Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship

Part II : Ambivalent Allies, Reluctant Rivals, and Disavowed Deviants

139 Part II Ambivalent Allies, Reluctant Rivals, and Disavowed Deviants As a political movement, immigrant rights necessarily involve coalition building. Just as immigration policy has often created odd categories to describe people—for example, the “Asian barred zone” operative throughout most of the twentieth century, which mapped the undesirability of all “Asian” people, from East Asia to Afghanistan —people from different places, living in different regions, with different languages and access to resources reach across what divides them to advocate for more just treatment of all people called “immigrants.” While most of the articles in this collection deal with questions of alliance in some way, the articles in this section are particularly concerned with the ways that immigrants forge connections to one another, across what divides them. In chapter 5, ethnic studies scholar Dustin Tahmakera illuminates the ways in which nineteenth-century ideas about the racial inferiority of indigenous peoples came to be used to delimit the legal rights of Chinese immigrants on the West Coast. He traces the progress of the ideas expressed 140 part ii in one decision, People v. Hall (1854), in which the Supreme Court ruled that the testimony of indigenous people could not be heard in court. Tahmakera ’s insistence that immigrants and indigenous peoples share historical and contemporary cause is amply demonstrated by the provisions in the Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill passed by the Senate in April 2006 that could abridge tribal sovereignty on reservation land along the U.S.-Mexico border to enable the militarized presence of Homeland Security . The text of People v. Hall follows the article. Writing from the Africana Cultures and Policy Studies Institute (ACPSI), historians Zachery Williams, Robert Samuel Smith, and Seneca Vaught, with literary critic Babacar M’Baye, make the crucial observation in chapter 6 that African peoples were early, though unwilling, immigrants to the Americas. Regulation of the slave trade, for these scholars, constituted immigration policy long before the writing of federal documents delimited certain nonnative peoples as “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” The first Black immigrants, then, were slaves. From this standpoint, these writers examine the experiences of African Americans with subsequent cohorts of Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, arguing that each group is compelled by the ongoing necessity of the struggle for civil rights. In chapter 7, media studies scholar Isabel Molina examines the Elián Gonzalez incident of 1999. Usually, she explains, the particular stories of women and children immigrants are overshadowed by mass media attention to either family unification, or presumptively male, solitary immigration . But in the case of Elián Gonzalez, Molina argues, the U.S. mass media and the Cuban exile community competed to interpret this light-skinned child as either a motherless refugee from a ruthless dictatorship or a lost son to be returned to his father in Cuba. This competition, in turn, she argues, led to a change in the ways Cubans in the United States are represented as citizens, exiles, and refugees. Interdisciplinary scholar Lisa Marie Cacho’s powerful essay, chapter 8, from which the title of Part II is drawn, brings the section to a close. Focusing on media coverage of conflict between Blacks and Latino/as over the issue of immigrant rights, Cacho argues that advocates for both groups have often been pressured to assert their normalcy. In particular, she argues , immigrant and civil rights groups have responded to the criminalization of Blacks and Latino/as by emphasizing law-abiding, heterosexual Ambivalent Allies, Reluctant Rivals, and Disavowed Deviants 141 and nuclear family-oriented identities, to the exclusion of alternative family formations and the realities of “illegal” immigration. Cacho’s essay explores the complexities of coalition building, and the ways that the politics of alliance are often impeded by the cultural politics of mass media. ...