north of Mexico were positioned as gente de razon (civilized people). Indeed, the complex relations between serranos—a term that denotes the community of peasant warriors in nineteenth-century Chihuahua—and the then largely centralized Mexican state reverberates here. As Ana Alonso has argued, the colonial Mexican state drew on codes of masculine honor to award land titles in order to advance projects of territorial conquest and subjugation of indigenous peoples, whom it characterized as barbarous, pathological, or criminal in comparison with the white patriarchs on the jagged edge of Mexico’s colonies. The Indians of northern Mexico fought tenaciously and with some success against these projects. Yet warfare is a cultural process: a reciprocal specialization in violence was established between the settler colonialists and the indigenous peoples, particularly the Apache.

And said specialization played a significant role. Nevertheless, the relations of power shifted late in the nineteenth century. The serranos’ privileging of local forms of solidarity or community identity positioned them as unruly. They were cast as threatening, and ultimately pathological, during the rule of the strongman Porfirio Diaz. They were effectively criminalized and transposed into antimodern savages, resonating with the colonialist nightmares about the savage natives. Their “natural” masculinity had to be socialized and violently tamed through the technologies of order and progress. Notably, during the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), some Mexicans claimed that the famed Mexican outlaw and revolutionary Pancho Villa was part Apache and that his brutal practices were part of this nightmarish legacy.

Similar dynamics can be found in the conquest of what is today’s southwestern United States. The general outline of this history has been largely well rehearsed by now: Following the “annexation” of Texas in 1836, the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, and the eventual occupation of Mexico City by US troops in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mexico ceded to the United States over a million square miles, roughly half of its national territory. Approximately eighty thousand Mexicans summarily became US citizens. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Gadsden Purchase, and other agreements eventually coerced Mexico into relinquishing what is now the southwestern United States to the dominion of the United States.

Then, as now, projects of asserting sovereignty in Texas and the rest of the newly acquired southwestern United States involved criminalizing or pathologizing lives. But at this juncture it served to legitimate colonial violence. There were numerous and largely discounted lynchings of Mexicans, cast as outlaws. Indeed, according to some revisionist histories, Mexicans were more likely than African Americans to be lynched in Texas. Land expropriations occurred alongside low-grade, localized nightmares of what Américo Paredes termed the “Texas Legend,” which held Mexicans to be a ghastly lot. They were cruel by nature, cowardly thieves who supposedly recognized Texans as superior. They were simultaneously envisioned as racially impure: an unholy, unsanctioned, pathological hybridity of Indian, African American, and “blackened” Spanish. Although the newly conquered Mexicans were legally considered white, socially and politically they were radically marginalized—lives situated in the collapsing of punishment and death, what Alan Gómez refers to as “living death.”

Folklore, oral traditions, and related cultural forms sought to disrupt the emerging stratagems of racialization, dispossession, and criminalization. For Paredes, the corrido—a culturally specific oral tradition of the “people who worked the land” put to song—documented US-Mexico border conflict. In his seminal With His Pistol in His Hand, Paredes documented and analyzed the corrido of Gregorio Cortez. This wrongfully outlawed character challenged Anglo cultural, social, and political domination and, it must be underlined, Anglo law enforcement. Other corridos documented the folk hero, Joaquin Murrieta. He was initially full of pro- US idealism, but he became a Robin Hood figure—a border bandit—avenging the racist murders of his wife and brother. These and other criminalized challenges to the emerging order of the late nineteenth century became memorialized as acts of resistance, both in the corridos, which were recounted in stories, and later in scholarly works.

In contrast to Texas, sustained contact, much less conflict, between Mexicans and Anglo-Americans was rare in the Arizona-Sonora settler colonialist context of the old frontier. A small number of Anglo-Americans trickled into the Arizona-Sonora region to pursue mining opportunities following the Gadsden Purchase in the nineteenth century. These initial encounters did assume the characteristics of a “race war,” as some scholars have put it. The nightmares of the Other did not haunt the Arizona-Sonoran borderlands to the same extent as those of Texas, at least not with respect to the Mexican population. Yet, Sonora holds a long history of anti-indigenous as well as anti-Asian violence.

Following the brutal containment of the Apache late in the nineteenth century by the United States and Mexico, a large migration of Mexicans came to southern Arizona. They found themselves in a community with increasingly pronounced residential segregation. Prior to the Gadsden Purchase, most of Tucson’s population clustered within or around the walls of the colonial presidio. The constant threat of Apache attack rendered Mexican Tucson a small and compact settlement, not much more than a military garrison on the east bank of the Santa Cruz River. It was there and at that time that the Barrio Libre of Tucson emerged.

