A reading by California’s new poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera at the Ruskin Arts Club in Los Angeles in 2007, from the collection 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007 (City Lights):

Read more about Herrera.

Rigoberto González

Yes, that’s a picture of me carrying a box of grapes. Home from college in the summer of 1993, the only way to spend time with my family was by joining them at work. My father insisted on taking the photograph because he didn’t want me to forget where I had come from. Why am I smiling? Even working among family and friends didn’t lessen the burden of the heat and exhaustion and aching muscles. I had cuts on my fingertips from mistaking their dusty roundness for a rotting grape. Grape picking and cleaning are skills I never mastered.

The dominant theme of my posts on Harriet this season, in case you didn’t notice, is the border: the banned border, the bilingual border, the science/ spirituality border, bordercrossings, and today this: a discussion of the centerpiece poem to my next poetry collection, Unpeopled Eden, which is about war and borders. “Our Deportees” (which you can find in the March/ April 2012 issue of American Poetry Review) is a long poem that took me a decade to give shape, but it started brewing long before that.

Shortly after migrating from Mexico in 1980, I made a school friend, Demetrio Chapa, who had been raised in California and was hip to all things American. At home, I was subjected to my grandfather’s folk music from Veracruz and my grandmother’s pirekuas, folk songs in her native indigenous tongue. So Demetrio introduced me to pop music . He had a funny little record player with colorful vinyl records, and among the tunes that made us get up and dance was Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.”

That song carried such positive memories of my first friendship, that when my family moved again I wanted to take it with me. I found it at a department store and begged my father to buy it. I have no idea what compelled him to make this purchase, except that over the years I knew not to ask for anything, so this was a rare occasion indeed. He bought me the full-length album called 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, with Dolly wearing glamorous heels as she’s hauling all kinds of work equipment: a lawnmower, a hoe, a hose, a paint roller–objects I associated with my family’s world of labor.

I was such a “good boy” that my grandparents humored me and allowed me to play my album on their precious console once in a blue moon. And that’s how I discovered two other tracks, “House of the Rising Sun,” which I suspected was about prostitutes (thank goodness my family didn’t understand English!), and “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” which also sent me for a loop: a song about 28 farmworkers getting flown back to the border, only to die when the small plane goes down on Los Gatos Canyon.

The song, I would find out later, was a Woody Guthrie cover. He wrote this song as a protest poem back in 1948, shortly after he read an account of the accident, which named the four white casualties (the pilot, co-pilot, flight attendant, and border guard), but referred to the 28 Mexican casualties as simply “deportees.” This was the era of the Bracero Program (1942-1964), which was an agreement between the U.S. and Mexico to allow entry to Mexican laborers particularly during wartime. (My maternal grandfather participated in the early 1960s.) The “deportees” on that plane had overstayed their welcome, but Guthrie called them bordercrossers, connecting them to a much larger social issue, undocumented immigration and the open contempt against them, which continues to this day. Here’s a cool YouTube video with a song version by Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son:

When I began to search more consciously for material, I kept going back to this song, haunted by the father’s gesture. I could not forget where I had come from. Yet somehow I couldn’t  quite get into the writing of it. For years I tried creating lives for the nameless, much like Guthrie gave life to the plane wreck, but it seemed wrong–these people had names already, but the world had refused to hear (or remember) them. I felt uncomfortable making a fiction of them. And then in 2008 I came across an article written by Chris Mahin, a historian and anti-war activist, on the 60th anniversary of the accident, and that motivated me further: I had to get this poem down on paper.

It came to me then: instead of writing about the spaces the workers inhabit, I would write about the spaces they vacate, leave empty, and are forced to occupy or abandon–the fields, the deportation bus, the detention center, the plane, the sky, the communal grave.

