BELONGING: PLACE, CARE, AND MASCULINITIES AMONG “CRIMINAL ALIEN” MEN DEPORTED TO MEXICO by TOBIN MICHAEL HANSEN A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of Anthropology and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2019 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Tobin Michael Hansen Title: Belonging: Place, Care, and Masculinities Among “Criminal Alien” Men Deported to Mexico This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of Anthropology by: Lynn Stephen Chair Philip W. Scher Core Member Daniel J. Tichenor Core Member Kristin E. Yarris Core Member Pedro García-Caro Institutional Representative and Janet Woodruff-Borden Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2019. ii © 2019 Tobin Michael Hansen This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (United States) License. iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Tobin Michael Hansen Doctor of Philosophy Department of Anthropology June 2019 Title: Belonging: Place, Care, and Masculinities Among “Criminal Alien” Men Deported to Mexico In what ways do long-time U.S. residents come to belong to families, local communities, and nations before and after deportation to Mexico? And how are they perceived not to belong? This dissertation explores the relationships between social and legal membership, identity formation, and belonging to place in the context of noncitizen criminalization, forcible expulsion, and place-making after deportation. It provides insights into the hardships of deportation and how people attempt to cope. This study is based on 19 months of ethnographic work. It examines the lives of long-time U.S. resident men who the U.S. government designates “criminal aliens” and deports to Mexico. The men at the heart of this research migrated from Mexico as children and grew up considering the United States home. Fifty-seven deported men contributed to this community-based research, shedding light on the impact of deportation on their lives by giving extensive interviews and allowing participation in their day-to-day activities. The dissertation elucidates multiple ways in which deported men come to belong and not belong, to populations and territories, across their life histories. Study participants were, as adults, incarcerated in U.S. prisons, designated “criminal aliens,” and expelled over the northern Mexico border by the U.S. government, experiencing iv various legal, social, and embodied exclusions. This research considers their participation in U.S. social and cultural life and how, in unfamiliar northern Mexico receiving communities, they navigate the social marginalization of family separation and, as stigmatized post-prison, “Americanized” Mexicans, encounter alienation, a lack of work, and embodied violence. They carve out narrow spaces of belonging by mobilizing U.S. Latinx identities, building solidarity with other deportees, harnessing memory, and struggling to make home in northern Mexico. Regional and personal histories, cultures, and interpersonal relationships enable limited social inclusion despite rigid and exclusionary U.S. immigration enforcement. In the present-day context of broad illegalization and criminalization of migrants, refugees, and other noncitizens around the globe, this dissertation suggests that social and cultural aspects of belonging must be better understood. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Tobin Michael Hansen GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon Corban University, Salem, Oregon DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, Anthropology, 2019, University of Oregon Master of Arts, Anthropology, 2015, University of Oregon Master of Arts, Interdisciplinary Studies, 2008, Oregon State University Bachelor of Arts, Accounting, 2000, Corban University Bachelor of Arts, English, 2000, Corban University Bachelor of Arts, Finance, 2000, Corban University PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Employee, Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Eugene, 2015-2019 Graduate Employee, Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, University of Oregon, Eugene, 2013-2015 Instructor of Spanish, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, 2009-2013 Graduate Teaching Assistant, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, 2001- 2002 Adjunct Instructor of Spanish, Corban University, Salem, Oregon, 2000-2002 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Predoctoral Fellow, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2017-2018 Graduate Research Fellowship, Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, University of Oregon, 2017-2018 International Dissertation Research Fellowship Photo Competition Co-Winner, Social Science Research Council, 2017 Malcolm McFee Memorial Endowment Award, Department of Anthropology, vi University of Oregon, 2017 International Dissertation Research Fellowship (supported with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), Social Science Research Council, 2016- 2017 Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 2016-2017 Summer Research Grant, Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, University of Oregon, 2016 Guerrero-Friedlander Human Rights Graduate Student Paper Prize, Honorable Mention, American Anthropological Association, Committee for Human Rights, 2016 Graduate Student Paper Prize, Honorable Mention, Association of Latino and Latina Anthropologists, American Anthropological Association, 2016 Cheney-Safa Paper Competition Winner; Latin American Studies Association, Gender Studies Section, 2016 Graduate Student Research Grant, Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon, 2015 Luther S. and Dorothy C. Cressman Prize, Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, 2015 Graduate Research Grant, Global Oregon Initiative, University of Oregon, 2014 Graduate Research Award, Center on Diversity and Community, University of Oregon, 2014 Outstanding Teaching Award, School of Language, Culture, and Society, Oregon State University, 2011 Most Distinguished Graduate, Corban University, 2000 Joshua-Barnabus Award, Corban University, 2000 PUBLICATION: Hansen, Tobin. 2019. “Social Citizens and Their Right to Belong.” In Illegal Encounters: The Effect of Detention and Deportation on Young People, edited by Deborah A. Boehm and Susan J. Terrio, pp. 32-44. New York: New York University Press. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I offer my sincerest gratitude for the support I have received to advance this project to fruition. Many people have engaged and constructively critiqued the research presented here. First and foremost, thank you to my mentor and dissertation chair Lynn Stephen for sharing with me a vision for this work. Your immeasurable support and invaluable insights have buttressed it from beginning to end. I am infinitely appreciative. Thank you to my dissertation committee members—Pedro García-Caro, Philip Scher, Daniel Tichenor, and Kristin Yarris—for incisive comments on my writing and hours of lively discussion in faculty offices, at coffee shops, and around campus. You have made the final work incalculably better. Many others have shaped my thinking from decades back: thanks in particular to Richard Clinton, Kay García, and Susana Rivera-Mills. Thank you to my peers at UO, especially Rucha Chandvankar, James Daria Timothy Herrera, Samantha King, Emily Masucci, Rupa Pillai, Kathleen Piovesan, Iván Sandoval Cervantes, Jonathan Turbin, Sofía Vicente Vidal, and Alexis Yalon. Your esprit de corps has lifted me up on many occasions. Wonderful humanistic social scientists have supported both my intellectual and professional development: Erin Beck, Deborah Boehm, Lauren Heidbrink, Josiah Heyman, Daniel Martínez, and Jeremy Slack. And heartfelt thanks to Manny Campbell for taking my aspirations seriously, seeing in me more potential than I thought I had, and turning me on to anthropology in the first place. Fieldwork was supported and made infinitely better by friends and collaborators in northern Mexico and southern Arizona: Marla Conrad, Engracia Robles, and others at the Kino Border Initiative; Yessenia Medrano and the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project; Taquero and everyone from Puro Barrio. Thank you Juan Carlos Moreno, viii my friend, for giving me a home away from home. And of course, I am indebted to Danny, que en paz descanse, Dustin, Javier, José Luis, Marcos, Milton, Paco, and so many deported people who shared their lives. My gratitude to colleagues in the Department of World Languages at Oregon State University and to my teachers in UO’s Department of Anthropology who cultivated my growth. Thank you to Rafael Fernández de Castro, Melissa Flocca, Greg Mallinger, and the vibrant, generous 2017-2018 cohort of the Predoctoral Fellows Program at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. Much of the dissertation was drafted during time in residence there. This project was propelled in its infancy by my giving instructors and supportive cohort at the 2015 National Science Foundation’s Summer Institute for Research Design. I am also appreciative of financial support from the Social Science Research Council, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; and the University of Oregon’s Center on Diversity and Community, Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies, Center for the Study of Women in Society, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Anthropology, Global Oregon Initiative, and Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics. Finally, my family has given unwavering support. Thanks to my parents, Curtis and Elaine, who have taught me to work hard, love freely, and lose graciously. And to Mark and Scott and the whole family for helping me learn life lessons. To my wife Kristine: thank you for your love and generosity, never losing your sense of humor, and for being the brightest star in my galaxy. All shortcomings in the dissertation are mine. ix To Oscar. You not only encouraged me to begin this research, but you made it your own along the way. You are always remembered. x TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................1 The Rise of “Criminal Alien” Deportations .............................................................8 State Power and Historical Exclusions and Expulsions .............................10 Mexican Inclusion and Social and Legal Subordination ...........................13 Illegalization, “Criminal Aliens,” and Non-Belonging. .............................17 Toward an Anthropology of Belonging .................................................................22 Transborder Lives ......................................................................................26 The Borders of Race, Gender, Care, and Violence ....................................27 The Social and Spatial Geographies of Nogales ....................................................31 Topography and Historical Development in and around Nogales .............33 The Six Zones of Nogales ..........................................................................41 A Word on an Ethnography of Care and the Quandaries of Representation .........44 Ethnographer Positionality .........................................................................48 Representational Dilemmas .......................................................................50 The Outline of this Dissertation .............................................................................53 Notes ......................................................................................................................55 II. MAKING LIFE IN THE UNITED STATES: (IM)MOBILITIES, RACE, AND BELONGING .......................................................................................................57 Detention Centers: Confined to Home ...................................................................59 Migrations and the Making of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands ...........................63 Normalized Migrations ..............................................................................64 Labor Migrations .......................................................................................66 xi Chapter Page Childhood Crossings ..................................................................................69 Crossing: Authorized and Unauthorized Family Relocations ...................72 Precarious Social Positioning and Life in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands ..............76 Race and Economic Precarity in Borderlands History ..............................77 Spatialization: Mexican Phoenix ...............................................................83 Crossing Back North and “Passing” in the Borderlands ........................................87 Conclusions ............................................................................................................96 Notes ......................................................................................................................97 III. POST-DEPORTATION VULNERABILITIES: NAVIGATING VIOLENT SOCIAL-SPATIAL GEOGRAPHIES IN NORTHERN MEXICO ..............................99 The Contours of Mafia-State Geographies ..........................................................103 Multiple Dimensions of Violence ........................................................................109 Social and Spatial Geographies of Mafia-State Violence ....................................112 Landmarks and Borders ...........................................................................113 Gaining Proficiency in Social and Spatial Geographies ..........................117 “Eighty-Sixed”: Circumscriptions within and Prohibitions from Place .........................................................................................................119 Ups, Downs, and Staying One Step Ahead ..............................................122 Imagined Returns, Places Beyond Fences, and Staying in Place ............127 Heading South: Real and Imagined Refuge .............................................135 Conclusions ..........................................................................................................137 Notes ....................................................................................................................139 IV. “DOWN HERE YOU GOTTA’ START FROM ZERO”: WORK, HUSTLES, AND xii Chapter Page REDEFINING MASCULINITIES AFTER DEPORTATION .......................................141 Dreamer’s Hustles, Persistent Stigma, and Changed Ways .................................143 Deportability, Deportation, Work, and Masculinities ..........................................146 Migration, Deportability, and Labor Control ...........................................148 Gender Shifts and Masculinities ..............................................................150 “Por necesidad [Out of Need]” ............................................................................151 Opportunities and Obstacles: Documentation, Hustles, and Straight Jobs ..........156 Wages .......................................................................................................160 Call Centers and Other Straight Jobs ...................................................................164 Hustling on the Line .............................................................................................168 The Evolution of the Line ........................................................................171 Affability on the Line ...............................................................................172 “Getting By”: Other Hustles ................................................................................174 Ingenuity, Deceit, and Compassion .........................................................177 Conclusions ..........................................................................................................180 Notes ....................................................................................................................182 V. “WE FIND EACH OTHER DOWN HERE”: CARE CIRCULATIONS IN TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES AND LOCAL COMMUNITIES ...........................183 Care Up Close and from Afar ..............................................................................187 Prison Animus, Prison Care .................................................................................191 Transnational Families: Separation, Transition, Support, and Frayed Ties .........195 Family Visits ............................................................................................199 Long-Distance Family Care .....................................................................202 xiii Chapter Page Burning your Family and Frayed Ties .....................................................204 Local Care: Families and Deportee Care Communities ......................................208 Family Members’ Deportations and De Facto Deportations ...................209 Shared Identities: “We Find Each other Down Here” .............................213 Lexical Distinctions .................................................................................216 Care Community Diversity ......................................................................217 Prison, Residential Spaces, and Domestic Lives .....................................225 Overcoming Prison Animus .....................................................................229 Conclusions ..........................................................................................................231 Notes ....................................................................................................................232 VI. “AMERICANNESS”: CULTURE, SELF-REPRESENTATION, AND BELONGING ..............................................................................................................233 Cultural Imagination, Self-Representation, and Mass Culture ............................237 Civic Culture ........................................................................................................241 Historical Referents and Race ..................................................................245 U.S. Militarism and Patriotism ................................................................248 Resistance to U.S. Empire .......................................................................249 Popular Culture ....................................................................................................252 Popular Culture as Generational Marker .................................................254 Popular Culture as Pedagogical Tool .......................................................256 Pop Culture, Self-Expression, and Masculinities ....................................257 Chicanx and Mexican Popular Culture ....................................................263 The Politics of Culture, Assimilationism, and Chicanx Anticolonialism ............266 xiv Chapter Page Scholarly Approaches to Culture .............................................................267 Conclusions ..........................................................................................................270 Notes ....................................................................................................................272 VII. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................273 Danny ...................................................................................................................275 Bad News .............................................................................................................276 Belonging and Non-Belonging ............................................................................279 APPENDICES A. List of Acronyms ...........................................................................................282 B. Diagram of State Actors .................................................................................283 C. Chart of Participants ......................................................................................284 D. Research Methods ..........................................................................................289 E. Participant Interview Table ...........................................................................298 F. Interview Outline for Core Participants .........................................................299 REFERENCES CITED ....................................................................................................304 xv LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Map of Arizona-Sonora borderlands ...............................................................................3 2. Interstate 19. Nogales, Sonora in the distance ................................................................ 