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Some Arizona Immigration History

The Pruitt's Protest went off without a hitch yesterday, Saturday, Dec. 15, 2007. Attendance on our side was up to 175 compared to 150 last week and compared to an estimated 100 the week before. Let's hit 200 next Saturday! The energy on our side is so powerfully positive! You'll feel great knowing you are part of an important moment of history!
Let's talk about the current immigration laws as being a front for what I call "Neo-Slavery." Why do I call it Neo-Slavery? Because what the anti-immigrants really purport to do is maintain the current immigration laws--they have successfully opposed any attempted changes to immigration law that would make immigration more realistic, workable and humane--and thus turn this segment of the human population into a subclass of non-humans.

What do you call a human being who has no rights, who can be abused, killed and deported without recourse to due process or a right to legally defend themselves, someone who is exploited just for their labor but told they cannot enjoy the fruits that their labor gives the society in control? (Work for us, for crappy wages, pay our taxes, but don't send your kids to our school and don't use our hospitals, labor hard, but if you get hurt, too bad. Suffer, better yet, die. We will replace you). Sounds like slavery to me.

I call it "Neo-Slavery," because those who promote this state of affairs have found a clever way to have slavery but pretend it's not, at the same time: lure people to this country because they are hungry or they just dream of a better life but make sure they come without legal status, exploit their labor for very little cost and dispose of them when they are no longer useful.

The only important difference between old-fashioned slavery and neo-slavery is that people were forced to come here and given no hope of ever having a better life and were systematically tortured, worked to death and humiliated. This was a particular type of perverse cruelty inflicted upon the ancestors of most of our African American brothers and sisters.

But luring people here with a dream of a better life, then destroying that dream is another perverse kind of cruelty. I won't say it is just as cruel, but it is cruel nonetheless. It's like when a young woman is courted by a handsome, wealthy man who promises her everything she dreams of. She elopes with him and believes she will be in wedded bliss the rest of her life. Then she finds out he just wanted someone to put down so he can feel superior, labor to maintain his house and satisfy his needs while he then uses all she gives to go out to party and aggrandize himself. She gets used, abused and beaten, while he has the time of his life, until he decides he doesn't want her anymore and throws her out. Now, doesn't this sound like a lot of immigrant experiences?

What eastern foreign immigrants understand--you know the ones from New Jersey, Iowa, the Carolinas, Indiana, etc., because they are more foreign to the deserts of the U.S. Southwest than many of the Mexican immigrants--is that Mexican immigration to work in the U.S. is a tradition that goes back to the time immediately after the time when the United States invaded, murdered and stole to seize this land from Mexico, just like the Nazi Germans invaded, stole and murdered to get Lebensraum from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia and the like, or how the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and the other eastern European countries after World War II, or China's invasion of Tibet.
Oh, wait, perhaps I should not compare the invasion of Mexico by the U.S. to those of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or China. Those were evil empires; God told the Anglo Americans to exile and kill the Native Americans and invade Mexico, because they were the chosen people come to build a New Jerusalem on American soil after they killed off all the heathen red men and brown-skinned Spanish papists who stood in the way of the Chose Ones. Okay, enough sarcasm.

When the United States took control here, there were indigenous nations who had lived here for millenia and Hispanos who had lived here for a few centuries--except that many Hispanos also had Native American blood in them, so who knows when their ancestors got here and it really doesn't matter, because they were here. We just have to remember, that the Hispanos got here second. Native peoples first, Hispanos second.