While I was working with these parameters, and the decision to use 9-line stanzas as the poem approached each place like the 12 stations of the cross (the poem comes to a close with 6 sections)–yes, all number divisible by the holy number 3–I stumbled upon another article that claimed to have located the names of all but one of the “deportees.” That gave me permission to construct, like Guthrie does in his song, a kind of roll call, in the last section of the poem:

Manuel Merino, Julio Barrón,
Severo, Elías, Manuel Calderón,
Francisco, Santiago, Jaime, Martín,
Lupe, Guadalupe, Tomás, Juan Ruiz,
Alberto, Ramón, Apolonio, Ramón,
Luis, Román, Luis, Salvador,
Ignacio Navarro, Jesús, Bernabé,
Rosalío Portillo, María, y José.
Y un Diportado No Identificado.

I was reminded of the precariousness of names, identities and even documents, when I had all of my papers stolen in Puerto Rico in January. All seemed fine until I had to board the plane back to JFK without ID. I had to be interviewed by an IVE–an identification verification expert–from the State Department. It was a stressful 45-minute process that took place after I signed a document that said I would be placed under arrest if I didn’t pass the test. Among the requests the IVE made was that I name one other person who was related to me, who shared my last name, who also lived in the U.S. (read: was in “the system”). I could not name any although I have dozens of relatives living in this country. Undocumented, they don’t have this incredible privilege that I have to hold my name up for everyone to see, to walk into an airport and voluntarily board a plane to wherever it is I want to go, want to be.

Guthrie’s song remains attractive to protest singers. I invite those interested to seek out the versions crooned by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and of course, by Dolly, the country sensation who first invited me not to forget where I had come from, long before my father’s advice, long before the photograph I keep mounted on my writing desk, right next to my computer.

Go to original article.

Rigoberto González is an acclaimed poet and author and professor of English at Rutgers University.

On the twenty-year anniversary of the L.A. riots,  and in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Williams, the country is revisiting its familiar demons of racial violence and police abuse of power. Now it’s time to broaden the dialogue on law enforcement and racial oppression to the border. Please view this video appeal from Presente.org, featuring footage from PBS Need to Know, and support the campaign calling for justice for Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas.

From Maria Puga, widow of Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas:

In 2010 near San Diego, Border Patrol beat and tasered my husband Anastasio while he was hogtied and face down on the pavement.  They tortured him to death, despite his repeated pleas for help.  

Over the last two years, Border Patrol has refused to release the names of the agents responsible or to reveal whether those involved have been disciplined. Anastasio was not their only victim. Since the year Anastasio was killed, Border Patrol agents have killed or seriously injured at least 9 people from San Diego to Texas.

My family is demanding that the Department of Justice conduct an open and thorough investigation of all the killings committed by the Border Patrol since 2010.  Will you join me in bringing justice to my family and the other families that have been victimized?

To learn more about this case, read and watch the story on PBS Need to Know.

While Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney attempts to distance himself from the scandalous fallout over the hijinks of his former Arizona co-chair Sheriff Paul Babeau, the tireless Citizens for a Better Arizona group created an ad to remind  TV viewers of this week’s Republican debate in Mesa about another disgraced law enforcement titan that needs to resign: Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The ad, scheduled for various TV outlets, pulls no punches:”He’s not tough. He’s terrible. He needs to resign.”

While Arpaio’s campaign stomp for Gov. Rick Perry’s disastrous campaign in New Hampshire brought more headlines than votes, Republican candidates like Rick Santorum still made courtesy calls this week, despite the mounting calls for the increasingly reckless Sheriff to hand in his badge.

Two months after the Department of Justice released its report that Arpaio’s Maricopa County Sheriff’s office led a “chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations” and carried out the “most egregious racial profiling in the United States,” the ad by the Citizens group, which led the successful recall of former Senate President Russell Pearce, comes as part of a growing bipartisan effort to hold the controversial sheriff accountable for gross mismanagement of his department, civil rights violations and the bungling of criminal investigations, including child sex crimes.

Along with the unanimous vote of the Phoenix Human Relations Commission, an unusually diverse and unprecedented number of Arizona state legislators, county supervisors, Phoenix-area city council members, school board members, religious leaders, and members of the U.S. Congress have joined numerous civil rights organizations calling for Arpaio’s immediate resignation.

