Farther south, off East Avenue K and 20th Street East, in a sparkling new section of four-bedroom homes, an ice-cream truck with a USMC flag in its window cruises slowly past the fire station through wide new streets where homes were selling in the mid-$400,000s three years ago. No children come out to greet it.
Down around a turn, where the subdivision that American Premiere Homes advertises as Eastbrook Estates begins, the reception office is closed in the high light of a weekday. Attractive model homes—with names like Aspen Creek, Willow Edge, Cedar Brooke—are dressed up with low-water grass, three-car garages, high tan front doors, and Craftsman-style details. But they sit locked behind low black iron gates, like pageant contestants who have failed to place.
To the right the street disappears. There is no subdivision, just sidewalks cut to suggest where cars might go, and markings in the shifting sand that imply property boundaries. In the distance, a long cinderblock wall and the low line of roofs behind it mark the end of the development. There is only the bridled desert breeze and the wide insouciant sky, until a couple appears at the curve of the street.
Eileen and John Zanderzuk have ended up in Lancaster from stops in New York City and Pennsylvania and Simi Valley. They bought their home three blocks away on a shortsale, happy to secure an extra half-acre on which they could build a greenhouse for their bonsai business. “It’s quiet,” Eileen says. “We don’t feel lonely.”
“Are you from American Premiere?” she asks. “We never see anyone from there and lots of people ask us questions.”
The silent streets of Lancaster form an unlikely early-twenty-first-century counterpoint to the silent streets of the late-twentieth-century South Bronx. From the inner cities to the colorized suburbs, abandonment is a form of destruction, a willed blindness.
At this moment, on the other side of town, the California state prison—which dropped “Lancaster” and then “Antelope Valley” from its name to satisfy residents worried about the area’s reputation—is facing a court order to reduce its severe overcrowding. The prison holds five thousand mostly Latino and Black inmates, double its design capacity.9 Its health services are under severe strain. Even the state’s top prison administrator agrees that conditions are an unsafe embarrassment.10 He is campaigning to add even more prisons to the largest system in the nation with the largest system in the world.
Mira Loma Detention Center, with its nine hundred immigrant detainees, is still cooling off after April uprisings ended in a mass tear-gassing.11 Reports have not yet surfaced that a series of teenage riots at Challenger Memorial Youth Center kept the facility in lockdown for most of December 2007.12 The Department of Justice is investigating mistreatment of students there, the Los Angeles Probation Commission will soon issue a report calling its educational facilities “broken,” and the ACLU will file a complaint arguing that Challenger is denying basic educational opportunities and due process to its youths.13
A year later, as the Tea Party and its movement for “limited government and free markets” is roaring to life, Kenneth E. Hartman, a prisoner convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole in the California State Prison, writes in a piece for the New York Times,
From the four-inch-wide window in the back of my cell, I watched, for seven years, the construction of a housing tract across the street—a subdivision we call Prison View Estates. We marvel at the hubris of building chockablock stucco mini-mansions within shouting distance of a maximum-security prison. Today, a year after the gaudy balloons from the grand opening deflated, the row of houses directly across from my window looks to be unoccupied.14
II
Tucson. Almost noon in the desert sun.
They are running. But it feels like—perhaps for the first time—they are not running from something, but toward something. Voice. Control. The future. With one hand, they press their mortarboards to their heads as they dash for the door. The satin folds of their blue graduation gowns billow and catch the light. They shine.
Lizbeth still has a pancake in her other hand. Yahaira had warned her, You’d better eat before this all starts. Now Lizbeth’s going, What do I do with this pancake? They’re yelling back, half-annoyed and half-amused, Just throw it on the fucking ground!
Their hearts are speeding. Adam—a Japanese American ally, the only one not in a cap and gown—buzzes the intercom with a perfect ruse: an appointment for a legislative internship. It all might have become a set of likable Facebook posts—mortarboards, graduation gowns, an uneaten pancake, punking a powerful senator.
If time was something they still had. “Status update” has added meaning to those without nine-digit numbers, those who are undocumented. At this moment there are 11.5 million of them—invisible Americans, part of a global population derisively called “illegal,” which really means “condemned by others to live as less than human.”
Laws are constructs. Laws can be changed. So they have put their hopes into one called the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act—the DREAM Act—introduced in 2001 by Senators Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and reintroduced in every session of Congress since. The bill would allow undocumented youths who had met certain requirements—they had arrived as minors, lived in the United States for at least five years, and completed two years in the military or college—to apply for citizenship. It will not take care of all the 11.5 million, but as Yahaira tells people, It will allow many of us to move forward with our futures and fulfill the dreams we have of bettering our communities and fully integrating as the Americans we are.
Change happens in expressions of unrest and risk, in explosions of mass creativity. For over a decade the undocumented youth movement has been growing. But until now the activists have not put their American lives on the line, gambling on permanent exile from their communities, their homes. But they have pled. They will no longer plead. They have waited. They can no longer wait.
