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3 HOMES, BORDERS, AND POSSIBILITIES Yen Le Espiritu When people come together voluntarily to create their own vision, they begin wishing it to come into being with such passion that they begin creating an active path leading to it from the present. —GRACE LEE BOGGS, LIVING FOR CHANGE Through my education in Ethnic Studies, I just became really empowered. I gained the knowledge. And through educational discussions and events organized by the League of Filipino Students (in L.A.) I became informed about the oppressive economic, social, and political situations occurring in the Philippines. . . . I gained the tools to really understand the world around me and to make sense of everything. And then it came to that point where I . . . wanted to apply [these tools]. For me, to do that, I felt that I needed to go back to the Philippines and participate in the liberation struggles there. —MELANY DE LA CRUZ, SECOND-GENERATION FILIPINA Home making is really border making: it is about deciding who is in as well as who is out. I began this project on Filipino Americans in San Diego at the border—the U.S.-Mexico border.1 Since the mid-1970s, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border region has intensified. From San Diego to the Rio Grande Valley, armed U.S. federal agents patrol key border points to block “illegal” crossers—to keep “them” from invading “our” homes.2 Since 1994, “Operation Gatekeeper,” a highprofile blockade-style operation, has turned the San Diego–Tijuana border region into a war zone, pushing immigrants to attempt more treacherous crossings in the forbidding mountains and deserts east of San Diego. Since Gatekeeper’s launch, an average of ninety immigrants have died per year; the most common killers are mountain cold, desert heat, and canal drownings and falls.3 Anti-immigrant practices targeted virtually all people of “Mexican appearance”; many of my Latino students , colleagues, and friends angrily reported being stopped, harassed, and humiliated as they crossed the border. The political furor over undocumented immigration reached its nadir in 1994 when nearly 60 percent of the California 604 Y E N L E E S P I R I T U electorate voted in favor of Proposition 187, a measure designed to deny almost all publicly funded social services, including education and health care, to undocumented immigrants and their children. The public relations campaign on behalf of Proposition 187 expressly targeted immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, blaming them for many of California’s social, moral, and economic ills and demonizing them as “reproductive, parasitic, benefit-taking, overrunningthe -nation villains.”4 As I watched this spectacle of border making, I was reminded of my own bordercrossing experience. In 1975, when tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees, including my own family, arrived in the United States, the majority of Americans did not welcome us. A Harris poll taken in May 1975 indicated that more than 50 percent of the American public felt that Southeast Asian refugees should be excluded; only 26 percent favored their entry. Many seemed to share Congressman Burt Talcott’s conclusion that, “Damn it, we have too many Orientals.”5 Five years later, public opinion toward the refugees had not changed. A 1980 poll of American attitudes in nine cities revealed that nearly half of those surveyed believed that the Southeast Asian refugees should have settled in other Asian countries.6 This poll also found that more than 77 percent of the respondents would disapprove of the marriage of a Southeast Asian refugee into their family and 65 percent would not be willing to have a refugee as a guest in their home.7 Anti-Southeast Asian sentiment also took violent turns. Refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in many parts of the United States have been attacked and even killed; and their properties have been vandalized, firebombed, or burned.8 The antirefugee rhetoric was similar to that directed against Latino immigrants: Southeast Asians were morally, culturally, and economically deficient—an invading multitude, unwanted and undeserving. The rhetoric that demonizes anti-Latino and anti-Asian immigrants is disturbing not only for what it says, but more so for what it does not say. By portraying immigration to the United States as a matter of desperate individuals seeking opportunities, it completely disregards the aggressive roles that the U.S. government and U.S. corporations have played—through colonialism, imperialist wars and occupations, capital investment and material extraction in Third World countries and through active...

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