Only a quarter of the 122,600 undocumented students who graduate high school in the United States each year will attend college and less than 3 percent will complete university.[1] Undocumented students face tremendous obstacles to educational success—due to their legal status, financial hardship, and their parents’ lack of experience with higher education.[2] Many of these undocumented students have spent nearly all their lives in California and know no other home.
With nearly two and half million of the estimated eleven million undocumented migrants in the United States, California is the state with the largest number of undocumented migrants. The Golden State also offers some of the most favorable higher education policies for them.[3] Governor Gray Davis signed California Assembly Bill (AB) 540 into law in 2001, which granted undocumented students eligibility for in-state tuition. One decade later, Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 130, making private scholarships available to undocumented students; and AB 131, which allowed eligible undocumented students to apply for Cal Grants and other state financial aid. These policies make higher education more affordable and accessible for undocumented students.
What happens when these students arrive on campus? In 2014, a group of undocumented students at the University of California, Merced—the institution where we work—asked us to help them find out. These students wanted to know what obstacles undocumented students face, and what opportunities allow for their success. We conducted focus groups with thirty-five undocumented students enrolled at the university, which is a Latino-majority university in California’s Central Valley.
Our findings reveal that a favorable local context, including ample university resources, targeted university policies and procedures, favorable state laws, as well as federal policies of administrative relief such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)[4] have brought a four-year degree within reach for undocumented students. As Yvette, one of our focus group participants, stated, “Here in California we’re lucky… I know other people in other states still have it really hard. If none of [these policies] had been in place, I would probably be back in Mexico.”
At the same time, undocumented students continue to experience the negative consequences associated with being undocumented, especially as it pertains to economic uncertainty and the threat of deportation, both directly and vicariously through the experiences of their family members. Joaquin captured the sentiment of many when he told us he has a “constant fear” his parents could be deported.
Financial concerns were paramount for the undocumented students we spoke to. Two-thirds of the students in our focus groups had an annual family income less than $25,000. Their undocumented parents were barely getting by and had difficulty coming up with financial support for their children in college. At the time, undocumented students did not qualify for student loans, a fact many of our participants lamented. Don, for example, explained: “We’re always worrying. Are my parents going to have enough money for the next payment?” John chimed in, saying: “It was hard because of not being able to not take out loans. My parents are low-income and even though they give us financial aid, it is not enough.” California now offers small loans to undocumented students, which alleviates some of these concerns.[5]
Don, for example, explained: “We’re always worrying. Are my parents going to have enough money for the next payment?” John chimed in, saying: “It was hard because of not being able to not take out loans. My parents are low-income and even though they give us financial aid, it is not enough.”
Although the adjustment to university was difficult for many students, they also spoke about how much support they found on campus. Sara summed up the climate at UC Merced: “I think that overall this school and the faculty and staff try to make us feel as comfortable as possible.”
California laws that legitimize undocumented students’ presence at university and enable their access to education combined with a supportive campus climate suggests undocumented students at UC Merced fare substantially better than those who came before the passage of such policies or reside outside of California. Our findings suggest that expanding access to opportunities for all undocumented people—or better yet, a massive legalization program—has the potential to change undocumented immigrants’ social and economic life chances in the United States.
Undocumented students’ daily lives are affected most by the contexts closest to them, which at the local level of UC Merced and California has improved their educational experiences and likelihood of attaining a four-year degree; and yet, they are unable to forget the larger national context, including federal policies of looming mass deportation, which underscore their own vulnerability and that of their family members, and the condition a persistent sense of exclusion and isolation. The specter of illegality forms the backdrop for undocumented students’ lives.
In a highly favorable local and state context, these students thrive in high school and move on to college. An encouraging teacher, a supportive group of friends, and a full ride to university all make their lives more bearable. Nevertheless, there are real limits to these students’ ability to excel in the absence of federal immigration reform, and their legal vulnerability is never far from their minds.
The financial constraints undocumented students confront affects their ability to enroll in needed classes in time, secure affordable housing, and dampens opportunities other students enjoy, such as taking advantage of study-abroad programs. Our findings underscore the importance of trained and skilled institutional agents and support staff at high schools and colleges who make an immediate impact on undocumented students’ decisions to apply for and attend university.
We conducted these focus groups in 2015, when President Obama was in office. The climate has changed. Whereas Obama participated in creating and supported DACA, President Trump ordered an end to the program.[6] In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s inauguration, students questioned whether they should continue to apply for DACA and also expressed growing unease regarding the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in the wider off-campus community. Students also expressed some doubt that UC Merced administrators and faculty were doing enough to protect them on campus and off, which led to some campus protests and calls for faculty conducting research among this vulnerable community to be more accountable to students.
With the recent rescission of DACA, students who currently have DACA will eventually lose their work permits as well as access to employment in the formal economy. DACA has had a noticeably positive impact on its beneficiaries. It has opened up economic opportunities, allowing recipients to obtain driver licenses,[7] and even to open their first bank accounts. The rescission of DACA will negatively affect undocumented youths’ access to university as it affects their ability to work and thus afford university, either while working, or while having to pay back loan debt upon graduation.
In contrast, a more favorable federal context could be life-changing. Providing a pathway to legalization would go a long way to help remedy the issues undocumented students face.
Our research provides evidence that favorable policies at the local and state level improve the life chances of undocumented youths and students in California in very real ways, with positive effects on their educational outcomes and the broader community. From our perspective, then, policy reforms at the federal level that improve the national context are necessary to alleviate the challenges undocumented students face, expand their opportunities and chances of success, and enhance their lives and those of their family members.
[2] Leisy J. Abrego, “I Can’t Go to College Because I Don’t Have Papers: Incorporation Patterns of Undocumented Latino Youth,” Latino Studies 4 (2006): 212-31; Leisy J. Abrego and Roberto G. Gonzales, “Blocked Paths, Uncertain Futures: The Postsecondary Education and Labor Market Prospects of Undocumented Latino Youth,” Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk 15 (2010): 144-57.; Shannon Gleeson and Roberto G. Gonzales, “When Do Papers Matter? An Institutional Analysis of Undocumented Life in the United States,” International Migration 50 (2012): 1-19.
Tanya Golash-Boza is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She has published five books including: Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism (2016), Forced Out Fenced In: Immigration Tales from the Field (2018), and Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions, and Deportations in Post 9/11 America (2015).
Zulema Valdez is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Merced. Her research interests include racial and ethnic relations, entrepreneurship, and health disparities. She is the author of two books, The New Entrepreneurs: How Race, Class and Gender Shape American Enterprise (2011) and Entrepreneurs and the Search for the American Dream (2015).
Laura E. Enriquez Daisy Vazquez Vera S. Karthick Ramakrishnan
Previous research shows that undocumented immigrants face a variety of economic, educational, and social barriers due to their undocumented status.[1] However, little scholarship has specifically explored how immigrants’ undocumented status structures spatial mobility, particularly by limiting access to driver licenses. Driving without a license increases the risk of coming into contact with immigration enforcement mechanisms and thus increases the risk of deportation.[2] Even when police do not cooperate with immigration officials, there are financial consequences if the unlicensed driver is cited and/or their car is impounded.[3] These risks lead many undocumented immigrants to restructure their lives—driving only at certain times or to fewer places—and limit their economic, educational, and social participation. For example, undocumented immigrants may avoid driving farther for employment or educational opportunities or decline to engage in social activities that require driving or proof of government-issued ID.[4]
Given the anti-immigrant stance of the current federal government, sub-federal policies offer a glimmer of opportunity to undocumented Californians.[5] For example, California Assembly Bill (AB) 60, known as the Safe and Responsible Driver’s Act, went into effect January 2015. California became the tenth state to provide undocumented immigrants with access to driver licenses, moderating the consequences of illegality by allowing them to more fully participate in society.