Adam speaks into the intercom. The door clicks, then it gives. He holds it for them. Each takes a breath and files in. Yahaira Carrillo, 25, Kansas City. Tania Unzueta Carrasco, 26, Chicago. Lizbeth Mateo, 25, Los Angeles. Mohammad Abdollahi, 24, Ann Arbor. There is also a documented ally from Tucson, Raul Al-qaraz Ochoa.
They do not all remember the details of what they said at the beginning. Only that it has begun. That they are there and they are not leaving until Senator McCain supports the DREAM Act. They sit on the floor of the reception area.
It is May 17, 2010, the forty-sixth anniversary of the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The energies of the state once directed toward ending racial segregation are now being marshaled to crack down on immigrants. In fewer than two years, President Obama has deported over a million of them—he has become the fastest deporter-in-chief in U.S. history.15 His clampdown is broad, indiscriminate, and brutal. Thousands of children have been separated from their parents.16 Thousands of citizens and legal residents have been detained and some deported, too.17
Immigration policy is now largely about enforcement and punishment—saturation border policing, high-volume capture, and processing efficiency. The forces of—oxymoron alert—government innovation once focused on putting a man on the moon now serve the goal of updating the formal status of large numbers of people from “illegal” to “removed” in as little time as possible.
But little is being exerted to cut the red tape an immigrant faces in applying for naturalization. “People ask me, ‘Why don’t you just go through the process?’” says the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and undocumented immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas. “They don’t understand. There is no process, not any rational one.” The waiting line for some Filipinos to receive a family visa stretches back a quarter of a century. For a Mexican petitioning to be reunited with a citizen who is a sibling, the wait is 164 years.18
This summer will be scorching. Governor Jan Brewer has just signed HB 2282, banning ethnic studies. The legislature has passed SB 1070 and she vows to sign that as w
ell. The week before, the young protestors had been young lobbyists in Washington, DC, asking senators to move the DREAM Act, telling them that right after their meetings they would be flying to Arizona, the most hostile state in which to be an immigrant in America, to raise the stakes around this debate. Nobody believed them then.
Conformity, their leaders had long told them, was the only way to pass the camel of a reform bill through the eye of the congressional needle. Don’t be too radical, too queer, too loud, they warned. Don’t stray off message. But that strategy had failed.
In 2007, millions around the country had rallied for the second year in a row to demand immigration reform. Immigrant stories had moved Congress to take up a bill. But both the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act and the DREAM Act went down in legislative flames. By 2010, formalist language had eclipsed human narrative, and the debate had been effectively reduced to two words. “Legal” was one. The other had been mainstreamed in the racist question—what part of “illegal” don’t you understand?
Turning toward civil disobedience in Arizona, the DREAM activists agree, raises questions of access to education and calls attention to Senator McCain’s flip-flops on immigration. But it might also force open the question of what it means to be visible, mobile, and whole in a world defined by flows of capital and bodies. More to the point, what other choice do they have but to fight?
The sociologist Robert S. Gonzales describes how the lives of undocumented youths depart from their peers. By their teens, undocumented immigrants are being diverted toward a grimmer future. Between sixteen and eighteen years old, they go through a “discovery” phase in which they become aware of their status. From eighteen to twenty-four, they see their opportunities dissolving before their very eyes. They cannot vote. They cannot secure financial aid. Getting a driver’s license or a job is complicated. They “learn to be illegal.” And as their peers transition into full adulthood in their late twenties, they resign themselves to an existential state of “coping.”19
“My life has been on pause, rewind, or replay for years,” Yahaira writes in a letter to President Barack Obama during the summer of 2010. “Waiting is not an option.”20
Tania was one of the earliest poster-children for the DREAM Act. The daughter of community organizers, she arrived in Chicago at ten. At Lincoln Park High, she was captain of the swim team, a star student, and an acknowledged leader. When one of her friends was unfairly arrested outside of school, she organized classmates to challenge police brutality and school militarization.
But as she approached her high school graduation in 2001, she began to understand what it meant not to have papers. First her mother had told her she could not go to France with her classmates: “I don’t know that you can come back if you go.” Tania thought her mother was simply being overprotective. But in time she saw that her status was separating her from her peers. “I didn’t want to be different,” Tania said. “I didn’t want them to think that I had special needs of any kind. I just wanted to be ‘normal.’”
But she would not be able to attend any of the colleges of her choice unless she applied as an international student, which seemed absurd. She accepted a scholarship to a private college conditional upon securing a Mexican student visa. In the summer after graduation, she left for Mexico, angry and frustrated, to try to get one. But officials confiscated her passport and told her that her parents owed American taxes as illegal immigrants. At eighteen, she was suddenly stateless.
Her case came to the attention of Illinois senator Richard Durbin, who had recently introduced the first version of the DREAM Act. Reporters came calling. In one of those articles, Tania read that at least 65,000 other undocumented students graduated in the United States each year. She began to feel like she wasn’t alone.