4 3. Handcuffs and leg shackles are removed .........................................................................5 4. Desertscape outside Nogales ..........................................................................................34 5. Low-lying basin of the Line and downtown ..................................................................40 6. One block south of the Line ...........................................................................................41 7. View to the southeast of residential area .......................................................................42 8. View to the north ...........................................................................................................43 9. Industrial zone ................................................................................................................44 10. Florence Correctional Center .......................................................................................61 11. CCA Eloy .....................................................................................................................62 12. Participants’ states of birth ...........................................................................................65 13. Participants’ primary U.S. states of residence .............................................................77 14. Llantera Hispana rim shop ...........................................................................................86 15. Railroad tracks ...........................................................................................................116 16. Escalinata (outdoor stairs) ..........................................................................................124 17. Desert north of Nogales .............................................................................................128 18. Rick picking up trash .................................................................................................168 19. The Line .....................................................................................................................170 20. Recently deported person ...........................................................................................196 21. Two-bedroom deportee house ....................................................................................225 xvi Figure Page 22. Shipping bay converted into a studio .........................................................................226 23. Shared deportee studio ...............................................................................................227 24. Fantasma prepares a meal ..........................................................................................229 25. Deportee tattoo of Phoenix Cardinals’ logo ...............................................................255 26. Lyrics to one of Paco’s many rap compositions ........................................................261 27. Alain Ojeda’s rendering of “criminal alien” experiences ..........................................264 28. Danny .........................................................................................................................279 xvii LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. Research Participants (Deportees) ...............................................................................284 2. Participant Interviews ..................................................................................................298 xviii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION On the bustling streets around the DeConcini Port of Entry people come and go, crossing paths, negotiating their lives. The port itself is a two-story grayish building with a soulless row of square, tinted windows. Several lanes of vehicular traffic roll north and south, past car-width inspection slots and guard gates and through a rectangular opening under the second story. One of the port’s broad wall exteriors faces the United States northward and the other looks south toward Mexico; from either end, the 30-foot tall steel bollard border fence extends up and down rolling hills for miles to the east and west.1 The port and the fence separate and conjoin Nogales, Arizona with Nogales, Sonora, two political entities that share a name and in many senses are one urban area called Ambos Nogales or “Both Nogales.”2 Although there is another land port across town, most people cross here. In each month of 2017, more than 518,000 vehicle passengers crossed from Nogales into the United States, in addition to 220,000 pedestrian crossings and 11,000 bus passenger entries.3 People approach the port on foot or in vehicles, in lines that are longer and slower some days than others. To cross north, they present U.S. passports, U.S. legal permanent residence cards, Mexican passports with U.S. border crossing cards, or other documents that permit crossing back and forth between Ambos Nogales, although many from the Mexican side are never allowed north and many from the U.S. choose not to venture south. Documents are not checked when crossing into Mexico. The majority of people in the city blocks surrounding the port—whether crossers or people just going about everyday life on one side or the other—are locals: commuting 1 to work or school, shopping, or unwinding with others. But amidst the strutting cowboys in leather boots, elementary school students running and shouting in navy uniforms and superhero backpacks, and middle-aged white people strolling in flip flops and cargo shorts, there is another sort of negotiation of life. Buses or occasionally 15-passenger vans that have traveled south on I-19 pull up multiple times a week and park just a few dozen feet north of the port, between the pedestrian walkway and vehicular lanes, drawing little attention. These passengers come from the U.S. side and do not venture back and forth, but cross south here just once. They are non-U.S. citizens who have been ordered “removed,” or deported, by the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and barred from reentry (see Appendix A for a list of acronyms and Appendix B for a diagram of government agencies in the United States and Mexico with which deportees have contact). These aging buses, charted by the federal government, painted white with steel protective cages barely visible through tinted windows, are only distinguishable by tiny lettering on the undercarriage: U.S. DOT number and “Special Shuttle, Operated by G4S Secure Solutions.”4 These buses come from immigration prisons in the southern Arizona towns of Eloy and Florence, or others further away (see Figure 1). 2 Figure 1. Map of Arizona-Sonora borderlands. U.S. Census Bureau. They rumble for an hour south of Tucson on this four-lane highway that cuts through the high-desert—lined with saguaro, ocotillo, and large igneous rocks—before reaching Nogales, Arizona and slowing for the last half-mile under signs that read “FREEWAY ENDS,” or simply, “MEXICO” (see Figure 2). The open interstate morphs into a two- lane street and follows a moderate downgrade through a sweeping S-curve in front of a Burger King, a McDonald’s, some large parking lots, and a few local shops on the final block north of Mexico. 3 Figure 2. Interstate 19, less than one mile from the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry. Hills and houses in Nogales, Sonora are barely visible in the distance. All photos were taken by author. The buses approach the activity of the port inconspicuously. Dozens of Customs and Border Patrol officers mill nonchalantly between guard posts and inspection stalls in polished boots, with tactical vests under navy uniforms and top-of-the-line Glock pistols holstered. Private security guards in gray polyester uniforms with revolvers get off the buses first. Then, one-by-one, groups of men or women, but usually men, walk down the steps of the bus. Depending on “security level,” people walk out with hands cuffed and feet shackled or, occasionally, without restraints. The private guards consult with Mexican consular officials, turned out in cotton shirts and navy vests. Cuffs and shackles are removed (see Figure 3). Deportees sign a property release on a metal table and are handed clear plastic DHS bags with a few belongings. Some wear border-crossing clothes, others the clothes from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest in 4 the United States, and others green, orange, or blue prison or jail jumpsuits and slippers. No one has shoelaces. Those are taken away in detention centers—a “safety risk.” Figure 3. A passerby looks on as handcuffs and leg shackles are removed to prepare deportees to be led on foot through the port of entry to Nogales, Sonora. Mexican consular officials walk deportees a couple hundred feet, through an empty vehicular lane over yellow reflectors and into federal offices, just feet from the U.S. government’s port-of-entry building. Human Repatriation5 officials in brown pants and olive tops—no guns—sit deportees in rows of plastic chairs for a short orientation on services and safety. Deportees are called—“¡Pase!”—to sit in chairs across from upright officials clicking away at computers. Interviews take just a few minutes: “Name? Birthdate? Place of birth?” Officials snap a photo with a webcam and snag a “Repatriation Certificate” from a printer to hand to interviewees, dismissing them. Next repatriado. “¡Pase!” 5 This scene is simultaneously momentous and mundane. Many aspects are routine, bureaucratic, and “normal.” Every day the United States government deports hundreds of people over the southwest border and into the northern Mexico borderlands.6 Yet for those forcibly expelled from the United States and those sympathetic to their situation the scene is also suffused with surprise, anguish, and significant complexity. Deportation has wide-ranging effects on individuals, families, communities, and nations. This scene begins to suggest fundamental questions that this research undertakes regarding how people experience belonging and not belonging and are perceived to belong (or not) within political and social communities, to place, and to other people. This study examines the intersection of belonging and deportation. It focuses on long-time U.S. resident “criminal alien” men who are deported to Mexico. The people that participated in this research, a fraction of all of deportees, migrated from Mexico to the United States at age 12 or younger and, as adults, were deported to Mexico as so- called “criminal aliens” (see Appendix C for a chart of research participants). Belonging—being a part of, being present in one’s rightful place, experiencing membership—is conditional and partial. The lives of “criminal aliens”—non-U.S. citizens convicted of a crime—provide insight into various ways people belong to nations, communities, families, and each other through shared life histories; cultural and linguistic socialization; movement, immobility, and confinement in place; circulations of care; and shifting understandings of identity. From 2013 to 2018 I carried out 17 nonconsecutive months7 of ethnographic fieldwork in Nogales, Mexico and one month8 in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico, a comparative site (see Marcus 1989 on multilocale and translocal ethnographies). I conducted 6 fieldwork with “criminal aliens,” most of whom had been incarcerated in U.S. prisons and half of whom identified as formerly gang affiliated. I observed these deported men’s attempts to move forward with their lives. I went to work with them, shared meals in their rented rooms or small houses, walked the streets with them, and lived day-to-day life by their side, among the people of Nogales and Puerto Peñasco. I listened closely to their stories and I saw up close their struggle to belong. To gain additional insight, I volunteered an additional five weeks9 as a legal intern for the Florence Immigration and Refugee Rights Project (FIRRP) in CCA, FCC, and SPC, immigration detention centers in Eloy and Florence, Arizona (see Appendix D for research methods). While in Nogales and Puerto Peñasco I conducted 57 semi-structured interviews with deported men (see Appendix E for number of interviews and Appendix F for the interview guide). I completed longitudinal follow up interviews with 22 of those deported men, whom I had first interviewed between 2013 and 2016. With 18 deportees, I conducted life history interviews. Interviewees were Mexican national men that migrated to the United States at age 12 or younger and were deported as “criminal alien” adults. Here I refer to these 57 men as research participants, interlocutors, or interviewees. The quotidian scene of busloads of people deported from the United States to Nogales with which I began the introduction provides a geographic and temporal point from which to expand outward and begin to conceive of deportation as a process encompassing a broader scope of place and time both before and after deportation. Analyzing noncitizen belonging in the United States through the lens of deportation permits insight into the increased verve for noncitizen exclusions, the evolving mechanisms of state exclusion and expulsion, and the shifting determinations of those 7 deemed worthy of presence. Contextualizing U.S. deportations is critical to understanding the logics whereby coercive displacement—via the complex bureaucratic contortions done to identify, apprehend, imprison, transport, and ultimately expel noncitizens—is natural and largely unquestioned. After first looking, in the section that follows, at how non-belonging has been constructed and policed in the United States historically, and how those perceived not to belong have been excluded and expelled, I then shift the focus in subsequent sections of the introduction to a more complicated story that considers the social and cultural ways that belonging is negotiated both before and after deportation. The Rise of “Criminal Alien” Deportations The several dozen people that would be led off a bus and into Mexico through the DeConcini Port on any given day when I was conducting research are just a fraction of deportees. In 2016, the most recent year with available data, the U.S. government deported 340,056 people (Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 2017, 103). U.S. government deportations are contributing to a global trend in which exclusions and expulsions have intensified from the United Kingdom, European Union countries, Australia, and now even from South Africa, Mexico, and other countries. The sheer volume of deportations, moreover, reflects an exponential increase since the 1960s. Mean annual deportations totaled 9,098 in that decade and about 23,000 in the 1970s and 1980s (Yearbook 2017, 103). By 1997 they reached 114,432 in that year alone, almost tripled by 2007 to 319,382, and peaked at 433,034 in 2013.10 “Criminal alien” deportations have been part of the upsurge. Throughout much of the 20th century, annual criminal deportations numbered a few hundred, except for highs of a few thousand 8 during economic downturns in the 1930s and after WWII (King et al. 2012, 1802). The year 1986, a “watershed year” (King et al. 2012, 1796) or “Great Divide” (Massey et al. 2002), marked the advent of mass “criminal alien” deportations. Whereas U.S. government deportations for criminal convictions totaled 2,318 in the entire decade of the 1970s (Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1982, 378), they increased to 4,385 in 1987 (Sourcebook 1997, 416), and 33,951 in 1997 (Sourcebook 1999, 381). “Criminal alien” deportations reached 135,570 in 2016 (Yearbook 2017, 103). A few statistics are also useful for framing Mexico’s prominent positioning within the geographic distribution of deportations. The U.S. government deportation’s reach has become greatly extended, expelling noncitizens to between 180 and 190 countries year by year (ICE 2018, 17-22). Yet Mexico receives exponentially more deportees than other countries. For example, in 2016, Mexico received seven times more deported people than the second highest receiving state, Guatemala (Yearbook 2017, 114). Nogales alone, with a population of just over a quarter million,11 has received on average almost 21,000 deported people per year since 2014.12 And that represents only about 10% of U.S. deportations to Mexico, the vast majority to northern border cities (Secretaría de Gobernación 2018). If there has been a dramatic rise in noncitizen deportations in recent decades, what is the reason? How, particularly, has “criminality” driven mass deportations? And how has Mexico become an important site for receiving deportees? A transdisciplinary literature on deportation that has burgeoned since the early 2000s helps begin to understand the motivations and mechanisms that expel noncitizens as well as the consequences of expulsion (Coutin 2015). At the intersections of immigration studies, 9 security studies, and deportation studies, scholars have examined ramped up border militarization (Andreas 2001; Heyman 2013; Nevins 2002), interior surveillance and enforcement (Ábrego et al. 2017; Coleman 2007; Inda 2006; Martínez et al. 2018), legislative approaches that restrict noncitizen presence (De Genova and Peutz 2010; Inda 2013; Dowling and Inda 2013), the illegalization of noncitizens (De Genova 2002; Gomberg-Muñoz 2017), and the criminalization of noncitizens (Chacón 2013; De Genova and Peutz 2010; Inda and Dowling 2013; Stumpf 2006; Zilberg 2011). State Power and Historical Exclusions and Expulsions The control that states wield over the discriminatory admission and expulsion of people shapes the trajectories of individuals’, families’, and communities’ lives. While it is not illogical to interrogate the possibility that people’s movements between states reflects weakening state influence (cf. Aretxaga 2003; Calavita 1992; Nagengast 1994; Sharma and Gupta 2006), states’ tenacious and flexible institution of assemblages of immigration laws, policies, and enforcement practices exert vast effects on places and peoples (Coutin 2000, 2003, 2007; Heyman 1995, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002; Kearney 1995). Deborah Boehm (2012, 55-67) makes explicit the U.S. and Mexican states’ reconfiguration of transnational Mexican families. Nation-state boundaries, as Boehm’s unsurprising but insightful analysis goes, constrain family reunification by passively inhibiting movement and by actively intervening through, among other practices, deportation. Moreover, this direct mediation of people’s lives extends beyond the geospatial boundaries of the state itself since state reach is embedded in larger processes of states’ changing spatialization (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). 