Against the backdrop of these wars George W. Bush officially outlawed domestic racial profiling. But he made a gaping exception for the broad purposes of fighting terrorism. Hate crimes against brown immigrants of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian backgrounds soared—over two thousand were reported in the five months after 9/11 alone. Mass roundups, secret detentions, and deportations began, sometimes depopulating entire neighborhoods of immigrants. “Everybody was seen like suspects,” Pakistani American journalist Mohsin Zaheer told Tram Nguyen.4
The new homeland security complex sprawled. To the vast criminal databases that had been created for the purposes of containing urban youths of color were now added immigrant and refugee shopkeepers, seamstresses, students, and laborers. All could now be suspects, Nguyen wrote, labeled alongside gang members, drug and human smugglers, and actual terrorists as “clandestine transnational actors.”5 To the state the main thing immigrants shared with criminals was the quality of being otherwise unseen.
WHO ARE WE, REVISITED
In 2004, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published his last book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. He had become famous for a previous book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, in which he argued that the world’s coming conflicts would best be understood as a battle between Western and Islamic cultures. In Who Are We? he brought the clash of civilizations home. At stake now, he argued, was nothing less than national identity.
Huntington’s work echoed the work of an early-twentieth-century Harvard-trained historian named Lothrop Stoddard who had published a bluntly titled and widely read book called The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy. Stoddard’s book had included color-coded maps revealing that, everywhere, colored men were closing in on the white homelands of the West. “Colored migration,” Stoddard wrote, “is a universal peril, menacing every part of the white world.”6
Stoddard himself was elaborating an anxiety that President Theodore Roosevelt, former imperialist Rough Rider and Melting Pot playwright Israel Zangwill’s most famous fan, had first made a national obsession—that declining white women’s fertility rates would lead to what he called “race suicide.” A century later, Huntington and his media counterpart Pat Buchanan were reviving parts of this strange thesis. The other side of imperialist nostalgia was Darwinian eclipse.
Huntington argued that the rise of Mexican Americans—who, through immigration and high fertility, were “establishing beachheads” across the Southwest—threatened to unravel a core national culture rooted in Christianity, Protestant values, the English language, British government, and European art and humanities. Huntington bemoaned the intergenerational retention of Spanish, which he saw as a refusal to assimilate. No matter that the overwhelming evidence pointed to immigrants’ widespread adaptation of English. The mere prospect of bilingualism and biculturalism was threat enough.
Huntington was annoyed that Mexican Americans chose to “celebrate their Hispanic and Mexican past.” It reflected that they were “contemptuous of American culture.”7 Most stunningly he misread a 1992 survey that had asked first- and second-generation Mexican American children what they called themselves. With alarm, he noted that most did not choose “American.”
Huntington was probably unfamiliar with the work of his Harvard colleague Mahzarin R. Banaji, whose study with Thierry Devos on implicit bias and racial stereotype among young people was published several months after Who Are We? Banaji and Devos found that youths of all backgrounds tended to identify “American” as “white.”8 Yet to Huntington here was another sign pointing toward the potential rise of a Mexican-dominated breakaway state. In a line that would be quoted by white racialists for years to come, Huntington wrote, “Demographically, socially, and culturally, the reconquista (reconquest) of the Southwest United States by Mexican immigrants is well underway.”
To Huntington, culture war was eternal. “No other immigrant group in U.S. history has asserted or could assert a historical claim to U.S. territory,” he wrote in an article, evoking nothing less than the Alamo. “Mexicans do not forget these events. Quite understandably, they feel they have special rights in these territories.” If the United States was not careful, he warned, it could end up like, God help us, Miami, where, he wrote, “the Anglos came to realize … ‘My God, this is what it’s like to be in the minority.’”9
Huntington’s book, Menand wrote, was “about as blunt a work of identity politics as you are likely to find.”10
A LOST AND DYING WORLD
These politics began at the intersection of race and generation, where looming minoritization appeared like the specter of defeat. The scholar H. Samy Alim had a term for this paranoid state of mind: “demographobia,” which he defined as “the irrational fear of changing demographics.” He added, “It is also apparently the only consistent aspect of Republican ideology.”
Non-white births in the United States would soon exceed white births.11 Yet the most politically influential American demographic, the post–World War II generation known as the Baby Boom, remained four-fifths white. Demographer William Frey named the divide “the cultural generation gap.”
The cultural and political implications were huge. Political scientist Ron Brownstein wrote, “Over time, the major focus in this struggle is likely to be the tension between an aging white population that appears increasingly resistant to taxes and dubious of public spending, and a minority population that overwhelmingly views government education, health, and social-welfare programs as the best ladder of opportunity for its children.”12
Frey measured the cultural generation gap by simply subtracting the proportion of white children in a state from the proportion of white seniors. In Arizona, the state with the widest gap, 83 percent of seniors were white and only 43 percent of children were. The next five gap states were Nevada (34% gap), California (33%), Texas (32%), New Mexico (31%), and Florida (29%). For close watchers on the left and right, all of these states were like barometers in tornado season.
