A Common Humanity: Ritual, Religion, and Immigrant Advocacy in Tucson, Arizona

Notes

191 Notes Chapter 1. Migrant Deaths and Immigrant Advocacy in Southern Arizona 1. The term “restrictionist” as applied here is common in academic literature on immigration; “expansionist” comes from Fry. For a comprehensive survey of radical nativist restrictionism in the United States, see Bennett, Party of Fear. 2. The term comes from the famous closing lines of the Emma Lazarus poem “New Colossus,” which adorns the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” 3. For a brief but suggestive discussion of this point, see Southwest folklorist James Griffith’s essay “Meeting la Corúa” in Beliefs and Holy Places. 4. In 2000, the US immigration commissioner, Doris Meissner, conceded, “We did believe that geography would be an ally to us. It was our sense that the number of people crossing the border through Arizona would go down to a trickle once people realized what (it’s) like” (qtd. in Borden). 5. The government’s fiscal year begins October 1. Thus, fiscal year 1998, for instance , runs from October 1, 1997, to September 30, 1998. Indications are that Border Patrol calculations undercount migrant deaths and the actual toll is much higher. The official counting method excludes many deaths because of where or how they occurred , and bodies found by other law enforcement agencies are tabulated only if Border Patrol representatives request such information. In fiscal year 2004, for example, the Border Patrol issued the official count of recovered bodies at 172, whereas county medical examiners in southern Arizona gave the total as 221 (Almond; LoMonaco, “Accuracy”; Turf). 6. Since the word “immigrants” literally means people who intend to live in their new country permanently, most members of the groups in this study prefer to say “migrants ,” which encompasses both those who stay and those who plan on returning to their homelands. Therefore, “transnational migrant advocacy” would be a more accurate label for the movement of which these groups are a part. However, I have chosen with some reluctance to use “immigrant advocacy,” since “immigration” is still 192 • Notes the most widely used term in the mass media and among the general public for the issues the groups address. My tendency throughout the book is to use “immigration” (and “immigrants”) to discuss the general phenomenon of human movement across borders and policy debate about it, but “migration” (and “migrants”) in the more narrow context of group operations. 7. The language of the law is as follows: (A) Any person who— (i) knowing that a person is an alien, brings to or attempts to bring to the United States in any manner whatsoever such person at a place other than a designated port of entry or place other than as designated by the Commissioner, regardless of whether such alien has received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States and regardless of any future official action which may be taken with respect to such alien; (ii) knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered or remains in the United States in violation of law, transports, or moves or attempts to transport or move such alien within the United States by means of transportation or otherwise, in furtherance of such violation of law; (iii) knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation; (iv) encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law; or (v) (I) engages in any conspiracy to commit any of the preceding acts, or (II) aids or abets the commission of any of the preceding acts, shall be punished as provided in subparagraph (B). 8. Sources identified by first name only are aliases for people interviewed under conditions of anonymity. Chapter 2. Political Imagination in the United States 1. For a more extended analysis of this archetype, see Eliade 29–58. 2. The phrase comes from the first charter of the Virginia Company, which was written to establish the Jamestown colony in...