A year after the implementation of AB 60, a reported 830,000 undocumented individuals had applied for an AB 60 driver license, roughly 31% of California’s undocumented immigrant population.[6] Yet, approximately one in four applicants were unsuccessful in obtaining a license during the first year.[7] While it is to be expected that not all undocumented immigrants would apply or successfully obtain a license, it is important to consider whether some groups are disproportionately unable to partake in this opportunity and move toward social integration.
It is not a simple matter to know whether immigrant communities in California have equal access to driver’s licenses; AB 60 was designed and implemented in a manner that explicitly prohibited the collection and dissemination of data on applicants’ race, ethnicity, and national origin. In order to overcome these limitations on administrative data, our research team conducted interviews with staff members from thirty-two immigrant-serving organizations in greater Southern California, to explore why some undocumented Californians have not applied for AB 60 driver licenses and identify the barriers that make applicants unsuccessful. We find four main barriers to successfully obtaining an AB 60 driver license:
fear of revealing one’s immigration status;
few acceptable identification documents when applying;
language barriers; and
limited advertising for testing accommodations.
Although all undocumented immigrants may face these barriers, race differentiates how these barriers emerge, making it so that undocumented immigrants who are not of Spanish-speaking, Mexican origin are more likely to be prevented from obtaining an AB 60 driver license. We argue that the implementation of AB 60 has raised unique barriers that disproportionately disadvantage some groups of undocumented Californians.
Racialized Illegality
Of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, 77% are of Latina/o origin. Yet, almost a quarter of undocumented immigrants are not from Latin America, with approximately 16% coming from Asia, 4% from the Caribbean, 3% from Africa, and 3% from Europe and Canada.[8] Furthermore, the Asian undocumented population has grown to approximately 1.7 million individuals, more than tripling between 2000 and 2015, accounting for about 1 in 7 of the Asian immigrants in the United States today.[9] Despite these demographic realities, pervasive images link Mexico and Latin America with undocumented immigration.[10]
The racialization of undocumented immigration as a Latina/o issue leads to racialized illegality, wherein undocumented immigrants experience illegality differently based on how they are racialized in the United States. This racialization can draw attention to Latina/o undocumented immigrants, leading to their increased risk of interaction with police and immigration enforcement mechanisms, higher deportation rates, xenophobic interpersonal interactions, and hate crimes.[11] However, Enriquez finds that the racialization of illegality can have a silver lining, as Latina/o undocumented college students have an easier time accessing educational resources and support structures than Asian/Pacific Islander undocumented students.[12] Research also indicates that the racialization of anti-immigrant policies like Proposition 187 in California led to greater mobilization among Latinas/os than among Asian Americans.[13] Thus, regardless of whether the cause is institutional bias or differential mobilization, prior work suggests that the demographic predominance of Latinas/os and the discursive racialization of undocumented migration as a Latina/o issue may disadvantage non-Latinas/os and non-Spanish speakers in institutional settings, such as applying for AB 60 driver licenses.
Data
We draw on interviews with staff members from thirty-two immigrant-serving organizations in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, and San Diego counties. We purposefully recruited staff members that serve undocumented immigrants. Interviews took place in two waves: from August to October 2016 and from July to August 2017. Each interview lasted approximately one hour and followed a semi-structured interview guide. For this article, we focus on the part of the interview where staff members discussed the barriers that their clients faced when applying for AB 60 licenses and the advocacy and/or services they provided around AB 60. Data analysis involved open and discrete coding to identify four primary types of barriers. We then compared across racial groups to see how these varied.
We also conducted participant observations at twelve DMV offices in Southern California. In Los Angeles and Orange counties we selected three offices in each: one in a predominantly White area, one in a Latina/o area, and one in an Asian area. In San Bernardino and San Diego counties we selected two offices in each: one in a predominantly White area and one in a Latina/o area. We also observed two Driver License Processing Centers, offices dedicated exclusively to driver license transactions. We conducted two hours of observations at each of the offices—one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Observations focused on observing client experiences as well as staffing and application volume and demographics.
Fear of Revealing Immigration Status
Our interviews suggest that both the state of California and non-profit organizations allocated significant funding to raise awareness about AB 60. Organizations reported holding community forums, distributing information at community events, putting on workshops, and designing infographic roadmaps describing the application process and requirements to apply. Latina/o organizations’ longstanding work on undocumented immigrant issues ensured that they had the institutional capacity to quickly disseminate information about AB 60 to their clients. Organizations’ work to raise awareness about AB 60 licenses revealed that undocumented immigrants from all countries of origin feared the potential repercussions of disclosing their immigration status to a government agency. A representative from the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice shared: “There was a lot of misinformation. There were people saying, ‘don’t get the AB 60 driver license, you’re going to get deported.’” Organizations worked to counteract these fears, highlighting how the AB 60 licenses are not marked differently in DMV databases and that the documents they submit with their application are not available in any public record.[14]
However, organizations recognized that in some cases the fear of being targeted for deportation was valid, particularly within the Latina/o community where individuals were more likely to have criminal records due to racialized policing practices. Law enforcement and immigration agencies often depend on driver license databases to identify and locate individuals as part of their investigations, posing a risk for AB 60 applicants with criminal histories.[15] A representative from the Mexican Consulate suggested that these practices can affect individuals convicted of minor offenses: “Operations that ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] has done tend to sort of get individuals with low criminal records. So sometimes … DUIs, failure to appear, failure to pay tickets.” A few organizations suggested that these types of minor criminal records were more likely to haunt Latinas/os because many of these infractions result from their higher risk of being pulled over for unlicensed driving due to racial profiling and police procedures.[16]
Stalled in Secondary Review: Few Acceptable Identification Documents
To apply for a license, applicants must provide documentation to confirm their identity; however, acceptable documentation is stratified by country of origin.[17] Essentially, the less secure the identification document, the more documents must be provided to substantiate an applicant’s identity. Applicants can present a single foreign document if it is an identification card issued by the Mexican government (i.e., passport, consular card, or electoral card) or a valid foreign passport with a verifiable U.S. social security number. Applicants from Korea and nine Latin American countries can provide two foreign documents, a valid passport and an approved identification card. All others must submit as many supplementary documents as possible, which are sent to secondary review for verification. This secondary review process disproportionately targets non-Latinas/os and can significantly delay or even prevent their application.
Notably, undocumented individuals from Mexico have the most straightforward identification process because they are only required to provide one identification document that is readily available via same-day processing at one of the six Mexican consulates in greater Southern California. According to a representative from the Mexican Consulate in San Bernardino, this unique opportunity to provide a single identification document resulted from close collaboration: “The DMV worked very close with the government of Mexico in order to have a system.” Indeed, the Mexican Consulate changed their consular card in November 2014 to meet DMV requirements by incorporating new safety features such as encrypted data and biometric measures.[18] In this case, long-standing relationships among the Mexican Consulate, organizations, and the DMV helped them establish a straightforward identification process for Mexican-origin immigrants applying for AB 60.
