80 online
 
Most Popular Choices
Share on Facebook 6 Printer Friendly Page More Sharing
OpEdNews Op Eds   

Criminalizing La Raza Cosmica

By       (Page 1 of 2 pages)   No comments
Follow Me on Twitter     Message Greg Moses
Become a Fan
The bus to Laredo is hushed and nearly full as I step aboard in Austin, taking a seat next to a thirtyish man who occasionally speaks across the aisle to a young woman who mostly sleeps.

In San Antonio, I connect with the El Paso bus, sitting next to a grandmother who clutches a purse with both hands. She glances occasionally across the aisle at a restless young boy who sometimes stands upon his seat, sometimes lays his head on his mother's lap.

The drivers make announcements first in English then Spanish, but looking and listening from where I sit, it would be more practical to reverse that order of things. As these buses move, so moves history.

"La Quinta. Spanish for 'growth spurt'," says a smart little placard at a Kerrville, TX motel. Dots scatter across a map of the USA. Dots between Laredo and Chicago might as well mark the movement of la migra, Spanish for people seeking work.

There is so much human value on these buses. In terms of labor force alone: cement workers, roofers, landscapers, mechanics, cooks, janitors, clerks, musicians, and housekeepers. Foreign-born Hispanic men have a labor-force participation rate of 85 percent (says a 2002 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) making them the most active subgroup of workers in the USA.

Clusters of travelers speak also of families flung apart, hearts stretched across America. Along the highways of the Texas vastlands, we gaze out windows and think through our lives.

La Raza Cosmica is what Mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelos imagined for the peoples of these vast and handsome lands. La Raza Cosmica, Spanish for the cosmic race or the cosmic peoples. Out of the intermingling histories of los Indios, European, African, and Asian peoples, Vasconcelos prophesied not a master race but a cosmic blend of talent and virtue. In the peace of the bus, with the skin colors all present, the landscape seems to ask why not?

But outside the bus, an hysterical politics is being watered and fed that would turn this landscape into a territorial imperative, culminating in the construction along the USA-Mexico border of something called an unclimbable wall. With my mind's eye on the placard map, I trace the crooked line that starts at the boot-tip of Texas and runs west-north-westward along the borderlands of New Mexico and Arizona up to the left hip of California at the Pacific Coast. An unclimbable wall to separate Latin Americans from El Norte.

In the President's radio address Saturday, the issue of immigration was framed in terms of homeland defense. "To defend this country, we have to enforce our borders," he said with a twist of grammar, as if a border is something inherently enforceable.

"When our borders are not secure, terrorists, drug dealers, and criminals find it easier to sneak into America," he warned, ignoring plain statistics that suggest the vast majority of immigrants come here to work and grow families. "My administration has a clear strategy for dealing with this problem: We want to stop people from crossing into America illegally, and to quickly return the illegal immigrants we catch back to their home countries."

Here the President's anti-terror logic gets applied to Latin America. Some people crossing the border might be terrorists; therefore, in order to solve "this problem" we must make war on all people "crossing into" America. And the phrase "crossing into" says a mighty lot about how the President's strategy draws us closer to an unclimbable wall. He didn't say "crossing over".

At the turn of the 20th Century, 85 percent of immigrants to the USA were "crossing over" from Europe, but today those numbers are reversed. In addition to the 15 percent who still come from Europe today, 25 percent cross the Pacific from Asia, and eight percent from places "other" than Europe, Asia, or Latin America.

But these days, Latin America provides fifty one percent of the foreign born residents in the USA, and about half of those Latin Americans are not from Mexico. Or to put it another way, for every Mexican migrant "crossing into" the USA from the South, there is nearly another Latin American who is not from Mexico.

The President on Saturday made reference to this non-Mexican immigration when he announced that a new Homeland Security bill will allow him to "expand the holding capacity of our detention facilities by 10 percent."

"This will allow us to hold more non-Mexican illegal immigrants while we process them through a program we call 'expedited removal,'" explained the President. "This will make the process faster and more efficient. Putting more non-Mexican illegal immigrants through expedited removal is crucial to sending back people who have come here illegally. As Secretary Chertoff told the Senate this week, our goal is to return every single illegal entrant, with no exceptions. And this bill puts us on the path to do that."

In this part of the President's address, it is no longer a question of whether the border-crosser may be a terrorist, etc. One is simply an illegal non-Mexican who must be deported, each and every time. (Are there no prisons? asks Scrooge. But nowhere near enough for the non-Mexicans, sir, replies the First Gentleman.) And what about those who are Mexicans?

Next Page  1  |  2

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).

Rate It | View Ratings

Greg Moses Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter Page       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Greg Moses is a member of the Texss Civil Rights Collaborative and editor of The Texas Civil Rights Review. He writes about peace and Texas, but not always at the same time.

Go To Commenting
The views expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
Writers Guidelines

 
Contact AuthorContact Author Contact EditorContact Editor Author PageView Authors' Articles
Support OpEdNews

OpEdNews depends upon can't survive without your help.

If you value this article and the work of OpEdNews, please either Donate or Purchase a premium membership.

STAY IN THE KNOW
If you've enjoyed this, sign up for our daily or weekly newsletter to get lots of great progressive content.
Daily Weekly     OpEd News Newsletter
Name
Email
   (Opens new browser window)
 

Most Popular Articles by this Author:     (View All Most Popular Articles by this Author)

Russian Activists Speak for Peace

Dwight Yoakam Rocks Texas Rodeo

Make that Connection: Where Massive Unemployment Meets Online Higher Ed

No V-shaped Recovery for 2020 College Students or Grads

Obama's Defense of Manhattan Mosque: Strike Three against Mob Rule

To View Comments or Join the Conversation:

Tell A Friend