10 The U.S. government’s contemporary deportation powers are historically rooted and briefly sketching its development helps make sense of deportations today. This history also challenges public discussions of deportation in the United States that often assume that national citizenship absolutely determines belonging. This thinking assumes that various dimensions of belonging—physical presence within a national territory, membership within a polity, social integration in a local community, and cultural inclusion reflected in language affinity and everyday life—are aligned and mutually reinforcing. But belonging—physically, politically, socially, and culturally—has been much more complex since colonial North America and after U.S. independence. Disenfranchisement and exclusions of women, the poor, people of color, and noncitizens have for centuries been mediated by assumed valuations of these social, economic, and political statuses (Chavez 2008; Hernández 2010; Kanstroom 2007; Ngai 2004) and have shaped the dynamics of contemporary deportations. Present-day deportations of Mexican national “criminal aliens” have antecedents in historical modes of physical expulsion from the pre-independence English colonies and the post-independence United States and have hinged on the concepts of merit and moral character (Kanstroom 2007, 21; see also Stevens 2010, 56). In English law, merit—the recognition of deservingness to be present and have a claim on the polity— had distinguished insiders/subjects and outsiders/aliens by the 17th century (Kanstroom 2007, 23). Merit has functioned as a determinant for belonging in two ways: through social identity and so-called moral character. Characteristics of social identity impute social status and thus determine membership and attachment to a common territory. In the last four centuries, social identity has been invoked specifically as justification for 11 denying full political membership, and at times effectuating social and territorial exclusion, to indigenous peoples, immigrants, slaves, women, poor whites, and others. Moral character, the shifting standard for apposite values and behavior, also has excluded from citizenship so-called traitors, religious minorities, the poor, and those deemed criminal. Since well before U.S. independence, expulsion from the colonies for non-dominant ideological and religious views had been legitimated (Kanstroom 2007, 30; Kettner 1978). These exclusions intensified during the revolutionary period, as those deemed disloyal or subversive to the cause of American independence were identified through obligatory oaths of loyalty, formal hearings, and banishment or incarceration for the guilty. Further, the poor and those regarded vagabonds were likewise excluded from colonial townships throughout the 17th and 18th centuries (Benton 2016[1911]). Legal belonging was largely determined by the formal holding of property—without a legal “settlement” with which to establish residency one risked the designation of “transient,” which carried with it the risk of formal exclusion by towns’ governmental bodies (Herndon 2001). Lastly, the social control of those deemed criminal in Great Britain during English colonialism was explicitly linked to expulsion, in this case through the exportation of “convicts” from Old World to the New. This practice ended after independence and, in a reversal of this flow, U.S. states and municipalities implemented laws to enable the removal of those deemed criminal, through formally instituted mechanisms of banishment and exile (Klebaner 1958; see also Kanstroom 2007, 42). Taken together, these means of displacement from localities amounted to very few deportations from the nation over the first century of its existence. The first federal restrictions on entry in 1875, however, of some convicted criminals and sex workers 12 (Ngai 2004, 58), set in motion a sharp turn toward “alien” excludability. Into the 1880s, additional categories of people were designated inadmissible—e.g. “polygamists,” “the insane,” and “Chinese laborers”—yet the consolidation of federal authority and the institution of deportation mechanisms were only implemented in 1891 (Ngai 2004, 59). Still, few less than a few thousand deportations were carried out per year between 1892 and 1920 (Hester 2017, 29). The 1917 inscription of “moral turpitude” into U.S. deportation law (King et al. 2012, 1795), designating certain criminal convictions as morally disqualifying and a catalyst of deportation. This designation was added to growing a contemporaneous list of inadmissible people that comprised “all Asians, illiterates, prostitutes, criminals, contract laborers, unaccompanied children, idiots, epileptics, the insane, paupers, the diseased and defective, alcoholics, beggars, polygamists, anarchists, and more” (Hernández 2010, 27). Mexican nationals and peoples of Mexican decent also faced shifting practices of discrimination. Mexican Inclusion and Social and Legal Subordination Perceptions of Mexican-born immigrants as provisionally meritorious of admissibility within strict parameters have produced unique forms of legal and social marginalization. Prior to the mid-19th century, entrenched Anglo-American social hierarchies racialized Mexicans and excluded them from the possibility of citizenship altogether (Menchaca 2001; Molina 2014). In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted U.S. citizenship to Mexican residents in the newly annexed U.S. southwestern territory and reinforced the general perception that for historical reasons the U.S. southwest was, in the words of the U.S. Immigration Service, Mexicans’ “natural habitat” (Ngai 2004, 64). Simultaneously, institutionalized white supremacy and perceptions of 13 Mexican labor expendability produced residential and occupational segregation, barriers to accessing education, dispossession of landholdings, and overt animus (Gomberg- Muñoz 2017, 22; Zavella 2011, 26; see also Chavez 2017). Nevertheless, the active recruitment of Mexicans to work in agriculture and other low paid industries in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th led to the economic interdependence of the United States and Mexico and to entrenched patterns of significant northward and circular migration and periodic assertions of U.S. government expulsion power (Green 2011; Kang 2017; Plascencia 2009; Portes and Rumbaut 2014). Mexican workers became vital to economic productivity—principally in agriculture, mining, and railroads—in the U.S. southwest at the turn of the 20th century and were exempted for a time from any entry inspection and, for a time, from the head tax and visa fee instituted in 1917 (Ngai 2004, 64). In the 1920s, increased Mexican migration coincided with burgeoning nativism, leading to the U.S. federal government’s first animated efforts at deporting Mexicans, which resulted in approximately 100,000 deportations between 1920 and 1923 (Ngai 2004, 72), and annual figures that fell to 1,751 in 1925 and rose again to over 15,000 in 1929 (Ngai 2004, 67). This combination of social subordination and capital’s expanding and contracting demand for fungible labor continued to produce mass northward migrations. Mass U.S. government expulsion efforts in the 1930s and 1950s also influenced Mexicans’ movements and reflected contradicting and fluctuating desire to exclude them from social and economic life within U.S. territory. Agribusiness’s robust labor demand in the 1920s abruptly slackened with the advent of the Great Depression in 1929 (Hernández 2010, 80). The deflation of the global economy led to broad displacement of 14 U.S. workers; an estimated 350,000 arrived in California during the decade of the 1930s (Hernández 2010, 80). This labor surplus of “Okies” and others intensified anti- immigrant sentiment, rendering Mexicans and Mexican-Americans an easily identifiable target for racial and economic anxiety. Cries to “deport the Mexicans” proliferated as removal became seen as a remedy to widespread underemployment and joblessness (Hernández 2010, 80-81). Local and state governments and charities—predominantly Los Angeles County relief agencies and other California authorities (Ngai 2004, 72), but also in Illinois and Texas—ponied up funds to transport Mexicans by train to the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexican-Americans, irrespective of their possessing U.S. citizenship in some cases, were likewise removed. Although the U.S. Immigration Service did not conduct the expulsions directly, it facilitated them by stoking a climate of fear. For example, in the high-profile La Placita raids in Los Angeles, which where replicated in other towns and cities, local police and immigration authorities barricaded public and residential neighborhoods, demanded to see passports or evidence of legal presence, and forcibly removed those who could not (Ngai 2004, 73). Some Mexican nationals who possessed economic means returned to Mexico voluntarily. And as word of economic stagnation reached Mexico, it made northward migration unattractive to would-be migrants during this period. In total, between 1929 and 1939 some 1.6 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans returned to Mexico through forced and voluntary exit (Hernández 2010, 82). Migrations and deportations during the WWII and postwar eras again highlighted the tensions between the desire for Mexican migrants’ labor and the unease with which they were welcomed into the social and economic life of the nation. U.S. Public Law 45 15 appropriated monies for an executive agreement with Mexico that arranged so-called guest workers to assuage wartime labor shortages (but that lasted from 1942 to 1964) in what became called the bracero program (Calavita 1992). Almost five million people participated (Stephen 2007, 72). Despite the fact that farmworker wages were the lowest in the country when compared to other manual labor, earning workers on average $500 annually, non-bracero Mexican migrants became desirable to farm owners because they could be paid even less, stay longer, and were not in a legal position to organize (Stephen 2007, 73-74). In a reaction to the unauthorized hiring of non-bracero workers, the U.S. government implemented a new model of immigration policing, called Operation Wetback, which by 1952 had intensified line patrols, introduced routine roadblocks, and instituted regular non-warrant entries onto farm and ranch lands, a practice which had been upheld in court against the wishes of local farmers and ranchers (Hernández 2010, 155). Retired General Joseph Swing became the new head of INS and sought to ramp up Operation Wetback in an ambitious effort to project enforcement authority and the appearance of a border “under control.” More than one million Mexicans were deported between July 1, 1953 and June 30, 1954 (Hernández 2010, 173). In a process colloquially known as “drying out the wetbacks,” the INS cooperated with the Department of Labor by apprehending undocumented workers, removing them to the U.S-Mexico border where one foot would tread Mexican territory and Department of Labor officials would instantaneously process them for work in the United States, allowing them to turn heel and return north to their place of employment (Hernández 2010; Massey et al. 2002). Operation Wetback provided the appearance of border control while not constricting the 16 movement of laborers, thus placating farmers and ranchers as well as the U.S. population more broadly. In addition, it further conjoined government regulation of immigration and labor while simultaneously reinforcing the state’s prerogative to exclude and admit people under its terms. Legislation promulgated in 1965 led to the “illegalization” of millions of noncitizens and further intensified the legal precarity of Mexican migrants. Mexican migration had no legal quotas until the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which capped Mexican visas at 20,000 per year, essentially rendering the vast majority of migrant workers unauthorized (Inda 2013). This legal maneuver, which “illegalized” the majority of Mexican migrants, would reinforce popular notions of their signification as the quintessential “illegal” (Ngai 2004; Plascencia 2009). All the while, labor demands continued to be satisfied and an enforcement regime arose whose principle effect is not effectuating the deportations of the millions of unauthorized residents in the United States but instead creating the liminal state of deportability (De Genova 2002; Ngai 2004, 58)— the possibility and threat of enforcement action that disciplines migrants themselves and placates anti-immigrant political constituencies. Illegalization, “Criminal Aliens,” and Non-Belonging As Mexican immigrants in particular became discursively constructed as “illegal,” more recent legislative acts have intensified deportations by also expanding capabilities for expelling “criminal aliens” (Ellerman 2009). The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 instituted swift deportation proceedings and funded the Alien Criminal Apprehension Program (Inda 2013; King et al. 2012, 1797). In 1988, the Anti- Drug Abuse Act established the category “aggravated felony” for murder, drug 17 trafficking, and firearms trafficking; mandated “expedited removal” for their commission; and established harsh penalties for reentry (Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988). The 1990 Immigration Act barred judges from making “Judicial Recommendations against Deportation,” effectively eliminating most forms of discretionary relief from deportation (Kanstroom 2007, 228). Even more severe anti-immigrant legislation was passed in 1996: the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Two of IIRIRA’s principle ramifications are, first, to drastically expand the category of aggravated felonies that trigger deportation proceedings. Second, Section 348(a) contains the pithy phrase “No waiver shall be granted… [if] the alien has been convicted of an aggravated felony.”13 This curt directive has had profound impact, proscribing many forms of discretionary relief from deportation based on social or cultural ties. The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 further expanded administrative authority to detain and remove immigrants (Hagan et al. 2011, 1376). Hardened immigration enforcement has coincided with harsh crime control laws, bolstering the U.S. government’s ability to sweep from the United States noncitizens arrested for or convicted of crimes. Three robust federal efforts have instituted collaboration with local law enforcement, jails, and prisons to facilitate identifying, detaining, and deporting “criminal aliens,” under the umbrella program known as the Criminal Alien Program (CAP) (Congressional Research Service 2016; Martínez et al. 2018). The first two—Secure Communities and the Priority Enforcement Program— instituted under the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations, facilitate data sharing between DHS and the Department of Justice and enable screening for immigration 18 violations in over 300 jails and all state and federal prisons. Moreover, the 287(g) program delegates federal law enforcement functions to certain state and local police officers. The federal government’s commitment to the conjoined immigration enforcement and criminal enforcement apparatus is reflected in the combined annual budgets of CAP and Secure Communities, which rose from $6.6 million in FY2004 to $497.7 million in FY2016 (Congressional Research Service 2016, 17-18). Forty per cent of deportees from the United States in 2016 were designated “convicted criminals” or had criminal charges pending (Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 2017, 113). Perversely, however, tens of thousands of noncitizens’ criminal charges reflect only immigration crimes, such as illegal entry or illegal reentry (USDHS 2018, 4; see also Ewing, Martínez, and Rumbaut 2015; Macías-Rojas 2016). The “illegalization” of migrants has not only led to mass deportations but has resulted in the discursive transformation of the figure of the racialized Mexican migrant into an unsympathetic criminal subject. The everyday word “criminal” wound into Late Middle English from the Latin cernere, in the sense of “wicked” and today connotes “lawbreaker,” “villain,” “delinquent,” “malefactor,” and “wrongdoer.” Immigration restrictionists utterance of the phrases “illegal aliens” and “criminal aliens” is not socially neutral but signifies a shadowy Other with designs on law-breaking and other criminal activity. For Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, criminalization based on assumed illegality has become a culturally inscribed, recognizable identity which Lynn Stephen argues renders them always already suspicious and, in her words, “preemptive suspects” (Stephen 2017; see also Chavez 1992). The criminalized individual is positioned as 19 villainous and assigned diminished moral value based on the presumption that the legal regime that deems noncitizens without authorized U.S. presence to be “illegal” and “criminal” is well calibrated ethically and morally (Cacho 2012, 4). Legibility as “criminal”—as belonging within to this supposedly fixed and immutable identity category—within legal regimes ultimately influences the subject-state relationship and culminates in state nonrecognition and the denial of rights claims. Criminalization broadly then has both resulted from and instigated this enhancement of the deportation apparatus, particularly in regard to “criminal aliens.” Two forms that criminalization takes are important to highlight. First is the creation of laws and enforcement mechanisms that render greater numbers of noncitizens “criminal aliens.” Second, the staggering rise in “criminal alien” deportations, and in turn the postulation of Mexicans (and increasingly noncitizens from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala) as paradigmatic “illegals” and “criminals,” has led to the further conflation of immigrants with so-called criminals. In public discourse surrounding immigration, all noncitizens become stigmatized and perceived as fungible; this includes “criminal aliens” in particular, who thus become unwitting characters in what has been called U.S. policymakers’ perpetual political theater (Heyman 2013, 159) and image management (Andreas 2001, 9). The conflation of immigration and criminality provoke immigrants’ political and legal alienation (Coutin 1993) and result in noncitizen illegalization being taken for granted (De Genova 2002, 2005; Dowling and Inda 2013; Dreby 2015; Golash-Boza 2014) and becoming profoundly pervasive. The notion that immigrants are “illegal aliens” goes beyond the “legal codes, government policies, and bureaucratic apparatuses” 20 (Coutin 1993, 88) of formal state control, which is incomplete (Heyman and Smart 1999) because of enforcement that is capricious and incapable of perfectly and absolutely surveilling, identifying, interdicting, and apprehending unauthorized noncitizens. “Illegality” and deportability pervade matrices of social domains such as work, school, and home as well as political, journalistic, and pundit discourses. Immigrant “illegality” and deportability become naturalized and the “illegal immigrant” becomes an archetypal social-cultural figure. The present research takes a human-centered approach to rethinking the assumed naturalness of noncitizen belonging in the United States. The historical formulation of illegality and criminality examined above open the possibility to an alternative conception of belonging. Belonging can be conceived of without presupposing the categorical supremacy of legal status or the unworthiness of particular social identities. Considering the social and cultural aspects of noncitizens’ lives and grounding their personal narratives in place allows new understandings of belonging to families, home communities, and the nation. At the same time, this approach permits exploration of the tensions of belonging after deportation to Mexico. For the deported people with whom I conducted research, the compounded social stigma of “Americanized” outsider identities and masculine embodiment of signifiers of gang and prison life as well as an unfamiliarity with the physical spaces and the social, cultural, political, economic, and institutional structures of Nogales reinforced notions of non-belonging, despite Mexican citizenship and putatively complete legal inclusion. Yet deported men also strove to belong by learning to navigate 21 the social and spatial geographies of Nogales, developing relationships, and redefining their gendered selves. Toward an Anthropology of Belonging This project began on a suffocating July morning in 2013, when I serendipitously met Danny and Miguel. On a car trip from Oregon to Texas, I stopped to see Nogales. I parked in a lot on the Arizona side, a couple of blocks north of the DeConcini Port of Entry where I saw the typical chaos and mundanity of the border crossing. A pathway took me around one side of the port where I passed through a turnstile under a plastic sign with block letters: “TO MEXICO.” The gates and border guards made me think about the glaring asymmetry of my breezy and unchecked entry into Mexico—U.S. passport in my pocket, additional crossing documents are not needed—and the absolute denial of entry to the United States to so many people in Mexico without the economic solvency to be granted crossing documents by the U.S. government.14 After emerging from under a covered walkway about a hundred feet from the turnstile, I caught my first glimpse of the roughly twelve-block tourist area known as the Line. I wove through groups of friends and family and couples holding hands, meandering my way past rows of pharmacies whose hawkers stood outside announcing Viagra, Cialis, and an array of other over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. They hollered over the laughter, boisterous conversations, and music