While this benefits Mexican-origin immigrants, those in more rural areas of California may still have trouble traveling to a Consulate.
All non-Mexican applicants are required to present multiple forms of identification, preventing their timely and successful application for a driver license. Prior to October 2016 (when Korean identification cards were approved),[19] the DMV had only approved consular or national identification cards from Latin American countries as a secondary form of identification. A representative from the Thai Community Development Center explained: “There was that issue and the fact that our folks couldn’t present their Thai national ID card. So they would [only] have their passport, and everyone was basically getting pushed into secondary review because they didn’t have the appropriate IDs that the DMV was looking for.” Unlike the Mexican Consulate, other national governments and non-Latina/o serving organizations had to spend time developing relationships with the DMV so that they could get their identification cards approved. This forces almost a quarter of the undocumented immigrants who are not from these eleven approved countries into the drawn-out secondary review process. Organizations found that many applicants lost the desire to pursue their license because the delay in their application process. In some cases secondary review could take so long that their one-year driving permit would expire before they receive a license, forcing them to re-start the entire process.
It is important to recognize that some groups are not able to get identification documents from their foreign governments. A representative from the Korean Resource Center shared, “The problem with the consular ID is that some nations don’t have it. And that creates inequities between immigrants. Some African nations, their government [sic] isn’t functional so there’s no way they’re going to get national ID. Some countries don’t even have consular offices nearby so they have to travel to Washington DC, which is not possible.” A representative from Korean Community Services also mentioned that Korean men between the ages of 18-35 have difficulties obtaining a consular ID because they are not serving their military obligation.
“The problem with the consular ID is that some nations don’t have it. And that creates inequities between immigrants. Some African nations, their government [sic] isn’t functional so there’s no way they’re going to get national ID. Some countries don’t even have consular offices nearby so they have to travel to Washington DC, which is not possible.”
Lost in Translation: Language Barriers
At all steps in the application process, AB 60 applicants have to navigate potential language barriers. A representative from the Thai Community Development Center explained,
“There’s a lot of language access barriers at all levels. Getting information. If they actually call the DMV, they only greet you in Spanish and English, so if I was a monolingual non-English, non-Spanish speaking person, how would I navigate a telephone system that I can’t understand? Even though the DMV has interpretation services available, how are you able to get through [to] that when you can’t even understand what you’re being told? A lot of the materials haven’t been translated yet, but are currently in the process.” Indeed, the DMV offers limited translation services, which disproportionately constrains non-Latina/o undocumented immigrants who do not speak Spanish.
Language barriers arise throughout the entire application process. First, applicants must acquire information about the AB 60 application process and make an appointment. However, the DMV’s website only provides AB 60 information in English and Spanish. Our observations at twelve DMV offices also found that most AB 60 resources were only available in English and Spanish. Second, applicants must interact with DMV employees as they apply and take tests. Our DMV office observations suggest that, regardless of the racial demographics of the area, there was often a DMV employee available who spoke Spanish, but not necessarily other languages. Third, applicants must study for their driver license knowledge test. While the tests are available in thirty-one languages, study materials are only available in fourteen non-English languages.[20] Finally, the behind-the-wheel driving exam is only administered in English; those who do not have a working understanding of English may struggle at this final stage.
Our DMV observations suggest that most non-Spanish speaking applicants navigate their limited English language skills by bringing someone to serve as their interpreter; however, study materials and knowledge tests remain unavailable in many languages. At the beginning of this project in 2016, DMV study materials were only available in ten languages: Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Farsi, Korean, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. Since then, four new languages were added to the list: Hindu, Japanese, Khmer, and Thai. These additions are the result of active advocacy by community organizations to expand language access. Yet, significant gaps in language offerings remain. In particular, representatives from Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) and Semillas de Esperanza spoke about indigenous Latina/o groups being some of the last to find out about AB 60 and among the most disadvantaged in receiving language assistance at the DMV.
Finally, all groups share some concerns that the language translations provided are too formal and lack cultural competency. Many organization representatives expressed concerned that the DMV was translating materials verbatim and not including any cultural context. A representative from Asian Americans Advancing Justice explained, “Certain words exist in English but it might not exist in Filipino, in Korean, in Thai, in Swahili, in different languages.” A representative from the Long Beach Immigrant Rights Coalition also believed that this issue also impacts Spanish speakers since the majority use colloquial Spanish and the DMV’s Spanish translation includes more difficult and technical terms that cause confusion. Thus, even when translated materials are provided, language barriers can still contribute to failing the knowledge exam.
Beyond the Computer Exam: Limited Advertising of Literacy and Technology Accommodations
The driver license knowledge test is offered as a computer-based test. However, undocumented immigrants, especially those from less educated and low-income backgrounds, may often struggle with limited technological skills. A representative from the American Friends Service Committee in San Diego shared, “They’re using now these touch screens that doesn’t allow people to come back to certain questions, or is very confusing sometimes when they skip a question and they don’t realize if they don’t go back to it or [that] they’re even able to go back to it, it’s qualified as a no answer so it’s wrong.”
The driver license knowledge test also poses unique barriers for individuals who struggle with literacy. A representative from the Mexican Consulate explained, “We do have a large population of individuals who can’t read or write. And those tend to be indigenous. And those are the ones that haven’t taken advantage of the license. … [Another] reason why is because they don’t know how to study.”
Attempting to accommodate individuals with special needs, the DMV offers several alternative methods for completing the driver license knowledge exams, including listening to an audio version of the test or having an examiner ask the questions.[21] These services appear to have been developed for general applicants who are visually disabled and it is unclear if these services extend to individuals with limited literacy. Most applicants are also not aware of these alternative options and information about these accommodations is not available on the DMV’s AB 60 website. A representative from the North County Immigration Task Force in San Diego, shared, “Many people do not know that they can ask for an oral test. Or people are being forced to take the test in the computer when they don’t feel comfortable doing it.” To counteract this, they encourage their clients to ask for paper or oral exam accommodations. Yet, the audio test is only available in fifteen non-English languages, and an audio version of the study materials is only available in English and Spanish.
Coordination and Advocacy: Broadening the Impact of AB 60
Two and a half years after the implementation of AB 60, it is important to reflect on who is struggling to benefit from this policy. We find that significant barriers remain for all undocumented immigrants. However, it is also clear that the implementation of AB 60 has disproportionately hindered the social integration of a significant portion of undocumented immigrants—namely those who are not of Spanish-speaking, Mexican origin. For the most part, this is the product of two factors: institutional capacity (the DMV was already equipped to work with Spanish-speaking clients), and strategic coordination (Latina/o-serving organizations were poised and funded to raise awareness about the new law, and the Mexican Consulate worked closely with policy makers to ensure that the identification documents available to Mexican undocumented immigrants would be accepted).
As these barriers revealed themselves, immigrant-serving organizations took note and began to advocate for clients. A coalition of organizations wrote an open letter to the DMV Director outlining the unique barriers faced by the African, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander undocumented communities, advocating for policy changes to increase their access.[22] Organizations, particularly Asian/Pacific Islander serving ones, translated information to clients—in person, over the phone and on their own websites. Some consulates looked to the Mexican Consulate as they began looking to coordinate with the DMV to ensure that their identification cards met DMV guidelines. Coalitions and networks abounded as organizations looked to one another for advice and resources, referring clients to others when they were not equipped to offer services.
