Cultural Outing - Dr. John Marquez

Yesterday afternoon, several of us in class got the opportunity to listen to Dr. John Marquez speak from his newest paper "WetBlacks and Brown Panters: Foundational Blackness and Latino Politics in the Gulf South". The discussion that ensued mostly revolved around the topics from his paper: the concept of sovereignty as a tool to compare the U.S./Mexico border and the southern border of Spain. His main focus was on the concept of sovereignty in the US and how that affects how it treats its southern border. Beyond economic effects (including the fact that both the US and Mexico rely on the border to be relatively porous for economic reasons), he went right to the center of the issue: the unconstitutionality of the border and the practices there. The death toll on the US/Mexico border is higher than any other in the world. Thousands die every single year, and the way things have been going, those numbers are not expected to diminish any time soon. The fact that it is a deadly area isn't the heart of the issue though. The real problem that Marquez has with the exorbitant death toll is that it is seemingly being used as a strategy to attempt to deter illegal immigration.
Marquez argues that not only does the US actively make the border more deadly than it needs to be, but does it in a way that is entirely unconstitutional. Despite popular belief that the enforcing of the border has come on since 9/11, many of these practices of violence predate 9/11 by almost a decade. Marquez pegs the date of border militarization in the early Clinton regime (ca. 1996). In his research, he has discovered that militarizing the border was not just a benign side-effect of increased national security, but an active strategy to kill more immigrants. By militarizing the urban entry points (ie San Diego, Laredo, Juarez), the US government is purposely forcing immigrants into the more desolate landscape of the American southwest. By forcing immigrants to go that way, the US government is hoping that more of them will die while crossing and thus deter future people from attempting to cross.
This argument is then extended and exposed for what it really does to the border patrol who are on the border: legitimizing the use of lethal force against Mexican nationals for no reason other than the fact that they are Mexican. Marquez showed images and told oral histories of several Mexican nationals (some not even trying to cross the border), and Mexican Americans (full American citizens) shot and killed in proximity to the border for attempting to throw rocks at border patrol officers. THROW ROCKS! Subsequently, the US government backs up those officers, allowing and even encouraging their use of deadly force.

I felt that Marquez's talk was extremely enlightening and in every way tied to this course. His portrayal of the US relationship to its southern border, albeit biased, was still very well-researched and supported with real fact. Facts so stunning and blatantly racist that it would be impossible to make them up it seems. Pardon me for sounding informal, but the fact that Mexican nationals are being shot IN THE BACK while RUNNING AWAY FROM BORDER AGENTS are killed and no discipline is brought down on the shooters is ridiculous. Even in an actual wartime scenario, that is a cowardly thing to do to someone, how much more then is it in a situation of immigration. According to the US Constitution, ALL PEOPLES within our borders are supposed to be allotted the same basic civil and human rights regarded to citizens: fair trial, innocent until proven guilty, and NOT SHOT AT IN THE BACK. Additionally, in order to discharge a firearm against another person (use of deadly force), both police and border patrolmen are supposedly held accountable to only resorting to that level of violence when their own or others' lives are in imminent danger and the use of deadly force is the only other resort. Someone running away from you is clearly not a lethal threat unless they have guns attached to their back and can shoot you while facing the other direction.
It really surprises me that our country can be so seemingly corrupt. We constantly look at the global south and the third world as sort-of being stuck in their own plights until they can fix their internal corruption and get their economies up to snuff. But how can we as a nation say that when we're the ones in trillions of dollars of debt and apparently give men the power to shoot Mexicans on sight whether they pose a threat or not. How is that first world behavior?

As far as direct connections to class, this seems to me to be exactly what the entire Chicano movement was fighting against. That if you look Mexican and live close enough to the border (even if you're on the US side), you are still regarded as shoot-able and an invader. One other aspect of Marquez's discussion of US sovereignty was the rhetoric, or myth as he more aptly put it, of calling Mexican immigration an "invasion". Due to this rhetoric and the increasing militarization of the border gives it the impression of a "war zone". This is where the shooting and police brutality comes from. Now, imagine that you're a Chicano. You've lived your whole lifke in the US. You've never committed a single crime in your life. But still, somehow, you are viewed as the enemy, as the invader, as the alien in your own land. Compounded with that, you aren't actually Mexican, so going south of the border, you still find yourself ridiculed for not speaking Spanish and not being Mexican enough. Where are you supposed to go? Once again, forgive my informal writing, but I think putting yourself in their shoes gives a glimpse into what they actually have to deal with.
It is no surprise then that people like Bustamente, Fusco, and Gomez-Peña do the performances that they do. How else can they attempt to explain such blatant racism and rhetoric of hate against their people? Whether or not you agree with those artists repetoire or count it as effective or not, you cannot argue that it is topical and in direct response to real-life issues.
Additionally, Dr. Marquez played a corrido written to commemorate the death of a 15-year-old boy shot and killed by a border patrolman. This goes right along with Kun's piece on the border as an aural space. (Which could be argued to be a whole other border and could comment on the discussion a few blog posts down about the tunnels into the US from Mexico). This corrido really shared the pain and hurt put on an entire community after this boy's death and directly supports Kun's argument that the border is not only physical, but aural as well. The physical border brought about this boy's physical death, but the corrido, by creating and discoursing with the aural border, was definitely a part of that border experience.

I know that a few other people will be posting on this event, and I look forward to bringing it up in class and discussing this more on the blog as well.