Meanwhile the US Civil War and Chinese immigration to the United States brought a groundswell of support for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 between the United States and Japan. These measures restricted the immigration of laborers from Asian and certain European countries, which in turn allowed Mexican immigrants to meet the steadily increasing demand for low-wage jobs in the emerging Southwestern economy.

Locally, in Arizona, dark associations were soon cast on Tucson’s emerging Barrio Libre. It developed a criminal reputation that varied over time—from a haven for bootleggers in the 1920s and the site of a vibrant but rather dangerous nightlife to the home of ordinary hardworking Mexican families. Moreover, Barrio Libre had a significant indigenous component. Both Tohono O’odam and Yaquis from Pascua lived on its western and northern edges, and there was significant intermarriage between Mexicans and the indigenous peoples, both of whom were at the fringes socially of polite Mexican society. Urban renewal wiped out many of the old adobe structures built in the late nineteenth century.

As the twentieth century unfolded, the international boundary between Arizona and Sonora was largely a space of goodwill. The establishment of the railroad and new border towns increased commerce between respective border communities. No official barrier separated Nogales, Sonora, from Nogales, Arizona; only a stone marker in the middle of what was called Calle Camou (on the Mexican side) and International Street (on the American side) delineated their limits. Spanish was commonly spoken on both sides of the then transparent international boundary.

People on the American side recognized the importance of maintaining good relations with Mexico and its people. Both communities’ relative remoteness from the centers of respective national governments prompted elites of Arizona and Sonora to develop a working consensus. US citizens in Nogales spoke of growing relationships with the Mexican town, and some business establishments “crossed” the border. For example, one saloon allowed its customers to circumvent the laws of both countries by moving from one end of the bar to another.

Law enforcement involved complex relations between Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona. For example, in one instance, Sonoran officials—including the governor and a Mexican official based in the United States—conspired to transfer a mentally impaired individual from southern Sonora, which had no medical facilities, to Phoenix. The operation involved an elaborate ruse with the assistance of a local policeman in Nogales, Arizona. Meanwhile, at the level of the US government, there was virtually no restriction on immigration from Mexico until 1929. Eventually, a rapid expansion of agriculture and the accompanying market relations in the newly minted US southwestern states resulted in an ever-increasing dependence on migrant workers for seasonal planting and harvesting of crops.

The demand for migrant labor, however, must be seen in relation to the nineteenth-century genocidal and related settler-colonialist campaigns against California Indians and related instantiations of sovereignty. Anti-Chinese violence in California had been bolstered by the passage of the aforementioned Chinese Exclusion Act, which severely limited the availability of Chinese laborers. Landowners sought to replace these workers with African American migrants from the Southern states, but there was significant popular resistance to their presence. Agribusiness likewise experimented with Japanese labor, recruiting slightly more than twenty-seven thousand Japanese to the United States between 1891 and 1900. Those efforts proved too successful. Labor organizing, together with an anti-Japanese campaign in San Francisco, led to the Gentlemen’s Agreement, under which the Japanese government agreed to significantly curtail Japanese immigration to the United States. Similarly, the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 rendered Filipinos a desirable working population, until an act of Congress effectively ended Filipino migration to the United States. This process and the continuing quest for the least expensive marginalized workers eventuated in the US dependence on Mexican nationals migrating across the border, a dependency formed in relation to the potential sovereignty-signifying violence of the emerging international boundary-cum-frontier, typically embodied in law enforcement and those acting on its behalf.

Meanwhile in Mexico, a significant amount of US capital had penetrated northern Mexico during Diaz’s iron-fisted regime (1876-1910). That part of Mexico was soon showcased as exemplifying Mexico’s modernization. An impressive network of railroads was built, linking Mexican cities and mining and industrial sites, as well as agricultural sites in the United States, to central Mexico. These processes shifted the economic center of Mexico northward, toward the then newly made frontier with the United States. Porfirio Diaz, Mexico’s strongman president, began insisting on growing crops for export and privatizing communal lands, leaving many rural people landless and hungry and inaugurating migrant flows. A dramatic population boom exacerbated these conditions. Indeed, according to some estimates, some 98 percent of Mexico’s farmers had no land at this time. And with the newly developed and US-financed railway system, the painful reality of declining wages, the rapidly rising cost of staples, and landlessness, many Mexicans adopted the strategy of journeying northward.

(Continues…)

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