Despite these barriers, California is poised to issue a million AB 60 licenses to undocumented immigrants by the end of 2017.[23] This is a substantial win for the undocumented community, and will contribute to countless positive outcomes for undocumented immigrants, their families, community members, and California as a whole. At the same time, our fieldwork in Southern California has revealed substantial barriers faced by Asian American and Pacific Islander immigrants, and there are good reasons to believe immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean face similar barriers. With other states looking to California for leadership on immigrant integration, the state has a unique opportunity and obligation to ensure that all share the benefits of policies such as immigrant driver’s licenses equally.
Notes
Thank you to our project collaborator, Dr. Allan Colbern, and our research assistants, Rocio Garcia and Asbeidy Solano. The research received funding from the UC California Immigration Research Initiative. Special thanks to all interview participants, community organizers, and officials who worked to establish and implement AB 60.
[1] Leisy J. Abrego, “Legal Consciousness of Undocumented Latinos: Fear and Stigma as Barriers to Claims-Making for First- and 1.5-Generation Immigrants,” Law & Society Review 45 (2011): 337-70; Nicholas P. De Genova, “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 419-47; Joanna Dreby, Everyday Illegal: When Policies Undermine Immigrant Families (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Shannon Gleeson and Roberto G. Gonzales, “When Do Papers Matter? An Institutional Analysis of Undocumented Life in the United States,” International Migration 50 (2012): 1-19; Shannon Gleeson, “Labor Rights for All? The Role of Undocumented Immigrant Status for Worker Claims Making,” Law and Social Inquiry 35 (2010): 561-602; Roberto G. Gonzales, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Cecilia Menjívar and Leisy J. Abrego, “Legal Violence: Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2012): 1380-1421; Laura E. Enriquez, “Multigenerational Punishment: Shared Experiences of Undocumented Immigration Status within Mixed-Status Families,” Journal of Marriage and Family 77 (2015): 939-53; Laura E. Enriquez, “A ‘Master Status’ or the ‘Final Straw’? Assessing the Role of Immigration Status in Latino Undocumented Youths’ Pathways out of School,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43 (2017): 1526-1543.
[2] Amada Armenta, Protect, Serve, and Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Mary Romero, “Racial Profiling and Immigration Law Enforcement: Rounding up of Usual Suspects in the Latino Community,” Critical Sociology 32 (2006): 447-73.
[4] See Laura E. Enriquez, “Gendering Illegality: Undocumented Young Adults’ Negotiation of the Family Formation Process,” American Behavioral Scientist 61 (2017): 1153-1171; Leah Schmalzbauer, The Last Best Place: Gender, Family, and Migration in the New West (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Angela Stuesse and Mathew Coleman, “Automobility, Immobility, Altermobility: Surviving and Resisting the Intensification of Immigrant Policing,” City & Society 26 (2014): 51-72. There is also compelling evidence that access to driver’s licenses reduces the incidence of hit-and-run incidents. See Hans Lueders, Jens Hainmueller, and Duncan Lawrence, “Providing Driver’s Licenses to Unauthorized Immigrants in California Improves Traffic Safety,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (2017): 4111-4116.
[5] Pratheepan Gulasekaram and S Karthick Ramakrishnan, The New Immigration Federalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); S. Karthick Ramakrishnan and Allan Colbern, “The ‘California Package’ of Immigrant Integration and the Evolving Nature of State Citizenship,” Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (2016), http://www.irle.ucla.edu/publications/documents/IRLEReport_Full.pdf; Monica W. Varsanyi, “Interrogating ‘Urban Citizenship’ Vis-À-Vis Undocumented Migration,” Citizenship Studies 10 (2006): 229-49; Monica W. Varsanyi, Taking Local Control: Immigration Policy Activism in U.S. Cities and States (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
[7] DMV, “AB 60: 605,000 Driver Licenses Issued in First Year.”
[8] 2015 estimates of the unauthorized population from Center for Migration Studies. Retrieved from http://data.cmsny.org, 15 September 2017
[9] S. Karthick Ramakrishnan and Sono Shah, “One out of Every 7 Asian Immigrants Is Undocumented” (2017), accessed on 18 September 2017, http://aapidata.com/blog/asian-undoc-1in7/.
[10] Leo Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).
[12] Laura E. Enriquez, “Border-Hopping Mexicans, Law-Abiding Asians, and Racialized Illegality: Analyzing Undocumented College Students Experiences through a Relational Lens,” in Studying Race Relationally, ed. Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and Ramón Gutiérrez (Oakland: University of California Press, forthcoming).
[13] S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, Democracy in Immigrant America: Changing Demographics and Political Participation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Laura E. Enriquez is Assistant Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the educational, economic, political, and social experiences of undocumented young adults who immigrated to the United States as children.
Daisy Vazquez Vera is a doctoral student in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles.
S. Karthick Ramakrishnan is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Associate Dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside. He received his Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University. His research focuses on civic participation, immigration policy, and the politics of race, ethnicity, and immigration in the United States.
“As I was saying,” Navarre said, breathing a little heavily, “the gold was everywhere—nuggets the size of muskmelons, gold dust in drifts, dunes of it like anthills. On a large anvil, I saw the misshapen coins and lumpy ingots of a small forging operation that stretched farther back into the mountain, lost from sight.
I won’t lie. I plunged my hands into the nearest heap up to my shoulders. I’d been galumphing in rain and muck all day. All I wanted was to roll around in all that dust till it stuck to me like breadcrumbs on a rainbow.
If somebody had piled up this much gold in a cave, there must be mountains of it still out there. Rivers of it, just waiting. Enough gold for me to tell Greeley to go hang. Enough to buy the Tribune out from under him and rouse the whole world with it. Enough to buy out Sutter and give his blamed valley back to the Miwoks, to buy off every American soldier on Mexican soil and—
Mexican soil. Oh, shit.
In a flash, I saw it as if I were there. I saw the Guadalupe-Hidalgo estate, the generals and their secretaries gross from last night’s capons, fingers too sticky from the morning’s pastry to hold their pens upright, signing it away, signing it all away.
Forget the gold. I had to warn Mexico now, be it a thousand miles away…
David Kipen is the founder of the nonprofit Libros Schmibros Lending Library in Boyle Heights, a lecturer on the UCLA faculty, and a Critic-at-Large of the LA Times. His Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters will be published Fall 2018 by Modern Library. The Américas will be his first novel, and he welcomes your kibitzing at kipend@gmail.com.
“Last week,” he began, sleep forgotten, warming to the story as if from memory, growing more loquacious the while, “for all anybody knew I could’ve been dead a year. A year ago I was traveling with Frémont’s army, supposedly writing a profile of him for the Tribune.
Boy, that man knew how to treat a reporter. I wasn’t in any hurry to finish. I guess I took too long, because Mr. Greeley sent word I was to file immediately or not bother coming back.
I was mulling the choice when I heard a story from an old Miwok woman about gold in the foothills of the Sierra. So I stuffed my Frémont notes into my saddlebag, waited till lights-out, lammed out of that man’s army and made for the mountains. If I didn’t get rich, at least I’d get a better story. Maybe I’d get both.
So I knocked around California for a few months, chasing down one rumor after another. I rode south almost to Placerita to check out the gold strike from ’42, but it was pretty well played out.