For a quarter-century, California had been the bleeding edge of the cultural generation gap. The 1978 passage of Proposition 13—ten years after the triumph of Nixon’s Southern strategy and two before the Reagan Revolution—defined cultural generation gap politics. This anti–property tax initiative effectively revoked the Golden State’s expansive postwar social contract, an act of civic white flight.
Next, the culture wars moved to California’s rapidly browning universities. In the 1990s they climaxed with the passage of ballot initiatives that banned affirmative action, bilingual education, and social services to undocumented immigrants, while fueling massive prison expansion. During these years, when a politics of abandonment were transforming into a politics of containment, there had been irrational exuberance among the state’s Republicans. Party leaders often spoke of creating a permanent majority.
But by the new millennium, California had gone blue. Before most of the other gap states, its population of voting-age people of color had reached critical mass. The ongoing backlash drove them to the polls and helped forge a new cultural consensus with young and middle-class white voters, defined by technology, urbanism, and diversity, and leaning left.
In other states, politicos continued to exploit the cultural generation gap the way that Lee Atwater and the right had exploited Willie Horton. In the spring of 2010 the Republican-dominated Texas Board of Education voted to revise history, government, and economics textbooks for its five million students, 60 percent of whom were now of color. Two decades before, a multiculturalist challenge to California’s history standards had influenced textbook writing and adoptions nationally. The Texas board was attempting a kind of restoration.
In the new textbooks, Moses would be credited with influencing the Founding Fathers. Slavery would be downplayed. Confederate leaders would be more closely studied. The Seneca Falls Convention that had inspired the women’s suffrage movement and a court decision that barred
segregation of Mexican American students in Texas public schools would be erased. Accounts of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence were required to be “balanced” by accounts of the Black Panther Party’s stand on revolutionary violence. Latina board member Mary Helen Berlanga dryly noted that the board had not voted to require discussions of the Ku Klux Klan or the U.S. Army’s role in the Indian Wars.
The main thrust of the revisions was to emphasize a “biblical worldview.” Conservative board member Cynthia Dunbar had laid out the guiding vision of restoration that would be adopted by the board. “We as a nation,” she had written in a 2008 book One Nation Under God, “were intended by God to be a light set on a hill to serve as a beacon of hope and Christian charity to a lost and dying world.”13
NATION AS BORDERLAND
In Arizona, the cultural generation gap between white elderly and browning young post-boomers yawned the widest. The state seemed due for a Huntingtonian reckoning.
Self-styled “Minutemen”—often elderly snowbird couples in floppy sunhats and angry middle-aged survivalists in surplus-store camo, loaded with water bottles, suntan lotion, and armed to the teeth, gathered themselves in the high desert to defend their border. Day after day they sat forlornly in pickup truck beds and picnic chairs, looking through their binoculars at empty scrubland to detect something, anything to confirm that their country was being overrun. They looked in vain.
The real problem was in Phoenix, at the capital. For decades, huge government subsidies and unsustainable development-fueled growth had made Arizona a boom state. But the state of Barry Goldwater and John McCain had also long been an anti-tax, small-government state. By 2010, the real-estate collapse and the state’s slash-and-burn austerity plunged it further and faster than the rest. Educational spending was slashed. Quality of life plunged. It joined Mississippi as the poorest in the nation. As longtime observer of state politics Jeff Biggers put it in his book, State Out of the Union, Arizona was a “failed state.”
Enter a backbench Republican governor named Jan Brewer—who had been known largely for a blundering campaign to jail record-store owners for selling “obscene” rap and rock albums, and who, by virtue of being the secretary of state at the right time, had become governor when Democrat Janet Napolitano became President Obama’s director of Homeland Security.
In early 2010, Brewer found herself in a three-way dead heat in her upcoming primary. Then a white borderland rancher named Robert Krentz saw a person on his land whom he thought was a crossing immigrant in need of aid. He radioed his brother and went to see about the person. He never came back. He was found in his truck, shot to death. The murderer was never found.
In an anguished statement Krentz’s family called on the president to deploy military to the border to protect U.S. citizens from the drug cartel wars in Mexico. But though authorities believed the killer was likely a drug smuggler, Brewer quickly reframed the issue of border violence as an immigration issue.14
For years Arizona Tea Party head Russell Pearce had been floating a bill written for him by representatives of the conservative business lobbying group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The bill required anyone merely suspected of being an undocumented immigrant to produce papers proving their citizenship. It authorized state police to make warrantless arrests of anyone believed to be an undocumented immigrant. It criminalized undocumented immigrants looking for work. It all but legalized racial profiling and family separation. This so-called Show Me Your Papers bill was so extreme it had never gained traction. But after Krentz’s death Jan Brewer went all-in on Pearce’s bill, now called SB 1070.