thumping from cars creeping to escape the congestion. I continued past curio shops displaying kitsch Mexican crafts and lurid souvenirs (one bright t-shirt says, “One tequila, two tequilas, three tequilas… FLOOR!” and another “FBI: Female Body Inspector”); under awnings of one exchange house after another, selling pesos and dollars; and by the flat façade of the two-story 22 Catholic parish and bell tower. The aroma of sizzling taco beef permeated the air, swirling with that of freshly diced fruit, stale hot dogs and onions, cigarette smoke, and floral perfumes. Eventually, as I blindly picked a route not knowing where it would lead, the scene changed. Several blocks south of the tourist area I made my way down a potholed, one-way residential street lined with rickety, one-story row houses in faded greens, coppers, and browns. From a couple of blocks away, I saw two men in their 40s sitting on a dilapidated, raised sidewalk in front of a crumbling cement house. I noticed their white tank tops, prominent tattoos, and Danny’s15 shaved head and Miguel’s slicked-back dark hair. As I continued toward them, Danny popped up and came toward me. He asked in native English, “Hey, white boy, are you from up there [the United States]? We are too!” I was instantly racialized as white and thus different, yet simultaneously recognized as sharing a U.S. national background. Danny, animated upon meeting me, quickly slipped into an exasperated tone. He started explaining that he was deported just months earlier and that he had lived his “whole life” in Arizona. I was struck by Danny and Miguel’s strong desire to convey to me their connections with home in the United States. Danny exuberantly showed me an Arizona driver license and photos of his sons and daughters in Phoenix. Miguel, always quieter, almost whispered in his gruff voice that he had been deported from Los Angeles three years earlier. They described “getting stuck in Mexico” and Danny said that trying to get by in Nogales was worse than his 15 years in Arizona state prisons. Miguel made a few dollars a day at a sidewalk taco stand and Danny had not been able to get any work. Miguel did not have to start his shift for several hours, so I asked if they wanted to drink a beer. We walked unhurriedly, aimlessly south for several 23 blocks until stumbling upon a dingy bar just opening its doors. Crooked letters scratched on a cardboard sign behind the bar announced prices. Danny and Miguel began telling me their stories. I listened closely to Danny and Miguel as they described the imprint on their lives left by people and places in South- Central Los Angeles, where Miguel was from, and west Phoenix, in Danny’s case. They said that deportees were the “forgotten people” from the United States. Another deportee told me years later, “We’re just the trash America takes out.” They missed Arizona and California, the streets, their friends and families. They thought about home all the time. “Down here,” in Mexico, they did not know how “anything worked.” They had never lived here before. Danny and Miguel had to watch out for cops, always stopping them and threatening arrest if they didn’t cough up a few dollars. They struggled to find work and did not “know anyone.” At least they had a place to stay. Danny’s mother, who had died while he was in prison, left him the deed to a tiny house she had owned. They shared Danny’s place. Shared food. Had friends over who were deported. Tried to get by. Danny, Miguel, and I talked for five hours. We made arrangements for me to visit later in the summer and in August 2013, Danny and Miguel hosted me in their three-room house for a week. I met Puppet, Dora, Roy, and several other deported people and was told about how they felt discarded from the United States, invisible, and forgotten. I was extended an invitation that sounds almost too pat to be true; I was told, “Write about us.” Right from the beginning I was struck by the emotional investments, material collaboration, and the division of labor in the small cement house that Danny and Miguel shared. I saw over time that Danny and Miguel had various masculine grammar’s through which to express affective intimacy. They relied on playful antagonism and 24 disparagement. Outside, on Danny’s front sidewalk, Miguel would brag about the “real streets,” Los Angeles—Compton, south-central, and Whittier Boulevard. He would say, “Phoenix ain’t shit.” Danny would say that “la Finiquera,”—Phoenix—was the “real streets” and that “L.A. stands for ‘loser always.’” Danny and Miguel’s banter and everyday companionship reflected a particular way of understanding one another. A literal reading of their dialogue suggests a challenge to the respectability of each other’s background. But an alternative interpretation is that by recalling the streets and the prison yard they are reinforcing their shared masculine ideals of grit and street and prison toughness and are drawing on the signifiers of masculine resilience. Explicitly calling up pinto (prisoner) or cholo (gang) pasts is a reaffirmation to themselves and each other that they are the right kind of men—a way to assuage anxieties about being man “enough.” But this performative posturing, these modes of being, further marked them in Nogales as social undesirables, compounding suspicion that already accrues to men’s tattooed bodies in hip-hop clothing and to U.S. Latinx English and Spanish. Although the mutual support Danny and Miguel provide is crucial to their well-being, it exacerbates their stigmatization and complicates their integration into the broader community of Nogales. In the summer of 2014, preliminary ethnographic research design in hand, I returned to Nogales to see Danny, Miguel, and others. I quickly realized how prevalent long-time U.S. residents were. Almost daily I met deported men in public plazas, parks, on the streets, or when spending time with acquaintances. One happenstance encounter early on, when I was moving in to a tiny room for rent in a building on a hill, serves as an example. I arrived lugging an old suitcase, walking up a long cement staircase toward six 25 or seven men from the neighborhood in their 20s and 30s and three or four dogs. The men, my neighbors over the years, with whom I would become friendly, were sitting on the top steps joking, sipping beer from cans, and smoking cigarettes and a rolled marijuana joint. We said “Qué onda [What’s up]” with a nod. Pancho asked who I was and we made small talk. He had lived much of his life in Tucson. When I said I was an anthropologist, a writer who wanted to know more about deportation, he said in English, “I’ll tell you what it’s like. First you go to prison [in the United States]. Then you get deported. Then you come down here and got to see what you’re gonna’ do.” Transborder Lives This research is inspired by Danny and Miguel’s lives, but also by the understanding that lives such as theirs are lived simultaneously in multiple places and through negotiation of various markers of social difference. When people move and form lives in more than one nation, they become enmeshed in interconnected personal, institutional, economic, and political webs that span national borders and are thus transnational (Glick and Schiller 1994; Kearney 1995). Transnationalism is useful for conceiving of the ways people remain linked even when they are at a physical remove. Moreover, transnationalism suggests the ways that expelled noncitizens—considered unworthy of belonging to the polity, within social communities, and to place within the territorial United States—can nevertheless be conceptualized through multiple transnational connections that persist even as non-belonging is enforced by the state. Conceiving of ties across nations is crucial to understanding the connections to people in Arizona, California, and beyond; to streets, homes, work sites, and other places in local U.S. neighborhoods; and to the sense of self, personal history, and rootedness that 26 persist in memory after forcible expulsion. Transnationalism also allows for the forging of connections where one finds oneself, in place, at present. This notion suggests the importance of understanding that “criminal aliens” from Phoenix and Los Angeles continue to feel rooted in those communities yet are also extending roots in Nogales day by day, month by month, year by year as they make their lives there. Yet this picture becomes more nuanced by social and geographic positioning. People’s movements take them across more than national boundaries as they navigate lives that are connected in multiple places. Lynn Stephen’s (2007) concept of transborder lives takes into account the social positioning within multiple geographic sites that shape people’s lives. She draws from notions of borders as territorial and political boundaries and also as the ways in which social dynamics configured by colonialism shape understandings and material effects of race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality. The Borders of Race, Gender, Care, and Violence “Criminal aliens’” lives can be conceived as transborder in multiple ways. Borders are crossed metaphorically, Stephen suggests, through the historical processes that racialize people as “Mexican” in the United States and reinforce an inferior positioning vis-à-vis white people (see also Almaguer 2012; Molina 2014). Moreover, gender expectations shape the assumptions regarding “criminal aliens” masculinity as dangerous, threatening, coarse, and machista—hypermasculine and defined by a self- centered disregard for others. And physical crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border and its attendant violence is also a critical aspect of transborder lives. Women of color theorists opened examination of social difference and power to gendered and racialized identities on a multi-axis framework that also consider class, 27 nationality, and sexuality in what legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw called “multidimensionality” (1989) or “intersectionality” (1991; see also Anzaldúa 1987; Collins 2000, 8; hooks 1994, 120-121; Moraga 1983). These social identities overlap or blend within an individual and are mutually constitutive of relative social privilege and discrimination (Hames-García 2011, 5), or social locations. Social locations rationalize the access to or denial of resources, community participation and privileges, and provide a unifying basis for social organizing and resistance (Stone-Mediatore 2002, 125). Social locations deepen analyses of deportee lives on the Mexican border by considering social identities that, in addition to being gendered, racialized, and classed, are also “criminalized.” The addition of a criminalized subjectivity elucidates the social subordination of people perceived as threats to social order. Ontologies that consider individuals, independently of broader social contexts, the locus of responsibility for criminalized behavior form the basis of criminalized identity (Parnell 2006), a subject position co-produced with social identity categories listed above. Deportees are seen as law-breakers. This is reflected in the local lexicon, where they are referred to in Spanish using variations of “thug”—“malandros,” “maleantes,” or “malandrines”—or as “cholos,” a term for gang members or youth involved in street culture. The material effects of their criminalized marginalization include frequent police stops and arrests and difficulty securing housing, health care, and work. Masculinities—the position of men in a gendered social order—are likewise critical to understanding belonging. The shifting ways that men understand themselves as men and express themselves reflect not only the impact of deportation on gendered selves but the potential for novel masculinities to emerge (Inhorn 2012). I document how 28 deported men come together and create intimate homosocial living arrangements after deportation that share similarities to prison with a cellmate yet transgress the regional and gang animus of the “carceral social order” that prison institutions themselves foster (Lopez-Aguado 2018). Linking new local formations of masculinities to the global political and social forces of deportation thus reveals potentially novel ways we understand gender (Connell 2000; 2005). Moreover, deported men’s lives recast conceptualizations of racialized, working class men who have been associated historically with animality and immorality, as is expressed in stereotypes of their sexual promiscuity, violence, criminality, and savagery (Machillot 2014). Central to everyday practices are the care communities—spaces of ongoing reciprocal support—that deported men create. Looking at these ties helps illuminate the workings of belonging at transnational, regional, and local geographical scales and across legal and social domains, reconfiguring relatedness with others. Analyzing gender and relatedness together, as both fluid and practice-based, permits insight into how they are mutually constructed (Carsten 2004). A variety of intersubjective practices connect people’s lives. Kinship studies were dominated for decades by formulaic conceptions of biological and marriage ties. Today’s work, in contrast, focuses on varieties of fluid socialities (Borneman 2001; Carsten 2000, 2004; Faubion 2001; Peletz 1995; Sahlins 2013; Schneider 1984) that reflect the myriad ways people make life together. Marshall Sahlins (2013) conceives of relatedness as constituted by cultural practices that enmesh people’s lives, such as co-residence, commensality, shared memories, friendship, and shared suffering. Kath Weston (1991) 29 argued for the importance of making family for those in particularly subordinated social locations, such as LGBTQ people. In addition, the transborder permits analyses of violence. Forging social worlds becomes critical for navigating multiple structures of violence after deportation. The aftermath of deportation involves risk of multiple forms of violence. The concept of structural violence links the susceptibility of certain populations to global shifts in economic, social, and political systems (Bourdieu et al. 1999; Farmer 2004). Noncitizens, susceptible to the political (i.e. state directed) violence of forced removal, occupy positions within these systems that render them particularly vulnerable (Quesada et al. 2011, 341; see also Farmer 1996). Structural violence considers oppression at multiple historic and geographic scales and elucidates macro-level inequalities and overlapping forms of violence (Bourgois 2002, 222; Holmes 2013; Scheper-Hughes 1996; Scheper- Hughes and Bourgois 2004; Vogt 2013). The deportation of long-time U.S. residents results in a particularly disorienting exile. The imbricated components of juridical disenfranchisement (i.e. the mismatch between Mexican citizenship and U.S. Latinx social and cultural identity), social and economic subordination in Mexico, victimization at the hands of police and organized crime, and separation from family in the United States result in multiple forms of hardship. Critically, however, are the cultural dimensions of violence that imbue it with potency and significance. More than its physical aspects, such as pain, “Violence also includes assaults on the personhood, dignity, sense of worth or value of the victim” (Scheper-Hughs and Bourgois 2004, 1). The crassness with which cultural and social members of U.S. communities are summarily deposited in unknown receiving 30 communities constitutes an attack on their humanity and reinforces their positioning squarely at the bottom of the architectures of privilege and oppression. Violence attends to and is structured by broader social, economic, and political forces. This is not to ignore perpetrators’ agency and choice, nor to sanitize interpersonal violence—which as Phillipe Bourgois points out, is “usually painful and ugly,” and sometimes horribly so (2002, 222). Instead, it is meant to render visible the conditions that foster violence, and to understand the influence of the U.S. government’s deportation regime on multiple dimensions of violence. This analysis attends to local place-making and deportees’ somatic modes of being (Desjarlais 1997; Jackson 2013a; 2013b; Willen 2007) through which they make sense of their shifting affective, embodied, intellectual, and psychological lifeworlds. It considers, however, these to be configured by global forces of displacement at multiple geographical and political scales: transnational, national, regional, and local. Moreover, deportees’ vulnerability is contingent on the marginalization of their complex social identities of race, class, gender, and nationality. While deportees adeptly engage in place- making—developing techniques for navigating local social and spatial geographies—the only partial mitigation of interpersonal violence demonstrates how the entanglements of local place, embodied vulnerabilities, and the forces of global removal effectuate and perpetuate their exclusions. The Social and Spatial Geographies of Nogales An additional aim of this dissertation is to connect place with the broadly structured and agentive aspects of deportee experiences. Taking the social and spatial in tandem helps elucidate the particularities by which enmeshed social lives act within, 31 through, and around physical geographies (Lefebvre 1991[1974]). Moreover, places— comprised of social processes, natural and built material environments, and unstable, polysemic symbolic meanings—are shaped through historical processes (Casey 1996; Feld and Basso 1996; Pred 1984; Roberts 2018). Places thus enable, shape, and inhibit social action itself, just as places themselves are produced through social action. This meaning and process-based approach to space and place is inspired by post- positivist epistemological paradigms of humanistic-oriented cultural geography, sociology, history, ecology, and anthropology. It is a move away from the modernist Galilean “infinite, and infinitely open space” (Foucault 1984[1967], 1), Newtonian physics and Cartesian rationalism which have held sway for western theorizing and popular conceptions of space (and time) in the last four centuries (Casey 1996, 16). These Enlightenment logics view space as universal, an a priori infinitely extending vacuum, an empty container ready to be portioned, partitioned, or filled with objects. A meaning- centered view, in contrast, posits that place sits alongside space as central to fundamental questions of social life as well as knowledge and the knowable itself. In addition, the local socio-spatial dimensions of social privilege, power, and politics in conjunction with regional, national, and global spatial scales, help illuminate how social life is constructed and experienced (Harvey 1989; 1993, 21). For my purposes, linking analyses of place with global deportation regimes that displace populations on a grand scale, can elucidate the embodied experiences of deportees—the displaced—and provide insight into the consequences of deportation for socio-spatially emplaced selves. This permits insights into the struggles and contestations between simultaneous processes, on the one hand, of separation and persistent exclusion from 32 place—home in the United States—and, on the other, of participation, activity, and inclusion—no matter how partial and contingent—as another sort of home is made in Mexico after deportation. This new home, on the territorial and political U.S.