All the time I kept hearing about this fellow Sutter, a Swiss colonel who’d gone up the Americano from Yerba Buena and set himself up king of the Sacramento.
Last month I figured I’d go and see for myself. On my way, I met a talkative Mexican—begging your pardon—who’d heard that there was gold up below Tahoe, but that Sutter’s marshal hadn’t got around to checking it out yet.
Once we pulled in, who do I see but Jim Marshall, the best carpenter in Frémont’s army. He was on his way up the trail as foreman to a pack of Mormons, aiming to build Sutter his first sawmill that wouldn’t fall over if you pissed on it.
Well, Jim remembered me. He’s a good guy—a little soft, maybe, but honest. So I made him a deal. He wouldn’t have to lie, I was very specific about that. But I’d work for him at half-wages if he’d keep it off the books. He assumed I was on a fresh story, and so I was.
All the while, I sought out whatever news came to hand. The war—call it Mexican, call it American, or call it what they all are, a Real Estate War—the war was over, but the peace talks in Mexico City were taking forever. Typical diplomats. Every Sabbath an announcement was expected, and every Sabbath, none came.
Lately, though, the negotiators at the Guadalupe-Hidalgo villa looked to be putting on steam again. If they didn’t sign something, the war might flare back up. If that happened, the Washington delegation might get recalled home in a hurry,— where the winds were colder, their wives closer, and a good mole nowhere in evidence.
Anyway, Marshall and a bunch of us traipsed up into the foothills, with all our equipment banging and clanging off the wagon like a jug band. He picked out a riverbank for the mill,— a pretty place, well-forested and sheltered from the wind. Next day we went to work.
I kept my eyes open the whole time. Every chance I got, which wasn’t often, I wandered off with a fishpole, creel and a dipper hanging off my belt, ransacking the terrain for a sparkle. Mormons probably thought I had a wench up there.
Those Mormons worked pretty fast once the Miwoks taught ’em upstream from down. Young Charley Bennett finally figured out which end of a saw was which, and Scotty the carpenter was almost ready to start in on the mill wheel.
And then the sky opened. It rained for a week, let up for a day and rained some more. I borrowed an oilcloth slicker from the cook and took to squelching around the foothills.
At first there was nothing. I trudged through the mud and underbrush in circles. By the second day, I could go a full hour without getting lost. But my creel stayed empty, with nary a nugget or even a trout to weigh it down.
On the night of the full moon, I resolved to stay out after dark. Either it’d be bright enough to shine up a nugget, or dark enough to stumble across a bear,— by this time, I didn’t much care which.
Once the sun dropped behind the ridgeline, I made out a mossy cliff nearby, just starting to glisten in the moon. Halfway up the side, a jagged spot showed itself, darker than the cliff around it. I tear-assed over to the riprap under it and looked back up.
Just as I’d thought, it was a cavern. I scrabbled up the scree toward it. With every step, a tiny gravel avalanche slid me back almost as far. Finally I gained a purchase at the very top of the pile and chinned myself over the lip.
There in the cave, dim in the infiltrating starshine, I saw a hoard of gold beyond counting.”
“How much?” I interjected, stirring as if from a trance.
“Didn’t I just say it was beyond counting?”
“About how much?”
“Am I telling this story or you?”
“I thought you were sleepy.”
“Second wind.”
“Windier by the minute, to my ear. Monsieur Vignes always says to avoid ten-dollar words. He says they’re just showing off.”
Navarre looked pained, as if from an old wound.
“Ten-dollar words. Kee-rist. Just because you don’t have ten dollars for one of my words doesn’t mean the whole world is broke.”
“If your word is ten dollars and mine is five, where are most customers going to shop?”
He considered.
“Look, kid. If this shed caught fire, which book would you save?”
“That’s easy. Monsieur Vignes bought me the whole MartinChuzzlewit, bound in buckram. With deckle edges.”
“How much did it cost?”
“I don’t know. A lot, I bet.”
“Is that why you’d save it from a fire? Because it cost a lot?”
“Partly. Partly I just like it.”
“Pretty big book for a little kid like you.”
“Who’s little?”
“You understand every word in it?”
“Most of ’em. I look up the rest.”
“He looks up the rest. What in?”
“Monsieur Vignes gave me a Webster’s. It’s a library all by itself.”
“Webster’s, eh?” Navarre smiled. “I were you, I’d hang on to that one. Let Vignes hang onto his Dickens til the fire burns out. May I continue?”
I let him, and kept any further interruptions to a minimum. That may have been a mistake. By degrees, his telling grew purple as a hanged man’s tongue.
David Kipen is the founder of the nonprofit Libros Schmibros Lending Library in Boyle Heights, a lecturer on the UCLA faculty, and a Critic-at-Large of the LA Times. His Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters will be published Fall 2018 by Modern Library. The Américas will be his first novel, and he welcomes your kibitzing at kipend@gmail.com.
“What’s your name, kid?” the sodden wayfarer asked.
“Francisco P. Ramirez.”
“What’s the P. stand for?”
“Not Pancho.”
“Not Pancho. Fair enough.”
“What’s your name?”
“That’s complicated.”
“Your name is complicated?”
“I’ve had a few.”
“Pick one.”
“We don’t have much time.”
I had plenty of time.
“Why do you need La Jefa?” I asked.
“I need to get a message to la capital.”
“Racing homers only fly one way. Monsieur Vigne has had La Jefa for years. He had a sweetheart once in Mexico City, yet he never sent her a message for fear no one would bring La Jefa back. La Jefa is for an emergency only, and love isn’t an emergency.”
“Shit, you are twelve.”
“What’s the message?”
“Do you know about the Mexican War?”
“Fourteen-year-olds must be very stupid where you come from. I know from the newspapers.”
“Newspapers. What good are newspapers in the West? By the time you read about war, there’s peace. By the time you read about peace, there’s war. You might as well study ancient history. At least Gibbon gets the dates right. The daily press is just fast enough to be wrong.”
“So why are you a journalist?”
“I ask myself the same thing every day. All right, what does the press tell you about the Mexican War?”
“Depends on the paper. The Mexican ones call it the American War.”
“A war doesn’t care what you call it. What’s the last newspaper you read about this ‘American War’?”
“Someone left a Santa Fe New Mexican from Christmas on the Friday stage. The driver saves them for me. He brought me one from New Year’s the week before. It gets confusing sometimes. But the New Year’s one said the treaty talks in lacapital broke down. What’s the last you read?”
“It’s all out of date,” he sighed. “All of it. That’s why I need your Jefe. I know something about Mexico that even Mexico doesn’t know.”
“Something that fits around the leg of a pigeon?”
“Could be.”
“Is that what you had in your hand? When you tried to free La Jefa?”
“Hijo, enough with the questions. Do I get the bird or don’t I? I haven’t slept two hours together for three nights straight.”
“Then you’d better tell me the story while you’re still awake.”
“You’d better let me sleep or you’ll never get the story.”
I thought fast.
“Tell me the story or I’ll throttle the bird myself, and then where will you be?”
“You’ve been reading more than just newspapers, haven’t you? Put some coffee on. Have they heard of John Sutter’s Fort down here? Oh, and call me Navarre.”
David Kipen is the founder of the nonprofit Libros Schmibros Lending Library in Boyle Heights, a lecturer on the UCLA faculty, and a Critic-at-Large of the LA Times. His Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters will be published Fall 2018 by Modern Library. The Américas will be his first novel, and he welcomes your kibitzing at kipend@gmail.com.