“The issues we are focusing on are not partisan. We are talking about increases in violent crime, over 400 uninvestigated sex crimes and over $50 million in legal pay outs to settle hundreds of lawsuits — all of which occurred during Sheriff Arpaio’s reign of incompetence,” stated Mary Lou Boettcher, founder of the Mesa Women’s Republican Caucus and Board Member of CBA. “We believe it is important to inform and educate thousands of Republicans about Sheriff Arpaio’s dismal record when it comes to issues we care most about.”

Felipe Montes will be separated from his three U.S. citizen children unless we do something about it, now: http://Presente.org/FelipesChildren

An action launched on Valentine’s Day 2012 by Presente.org and the Applied Research Center is rallying public support to save a family scheduled to be torn apart by the Department of Social Services in Allegheny County, NC. On February 21, Felipe, husband to a US Citizen and father to three US Citizen children, will have his parental rights stripped away in court due to his deportation. The petition calls on the Allegheny County Department of Social Services to ensure that Felipe’s family is not permanently separated, but rather that they be reunified in the United States or Mexico.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Trying to please all at once and disappointing everyone, the White House has long played a game of good-cop-bad-cop on immigration, promising reforms while clinging to some of the cruelest deportation policies.

Meanwhile, President Obama’s delicate waltz around immigration highlights complex frictions within the labor movement on immigration policy—revealing contrasts between immigration enforcement employees and the AFL-CIO leadership.

Though the mainstream labor movement has not always placed itself at the forefront of immigrants’ struggles for equality, the AFL-CIO has recently spoken out in defense of undocumented workers and their communities. The AFl-CIO Executive Council has joined a chorus of groups opposing Secure Communities, a notorious Homeland Security program that promotes the sharing of information between local and federal law enforcement authorities about the legal status of immigrants arrested by local police.

The AFL-CIO stated that the program encourages racial profiling, and demanded that the White House “Immediately terminate the operation of Secure Communities” and bar it from jurisdictions known to practice “discriminatory policing.” The statement, signed by the AFL-CIO and National Immigration Forum, specifically cited Alabama’s brutal new anti-immigrant law, which is currently being challenged in court.

In the background lies the basic contradiction in Obama’s posturing on immigration. On one hand, the White House professes to be easing its approach, supposedly by focusing on deporting immigrants with criminal convictions. Recently the administration attempted to rein in the more extreme elements unleashed under its “enforcement-only” strategy. Responding to overwhelming evidence of discrimination and abuse, Washington recently cut off ties to the infamous Sherriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, whose virulent “lock’em up” campaigns against Latino immigrants were fed by Secure Communities and its sister enforcement program, 287(g), which encourages local-federal collaboration.

But Secure Communities remains a pillar of the immigration regime. Freshly leaked documents indicate that the administration considers S-Comm to be essentially “mandatory” in nature, despite widespread criticism from state and local governments as well as advocacy groups. There’s still controversy around whether localities can opt out of the program.

But labor is by no means of one mind on immigration policy. A recent New York Times article by Julia Preston suggests conflict inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as the National ICE Council, a union representing thousands of officers, has resisted participating in training for the reformed deportation policies:

in a new sign of the deep dissension over immigration, the union… has so far not allowed its members to participate in the training. Without the formal assent of the union, the administration’s strategy could be significantly slowed for months in labor negotiations.

Preston cites earlier congressional testimony by National ICE Council president Chris Crane, who bristled at the idea of softening deportation policies. Pivoting to anti-immigrant sentiments, Crane has also appeared on Fox News and the Lou Dobbs Show to contend that the administration’s policy shifts could prevent effective enforcement of the law.

Though the Council is affiliated with the AFL-CIO, it can take independent political positions, hence the contrast with the AFL-CIO’s stance on S-Comm.