-Mexico border, is shaped extensively by state power and militarization (Andreas 2001; Dunn 2009; Heyman 2013; Nevins 2002; Payán 2006; Rosas 2015; Stephen 2008). The U.S. and Mexican governments have sought, through significant fortification efforts, to control transnational circulations (Heyman 2013, 156; see also Andreas 2001)16 and networks of organized crime (known locally in English and Spanish as the Mafia) that simultaneously endeavor to circumvent regulations. The State-Mafia dynamics—alternately in conflict, collusion, confrontation, and cooperation—permeate the social and spatial geographies of Nogales. Moreover, they structure and distribute embodied vulnerability in what I call Mafia-State violence. I discuss the social and spatial contours of power at greater length in Chapter III, but in the section that follows I outline the historical social and spatial geographies of Nogales and the surrounding region as part of a more general introduction. Topography and Historical Development in and around Nogales Nogales sits in a basin-and-range region of the semi-arid, high Sonoran Desert. The Santa Cruz river snakes northward on the eastern edge of Nogales and between the Pajarito Mountains to the west and the Patagonia Mountains to the east. What today is the city’s rugged topography was cut from volcanic rock over millions of years into layers of clay, sand, and loose rock sediment. The city comprises uncountable gullies and gulches, some of which have been paved over into two-lane streets and others that intersect hillsides at odd angles. These haphazardly zigzagging ravines meander from the city’s 33 basin, at 3,480 feet above sea level, up sheer rock masses that form ridges reaching some 5,610 feet tall (Gastelum Ceballos 2008, 62). Even at these altitudes, mean high temperatures in July reach 92 degrees. In the depths of January, lows average 36 degrees and often sink below freezing17 and the aroma of creosote from makeshift wood stoves fills the air. Prickly pear cactus, ocotillo, mesquite, cedar, cottonwood, and even some ponderosa pine at the highest altitudes sprout from alkali sand and rust-colored clay (see Figure 4). Emerald greens explode during the July and August monsoon season when wild grasses grow, but the rest of the year desert drabs and light browns dominate. Figure 4. Desertscape outside Nogales city limits. For millennia the desert surrounding what would become Ambos Nogales was home to nomadic speakers of Akimel O’odam, Chiricahua Apache, Mayo, Opata, Pima, Tohono O’odham, and Yaqui peoples (Almada Bay 2012). Since colonial invasion, Hispanic Americans and Anglo Americans have contested the region with indigenous 34 peoples in attempts to establish political, cultural, and economic control (Sheridan 2012, 2). The Pimería Alta region, as present-day Arizona/Sonora was known, was among New Spain’s most sparsely populated territories (Menchaca 2001, 117) and Nogales became an important passage on the wagon route between settlements in Tucson—the northernmost Euro-American outpost in New Spain and, later, independent Mexico’s state of Sonora (Heyman 1992, 67)—and the small but prosperous seaport town of Guaymas, Sonora, on the Gulf of California, and other points in between. As per the Gadsden Treaty of 1853, U.S. and Mexican officials in Mexico City partitioned a new international boundary on parchment, annexing Tucson by tracing a line 60 miles to the south and outlining territory east of the Colorado River and west of the Rio Grande (St. John 2011, 35-36). In 1854 the binational Boundary Commission, a team of Mexican and U.S. engineers and surveyors, passed through and marked Nogales Pass with a pile of stones (Rochlin and Rochlin 1976; see also St. John 2011, 36).18 By the following year U.S. Army engineers had erected obelisk monuments every few miles in the desert sand, more than ten feet tall, which still stand today. Ambos Nogales emerged as a far-flung outpost in 1880, with the customs houses built by the U.S. and Mexican governments straddling either side of the line that had been depicted first on paper in Mexico City and then traced in the desert sand by the by the Boundary Commission. The customs houses were constructed in anticipation of the work of engineers for the Sonora Railroad, part of the Atchison-Topeka-Santa Fe system, or ATSF, in Mexico and American engineers for the Arizona and New Mexico Railroad, also part of the ATSF, who planned to intersect the U.S.-Mexico border at Nogales 35 (Arreola 2017, 109). By 1882 a railroad linked Guaymas with Benson, Arizona, a critical railroad hub for east-west cargo and transport in the United States (Arreola 2001, 508). In 1884 Nogales, Sonora and Nogales, Arizona were developing together. The population on the Arizona side was 2,000 and reached 3,000 on the Sonora side, principally within the three blocks hugging the boundary (Arreola 2017). Although technically a division between them had been platted into a grid, bisected by the international boundary, that comprised 29 blocks on the Mexican side and 37 on the American, the boundary line that had been mapped was not discernable on the ground. Ambos Nogales was essentially one town with a nondescript street, aptly named Calle Internacional, that spanned the international border. The growth of Ambos Nogales likewise impelled an inclusive binationalism whereby patriotic celebrations, dances, shopping, and other activities for both nations were jointly celebrated and Masonic lodges, athletic clubs, women’s societies, and a drama club and mandolin club counted in their membership people from throughout Ambos Nogales (St. John 2011, 87). And Ambos Nogales quickly became an important site of retail and bulk commerce and the cross-border exchange of international goods. By the early 20th century green grocers, clothiers, saloons-keepers, and tack outfitters had established businesses on the U.S. side, while “restaurants, drugstores, barbers, lodgings, bakeries, pool halls, jewelry stores, a tailor, coffee roaster, a theater, and a municipal market” operated on the Mexican side (Arreola 2017, 136). The turn of the century also coincided with greater effort from the U.S. and Mexican governments to demarcate a territorial and political division in Ambos Nogales (St. John 2011). As the settlement was growing in previous decades, several buildings 36 had originally been erected without regard for a clear border, including famously John Brickwood’s saloon which straddled the invisible line (St. John 2011, 90). Both the U.S. and Mexican states sought to surveil and better monitor the movement of people, livestock, and goods for which import duties and other taxes might be collected, such as the cigars sold on the Mexican side of Brickwood’s and the American liquor sold from the bar on the U.S. side (St. John 2011, 97). The transportation of cattle and produce and the smuggling of Chinese people—excluded from the United States in 188219—among other concerns, led both governments to proclaimed that a reserve strip of at least 50 feet had to be left clear on either side of the border. Homes, small businesses, barns, and other structures were moved. In a relatively quick turn of international geopolitics, the strife and division which blighted the U.S. and Mexican nations during the Mexican Revolution and World War I also became manifest in Ambos Nogales. Both U.S. and Mexican troops were sent to the border and skirmishes broke out between them in 1913 and 1915. August 27, 1918 saw an eruption of military and civilian violence that led to the deaths of 129 Mexicans and 32 U.S. Americans (Parra 2010). This led the first physical barrier, a barbed-wire fence, to be placed on this stretch of border in 1918 (Arreola 2017).20 Moreover, passports, visas, and the first border crossing cards became required for all crossers into the United States (St. John 2011, 139), although smuggling and illicit crossings thrived. As the conflict waned in the 1920s, people continued to move fairly easily between the Sonora and Arizona sides through one of four neighborhood crossings to work, conduct business, or socialize. A mesh fence was erected in 1935 and the number of crossings was cut from four to two. Local residents, both Mexican and U.S. citizens, 37 freely passed through one of the two small garitas, or kiosk-style customs posts, paying any applicable duty on goods (St. John 2011). Unfettered crossings were typical along the expanse of the U.S.-Mexico border until the early 20th century. The desire for greater regulation, however, catalyzed the founding of the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924 as the enforcement arm of the U.S. Immigration Service. The Border Patrol’s effectiveness was limited—to patrol the entire U.S.-Canada border and the 1,952-mile southwest boundary, it counted in its ranks only 290 agents by 1929 and 916 by 1939 (Hernández 2010, 246, 33). The majority of this southwest expanse was (and remains) rural and the perilous topography, ecology, and climate deterred crossing in many areas. And in growing sister cities such as Ambos Nogales, the importance of cross-border social and economic integration complicated immigration enforcement. This was notably evidenced by the Nogales, Arizona Chamber of Commerce’s successful effort in lobbying the U.S. Immigration Service to exempt the town from surveillance and relegate any border enforcement functions to the beyond town limits, in order to encourage local economic activity (Kang 2017, 3). Ambos Nogales became a central node for more substantial transnational commerce as well, from the extraction of copper, the development of cattle ranching, and the importing/exporting of other goods extracted, cultivated, or produced elsewhere in the United States and Mexico (Almada Bay 2012; Sheridan 2012). Moreover, tourism from the United States has long been a significant aspect of Nogales’s economic and social activity (McGuire 2013, 469-470). Cabarets and curios, or souvenir shops, became prominent particularly during the U.S. government’s experiment with alcohol prohibition between 1919 and 1933. Throughout the 1920s, moral reformers in the United States 38 enacted further prohibitions on gambling, prostitution, and boxing matches, as well as nighttime border crossings (St. John 2011, 150). This pushed vice districts into the northern Mexico border, and these have remained a primary economic and social organizer in some form since. In the mid-20th century, economic shifts toward industrialization also shaped urban development in Nogales. The trend of industrialization throughout the so-called global south, including many Latin American cities, particularly impacted northern Mexico border cities (Balbo 2014, 273-275), which, although contiguous to the United States, have grown in ways distinct from their conjoined U.S. sister cities (Alegría 2000). Federal development programs, such as the Programa Nacional Fronterizo (National Border Program) and the Programa Nacional de Desarrollo Fronterizo (National Border Development Program), for example, transformed urban space in northern Mexico border cities in the 1960s and 1970s. These programs invested heavily in industrial infrastructure—highways, industrial parks, electrical energy, and communications—to boost the development of maquiladoras (large manufacturing or assembly plants), while ignoring social infrastructure: housing, electricity, transportation, green spaces, potable water, sewer systems, and garbage collection (Lara and Sánchez 1994, 11). The burgeoning maquiladora sector, particularly attractive to rural workers, led to rapid population growth. New residents, in turn, occupied land and built houses without government authorization, coordination, or services. This resulted in entire neighborhoods of what are known locally as casas invadidas, or “invading” houses (Lara and Sánchez 1994).21 39 On a contemporary street map, the city limits of Nogales roughly trace an upright ellipsis. Railroad tracks—a major axis—split the city between east and west. Starting from the bottom-middle of the map, the tracks tightly parallel two main boulevards running up through town and into the U.S.-Mexico border. Topographical maps show an irregular hourglass shape. At the city’s core, two distinctive ridges mark the skinny portion of the hourglass, although hills haphazardly spot city suburbs. This core, the city center and tourist areas, sits in the flattened-out bottom of a low-lying desert wash, about seven blocks by seven blocks. An aerial view reveals the main streets and railroad tracks to overlay the wash. The wash is a receptacle of various tributaries that form in ravines, twisting down from the hills. It remains dry ten months a year, but intermittently floods each July and August. The wash is bisected by the imposing U.S.-Mexico border fence and it, like the railroad tracks, divides the east ridge of sporadic hills from west (see Figure 5). The several blocks of touristy area that squat in the wash and abut the fence on the Mexican side—where many deportees hustle and work—are known as the “Line.” Figure 5. View to the south from Nogales, Arizona. The border fence is visible at mid- distance. The low-lying basin of the Line and downtown Nogales, Sonora, between the east and west hills, are visible in the background. 40 The Six Zones of Nogales Nogales today can be crudely divided into six irregular and overlapping socio- spatial zones. First, the Line teems with workers vociferously announcing goods and services in English and Spanish: casas de cambio, small booths for currency exchange; pharmacies; eateries; bars; sex businesses in small hotels, massage parlors, and table dances; curios with arts, crafts, and trinkets; a church and people offering informal guide services (see Figure 6). Figure 6. One block south of the Line, looking south. Second, in downtown, just south of the Line and also part of the flat, low-lying grid- platted urban core, there are still more eateries, pharmacies, and casas de cambio; as well as municipal government buildings; plazas with kiosks; a school; clothing stores; and convenience stores. 41 A third zone consists of the pre-1990s irregularly developed working-class residential areas in the east, west, and south hills, with makeshift houses, neighborhood corner stores, interspersed police precincts and fire stations, and occasional public housing tenements and schools (see Figures 7 and 8). Figure 7. View to the southeast of residential area near downtown. Five blocks south of the border fence. 42 Figure 8. View to the north, overlooking a working-class neighborhood on the southwest outskirts of Nogales. Fourth, a small upper-middle and upper-class area in the middle of the city, south of downtown, houses boutique cafés, law offices, a mall, American fast food joints, a handful of upscale restaurants and bars, and large residences behind high concrete fences. Fifth, lower-middle class tract housing, featuring small units built in 1970s-2000s, with the help of the Institute of the National Fund for Worker Housing (INFONAVIT), a federal program that subsidizes workers’ mortgages. Lastly, industrial zones in the southern areas of town contain large maquiladoras that hire thousands of workers for assembly, processing, or manufacturing of textiles, electronics, and other goods (see Figure 9). 43 Figure 9. Industrial zone in the background, visible beyond a working-class neighborhood in the foreground. About 12 miles south of the Line, the southern outskirts of town give way to a major highway that lead to points in the Mexican interior. On these stretches, people sell goods at rickety roadside stands in front of small houses: bellotas (a local variety of acorn), coco water, machaca (dried spiced beef or pork), burritos, and more. These zones are the places that permeate my ethnographic writing. Navigating different parts of the city— predominantly on foot by also by bus, cab, and acquaintances’ vehicles—to maximize quality time with deported men required careful thinking and became crucial to carrying out research (see Appendix A on methods). A Word on an Ethnography of Care and the Quandaries of Representation At the end of my first two short visits to Nogales in 2013 (eight days total), the invitation to come back—from Danny, Miguel, and a handful of other deported people that I had met—meant that as soon as I returned to conduct more extensive research I 44 already had a growing social network in Nogales. In the summer of 2014, I took a bus from Oregon and, upon arriving in Nogales, stayed alone in a dingy room the night I arrived. I saw Danny and others the next day. After a week in a cheap hotel, I found a small room near downtown, just a few blocks from Danny’s, where I would stay during my intermittent years of subsequent research. My life and work came to reflect the improvised and perpetually messy yet rewarding business of living closely with others and enmeshing our everyday lives. The dire needs of deported people shaped my interactions and nascent relationships during fieldwork. The manner, frequency, and intensity with which I came to depend on others, and they on me, reflected my own shifting participation in care economies over the years. Care took many forms. At times care became taxing. Deported men and I partook in one another’s pain, stress, fear, or stiff resolve. They shook me out of loneliness. I assuaged their suffering. We talked and listened and sometimes cried. We weathered freezing temperatures and falling snow, scalding sun, and biting wind. At times care was muted, passive. We spent long hours sitting, talking, walking, eating, waiting—for wire transfers to be sent by family, phones to ring, work shifts to end, doctors to discharge—or just watching a high-desert sunset in silence. I took deportees clothing from Oregon or Arizona. I called and texted family members to let them know loved ones were okay, or to deliver a message. I paid for hot dogs, chimichangas, burritos, pizza, hamburgers, and many, many tacos. I accompanied deported men to meet with attorneys, apply for a government ID, receive a doctor’s attention, eat at a homeless shelter, and look for a place to live. Deportees introduced me to their family and friends. They gave me rides. Deported men paid for my hotdogs, 45 chimichangas, burritos, hamburgers, pizza, and tacos. they showed me Nogales and Puerto Peñasco, told me their stories, explained their lives. They opened their homes and their hearts and made me feel welcome. With some interlocutors, our relationships have grown closer over years, to encompass ongoing telephone, text, and social media contact; occasionally sharing living spaces in Nogales; and accompaniment to hospitals, doctor appointments, attorney appointments, drug rehab centers, job hunting, and house hunting. Danny and Miguel for years have told me that they love me—Miguel calls me “mijo,” a term of endearment. Care cannot be tabulated on a ledger. But I always felt that I received more than I could possibly give. I also gave money. People’s needs were made apparent in conversations that revealed how five to twenty dollars would help them eat, pay rent, or defray other expenses. And I thought it reflected my appreciation of the time people took to share with me, particularly when they could be making money working or hustling. But I was uneasy at first. Would it be insulting to offer? Too much? Too little? Or people downplayed their desperation, perhaps seeing me as a researcher, not a tourist, and thus detached from their everyday hustles. Others asked me directly: “Could you give/loan/help me out a little?” Care I gave and care I received could be marked by drudgery, doubts, anxiety, and frustration. Sometimes favors were requested and I could not help. It was too late, too far away, or simply too much. “I would if I could. You know that,” I would say, or something similar. At other times care flowed easily and with ebullience. I would text: “Yeah, let’s do it—I’ll see you at 5 am and I’ll go with you.” “Sure thing, I can ask 46 around for some power tools.” “No problem. Just text me your mom’s number and I’ll give her the message.” I began to envision my work as an ethnography of care.22 Care in this context— ongoing, reciprocal support in affective, material, and symbolic modes—was an object of study, but also a methodology. My participation in care economies felt intuitively appropriate, but also awkward. What did it mean to live in a community—that of Nogales, but also within the intimate social spaces deportees share? What was the right tack for conducting worthy research while remaining sensitive to the meaningful connections with the deported men around me? And I was insecure about perceptions. Would others in the community doubt that I was a researcher because the time, place, and nature of my interactions made me seem more like a friend or close acquaintance with many of my interlocutors than a buttoned-up social scientist with a tight interview schedule and clipboard of surveys. All I had going for me was my word and the tattered jotbook and pens I carried everywhere. Moreover, would disclosure of my care relationships lead Mexican or U.S. scholars to consider my research unduly influenced by interlocutors seeking to appease me to curry favor? As time passed, my understanding of deported men’s lives and the currency of various care practices unfolded alongside my increased dedication to caring for those around me in the ways I knew how and was able; moreover, these socialities became a site of meta-analysis. I knew that some people sought me out and appreciated my company, my financial help, or my willingness to listen to