Before the hulking stranger on the floor of the pigeon shed recovered his wits, I got my first good look at him. He must have had to bend almost double to cross the doorsill, so tall he seemed. He looked Californian—black-haired, brown at the hands, red in the face, and badly sun-burnt around his thick, sugared beard. If I wanted to pursue newspapering, M. Vignes had said, I had better learn to notice details.
The man opened his eyes with a ready, well-worn smile, then groaned and sank back as his situation rushed in upon him. His eyes never left me.
The voice was raw, but he spoke English like an Englishman. “What are you,” he asked, “fourteen? Twelve?”
“I thought you were a burro,” I said. When interviewing, M. Vignes had also counseled, you ask the questions.
“Not a burro,” he said, “but close. I’m a reporter.”
“A reporter? Have I read anything of yours? Who do you work for?” I tried unsuccessfully to conceal my excitement. “The Californian? Noticioso de Ambos Mundos?” I paused in awe. “Reuters?”
“I’ve been fired from all of them. Twice by the same editor at Ambos Mundos. Now I’m with El Clamor Publico out of Madrid…?”
“We only get the papers that come through on the stage,” I admitted. “I don’t know that one.”
“I get that a lot. Madrid and I haven’t heard from each other in a while, anyway. But if I’ve been fired, nobody told me about it.”
“Are you here on a story?”
The journalist closed his eyes with an expression of great weariness, then opened them wide and looked over at La Jefa.
“I need to borrow your bird.”
“La Jefa? She’s not mine to borrow. Besides, nobody borrows a racing homer. Turn this one loose, she’ll make straight for Mexico City and never look back.”
Thoughtfully, not expecting much, the journalist reached for his hip. He barely registered his disappointment.
“It’s in a safe place,” I said.
“I need your bird,” he repeated. “I’ll bring her back if I have to walk both ways.”
“But Paul Reuter gave her to Monsieur Vignes himself!”
The journalist closed his eyes again. He looked tired of thinking. Then he reached into the other pocket.
“If that bastard Reuter were here,” he said, “he’d offer you this.”
Of a sudden, the palm of his outstretched hand brimmed with yellow dust. He poured it onto the deal table between us. It formed a small cone there. What remained of the candle made the pile glint, and his eyes with it.
“Is that—”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I passed through Georgia in the thirties. I know.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Do you want some or don’t you?”
I loved M. Vignes, but my father owed him a fortune. Now it was my turn to think.
David Kipen is the founder of the nonprofit Libros Schmibros Lending Library in Boyle Heights, a lecturer on the UCLA faculty, and a Critic-at-Large of the LA Times. His Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters will be published Fall 2018 by Modern Library. The Américas will be his first novel, and he welcomes your kibitzing at kipend@gmail.com.
A note to the reader: Only the most improbable parts of this story are true. Yes, for nine days in 1848, between the discovery of gold on the south fork of the American Riverand the signing in Mexico City of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico was the richest country in the world and didn’t know it. Yes, gold was discovered twice in California, once in the Sierra Nevada in 1848, but once six years before that in Placerita Canyon, near Santa Clarita. And yes, in the 1850s, the best journalist in Los Angeles was a teenager named Francisco P. Ramirez, in whose ink-blackened hands I leave you now…
…we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…
— Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Los Angeles, late January, 1848
If I hadn’t burned a second candle to work on my newspaper that night, California might still belong to Mexico.
Under its glow, on the quadrille sheets that M. Vignes had vouchsafed me for the purpose, I traced out the titles of “ P-U-B-L-I-S-H-E-R,” “E-D-I-T-O-R-S” AND “S-T-A-F-F.” Across the page, modestly, I printed “F-R-A-N-C-I-S-C-O P-. R-A-M-I-R-E-Z” but once.
Months into my journalistic career, I still hadn’t decided for good whether to publish my newspaper in Spanish, as I’d been doing; in English, as I could do just as easily; in French, as M. Vignes might have liked; or all three, which would certainly fill up each number in a hurry. Ornate as I could make it, in my best freehand approximation of blackletter script, I had sketched in the most versatile placeholder I could think of: TheAméricas.
Now came the hard part. El Pueblo de los Angeles in those days didn’t have much news, except for all the murders. Hardly a week-end went by without a white man shot. If nobody was shooting any white men this week, someone was surely getting lynched for shooting one last week. Where was the news in that?
If they couldn’t find a white man’s killer to hang, even a Californian’s murderer would do. Next thing you know, there’d be necktie parties just for shooting an Indian. Pretty soon, it’d be news if a week went by without somebody kilt or strung up for it.
Hey…
And that’s how I got the idea. Carefully, with one large capital letter centered in each quartet of squares, I roughed out a headline: “NOBODY DIES IN BLOODY AFFRAY THIS WEEK.” A little long, but I could fix that later. I wasn’t altogether sure what an “AFFRAY” was, but I liked how it went with “BLOODY.”
It wasn’t literally true. Mr. Temple had challenged Sr. Sepulveda to an affair of honor just the day before. At the hour of truth, however, Temple repented his choice to shoot such a good customer, and so contented himself with killing Sepulveda’s second instead. Sepulveda insisted on satisfaction, but Temple’s own second ran away before it could be obtained.
So my best headline yet, “NOBODY DIES IN BLOODY AFFRAY THIS WEEK,” was also my first published lie. M. Vignes says every writer needs an editor to keep him honest, but I couldn’t afford one on my allowance. The question now was what to do next. That first lie opened up so many possibilities.
My candle hissed and flickered. Outside, the river whispered through the alders. The rio and the pueblo, the Sierra Madres to the north,— except for the snoring of a thousand souls and the occasional gunshot, all was quiet. With the moon gone, the night sky shone bright enough to read by.
Behind me, plump and fussy, each of M. Vignes’s famous pigeons dozed or burbled in their ranked cages, pecking greedily after some last leftover grains from dinner.
And then, outside the window, I heard it: a scraping sound, like an animal rooting among the grapevines. This had happened before. Last year a burro had escaped the corral and ripped out six of Father’s rows before we finally got him untangled. I knew I should go investigate, but I had few enough choreless hours for my newspaper without having to police vineyards for runaway livestock. It was probably just a covey of quail, come down to the river to drink.
My pen was thirsty too. I applied myself to my page.
No sooner had I re-dipped the quill than I heard it again, closer now. It was definitely a burro, probably the same one. My father should long since have sold the brute to M. Vignes, whose farmhands knew how to tie a knot that would hold, but Father could give a burro lessons in stubbornness.
I stepped outside and felt the cool breeze off the river. The burro was nowhere to be seen. In the distance, a lonesome coyote howled. A fish jumped, and I did too.
Neck prickling, I decided to make one quick circuit of the pigeon shed and return to my labors. I walked halfway round the shed to the small window in the back wall, opposite the door. Framed right there, I saw him, already inside—tall as a giant, wet black hair dripping down between desperate eyes, candleshadows from the taper on the table dancing wildly at his back. Then I watched dumbly as, with the same key I had idly left in the keyhole, he locked me out.
I wanted to run, to wake M. Vignes or even my father, but there was too much of value in the shed to turn my back on. Not only the next issue of The Américas, scarcely begun, but my first seven issues as well, still sitting unprinted under the desk, awaiting typesetting as soon as M. Vignes’s old Ramage press returned from its statewide rounds. Even more important were his prized racing homer pigeons, fluttering in consternation as, even now, the drenched figure drew himself up as if to loose them. From the pocket of his long duster, he withdrew a scrap of cigarette paper.