However, Crane told In These Times in an email correspondence that the NYT’s report of “dissension” was inaccurate. The delay was not caused by the union and has nothing to do with the policy, Crane said, but rather, with inadequate transparency and cooperation:

There is no standoff. DHS and ICE spent an extended period of time unilaterally developing both the Prosecutorial Discretion Memorandum and the associated training instead of working in partnership with the Union to jointly create a training program that would now be ready for implementation.  Ultimately it is the Agency’s right to take that approach but it does dramatically slow down the process and forces the parties to follow the timelines of the negotiated agreement.

Crane acknowledged the union’s earlier criticisms of the administration’s deportation policies as poorly conceived and aimed at “satisfy[ing] immigrant advocacy groups.” But, he stressed, the current qualms were about the development process and quality of the training, not ideology.

Nonetheless, Crane argued, “Most of the policies put out by this Administration really are bad,” citing a lack of clarity around how much discretion agents could exercise when dealing with immigrants “in the field.” Although union members would seek to work with the administration to improve these practices, in Crane’s view, “ICE lacks effective leadership” under an “anti-union manager,” Director John Morton.

But from the perspective of immigrant rights’ advocates, the controversy around the training completely misses the point: the union conflict doesn’t really hinder a better deportation policy, and the supposed reforms do not truly improve the status quo. While ICE may be split internally on some issues, grassroots advocates for immigrant workers demand nothing short of a complete overhaul of the bureaucracy.

Laura Rivas of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights told In These Times she is less troubled by the ICE union’s political dilemma than by the social dilemma it represents:

While we understand the concerns of job security and having clarity of what the rules are, the bigger picture that we see is, here you have an entire sector, which they’re a part of, whose job security relies on the mass and unjust incarceration and deportation of innocent people, of people who have longstanding ties in the U.S., and who have been criminalized for the past [twenty-five] years now under really, really outdated policies. That’s really what’s happening here.

While NNIRR has partnered with unions on some immigant-justice campaigns, Rivas said the politics of coalition-building are generally driven by the perceived interests of union members.

Throughout American labor’s history, attitudes toward immigration have fractured and wavered according to political and economic trends and organizing strategy. The political evolution of labor movements have often reflected the massive presence of immigrants in the workforce and by extension unions. Foreign-born workers have been alternately embraced as fellow workers and demonized as job-stealers–and sometimes, when it comes to the law-enforcement business, treated as problems to be fixed.

Today, immigration enforcement supports a major industry and government sector. The bureaucracy in turn serves the larger enterprise of simultaneously excluding and exploiting undocumented workers. Similarly, the prison industry employs legions of working-class people, many with robust labor unions, yet feeds off the systematic incarceration of the poor and disenfranchised.

As long as the 99-percent are divided among the people doing the enforcing and the people getting getting enforced upon, this awkward balance will stay in place, teetering on the wall between those who comply and those who don’t.

Go to original article.

In the wake of a scathing federal report on Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Democracy Now! interviews Randy Parraz, president of Citizens for a Better Arizona, and Stephen Lemons, a Phoenix New Times reporter who has helped expose Arpaio’s abuses and antics. The recent Department of Justice report has highlighted many of the most egregious aspects of Sheriff Joe’s reign of terror, but, as Lemons points out, this is hardly news to people who have had to live under Maricopa’s twisted anti-immigrant tyranny for years.

Parraz tied together the various abuses of power that stem from Arpaio’s focus on humiliating and oppressing the Latino community. Not only did he turn his immigrant-bashing into a vehicle for absorbing federal money into his district; his fixation on enforcing immigration law came at the expense of other police work, including a massive accumulation of neglected sex crime cases.

These were victims as young as two years old, to young women and girls, were violated, were raped or molested, and those cases were not followed up. In some instances, they even had the name of the perpetrator. They just—cases were just not—were actually said to be cleared or were closed. And so, this was done. And then this is the type of—just of lack of accountability, lack of concern Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies have to those instances. One of the reasons we believe is that most of those victims were either undocumented or were for children of undocumented parents, so it was not a priority on there, in terms of the sheriff’s office. So, again, this is about misplaced priorities.