their stories. Others were busier, more introverted, or perpetually perplexed about my activities and my motives yet wanting to participate. I was insistent about consent to participate in the research. This feeling was 47 heightened by contact on different occasions with pushy journalists at NGO facilities. The combination of their bluntness and seeming impatience with migrants, deportees, and asylum-seekers made me uneasy. The interactions seemed extractionist. Some people were adamant about wanting nothing from me other than the opportunity to tell their story in hopes that others would hear it. Others were in dire need of material support to make it through the day and I provided it when I could. This one- off, non-systemic approach to influencing the lives of those around me frustrated me in its insufficiency. The impact of sharing with those around me seemed fleeting. But the moral calculus, as I understood it, suggested that the good that this sharing bore, although minimal, was better for existing. Ethnographer Positionality In considering the ethics of an ethnography of care in which my interlocutors, other community members, and I were implicated, I began formulating a mental map of our relationality. Our social identities and life experiences marked certain contrasts yet also represented shared aspects of our backgrounds. Reflexively developing an understanding of our social locations, as I got to know my interlocutors and was sensitive to how they perceived me, shaped my idea of how best to cultivate an ethos of care in our relationships, the research questions and methodology, and ultimately my understandings about the meanings of their lives. Our different juridical statuses influenced in obvious ways our expectations of physical movements and proximity to family and home. As a U.S. citizen, my unconstrained international border crossings allowed movements from the U.S. interior to the border. I planned my research trips months in advance—crossing into Mexico for as 48 much protracted fieldwork while I was there and then returning to the United States— while my interlocutors rarely left Nogales or Puerto Peñasco. My comings and goings permitted me to spent time with my family in Oregon for months here and there. Even when conducting fieldwork in Mexico for months at a time, I expected to return to home, to Oregon, to see family. This contrast in our freedom of movement produced an affective and psychological distinction. To a greater or lesser extent, the men that I worked with longed to travel to Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, or wherever their home community was. This had a double effect on my relationships with them. At times my interlocutors expressed eagerness to hear about and vicariously experience aspects of my life, work, and family in the United States. At others, particularly when my interlocutors’ feelings of sadness or separation were acute, I avoided discussing my movements. The obviousness of my comings and goings aside, I sought to not trigger bouts of emptiness or loss. Other differences shaped our social locations as well. Their formal education stopped at middle school, high school (in one case), or a General Education Development equivalency and I was earning a Ph.D. My whiteness and Anglo-American identity shaped reactions to me. People racialized as white were common on the Line and, to a lesser extent, in other social spaces of Nogales. I was assumed on first glance to be a tourist, and accordingly received innumerable solicitations to purchase souvenirs, pharmaceuticals, illicit drugs, and sex services. Some confided—after years—that they were initially suspicious that I was an undercover police officer or Drug Enforcement Administration agent working in Mexico or an off-duty Border Patrol agent or U.S. soldier. 49 Although social differences underscored the variation in our relative advantages, and made me an oddity, shared aspects of our background also facilitated ways to develop and maintain relationships. Life histories intertwined with the U.S. nation—I in the Pacific northwest and my interlocutors predominantly in the U.S. southwest—meant that we largely were socialized within and drew from U.S. civic culture and popular culture (see Chapter VI). The cultural literacy and native English competency that my interlocutors and I shared, that I argue in Chapter V partially undergirds deportees’ social relationships, likewise permitted me to tap into a lifetime of connection with the U.S. nation. It also made time we spent together often enjoyable, easy, and comfortable. Moreover, we shared immersive socialization in many forms of heteronormative masculinities. Our backgrounds reflected similar gendered expectations about economic and emotional labor, aggression, collaboration, self-expression, and caretaking. We achieved varying levels of gendered consciousness and resistance to oppressive gender ideologies. Irrespective of self-awareness regarding the patriarchal social relations, my being seen as a man produced assumptions of my relatability and ability to apprehend their experiences. Representational Dilemmas Ethnography is uniquely positioned to depict the grisly aspects of social life in order to illustrate, in living color, the hardship borne of social inequities (Wilkerson and Kleinman 2016). Nevertheless, ethnographic writing that seeks to link everyday life with larger broader political, economic, and social structures, for all its attempts to richly and thoroughly describe social phenomena, can offer only fragmented snippets. At its best, social science’s interest in a human-centric, caring mode of representation renders the 50 suffering of others in writing and images with care. Yet a potential pitfall is the risk of habituating readers to horrific scenes or desensitizing them to gross inequalities through what may be perceived as gratuitous representations of others’ suffering (Wilkerson and Kleinman 2016). In a subtle and dignified rendering of deportee social worlds, I attempt to balance quotidian life—and its broad variation, from grinding hopelessness to satisfaction and even joy—with the occasional extremes, such as the threat or consummation of violence. I aim to provide vivid description and keen detail of life, while avoiding overblown, purple prose or unmerited lingering on graphic violence. Above all, it is only by highlighting intertwined social, political, and economic relations that ethnography may contextualize the structural factors and people’s everyday lives in order to encourage moral considerations of human worth, social membership, and public policy. Conducting community research with hidden populations or about socially taboo subjects, as I did, confronts ethnographers with representational dilemmas (Contreras 2013, 26-28). Sociologist Randol Contreras observes that overwrought representations of stigmatized activities risk reinforcing negative stereotypes of racialized people who are already vilified as menacing. At the same time, omitting gritty aspects of life sanitizes people’s experiences of their social worlds (Conteras 2013, 26-28; see also Bourgois and Schonberg 2009). I frequently heard about gang-banging, violence, and drugs on U.S. streets and in U.S. prison blocks. And in Mexico I occasionally witnessed human and drug smuggling and trafficking, police corruption, drug use, and Mafia violence. Recounting these incidents is generally unnecessary for supporting my analysis and I discuss some of these social phenomena—such as violence and drug trafficking—in 51 broader terms. Just as important, retelling these episodes would glamourize and exploit the conditions that configure my interlocutors’ suffering. Moreover, while I acknowledge that various approaches to conducting ethnography are morally and methodologically valid, I see sensationalizing representations as self-serving to cowboy ethnographers who depict themselves as the audacious heroes while seeking to cater to the voyeuristic curiosities some readers may have (Contreras 2013, 26-28). In my attempt at contemplative reflexivity, I selectively write myself in to the text to acknowledge my subject position and influence on those around me but avoid dramatizing my experiences in sticky situations. I want no part of cowboy ethnography. Yet unsavory aspects of life did come up in my research process. At times I was confronted with grim or unflattering facets of my interlocutors’ lives. Sometimes I was asked to include uncomplimentary details so that readers would understand them more fully. At others, I was told nothing but intuited embarrassment or shame. I have taken my interlocutors’ wishes into account and my own sense of propriety in determining my retellings and silences (see Vogt 2018, 18). My aim is that the representations of the dissertation resonate with deported men themselves and offer insight into the depth and breadth of their lives. While my sensibilities and values are reflected in the representational choices, these are conscientiously influenced by my interlocutors’ own values, sense of dignity, and desires. Historically, anthropology has focused its inquiries on distant, cultural Others about whom readers of ethnographies may have few pre-conceptions. One problem specific to anthropological work with, for example, former gang members, drug users, and ex-prisoners are the numerous representations that exist in the cultural ethos. Endless journalistic accounts, crime films and television shows, true crime novels, and other 52 media color notions of who these people are. And this is yet one more representation. I hope that it is richly multi-dimensional, unaffected, and fair—and at times even surprising. The Outline of this Dissertation The dissertation comprises five chapters in addition to this introduction and brief conclusion. The following chapter (II), “Making Life in the United States: (Im)Mobilities, Race, and Belonging,” explores the migrations that my interlocutors undertook to the United States within the broader context of 20th century crossings from Mexico that were largely encouraged by U.S. capital interests. They make home in the United States yet are also racialized in a way that positions them precariously within a stratified social order. It also considers how attempts that some deportees make to cross back into the United States after a first deportation reflect U.S. cultural belonging through “passing” as U.S. citizens. Chapter III, “Post-Deportation Vulnerabilities: Navigating Violent Social-Spatial Geographies in Northern Mexico” provides insight into the ways global deportation forces are intertwined with the local social and spatial geographies that deportees both navigate and transform. The chapter maps the social and spatial geographies of Nogales to outline what I call Mafia-State violence, conceptualized as a continuum of interlocking violences. This violence materializes as the forces that seek to regulate movements of people and illicit goods both confront and collude with the subversive efforts of traffickers and smugglers. The uneven distribution of violence, both in the spaces of the city and among its inhabitants, shapes deportees’ embodied experiences of removal as a particularly vulnerable population. Learning the social and spatial geographies of 53 Nogales enable deportees to respond to them by moving strategically within the city, reducing visibility by remaining stationary, considering clandestine returns to the United States, or leaving Nogales for other parts of Mexico. Chapter IV, “‘Down Here You Gotta’ Start from Zero’: Work, Hustles, and Redefining Masculinities after Deportation” illuminates how deportees transform expressions of masculinities, emphasizing U.S. Latinx identities in attempts to secure minimal material wellbeing in borderlands tourist economies. For my interlocutors, lacking social networks and local knowledge complicate employment. Moreover, bureaucratic difficulties obtaining necessary documentation for government-sanctioned employment and social stigma render some deportees unemployable. While some deported men do find work in the formal economy, others improvise hustles, deploying affable and gracious expressions of masculinity to provide informal services and generate an income. Chapter V, “We Find Each Other Down Here”: Care Circulation in Transnational Families and Local Communities explores the reformulation of masculinities that facilitate deportees’ mutual solidarity, which becomes essential in the face of family separation and social marginalization. Emotional separation from families accompanies physical distance and, although in a few instances family members relocate to Nogales, circulations of transnational care decelerate. In seeking others that they can trust in Nogales, deported men come together in intimate co-residential contexts and circulate emotional, material, and symbolic care. These solidarity communities reflect the importance of post-prison U.S. Latinx identities, that permit deportees to recognize similar personal narratives and come together to circulate care. Importantly, the gang 54 animus that arranges social life within U.S. prisons is transgressed in Nogales, as would- be gang rivals—in prisons or on the streets in the United States—incorporate compassionate expressions of masculinities that emphasize collective support. Chapter VI, “Americanness: Culture, Self-Representation, and National Belonging” demonstrates how deportees understand their belonging to the United States to be underpinned by U.S. cultural literacy. Deported men understanding their belonging to the U.S. nation in various ways, including through U.S. civic cultural and popular culture. Fluency in U.S. national symbols, nationalist historiography, civic tropes, and national icons as well as U.S. movies, television, genre fiction, and music are important to the ways that deportees make meaning in their lives and see themselves culturally situated. The dissertation ends with Chapter VII, a brief concluding discussion suggesting that attachments to place, shared cultural identities, and social networks demonstrate the inadequacies of legal categories for reflecting belonging. Notes 1 As of February 2019, several rows of concertina wire have been placed on the U.S. side of the fence. https://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/tension-builds-between-local-officials-and-feds-over- concertina-wire/article_2fc4028c-2a95-11e9-bbae-9b01e79db3e7.html 2 I refer to Nogales, Sonora, my primary research site, as “Nogales.” I specify “Nogales, Arizona” when referring to that city. 3https://explore.dot.gov/t/BTS/views/BorderCrossing_0/BorderCrossingTableDashboard?:iid=1&:isGuestR edirectf romVizportal=y&:embed=y&:usingOldHashUrl=true 4 G4S is the private security firm formerly known as Wackenhunt Corporation. 5 Repatriación Humana is an agency within the Mexican federal government’s Department of the Interior. 6 From 2014 to 2018 Mexican officials repatriated on average 533 people a day (194,542 a year) at land ports-of-entry on their northern border. In that same period, 13,703 people arrived each year on DHS- charted deportation flights to Mexico City. DHS suspended these flights in May 2018. http://www.politicamigratoria.gob.mx/es_mx/SEGOB/Estadistica 55 7 I conducted fieldwork in Nogales in August 2013 (one week), July-August 2014, August-September 2015 (one month total), July 2016-February 2017, August 2017-December 2017, and August 2018. 8 I conducted fieldwork in Puerto Peñasco in February 2016 (one week) and July 2017. 9 I volunteered for FIRRP for five weeks in February-March 2017. 10 Between 1892 and 2016, the total number of federal removals and returns of noncitizens from the United States is a staggering 55,875,808 (Yearbook 2017, 103). 11 Nogales has 233,952 inhabitants as of 2019. http://en.www.inegi.org.mx/app/areasgeograficas/?ag=26# 12 http://www.politicamigratoria.gob.mx/es_mx/SEGOB/Estadistica 13 https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/ocomm/ilink/0-0-0-10948.html#0-0-0-1243 14 Obtaining most types of visitor visa for admittance to the United States is financially and practically unfeasible for most Mexican nationals. The application process itself is often prohibitively expensive, at several hundred dollars. Moreover, requirements include proof of property ownership; proof of employment, investment, or other income; bank statements; formal travel itineraries; medical examinations; and documentation of criminal history. Even the few who can demonstrate these qualifications may be denied a visa without cause or explanation. 15 I use pseudonyms to protect maintain participant anonymity. 16 These include seismic sensors; low light vision capabilities; a 30-foot steel bollard fence; stadium lights; helicopters; fixed-wing aircraft; and surveillance cameras mounted on towers, unmanned drones, and instrumented balloons (Heyman 2013, 156; see also Andreas 2001). 17 http://smn.cna.gob.mx/es/informacion-climatologica-ver-estado?estado=son 18 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/91674#page/188/mode/1up 19 Significant Chinese populations have inhabited Nogales, Sonora and many areas of northern Mexico, since the United States government’s promulgation of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 directed some Chinese people to smuggling points in Canada and Mexico and led to the expulsion of others already living in the United States (Ettinger 2009, 35). In 1917, Nogales had a large Chinese Society Hall and 15 Chinese- owned downtown grocery and laundry businesses, including the prominent Juan Lung Tain Y Cía store chain (Arreola 2017, 140-142). Although Chinese descended peoples faced forcible expulsion campaigns from Sonora at moments in the 20th century, Chinese-owned restaurants continue to be prevalent in Nogales in the 21st century. And in recent decades, many people have continued to migrate to Nogales from the Sichuan region. 20 A barbed-wire fence had been raised in Tijuana in 1911 and another was built to separate Mexicali and Calexico in 1919 (St. John 2011, 144-145). 21 See also Matthew Gutmann (1996, 33-49) on self-built neighborhoods in Mexico City. 22 Pedro García-Caro encouraged my consideration of an “ethnography of care” and suggesting that I consider further the implications of the concept. 56 CHAPTER II MAKING LIFE IN THE UNITED STATES: (IM)MOBILITIES, RACE, AND BELONGING “I mean, I’m nervous,” Ismael said, casting his eyes away. He was ambivalent, unsure how to answer my question of whether he feared deportation to Mexico. He went on, “I haven’t been there for a long time. I made my life here, not there.” With my questions I was attempting to suss out possible legal remedies to the U.S. government’s proceedings to remove him. But Ismael had put it simply. He had made life here—in the United States, in Arizona—not there, in Mexico. I was interviewing Ismael in CCA Eloy, an immigration prison. We sat in a tiny conference room with bare white walls, a metal table between us. My files, notebook, and pen flickered under fluorescent lights. I had begun conducting the one-on-one intake interview—one of my duties as a legal intern for the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, a migrant advocacy non-profit in southern Arizona—after the large-group legal orientation. Ismael had been charismatic and playful. He had joked with an attorney, saying with puckish sarcasm, “Don’t let it happen again,” to an attorney who knocked on the conference room door and interrupted us with a question. He was tall, at least 6’2’’, with a tightly trimmed beard. He wore the navy-blue jumpsuit issued to Level 3 inmates, or L3s. Ismael’s criminal convictions—for Driving Under the Influence, drug possession, and conspiracy to distribute marijuana—supposedly made him a higher security risk than the L1s and L2s. My question darkened Ismael’s face. He had heard so many stories circulating about Mexico—of drug-trafficking and violence in his home state of Durango and around 57 the country—that he was not sure what to believe. But his simple declaration of having “made life” obscured other questions. How had he come to make life in the United States and what kind of life was it? My interaction with Ismael lasted less than an hour. But it reflects several questions that I dug into throughout the research in order to better understand my interlocutors’ perceptions of belonging. These questions are the subject of this chapter. What historical forces led to their migrations from Mexico? How did their subjectivities—as working class, poor noncitizens, racialized as Mexican—position them within U.S. social strata? And what do failed struggles after deportation to return clandestinely and again make life in the United States demonstrate about their belonging? In this chapter I tell a story of movement and immobility. My interlocutors’ many connections to U.S. spaces—territorial, social, and cultural—are catalyzed by transnational migrations. Their personal histories of northward migration to the United States from Mexico in the second half of the 20th century comprised broader family relocations actively spurred by U.S. labor demands. In U.S. communities, they became physically immobile but were metaphorically in movement, in processes of social incorporation. In the United States, they were socially subordinated—as nonwhite, poor or working-class Mexican nationals—yet nevertheless saw the United States as home. Although they came to belong socially to the U.S. nation, they became situated in racialized social hierarchies within it (Chavez 1992; De Genova 2005; Stephen 2007). Moreover, the geographical and social spaces of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands— particularly in California, Arizona, and Sonora—played a unique role in shaping their life histories. The U.S.