The pigeoncote took up most of a wall, four cages high and four across. Each bore the name of a different destination: the small, overworked birds for San Pedro, San Gabriel and San Fernando; the larger ones for settlements south as far as Loreto; one muyfuerte for Albuquerque; and, for La Ciudad de Mexico, proudest of all, La Jefa.
Most pigeons are even more moronic when they’re scared, but La Jefa now looked as intelligent as I’d ever seen her. She shrank from the man’s approach as he reached straight for her padlock and yanked.
The hasp held. Implacable, the man replaced the scrap of paper in his pocket and drew a revolver from his sideholster, ready to hammer the lock free. Squawking, audible even from this side of the window, La Jefa squeezed herself against the mesh at the back of her cage.
As if remorseful for contemplating violence against such a defenseless creature, the man paused. Then, slowly as an automaton in a belltower clock, he turned his weapon toward me.
Our eyes met. The man indicated the padlock and gestured meaningfully at me with the revolver.
Not knowing how else to pantomime it, I tapped my forehead.
I could see in his staring eyes that my import was clear: He had the key to the shed, but only I knew where to find the key to the cage. It was a standoff.
Maybe here I might mention that I hate standoffs. Playing at pistolero, I’ve always found them silly. If you could shoot me and I could shoot you, we should shoot each other instanter, not hesitate like two Frenchmen approaching the same threshold.
My adversary in the pigeon shed must have hated standoffs, too. He lowered his weapon, unlocked the door and motioned for me to come around. Then, he fainted.
David Kipen is the founder of the nonprofit Libros Schmibros Lending Library in Boyle Heights, a lecturer on the UCLA faculty, and a Critic-at-Large of the LA Times. His Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters will be published Fall 2018 by Modern Library. The Américas will be his first novel, and he welcomes your kibitzing at kipend@gmail.com.
My first encounter with the borderwall between the United States and Mexico came summer 2003. I had left New York after 9/11, and was invited by the artist Marcos Ramirez (“ERRE”) to visit his Tijuana studio. His directions were simple: “It’s the first building on the right just as you go through the revolting door.” Having grown up in the linguistic borderlands of a bilingual family, I found it equally plausible that Marcos was either making a shrewd commentary on the door that served as the pedestrian port of entry into Tijuana, or that he simply meant revolving.[1] The richness of the ambiguity stayed with me, and led me to the idea that architecture—in this case, a door in a wall—can be endowed with different meanings, either by accident or by design, and that architectural expression can be at the same time serious and humorous, and a powerful tool in polemicizing an architecture fraught with controversy.
That same summer I met the architect Teddy Cruz and was introduced to his vision for design that transects the border. Fascinated by his approach of thinking perpendicular to the border, I became interested in the line of the border itself and the diversity of the landscapes it parallels. This eventually led me on a journey exploring the borderlands of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, where my creative practice worked on several design projects in the Big Bend region—projects that consistently explored ideas of political, cultural, and material dualities in design and architecture. At the same time my studio was exploring how to make buildings using mud and concrete (which we saw as conceptually parallel to the contrasts of wealth and poverty, the United States and Mexico, contemporaneity and tradition), we also considered ways that these material systems—and in many ways, the cultural values and economies of scale embodied by these materials—could be interwoven: two distinct elements working in concert. Some of these ideas culminated in a project entitled Prada Marfa, on which we collaborated with artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. Constructed near the U.S.-Mexico border along a desolate highway in the Chihuahuan desert, a faux Prada store, built of mud and containing the 2004 line of Prada shoes and purses, both epitomizes and exaggerates the cultural and geopolitical dichotomies of the borderlands.
During the construction of Prada Marfa, we often witnessed helicopters descending on the horizon to pick up migrants walking through the desert. In fact, during our first visit to the building site for the project, several Border Patrol vehicles blocked our passage and agents surrounded us, demanding to know what exactly what we were doing there.[2] The heightened security in the borderlands, in preparation for the imminent expansion of wall construction, further fueled our desire to consider how design could be a vehicle for addressing the politics of border security.
As a finalist in the WPA 2.0 International Competition, my creative studio was able to explore the possibilities for political expression through architectural design. The competition, organized by the UCLA’s cityLAB, was inspired by the Depression-era Work Projects Administration (WPA) and the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This stimulus bill (the largest investment in public works in the United States since the 1950s) dedicated $150 billion to infrastructure, and designers were asked to envision a new legacy of publicly supported infrastructure—projects that would explore the value of infrastructure not only as an engineering endeavor but also as a robust design opportunity for strengthening communities and revitalizing cities.[3] Our entry, Borderwall as Infrastructure, sought to integrate water, renewable energy, and urban social infrastructure into the design for the borderwall and to challenge the very existence of the wall in its conception, function, and future. At that time, the design proposals suggested an intervention. Since the wall was well on its way to being constructed on a massive scale, the attempt was made to demand wall builders to be more concerned with the landscapes that were about to be divided by the wall, and we made that pitch to lawmakers in Washington D.C. with the proposals. The project was the catalyst for the book, Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary; however, this book no longer seeks to intervene in the wall’s construction but instead seeks to consider its transformation—an expanded study on rethinking the existing wall by redesigning it into something that would exceed its sole purpose as a security infrastructure and ameliorate the wall’s negative impacts and, perhaps through intervention, make positive contributions to the lives and landscapes impacted by the borderlands.
The work compiled in Borderwall as Architecture continues the exploration through a collection of anecdotes, essays, models, drawings, stories, and speculations. In addition, short reactions are offered by border scholars that present intimate and diverse perspectives of the wall. Thus, it also protests against the wall—a protest that employs the tools of the discipline of architecture manifest as a series of designs that challenge the intrinsic architectural element of a wall charged by its political context. The wall is a spatial device that has been inserted into the landscape, but with complete disregard for the richness, diversity, and complexities of the areas in which it was built and proposed. This book advocates for a reconsideration of the existing wall, both through design proposals inspired by people living along the border who see the wall as something to respond to in positive ways and through proposals that are hyperboles of actual scenarios that have taken and continue to take place as a consequence of the wall.
Image provided by Jill M. Holslin.
Image provided by Jill M. Holslin.
These propositions presume the somewhat ridiculous reality of nearly 800 miles of border fortification while suggesting that within this enormously expensive and extremely low-tech piece of security infrastructure lie opportunities for the residents of this landscape to intellectually, physically, and culturally transcend the wall through their creativity and resilience. The work is meant to be at once illuminating, serious, and satirical in order to expose the absurdity and the irony of a wall meant to divide but that has brought people and landscapes together in remarkable ways.
The work is meant to be at once illuminating, serious, and satirical in order to expose the absurdity and the irony of a wall meant to divide but that has brought people and landscapes together in remarkable ways.