In the mid-1960s, Barry Goldwater had cited states’ rights to oppose federal troop deployment to the South to enforce desegregation plans. Now drawing on the Krentz family’s call for troops on the border, Brewer not only decried President Obama’s federal inaction around border security, she cited it to justify Arizona’s right to supersede national law. The politics of the Southern strategy had been finally vacated of logic, leaving only ideology and fear.
“It started to dawn on me that this president and his liberal allies in Congress don’t really understand what America is all about and what our fundamental principles are,” Brewer would write. “It was then I knew that we were in a war.”15
Her press statements shifted from the details of economic anguish and budget cuts to body counts and faceless hordes—allegedly beheaded white ranchers whose bones were bleaching in the heat, “illegal trespassers” who were mostly “drug mules,” a full-scale invasion that amounted to unceasing “terrorist attacks.” The images were apocalyptic and Stoddard-worthy. When she signed SB 1070 into law on April 23, 2010, she became a national figure. In November she was elected by a landslide to serve her first full term.
But Brewer’s war—and her subsequent political success—had been secured only by fabricated images of terror. A Department of Homeland Security report found that the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States had actually dropped from a peak in 2007 from 11.8 million to 10.8 million.16 The sheriff of the county in which Krentz had died said he had not seen any increase in desert killings, or any headless bodies, for that matter. Even the issue of border violence had been overplayed. The Arizona Republic’s Dennis Wagner found that crime had been flat in the county for a decade, and, even at the peak, undocumented immigrants had only ever been implicated in 4 percent of violent crimes.
Wagner wrote, “In fact, according to the Border Patrol, Krentz is the only American murdered by a suspected illegal immigrant in at least a decade within the agency’s Tucson sector, the busiest smuggling route among the Border Patrol’s nine coverage regions along the U.S.-Mexico border.” The crisis, journalist Jeff Biggers said, had been manufactured, nationally and locally.
“This is a media-created event,” Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik told Wagner. “I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure.”17
Long before Brewer declared war on immigrants, right-wingers and prison companies had seen a post-9/11 growth opportunity. As immigration policies effectively became antiterrorism policies, the prison-industrial complex and the national security complex merged into a vast homeland security complex. In 1994, there were 5,000 immigration detention beds nationally. By 2011, the year the anti-immigrant business went vertical, there were 40,000.18 Nearly 400,000 immigrants were deported, a record number.19 Immigrant detention reached record costs, milking taxpayers of $1.8 billion a year.20
By 2010, there were ten Border Patrol agents for every border mile between Arizona and Sonora. Over half of all federal prosecutions were immigration-related, more cases than the FBI, DEA, and ATF combined.21 In 2012, the United States spent $18 billion on immigration enforcement, about $4 billion more than the total spent on criminal enforcement.22 Immigration was the primary feeder for the federal prison-industrial complex, and the main engine of the federal justice system itself.
Private prison companies had bankrolled ALEC, Brewer, Pearce, and most of SB 1070’s sponsors. Ideologues, incarceration companies, and their lobbyists all knew the real question was not whether the feds had ignored immigration. It was: How could corporations and failing states like Arizona get in on some of the action?
OF BOOKS AND BARS
Arizona, as Democratic congressman Raúl Grijalva put it, was becoming “a petri dish” for an anti-immigrant, anti-youth experiment. Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio had turned his jail into a “Tent City” of petty criminals and undocumented immigrants, filling it through workplace raids conducted by a posse of thousands of deputized volunteer vigilantes whom he would outfit with assault weapons. Other bills that the far right had tried to advance for years were dusted off, including proposals to curtail immigrant rights cannibalized from California’s Proposition 187, which had been ruled unconstitutional by that state’s Supreme Court.
In the renewed culture wars there
was again a close link between containing bodies and containing ideas. “How long will it be before we will be just like Mexico?” Russell Pearce had written in the lead-up to the vote on SB 1070. “We have already lost our history since it is no longer taught in our schools.”
Two weeks after Brewer signed SB 1070, she signed HB 2281, a bill meant to eliminate Tucson Unified School District’s vital Mexican American Studies program. In a district in which almost one in three of every students was Mexican American, the program had a record of excellent curricular design and student performance. On average, the 6,000 students served by the program—over one in ten were not Latino—scored higher on achievement tests and graduated at higher rates than their counterparts.23
But under the guise of having students “be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people,” HB 2281 gave the state board of education or the superintendent broad powers to shut down Ethnic Studies and other such courses. State politicians, with the backing of conservative judges, soon forced Mexican American Studies into dissolution and fired nationally recognized, award-winning teachers.
The school district removed hundreds of books from the shelves, including Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory, Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Elizabeth Martinez’s 500 Years of Chicano History: In Pictures. Literature teacher Curtis Acosta, who taught Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was told by officials not to teach the book any longer. One saddened TUSD board member, Adelita Grijalva, told Biggers, “We’re banning books in this district, not even anything controversial. We’re banning pictures.”24
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