So when the United States took control here, guess who worked for the Anglos who came to establish their claims and businesses here? ВЎLos mexicanos! The Anglos were usually too suspicious of the Indian populations, and they were busy ethnically cleansing the land of Indians, so it fell on the Mexicans to do the labor for the most part. Interestingly enough, as far as I can tell, oftentimes the Anglo American businesses preferred to hire the Mexicans over other Anglos, just like today!
My tГa abuela Alejandra Diamos DeGrazia Kerson made me aware decades ago of some of the writings of Charles D. Poston, the so-called founder of Arizona, because he proposed the division of the New Mexico Territory (which comprised both today's New Mexico and Arizona) into the separate territories of Arizona and New Mexico, which Abraham Lincoln accepted and thus we have two separate states today. Mr. Poston stated in his history of early Arizona under the U.S. the following interesting comments:

"In the Autumn of 1856 we had made the headquarters for the company at Tubac comfortable, laid in a store of provisions for the winter, and were ready to begin the exploration of the country for mines. When you look at the Santa Rita Mountains from Tubac, it seems a formidable undertaking to tunnel and honeycomb them for mines. Nevertheless, we began to attack with stout hearts and strong arms, full of hope and enthusiasm. The mines in the Santa Rita Mountains had been previously worked by the Spaniards and Mexicans, as was evident by the ruins of arrastres and smelters. Gold could be washed on the mountain sides, and silver veins could be traced by the discolored grass.
     "As soon as it was known in Mexico that an American company had arrived in Tubac, Mexicans from Sonora and the adjacent States came in great numbers to work, and skillful miners could be employed at from fifteen to twenty--five dollars an month and rations. Sonora furnished flour, beef, beans, sugar, barley, corn, and vegetables at moderate prices.
     "A few straggling Americans came along now and then on the pretense of seeking employment. When questioned on that delicate subject, they said they would work for $10 a day and board; that they got that in California, and would never work for less. After staying a few days at the company's expense, they would reluctantly move on, showing their gratitude for hospitality by spreading the rumor that "the managers at Tubac employed foreigners and greasers, and would not give a white man a chance." They were generally worthless, dissipated, dangerous, low white trash.
     "Many Mexicans that had been formerly soldiers at the presidio of Tubac had little holdings of land in the valley, and they returned to cultivate their farms, in many cases accompanied by their families." (Poston, Charles D. Building a State in Apache Land. Kessinger Publishing: Whitefish, MT. Original printing year: 1894. This printing: 2004.   Pages 18-19).

What so many people who come to Arizona do not understand and do not wish to understand is that from the beginning of the rule of the United States over these western lands, the Anglo American settlers depended on Mexican and Native American labor and knowledge and used that as the basis to build the modern Southwest. The Mexicans and Native Peoples knew how to make the deserts bloom and the mines produce. They built the houses, dug the canals, planted the crops and picked in the fields.

Mexicans--those who weren't already here before the Anglos came--crossed the imaginary line of the border at will and Anglos hired hired them at will because they worked well and frankly, there were needed then for American business to prosper, just as they are needed now. It was not always ideal, as the prejudice brought by some Anglos--and their desire to carpetbag the native Mexican and Native American populations--caused problems, particularly in places like Texas. But it was also obvious to many early Anglo settlers that they needed the Mexicans and the Mexicans in exchange were happy to work for them.
But some of the later Anglo arrivals, particularly the more recent ones, being completely ignorant of our western way of life came with their prejudices against Indians, people who didn't speak English or were Roman Catholic, or practiced Indigenous Religions--or both, like those Yaquis. These new eastern immigrants started the problems with their "nativist" sentiments, while refusing to see that they were the immigrants, not the Mexicans or Native Peoples. Thus segregation and all the other evils of Jim Crow were introduced, modeled on those types of laws meant to suppress the African American population of the East.
By the 1920s, anti-immigrants "nativists", variously organized as the Know-Nothings, KKK or the like, had pressured the government so much, that Congress passed the first major anti-immigration laws exclusively to keep out Italians, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Lebanese and other so-called "Mediterranean" stock peoples who were flowing into the U.S. like water down the Mississippi and whom nativists believed were contaminating their white, Anglo-Saxon protestant stock and values.