-Mexico borderlands configured cultural identities in which my interlocutors deftly navigated English, Spanish, and codeswitching; hybrid cultural 58 formations, social practices, and religious practices; and enmeshed labor, production, and consumption economies. Despite proficiency negotiating social, cultural, and economic borderlands spaces north of the border, my interlocutors’ sense of displacement in Mexico is protracted by acute bordering processes whereby territorial, political, and institutional barriers demarcate the United States from Mexico. In attempts to return clandestinely to the United States, some attempt to “pass” as authorized U.S. residents or citizens at ports of entry, ultimately reflecting both U.S. cultural identifications and the desire for return “home,” to the United States. In the next section, I discuss detention centers as one site of physical immobility within the U.S.-Mexico borderlands region. Then, I outline a regional history of 20th century migrations in order to situate my interlocutors’ memories of relocation to the United States within it. The subsequent section asserts that the racialization of Mexicans in the United States is vital to understanding their belonging, albeit as socially subordinated subjects. The section that follows examines “passing as American” to cross surreptitiously back in to the United States. The chapter ends with brief conclusions regarding the stakes of where boundary lines of belonging are drawn. Detention Centers: Confined to Home The threat of deportation maintains the U.S. presence of those who are not U.S. citizens in perpetual uncertainty (Golash-Boza 2014b). Southern Arizona detention prisons, such as the one where I met Ismael, serve as a stark reminder of the precariousness of noncitizen presence in the United States and noncitizens’ risk of institutional confinement and physical expulsion. Long days conducting interviews and consulting with inmates at the Eloy Detention Center (CCA), Florence Correctional 59 Complex (FCC),23 and Florence Service Processing Center (SPC), brought me into contact with many people awaiting adjudication of their cases: asylum-seekers, apprehended border crossers, visa overstayers, and long-time U.S. residents— unauthorized or Legal Permanent Residents (LPRs). I worked with detainees who hailed from Afghanistan, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Syria, and many other places. Occasionally, there was good news about a detainee being granted asylum or at least released on bond to live outside the facility and work during the slog through the courts. More often, however, the end of incarceration for the people I met was unfavorable. Either an immigration judge ordered a formal removal after many months or even years of hearings, or a detainee simply requested to be deported in the face of seemingly interminable detention. These requests, so-called stipulated removals, were greatly expanded by immigration courts in the last two decades and entail the relinquishing due process rights such as consulting with an attorney or appearing before an immigration judge (Koh, Srikantiah, and Tumlin 2011). Requesting a stipulated removal, forsaking the process whereby legal presence could possibly be granted, perversely often seems to detainees to be the only chance to exert some control over their lives. Detention centers’ diverse populations—cosmopolitan in national origin and a mix of (mostly) recent arrivals and (some) long-time residents—brought into relief contradictions of simultaneous belonging and non-belonging in the United States. Removals of noncitizens from detention centers and from U.S. territory often involved chartered plane rides to countries of legal citizenship around the world. But for Mexican nationals like my interlocutors, removals were different. Their deportations are carried 60 out by ground transportation, a ride just an hour or two south to Nogales, Arizona on Interstate 19, to the DeConcini Port of Entry. There they would be led across to Mexico, processed by the Mexican federal government as “repatriated” persons, and left to figure out what to do.24 In fact, I would see the same privately contracted buses and 15- passenger vans that rumbled into Nogales, Arizona on my visits to CCA, FCC, and SPC, either leaving with passengers or returning empty (see Figure 10). Figure 10. Main entrance to Florence Correctional Center. Although some of the hundreds of Mexican nationals deported to Nogales each week from these or other centers were recent border crossers, others, such as my ethnographic interlocutors, were long-time U.S. residents. They had spent months or sometimes years passing through detention centers across the United States. The majority had grown up in Phoenix or Tucson, within an hour or two of Florence and Eloy. In detention centers they were incarcerated yet present in the region that they identified 61 with—essentially confined to home. When I occasionally met people like this in detention centers, they would say something like, “I was born in Mexico, but I’m from here.” They could have attended school or lived as neighbors to the prison guards that controlled their movements between detention center cell blocks—“housing units” (e.g. “Alpha Unit,” “Bravo Unit,” “Charlie Unit”) colloquially called “tanks”—the cafeteria, and the open dirt space outside, a “recreational area” known as the “yard.” Some received family visits, during the few hours a week that they were allowed, from parents, siblings, or U.S. citizen children or grandchildren who attended public schools and had lives of their own in the region. My interlocutors had arrived at these centers after long periods of U.S. residence, on average 29.7 years for the 57 deportees that participated in my research. Their arrests by Phoenix or Tucson police, the Maricopa County or Pima County Sheriff’s Office, or similar agencies throughout Arizona or California and, in a few cases, other states initiated criminal processes that proceeded through courts, jails or prisons, and transfers to ICE custody and immigration detention (see Figure 11). Figure 11. CCA Eloy from a distance. 62 Detention prisons are only one space that my interlocutors came to occupy over their life histories. They also formed part of the social and geographic landscape of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Enmeshed in historical migration patterns, they arrive in the U.S. southwest and come to belong over time. The southwest becomes home; nevertheless, they become subordinated within social and economic systems and, not perceived as full social members, are subjected to legal expulsion through a racialized carceral and immigration enforcement regime. Migrations and the Making of an Arizona-Sonora Borderlands My ethnographic interlocutors’ exit from Mexico and relocation to the United States reflect historical processes and elucidate the individual and family motivations for their migrations. Their embodied, physical transborder movement from Mexico to the United States as well as their physical immobility and settlement once in U.S. communities impacted various aspects of their metaphorically transborder lives, such as social networks, acculturation processes, and educational and labor opportunities and eventually their imprisonment and deportation. The array of structural and individual factors (Golash-Boza 2015, 27) that have motivated migratory movements to the United States historically—e.g. the decreased returns of agriculture in rural Mexico, increased employment availability in the United States, active recruitment by U.S. capital interests, changing immigration laws and enforcement practices—influenced their border crossing experiences. These historical movements responded to U.S.-Mexico borderlands social and economic realities in which political and territorial divisions between the United States and Mexico were secondary. 63 Normalized Migrations Indeed, migrations within and between what today is Sonora and Arizona reflect movements that for millennia have characterized the region and continually remade their social composition. Several nomadic groups have lived, been considerably mobile, and continue to live in the region, including Apache, Akimel O’odham, Mayo, Opata, Pima, Tohono O’odham, and Yaqui peoples (Almada Bay 2012; Sheridan 2012). Also, during centuries of Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. colonial invasion, subjugation, extraction, and transformation, intra-regional movement was common (Almada Bay 2012; Sheridan 2012; Truett 2006; Vélez-Ibáñez 1996) and has shaped the larger story of demographic shifts and movements. My 57 interlocutors came from various places in Mexico (Figure 12). Mexican emigration was somewhat concentrated in the Central Pacific region of Mexico during much of the 20th century, including among others the states of Zacatecas, Jalisco, and Michoacán. Nine of my interlocutors were born in these three states alone. A few were born in regions with less traditional migratory connection to the U.S. southwest, such as Querétaro and Yucatán. Many, however, had explicit familial and community ties to the borderlands region. Fifteen had been born in Nogales. Eleven were born in other parts of Sonora (besides Nogales) and nine more in the northern border states of Baja California, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Nuevo León. 64 Figure 12. Participants’ states of birth. Created with mapchart.net, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution. Several interviewees recounted how community ties and family commitments on both sides of the border configured intra-regional mobilities. Crossings were particularly commonplace decades ago, before the contemporary U.S.-Mexico border control regime would so rigidly confine and inhibit movement (but is also subverted by new movements around, over, and through). Quotidian crossings meant that social and cultural concerns were more influential than legal ones, including the specter of birthright citizenship for newborns. The difficulty in crossing today as a Mexican national, particularly if one is previously deported, doubly embittered some of my interlocutors who, but for happenstance, had not been born in the United States and afforded legal citizenship. In talking about this with Caín, during a slow spell hustling on the Line, he emphasized the importance of national citizenship. Caín told me of how his mother, a U.S. citizen, and father, a Mexican citizen, had gotten together in El Paso, Texas when 65 she was 15 years old. His mother became pregnant at 16. Caín’s mother wanted to get away from her father, also a U.S. citizen, and his judgment of her pregnancy. So here’s what happened. My mom went to Chihuahua [with family] to have me. If she would’ve sat on it just a little bit, if she would’ve thought about it, maybe she would’ve said, “I should have my baby here on the U.S. side.” Check this out. I was born in 1983. They changed the law in 1986 so that if you were born outside the U.S. to one U.S. citizen parent, you would be a U.S. citizen. Indeed, because of a clause in the Immigration and Nationality Act, one that was changed through congressional amendment in 1986, birth abroad to one U.S. citizen parent did not confer U.S. citizenship to the child at birth (known legally as “acquisition” of citizenship) if the parent did not meet certain residency and so-called “wedlock” requirements. Caín was ineligible for U.S. citizenship. He was less than two years old when the family moved to Charleston, South Carolina for work, a reflection of the commonplace nature of crossings. Yet given the implications of his birth outside of the United States and the contemporaneous immigration law, the now intensified exclusions of “criminal aliens” such as Caín has the serious consequence of barring him from legal entry into the United States for life. Or, as Caín put it, “Imagine. If I was a U.S. citizen, I wouldn’t be here right now. I wouldn’t be going through all of this and living here in a Third World country.” Labor Migrations Regional labor pressures also invigorated movement in and between Arizona and Sonora. By the 1900s, migrants were recruited to the Territory of Arizona to mine silver, gold, and copper; tend to cattle; pick cotton and vegetable crops; and build railroads 66 (Sheridan 2012). A few interviewees could directly trace ancestors who had responded to the early 20th century cotton boom that led Arizonan farmers to turn to Mexico for labor. During this time, farmers’ desire for workers from Mexico prompted them to exert political muscle in Washington, D.C. The Arizona congressional delegation, along with those of other western states, fought to exempt Mexicans from the head tax and literacy requirements in the 1917 Immigration Act (Sheridan 2012, 221). The political groundwork for receiving Mexican workers having been laid, the Arizona Cotton Growers Association spent almost $200,000 a year between 1919 and 1921 to actively recruit people from Sonora (Sheridan 2012, 221). More than 72,000 Mexicans entered the United States with authorization in just the five years between 1917 and 1922 (Sheridan 2012, 221). The trend of migrant labor incorporation continued throughout the 20th century, with exceptions of mass expulsions in the 1930s and 1950s. Throughout the century, the need for industrial and agricultural labor in the U.S. southwest increased yet labor supply remained constant, generally speaking, incentivizing migrant labor participation. Again, some deportees I interviewed were aware of historical family migrations that responded to these dynamics. A few had fathers or grandfathers who had participated in the U.S. and Mexican federal governments’ Bracero Program, which was initially established to alleviate labor shortages during World War II but that ran until 1964 (Stephen 2007, 145). The mineral extraction industry at the turn of the 20th century likewise cultivated a borderlands logic of “region” that was not rigidly defined by the U.S.-Mexico political and territorial border. Copper mining, a labor-intensive pursuit, exploded through the last 67 decade of the 19th century and further drove close-knit regional integration in two ways: through human movement as well as the proliferation of wide-spread electrical grids needed for mineral extraction.25 Gilded Age U.S. corporations, flush with financial capital, and the Porfirian state’s quest for industrialization and hospitality to direct foreign investment also propelled regional integration (Truett 2006, 5). The towns of Nacozari and Cananea, Sonora and Bisbee and Douglas, Arizona were among those that partook in the copper boom (Heyman 1992). Cananea grew seemingly overnight from a town of 900 inhabitants to a city of 20,000 (Truett 2006, 4). Historian Samuel Truett (2006, 4) asserts that “Cananea remade a formerly isolated region at the ragged edges of states and markets into an industrial crossroads fed by circuits of capital, labor, and transnational collaboration that extended deep into both nations.” Arizona and Sonora had become a “copper borderlands” (Meinig 1998). These “copper borderlands” enmeshed far-flung “farms, ranches, mill, smelters, coke ovens, and timberlands,” creating intra-regional migration pathways for “Mexican miners, smelter workers, and ranchers who entered the industrial orbit of copper but also traveled other pathways” (Truett 2006, 8). Again, I quote from Samuel Truett (2006, 180) in a passage which illuminates how normalized labor movements were: [Managers] had to work harder than ever to pin down labor, sending agents down the coast and over the sierras with photos and propaganda describing the “favorable working conditions” in Nacozari, Pilares, and Cananea. In Hermosillo, the labor agent Simón Russek saw many men like himself. “Some have large placards at the corners,” he explained, “others have men walking through the streets using megaphones saying what they pay their workmen and what the 68 working conditions are.” He competed with sugar plantations, tomato growers, and the railroad, which was on the march south. The same “pioneer” conditions that lured capital across the border in the 1920s offered workers endless opportunities. The best Russek could do was to hawk photos of new churches, schools, picture shows, and handball courts: icons of a modern mining landscape produced as much for labor as for capital. The facilitation of labor migrations and even overt labor recruitment were not carried out only by capitalists. Border Patrol agents themselves at times collaborated with powerful U.S. business interests, recruiting Mexican workers and facilitating their migration, sometimes turning a blind eye to unauthorized crossings (De Genova 2005; Hernández 2010; Kang 2017). Childhood Crossings Work opportunities and transborder family and social networks shaped migration patterns broadly, yet my interlocutors, because of their young age, often had only vague notions of their family’s motivations for moving. Some could recount a few details of family members already in the United States or a lack of work in Mexico. These were often part of post-migration family narratives. Most commonly, people had few or no memories of Mexico from their childhood. They sometimes described phantasmagoric flashes from their first few years of life—of a mother holding a hand or of a dirt floor in a country house. Many did not know, exactly, where they or their parents had been born in Mexico. In talking about his background, Alfredo said of his parents, from a rural area in Nuevo León, “They’re from these little ranchos that no one’s ever heard of, I think a little ways from Monterrey.” But they had moved separately to Nogales, his mother with 69 family when she was just five years old and his father years later to look for work. His parents got together in Nogales. Alfredo said, “My dad went up to L.A. to work when he heard that my mom was pregnant. He was working up there. I was like, not even one- year-old when he told her to come up and bring me. It’s weird being down here, and my family’s all up there [in East Los Angeles]. In some cases, others who migrated after infancy had more substantive memories of life in Mexico. In 2016, Alberto and I sat on a tattered couch on the front cement slab outside his house in the East Hills, next to a clothes washer with frayed wiring protruding like cat whiskers. We sat overlooking downtown, a few feet from a ravine with nearly vertical slope and no guardrail. Alberto recounted his youth on the border, including extensive periods living on both sides and crossing back and forth. Alberto was born in Empalme, Sonora in 1978. His grandfather worked for the railroad in the port town of Guaymas. When just a few months old, the family brought Alberto to Nogales. It was my older brother, then me, then two little brothers. Mi mamá siempre ha sido ama de casa. Mi jefe trabajaba en produce. Era tomatero y trabajaba en la sandía. Pero pues en esa época empezó a trabajar mal. Era la mano derecha del Quemado. [My mom has always kept the house. My dad worked in produce. He worked tomatoes and watermelon. But back then he got involved in shady stuff. He was Quemado’s right-hand man.] His father became the right-hand man of a local drug baron from Sinaloa, which