Since the publication of the book we find ourselves immersed in a kind of borderwall zeitgeist. The wall is increasingly in the public consciousness with the assistance of president Donald Trump. During his campaign he loudly proclaimed that he would build a wall, and audiences cheered as if finally someone had arrived who would build the wall, albeit ignorant of the 650 miles of already existing walls that divide private property, public lands, Native American heritage sites, wilderness areas, and cities. In this new era of calls for wall building, the wall is no longer simply a political symbol of security. It has emerged as a cultural object. Steven Colbert raised the question: “America no longer has the world’s tallest building, but could our planned Mexican borderwall be the world’s longest building?” The wall is the manifestation of our morals, our desires, and our artistic and social pursuits. It appears in beer commercials, such as the Tecate beer commercial that transformed the wall into a bar joining the two countries together; or a Hardee’s commercial, where scantily clad beach volleyball players play a bi-national game of “wall y ball”, as has been played for decades along the border to celebrate a bi-national heritage, but in this case to decide if the latest hamburger is more “Tex,” or more “Mex.”
Because of the questionable functionality of the wall, artists and designers see its shortcomings as doorways into questioning the wall, smuggling creativity into the borderlands demonstrating that creativity is an important component of resistance. For example, Ana Teresa Fernandez, a Mexican artist from Tampico, Mexico, participates in erasing the wall wielding a paintbrush. By selecting paint the color of the sky, Fernandez subverts the prison-like solidity of the rusty steel of the borderwall with a thick coat of blue paint so that the columns become one with the gaps between them, creating a visual illusion—and perhaps for some, a premonition—that the wall is no longer there. Residents of Tijuana have taken much pride in this installation, protecting it from others painting over it or removing it. In many ways, they consider it a kind of monument—albeit an invisible monument. The irony is that if the wall is ever dismantled, Fernandez’s invisible wall might remain.
Just two weeks ago the prototypes for Trump’s borderwall were unveiled near San Diego. One of Trump’s hopes for the wall, in addition to being “big” and “fat,” is that it would also be “beautiful.” One of the 30’ x 30’ prototypes, which cost $406,318 to construct, is painted sky blue, and I can’t help wonder if borderwall activism has come full circle, with ELTA North America, the construction company who built this wall, co-opting Ana Teresa’s invisible wall to meet the demands of the call for proposals which required the wall to be “aesthetically pleasing.” There are seven other prototypes constructed to demonstrate Trump’s ambitions for borderland security, most at a cost approaching half a million dollars.[4] While it is uncertain what is to become of these prototypes, what is certain is that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “every wall is a door,” and in this case, each of these walls are doorways to a continued interrogation by artists and designers whose creativity has the ability dismantle the desires for division.
Image courtesy of Ana Teresa Fernández and Gallery Wendi Norris.
Notes
[1] A revolving door in Spanish is puerta revolvente. Revolvente might easily be misinterpreted as a cognate for revolting, because the Spanish reflexive verb revolver also can refer to an upset (turning) stomach.
[2] An expanded text on Prada Marfa can be found in Dominique Molon, Ronald Rael, Michael Elmgreen, and Ingar Dragest, Prada Marfa (Berlin: Walther König, 2007).
Ronald Rael is Associate Professor in the departments of Architecture and Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Earth Architecture, a history of building with earth in the modern era that exemplifies new, creative uses of the oldest building material on the planet, and earlier this year, Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary, together with Marcello Di Cintio, Norma Iglesias-Prieto, and Michael Dear. The Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum have recognized Rael’s work, and in 2014 his creative practice, Rael San Fratello, was named an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York.
listen to the voice of the people install the voice of the people paste the voice of the people paint the voice of the people on all of your public spaces day and night and notice what change is all about and notice what Democracy is all about Listen to the voice of the people install the voice of the people paste the voice of the people paint and Listen to the voice of the people install the voice of the people paste the voice of the people paint the voice of the people on all of your public spaces day and night and notice what change is all about and notice what Democracy is all about
—not tomorrow today
Pueblo
escucha la voz del pueblo aplica la voz del pueblo engoma la voz del pueblo, pinta la voz del pueblo de día y de noche en todos tus sitios públicos y date cuenta de que se trata la Democracia Escucha la voz del pueblo aplica la voz del pueblo engoma la voz del pueblo pinta y Escucha la voz del pueblo aplica la voz del pueblo engoma la voz del pueblo pinta la voz del pueblo en todos tus sitios públicos y date cuenta de que se trata el cambio y date cuenta de que se trata la Democracia
—no mañana hoy
Juan Felipe Herrera is the son of migrant farm workers and has held positions at Fresno State University and UC Riverside. He served both as Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2017) and was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown in 2012 to serve as California’s Poet Laureate. He is the author of several collections including 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border (City Lights, 2007), Undocuments 1971-2007 (City Lights, 2007), Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press, 2008), and Notes on the Assemblage (City Lights, 2015). “People” is a new poem (translated here into Spanish by Gabriella Ruelas and Omar Chavez) and will be published in the forthcoming collection, I am Talkin’ to You.
this is what the worker does:
this is what the cotton truck worker does:
this is what the tobacco leaf roller does:
this is what the washer-woman & the laundry worker does:
this is what the grape & artichoke worker does:
not to mention the cucumber workers—
not to mention the spinach & beet workers
not to mention the poultry woman workers
not to mention the packing house workers &
the winery workers & the lettuce & broccoli
& peach & apricot & squash & apple &
that almost-magical watermelon
& the speckled melon & the honey-dew the workers
this is what they do:
notice what they do:
notice: how they bend in the fires no one sees
notice: their ecstatic colors & their knotted shirts
notice: where they cash
their tiny & wrinkled checks & pay stubs:
stand in that small-town desert sundry store
then walk out they do & stall for a moment they do
underneath this colossal tree with its condor-wings
shedding solace for a second or two
notice:
how they touch the earth—for you
Tocar la Tierra (una vez más)
Esto es lo que hacemos:
esto es lo que hace el chofer del campo de algodón:
esto es lo que hace el que enrolla los puros con hojas de tabaco:
esto es lo que hace la mujer de la limpiadura y la de la lavandería:
esto es lo que hace el obrero de uvas y de alcachofa:
sin mencionar los que trabajan el pepino—
sin mencionar los que trabajan la espinaca y el betabel
sin mencionar las que trabajan con aves de corral
sin mencionar las empacadoras y
las que trabajan en viñedos y la lechuga y el brócoli
y el durazno y el chabacano y la calabaza y la manzana y
esa casi-mágica sandía
y el melón moteado y el melón verde los obreros
esto es lo que hacen:
atento a lo que hacen:
atento: en cómo se inclinan en los fuegos que nadie ve
atento: en sus colores vibrantes y sus camisas con nudos
atento: en el lugar donde cobran sus chequesitos y como tienen
el cheque y talón todo arrugado.
y como esperan en esa tiendita de abarrotes en el desierto
y de ahí salen y ahí hacen tiempo
para un descansito bajo ese arbolóte con sus alas de cóndor
dando consuelo por un segundo o dos
atento:
como tocan la tierra—para ti
Juan Felipe Herrera is the son of migrant farm workers and has held positions at Fresno State University and UC Riverside. He served both as Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2017) and was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown in 2012 to serve as California’s Poet Laureate. He is the author of several collections including 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border (City Lights, 2007), Undocuments 1971-2007 (City Lights, 2007), Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press, 2008), and Notes on the Assemblage (City Lights, 2015). “Touch the Earth (once again)” is a new poem, translated here into Spanish by Omar Chavez, and will be published in the forthcoming collection, I am Talkin’ to You.
The work is meant to be at once illuminating, serious, and satirical in order to expose the absurdity and the irony of a wall meant to divide but that has brought people and landscapes together in remarkable ways.