He said that while the Justice Department’s findings validate the evidence that many have observed for years, the actual impact of Washington’s position boils down to federal and local politics, where, unfortunately, xenophobia plays well:

[A]s far as the fallout from the Justice Department’s report… It validates a lot of what’s been said and already been reported. They use a lot of information that has already been in the press, that is familiar to people in Maricopa County, but perhaps not out of Maricopa County….

Arpaio loves this sort of thing. He loves going up against the Obama administration. He loves going up against the federal government. He uses these sorts of conflicts with the federal government to raise money for his campaign kitty, which at last count was about $3 million. He boasts he has over $6 million now in his campaign re-election fund. And as you’ve noted, he’s going to be running for re-election in 2012. This is also, unfortunately, very popular in Maricopa County, at least with a majority of the population who, you know, may have problems with some of what Arpaio does, his misspending of funds and so forth, but when it comes to discriminating against brown people, unfortunately, that is popular with some segments of Maricopa County.

Sadly, that attitude may also pervade many segments of the country as a whole, and the debate will only get uglier as the 2012 election approaches--thanks in no small part to President Obama’s utter failure to comprehensively address immigration reform. Despite the good-cop-bad-cop game that the feds are playing with Arpaio, Sheriff Joe is a mere caricature of a much larger monster, a phalanx of anti-immigrant hate that is of the White House’s own making.

At the invitation of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Manu Chao traveled to Arizona to witness the human rights crisis facing migrants there and to give a free “Alto Arizona” performance.

Film Director Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer) shot a short music video of Manu in front of the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Tent City jail before the show on September 21, 2011.

Shepard Fairey and Ernesto Yerena

The clock struck at 1,095 days and 11 hours today for Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Ariz. — or, at least according to the ticking icon on the Phoenix New Times home page that had asked readers for years: “How long has Sheriff Joe been under investigation by the feds?”

That investigation culminated Thursday when the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice released its long-awaited report, which found a “chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations” in Arpaio’s office. Drawing from tens of thousands of documents and over 400 interviews with sheriff’s department personnel, inmates and experts, the report documented “a widespread pattern or practice of law enforcement and jail activities that discriminate against Latinos,”  resulting in gross violations of  constitutional rights.

Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez threw down the gauntlet for Arpaio at Thursday’s press conference, giving him until Jan. 4, 2012,  to accept DOJ’s measures to take “clear steps toward reaching an agreement with the Division to correct these violations in the next 60 days,” or face a lawsuit.  Perez expressed DOJ’s willingness ”to roll up our sleeves and build a comprehensive blueprint for reform of MCSO,” adding, “if the will exists” on Arpaio’s end.

Irene Vasquez, Andrea Ortega, Jonathan Perez, and Isaac Barrera in Albuquerque. (Image: Chicano Hispano Mexicano Studies at UNM)

The Occupy movements mushrooming around the country have displayed the power of collective action when people organize and take to the streets. But alongside street protests, other more subtle uprisings are also exposing the hypocrisy of the political establishment from within. In Louisiana, undocumented youth have subjected themselves to the immigration gauntlet to expose struggles that countless immigrants face every day, trapped in a detention system that deprives them of basic due process rights. Their direct action coincided with the legal battle against draconian state laws that have emerged in recent months aiming to expand the profiling and detention of immigrants.

Their journey is documented on video by Arts of Aztlan.

On the xicana-ostudies blog of the Chicano Hispano Mexicano Studies program at the University of New Mexico, program director Irene Vásquez  and Levi Romero, New Mexico State Centennial Poet and Research Scholar, report on the youth’s experiences and their reflections on their ordeal:

‘Two undocumented student activists from California, Isaac Barrera, 20, and Jonathan Pérez, 24, took the journey of their lives and landed in a Louisiana detention facility to draw attention to the disparate treatment immigrants face in the United States.  The two undocumented human rights activists visited Albuquerque, New Mexico on their way back to California.  They attended the December 3, 2011, New Mexico Dreamers in Action State Congress.  Isaac and Jonathan shared with undocumented youth at the Congress the reasons why they took the risk of being placed in a Louisiana ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention facility.  On that same day, Isaac and Jonathan participated in interviews with Daniel Sonnis of Arts of Aztlan from Albuquerque, and Levi Romero and Irene Vásquez, faculty members in the Chicano Hispano Mexicano Studies at the University of New Mexico.