Repatriated to Chicago under a one-year grant of humanitarian parole, Tania was slated to be Durbin’s star witness at a hearing for the DREAM Act. “I had my plane ticket for September 11, 2001,” she said. The hearing was canceled. “And the government’s response was to turn everything around immigration into a conversation of national security and terrorism.”21
Her scholarship fell through, her parole lapsed, and she was once again undocumented. After 9/11, she enrolled at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a school that allowed her to pay resident tuition. She found an outlet for her activism among LGBT students and at a bilingual community radio station, Radio Arte. She came out, and she began reading Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Harvey Milk. She recalled, “I remember highlighting so much stuff—like, this is exactly how it feels to be undocumented.”
Radio Arte’s philosophy was to explore the power of narratives from the unheard. As an announcer and a production workshop leader, she said, “I really tried to push that, to tell people, ‘Your story is important.’ And we started talking about immigration a lot in class, and queer stuff.”
Soon Tania realized that half of the students in her Radio Arte classes were, in official parlance, “out of status.” One day, a student came into the office wanting to talk to Tania about a dream she had the previous night. There had been an immigration raid at the radio station, and they all needed to run somewhere. They stuffed themselves into a closet in Tania’s office and waited fearfully. The student had described a nightmare that felt all too real to many of the Radio Arte youths.
In early 2009, Rigo Padilla, a soft-spoken male student, told Tania after class, “I have my own story.” He pulled up a jean leg and showed her his ankle bracelet monitor. The twenty-one year old had been watching a football game with friends, and had downed a few beers. Driving home, he rolled through a stop sign and was pulled over. He was charged with misdemeanor drunken driving. When police learned he had no driver’s license, they turned him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. He was convicted and placed into deportation proceedings. A judge ordered him to return to Mexico by December 16, a country he had left at age six.
With a new name—the Immigration Youth Justice League—and nothing else but Rigo’s story, they began to build a campaign. But although Rigo had been an honors student with a spotless record before the arrest, many immigration reform activists refused to support his case. To them, his drunken driving conviction put him in the same category as the criminals President Obama wanted to deport—he was no longer a “good DREAMer,” but the picture of a “bad illegal.”
Undocumented Radio Arte staffer and IYJL organizer Reyna Wences argued, “What happened to Rigo could happen to me if I made a mistake, if I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.” This argument convinced a broad coalition—including mainline immigration organizations, the Chicago City Council, and Representative Jan Schakowsky—to support his bid to vacate his removal order. In December 2009, the Obama administration granted a one-year reprieve to Rigo. They had won with the power of a single story, and now they could turn to transforming the national undocumented movement.
The national failures of 2007 had spurred more intense national organizing among the DREAMers. In December of that year, Mohammad Abdollahi, Maria Marroquin, Juan Escalante, and Prerna Lal launched the Web site DREAMActivist.org where undocumented youths met, collaborated, shared information, and collected stories. United We Dream—a national confederation of organizations—began convening thousands of youths for trainings, and cultural and political campaign planning.
Together the two organizations launched the Education Not Deportation (END) initiative to rally support for people in deportation proceedings. They also sponsored annual DREAM Graduations, media events that highlighted that hinge moment where undocumented youths’ futures departed from their peers. From 2007—when German-born Tam Tran, Costa Rica–born Marie Gonzalez, and Zambia-born Martine Kalaw headlined a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on undocumented students—to the start of 2010, the national youth underground had molded itself into a story machine.
On New Year’s Day, four undocumented youths—Gaby Pacheco, Felipe Matos, Carlos Roa, and Juan
Rodriguez—began walking 1,500 miles from Miami to Washington, DC, to call for immigration reform, naming their journey the Trail of DREAMs. As they marched through the South they summoned images of the civil rights movement. In Greensboro, North Carolina, they met with veterans of the lunch counter sit-ins. In Nahunta, Georgia, they confronted a Ku Klux Klan counterdemonstration.
In Chicago, the IYJL organizers had discovered a collective identity, and through that, a way forward. “We realized it had been really empowering to be in a room where other people had said that they were undocumented,” recalled Tania. They could also see how their vision might be informed not only by civil rights and immigrant rights history, but by the history of the gay liberation movement.
Rigo asked the group, “Doesn’t the LGBT community have a ‘coming out’ thing? What if we were to have a coming out day for undocumented people?” This idea excited the group. Someone asked, “Gay people come out of the closet. But what do undocumented people come out of?” The answer was clear: the shadows. Not long after the Trail of DREAMs began, IJYL held its first Coming Out of the Shadows event at the Radio Arte building.
Inspired, Tania and Reyna made a presentation in February to United We Dream’s national convening of organizers. They said they wanted to do an action in Chicago’s Federal Plaza, in front of Senator Durbin’s office, across the street from ICE offices—they would loudly announce their status within shouting distance of Immigration officers. They encouraged others to do the same; it could be called “National Coming Out of the Shadows Day.” Yahaira recalled the shockwaves the idea sent through the room: “Half of us panicked and half of us were like, ‘Yes! That’s awesome!’”
Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659) Page 40