Interestingly enough, this is also when they started putting limits on Mexican immigration, which, as far as I can tell, did not exist prior to this. To be honest, many Anglo American businesses in the West protested this loudly (Why? Because they relied on Mexican labor!). Congress had changed the rules on immigration for the Mexicans without consulting either them or the American businesses that employed them. One day it was legal to cross the border and work and it stayed that way for years, all of a sudden, it was illegal! Why? Because a couple hundred politicians said so without considering the reality of economics in the Southwest? Congress made an arbitrary, foolish and inconsiderate decision. It did not fit the tradition and the reality of labor in the Southwest. So that's why neither the Mexican immigrant or the Anglo businessman ever paid much attention to these racist and arbitrary eastern laws. Besides, these laws weren't enforced much, if at all, except on a few notorious occasions. So nobody took them seriously until the recent anti-immigrant hysteria being promoted by a gang of racist nativists.

And these nativists had decided a long time ago that the only real Amerikaaners were going to be northern European whites who could melt into the white Anglo-Saxon protestant identity that they had fabricated in their minds. They had a vision of Amerikkka that did not include darker-skinned individuals or people who spoke other languages or practiced religions that deviated from the majority. And if you weren't part of the group they wanted, you had sure better act like one! Submit to their culture, yours is valueless! Give up your heritage, give up your language! Act like the nativists! "Assimyulate!" as an anti-immigrant shouted at the town hall last Wednesday.

These nativists--who ironically, are not natives--had been so successful up to this point! Earlier, they had outlawed Chinese and Japanese Immigration. Their policies had forced Native Americans onto reservations placed on useless land so that they could slowly starve to death in the wilderness. They had undone the work of Abraham Lincoln and made segregation and Jim Crow the law of the land with Plessy v. Ferguson and thus suppressed the Black population. Now they were able to stop the flow of those swarthy mediterranean types some of whom were suspiciously sort of dark-skinned, didn't speak English, were not Protestants, and worse, according to them, maybe Jewish! And while they were at it, they introduced immigration laws against those Mexicans, who not only looked Indian (because they largely are), but also spoke Spanish and were Catholics!

The "nativists" promoted the concept of the melting pot--which has its own racist notions implicit in it--but the only people who would be allowed to melt were "Alpine" and "Nordic" stock peoples with white skin. A drop any other blood meant you were contaminated! So no miscegenation allowed! They wanted to make a porridge with only one ingredient and one flavor! That was to be their Amerikkka!

In any case, it was Congress who screwed things up by trying to appease racism, just like Janet Napolitano and Phil Gordon have done by trying to appease the racists nativists in our midst. Because of the pressure of these non-native nativists, who didn't like Italians and Jews and others, they passed laws against Mexican immigration, too, and started us on the long road to the situation we have now.

By the way, those laws were wrong, period. The more Italians, Jews, Greeks, Spaniards, Armenians, Lebanese, Arabs, Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, Africans, etc., etc., etc., the better! And I certainly don't mean to inculpate my Anglo and Euro-American brothers and sisters who are on the side of freedom and justice for all, not all Anglos are guilty of the acts of some of their brothers. On the contrary, there are many Anglos do more than some Latinos to defend human rights. So I am not about that. And there are Latino sell-outs, vendidos.

But, everyone only enriches our country! My mother did not teach me the words of Benito JuГЎrez, "El respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz=Respect for the alien (the other's) right is peace," I learned those later. But she taught us to live the spirit of those words! She taught me to appreciate everyone, even when it is hard to!

By the way, I am writing this long history so that when a nativists minyute man or hysterical housewife is screaming, "why are you calling me a racist," you will have the historical background in understanding the racism that underpins almost all of the anti-immigrant sentiments in this country. Not all concerns about immigration are racist, some are just practical concerns we should address. But the blanket concept of restrictive immigration policy designed to keep people out because of their race, religion, national origin or the like racist. It is also bad for American commerce and does evil to our human soul.

Dr. David Rubi