‘Isaac and Jonathan, human rights activists from California, joined hundreds of social activists and hundreds of caravans to Alabama in October and November 2011 to shine a spotlight on harsh immigration laws that threaten the human and civil rights of thousands of families and communities.  Unlike the thousands of immigrants held in ICE detention facilities, Jonathan and Isaac walked into their situation voluntarily.  On November 10, 2011, they entered a border patrol agency in Mobile, Alabama as part of a direct action to prove that immigrants are currently undergoing punitive treatment by ICE and state officials.  Border patrol agents placed Isaac and Jonathan in custody for not having identification or papers proving their legal residency or citizenship. 

While in the Louisiana detention facility, they spoke with other immigrants who had been forcibly detained and placed in the detention facility.  A common story shared with Isaac and Jonathan was that individuals were routinely pulled over for traffic violations and then forcibly incarcerated and detained for not having a driver’s license.  Immigrants then faced months of imprisonment without access to the outside world because they were not allowed to call their families or friends. When given the opportunity to communicate with family and friends, many detainees were unable to do so because they lacked the money needed to pay for the phone call. …

Isaac and Jonathan weren’t totally going it alone. Their actions were part of a broader direct action campaign, supported by NIYA (National Immigrant Youth Alliance) and DreamActivist California.  Though their willingness to be imprisoned may seem brazen, the youth said they understood that the impact of any civil disobedience tactic lies in its ability to reveal the moral bankruptcy of the status quo:

‘When asked by Romero and Vásquez, “What were you hoping to accomplish in Alabama?, Jonathan responded, “Our intention was to show what Obama’s [administration] had been doing,” in regards to knowingly detaining and deporting immigrants who have not committed crimes.   Jonathan said, “We want to challenge the system and policies like Secure Communities and 287G that are criminalizing immigrants.”  Isaac and Jonathan are part of the San Gabriel Dream Team that has been engaging in acts of civil disobedience directed at ICE.  Isaac stated that the San Gabriel Dream Team is focused on “empowering youth to get out and be active because when you challenge the system directly it falls apart.  You can see it with our action.  We challenged ICE directly and publically, and they didn’t want to put us in deportation proceedings.” …

‘In regards to the direct action, Jonathan said, “It’s been about escalation and so we wanted to take it to the next level and take it to Alabama where a very Draconian Anti-Immigrant law just passed and we wanted to, one, escalate there, but also to support the immigrant community there, empowering the undocumented youth there so they can begin organizing as well…”  Isaac and Jonathan were the only members of the group who were placed in detention.  Jonathan described “We went undercover and decided to pretend we were afraid, pretend we are not connected in anyway, and we walked into the border patrol office and started saying ‘we don’t agree with what you are doing, you are deporting people…”  He went on to explain , “this sets a precedent for more people to… begin organizing from within detention centers all over the United States, because we know that civil disobedience only takes you so far.” ‘

Yet after their experience, in many ways, Jonathan and Isaac felt fortunate for being able to avoid detention in their day-to-day lives, rooted in a supportive community and connected to family and loved ones. Perhaps the cruelest aspect of the detention system is that to the extent that immigrants have any control over their economic or legal fate, they’re forced to choose between their dreams of carving out a better life in this country, and the families they risked everything to support by crossing the border.  “This desire to talk to family, be close to relatives, or to help support family members or loved ones,” reflected Vásquez and Romero, “can push some immigrants who have been detained to voluntarily sign their own deportation orders.”

The kind of destruction of that the immigration system imposes goes much deeper than police aggression or incarceration; it rips apart the very fabric of communities. For students like Isaac and Jonathan, crossing the line into the detention system allowed them to reveal an often hidden world, and to take that insight out of the shadows and into the streets.