brought about a lucrative situation for the family for a few years. Alberto showed me 15 or so faded Polaroids: his fourth-grade class photo in Nogales, Sonora; his confirmation in 70 Nogales, Arizona when he was 13; he and his brothers mischievously hamming for the camera, sporting 1980s polyester pants. “This is where I grew up, until we went up to the other side.” The family moved to Nogales, Arizona when he was 12. There they lived in trailer parks. Alberto routinely crossed back and forth to see family and friends on either side of the border. I asked if he had a crossing card or U.S. residency. He laughed, “No. Pues no hacía falta.” You didn’t need one. Alberto had a Mexican passport. But when he found out that coyotes paid a lot of money for original passports—especially U.S. ones, but Mexican passports as well—that they could resell on the black market, he sold it. “I would show my high school ID to cross. Or you didn’t have to show anything,” depending on the agent’s disposition. As Alberto told story after story of his youth and adulthood, his deep knowledge of the places in the twin border towns of Ambos Nogales that he had accrued over decades became evident. Sitting on the hill in Nogales, Alberto pointed to places around town where he had gone to school, worked, or knew people. He nodded north and described by neighborhood and street name where in Nogales, Arizona his schools, work, and friends and family were, although he had not been there now for several years. Alberto’s case was an exception. It was much more common for people to have few, fading memories of childhood in Mexico. Roy was only five years old when the family moved to East Los Angeles from rural Sinaloa in 1954. He had emotionally evocative memories of the rastro, or slaughterhouse, where his father worked in the town of Esquinapa. In telling me the story, Roy still sensed reverberations of agony he felt when his father first handed him a knife and told him to slaughter a pig. He said that the 71 chilling squealing still rings in his ears. Aside from the acute emotions and violence of the experience, Roy could recall few other details of Esquinapa. Crossing: Authorized and Unauthorized Family Relocations Both authorized and unauthorized migration from Mexico was commonplace in the second half of the 20th century, as is reflected in my interlocutors’ experiences. Despite strict quotas on Mexican migration inscribed in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which rendered much of the existing migratory flow nominally “illegal” from one day to the next, the United States government, influenced by capital interests that thrived on cheap, exploitable labor, did little to curtail migratory flows. The period from 1965 to 1986 amounted to a “de facto guest worker program,” since employers were by now dependent on inexpensive, reliable Mexican labor (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002, 45). The U.S. government allocated just enough resources to immigration enforcement to provide reassurances that the border was “under control” (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002, 45; see also Andreas 2001), while looking the other way while businesses regularly employed undocumented workers. Unauthorized crossings were generally not onerous for interviewees. Despite ramped up efforts since the 1980s to control immigration through increasingly punitive measures, these were not central to people’s initial crossing experiences between the 1950s and early 1990s. Eleven of 57 interviewees arrived in the 1990s, as the U.S. government was intensifying border enforcement by deploying technology, hiring Border Patrol agents, and erecting fencing, particularly in urban areas. At this time, saturation patrols and physical barriers in urban regions, known as “prevention through deterrence”—Operation Hold the Line in El Paso, Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, 72 Operation Safeguard in Nogales, and Operation Rio Grande in south Texas (Seghetti 2014, 4; see also Nevins 2002)—pushed migration routes into dangerous and desolate mountainous and desert terrain. This wildly increased the costs of smuggling services and crossing deaths (De León 2015; Martínez 2016).26 Nevertheless, most arrived earlier, when crossing was much less arduous: 22 people crossed in the 1980s, 13 in the 1970s, seven in the 1960s, and two in the 1950s. Most did not encounter the intense militarization, imposing physical barriers, and advanced technology used to police the contemporary U.S.-Mexico border (see Note 12 above). Jamie’s crossing illustrates the relative ease of unauthorized crossings in past decades. He was born in a village in the highlands of Nayarit in 1969. When he was young, houses were lit with oil lamps. Jaime remembers when electricity came to his town and eventually a streetlight was installed. His father had been a laborer in the Bracero Program and worked near Los Angeles. When Jaime was ten, his father and mother arranged for the family to relocate there. Jaime’s parents coordinated with a smuggler in Tijuana. I crossed through San Diego. A lady crossed me. I had a fake birth certificate. I still remember the name: “Javier Bautista.” I was in the back of the car, between her two kids. She was playing with us, and I remember the two kids were talking to each other in English. The agent looked at my birth certificate, but he talked to me in Spanish. The entire experience was unremarkable for Jaime. He had fond associations with his arrival to the United States. “I loved California. I remember seeing the freeways, the 73 fields with all the cows in them, the huge buildings.” The positive feelings regarding his experience of relocation continued. Once enrolled in school, he was a driven student. I was in ESL classes when I first got there. I remember we had to have our own classes, study from our own books. I worked through the books as fast as I could, to get out of there. I was done in six months. My older brother started before I did, but he took longer. I was like, get me out of here as soon as possible. I want to be in the regular classes!... I always tried to learn extra when I was in school. Many others are similarly nonchalant about crossing experiences. As one deportee put it, “At that time [the 1960s] you just held up the barbed wire and walked under, made it to the Kmart, got picked up, and you were in Phoenix.” And another said of his impression of clandestine crossings in 1978, “You just walked across the fence, got in a truck or something to head up I-19, and that was it.” Age at the time of crossing—4.7 years, on average, for my interlocutors—in addition to era, also shaped crossing experiences. Clandestine crossings have become increasingly dangerous and deadly even for healthy young adults (see Cornelius 2001; De León 2015; Golash-Boza 2015, 61-91; Nevins 2002; Rubio-Goldsmith et al. 2016) and much more so for children. My interlocutors in Nogales, however, did not have harrowing crossing stories. On the contrary, most told of much less precarious crossing experiences. Because of their young age, the majority had few if any recollections of crossing, but described relatively safe approaches, such as entering through a land port with false documents. Moreover, because of their young age, my interlocutors had not participated directly in family decisions surrounding migration to the United States. They considered their migration to have been part of a family decision and did not remember 74 being personally motivated by economic or social opportunity or an “American Dream” narrative, although their families may have been.27 For many, their move to the United States was part of a larger family relocation. Some went with immediate family to join up with extended family who already resided in the United States. This in itself contributed to a sense of belonging in U.S. communities through family ties, particularly when family members were seen as incorporated into everyday life. This was emphasized to me, for example, by a deportee who told me repeatedly of his uncle’s employment as an FBI agent and another’s proud insistence that his older brother’s employment by the U.S. Postal Service reflects a strong link to the nation. Sometimes people highlighted the vastness of family connections to the United States. Indio, although only six months old when his mother and father took him and two older siblings to Tucson in 1980, recounted how his mother, one of 16 children, is now among 14 that have moved to the United States. While several of Indio’s aunts and uncles live in Arizona, others live in North Carolina and Florida as well. Indio’s two younger siblings were born in Tucson. Dozens and dozens of cousins live in the United States. Indio received his LPR status through IRCA in 1986 and lost it in 2002 pursuant to a felony conviction. Danny likewise formed part of a large family relocation. His background reflects the back and forth nature of border-crossing across generations and, although he had childhood memories of Mexico, his integration into the United States with family at a young age. Danny’s mother, Ester, was from a watermelon and cotton-producing village in Durango called El Basoco. She migrated to Peoria, Arizona with siblings in the 1950s, but circumstances took her back to Ciudad Juárez and Danny was born there in 1964. 75 Danny, his older brother Raul, and Ester moved to Nogales, where Danny attended first grade near downtown at Enrique Pestalozzi Elementary, a three-story, redbrick and white stone schoolhouse, constructed in 1912 (Arreola 2017, 142) and that still operates today. Danny remembers his after-school walk from Pestalozzi a few blocks north to the shadowy, smoke-filled bar Ester ran with Danny’s stepfather, a Nogales entrepreneur. Danny spent long hours in the bar after school, doing homework in the back room. Ester, Danny’s stepfather, Danny, and Raul migrated to the United States in 1970, flying from Hermosillo to Phoenix with resident visas. Although Danny’s last name is Quintana (from the biological father he never knew), they lived in a west Phoenix neighborhood with much of his mother’s family, the Villanuevas. On the block where Danny grew up, there were four Villanueva households: Danny’s mother’s house, his uncle Pete’s, uncle Pablo’s, and his grandparents’. Precarious Social Positioning and Life the U.S. Borderlands Commonplace crossings at a young age and family relocations led to immobility and emplacement, reinforcing the notion of the U.S. southwest as home, the place where my interlocutors felt they belonged (see Figure 13). This belonging notwithstanding, the subordinated social strata within which they were positioned contributed to the persistent sense of not fully belonging, as was reflected in their ongoing economic marginalization and segregated spatialization of neighborhoods and cities where they lived, influencing my interlocutors’ understandings of collective social affinity and difference in the U.S. southwest. 76 Figure 13. Participants’ states of primary U.S. residence. Created with mapchart.net, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution. Race and Economic Precarity in Borderlands History Colonial ideas of race have persistently mediated social difference in the U.S.- Mexico borderlands and are fundamental to understanding the social, political, and economic subordination of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Euro-American colonial dynamics have, over the last five centuries, redistributed political power, concentrated wealth, upended social structures, and reshaped racial formations on both sides of the modern-day U.S.-Mexico border (Acuña 2000; Rumbaut 2009; Stephen 2012). Both Spanish colonial and Anglo-American racial ideologies have configured contemporary racial hierarchies in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. A racialized caste hierarchy, known as the sistema de castas, that formally instituted white supremacy was instituted and administered by Spanish colonial powers in 77 the Americas, particularly the Crown’s local bureaucrats and the Catholic church. Caste classification as criollo, peninsular, indio, mestizo, castizo, pardo, mulato, negro was determined through family genealogies and determined access to resources (Martínez 2008) and legally binding rights claims. Strict adherence to castas had declined by the early 19th century and was formally abolished with Mexican independence in 1821. Nevertheless, entrenched legacies of racial and class stratification continued to take various forms. Indigenismo, a form of nationalistic “modernization,” sought to homogenize and assimilate Native peoples and mestizaje, a racial “mixing” project that, fundamentally, aimed to whiten, masculinize, and Hispanicize indigenous populations entrenched racial and ethnic differences and provided justification for the ongoing subordination of indigenous peoples (Alonso 1994, 390; Gillingham 2011, 218; Lewis 2006, 179; see also Vasconcelos 1997[1925]). The separate but related project of white supremacy through settler colonialism centered around the genocidal appropriation of indigenous people’s land also linked race and place to systems of power (Hernández 2017; Pulido 2018; Smith 2012; Wolfe 2006). Settler colonialism understands the disappearance, elimination, or purging of Native peoples to be a primary means for dominating land (Hernández 2017, 8). Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández (2017) emphasizes the explicit racialization of this project in the U.S. southwest. The complete erasure of indigenous peoples is necessary, Hernández suggests, for the total and permanent usurping of indigenous land, invigorating at once the appetite for spatial control and the logic of white supremacy. In addition, as theorist Andrea Smith (2012, 68) points out, territorial annexation operates in conjunction with the logics of slavery and orientalism: that of capitalist accumulation, upheld through a racial order that 78 equates Black people with slaveability, and that of perpetual martial conflict with a “foreign,” threatening Other. The concept of settler colonialism helps elucidate the manner in which the intertwined logics of genocide, slavery, and orientalism have shaped an Anglo-American white supremacist racial order (Smith 2012). In the U.S.-Mexico borderlands broadly and specifically in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands (where in the 19th and 20th centuries there was a much smaller Latinx population than New Mexico and Texas), this racial order in conjunction with Spanish colonial racial logics has distinctly configured the regional contours of racialized power and claims to place historically. The racializations of Latinx peoples in the U.S. southwest, including of my interlocutors, are grounded in (Cobas et al. 2009; Rumbaut 2009, 18) these overlapping histories and, in U.S.-Mexico borderlands merge the “racisms in Mexico with anti-Latino racisms in the United States” (Rosas 2010, 696). At the turn of the 20th century, one way that burgeoning capitalist interests, local and state authorities, and the U.S. federal government in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands explicitly racialized its control over Anglo, Mexican, Mexican-American, and Native American populations (and small but stable Asian American and Afro-descendent populations) was the racial separation of workers. For example, Mexican workers were employed at lower pay scales than Anglos—known as the “Mexican rate” (Vélez-Ibáñez 2017, 13) or “dual wage” (Heyman 1992, 69)—in the mining, railroad, ranching, and agricultural industries (Sheridan 2012, 175-176; see also Acuña 2000, 114-115). U.S. citizens of Mexican descent were also paid at the lower rate (Vélez-Ibáñez 2017, 13). Thomas Sheridan (2012, 177) writes that, “What was happening was brutally clear: 79 Arizona was creating a socioeconomic pecking order organized largely along racial lines and justified by a racial ideology that considered Mexicans inherently inferior to Anglo Americans or northern Europeans.” Intergenerational social and economic disempowerment was prevalent in the lives of almost all of my interlocutors. Many described and defined their lives in terms of stark material deprivation. Shady, one of the few interlocutors who had not grown up in the U.S. southwest but in Chicago, connected his family’s economic difficulties, his involvement in gangs, and the eventual criminal charges that led to his deportation with the low-income neighborhood where he grew up. Shady said, “I had my residency in the U.S. and everything. But I fucked up. I know it sounds easy to say, but I’m a product of my environment. We were poor. We lived in a shitty neighborhood.” Shady clarified that he and his mother lived in an apartment on the South side Chicago. He continued, “I know what it’s like to be hungry. My mom worked three jobs. She always worked two, at least. And you know what it’s like there in the projects, I started getting in trouble.” Shady had been “banging,” affiliated with a gang, since age twelve. Marcos also talked about the social stigma associated with being a working-class family in the tiny, rural, east Arizona town of McNary. Marcos recalled specifically being in the fifth grade and his mother having little money. She purchased his clothing at Kmart and other budget stores. He likewise connected his problems at school with his experience as the butt of his classmates’ jokes for being poor. For others, their families’ economic precariousness meant that they had to start working at age 10 or 11, on construction sites or doing yard maintenance, in order to contribute to family income. The feeling that they were under constant economic pressure 80 continued into adulthood. Paco linked his working-class background and racialization as “Mexican” to his being targeted for a predatory home loan during the Great Recession. Paco worked for T-Core, a construction company in Phoenix, soldering and doing plumbing, fittings, and other intricate work. He eventually left to start his own small home repair business. When the economy and the construction business tanked in 2008, Paco could not make house payments nor refinance his home loan to keep his construction company afloat. The bank said his home was worth $60,000, even though he had paid well over that toward equity over the years and had bought his home for $209,000. Paco told me, I’m not stupid. How did they think they could do that shit to me? I told them I was going to stop making payments on my home. There was no work, no construction. Even with that Obama program where you only pay half, [I couldn’t make the payments]. Even paying $750 out of $1,500 it was crazy. I left that place. Paco reiterated several times that he felt personally duped by a system designed to take advantage of poor Mexicans who were not in a position to demand recourse for the effects of rapacious real estate practices. Peter also highlighted the poverty of his childhood, despite the warm memories he had of arriving to California’s Central Valley in 1983 at age four. Once enrolled in school in Delano, Peter made friends and enjoyed his classwork. He had to miss frequently, however, to help the family make ends meet by harvesting the fields. Peter said, “It’s miles and miles of grapes up there, pinches viñedas, miles and miles… We do all the jobs the gringos don’t want to do. Pick the grapes, watermelons, peaches, everything.” Peter 81 was disillusioned by not being able to attend school, meet requirements, and graduate. He was explicit about the role of his “Mexicanness” in placing his family below gringos in the racialized labor hierarchy. While many spoke of the difficulty of life in the United States and the ongoing economic precariousness that they faced, part of people’s conceptualization of their migration was one of increased economic opportunity as well. Steve spoke explicitly of the destitution his family faced in Mexico before leaving for the United States and linked his family’s migration to a search for greater opportunity. He was born in Nogales, Sonora in 1977. Steve’s father left the family when he was three years old, an incident that catalyzed the family’s relocation to Tucson. My dad left us, he just ran out. So my mom kind of ran away. It was, like, 1980 when we got to Tucson. We had this place in East Tucson, by West Kelso and Balboa. I remember later on, when I was growing up. We were so poor in Nogales. The first time I wore shoes was in Tucson! My feet, my toes are all messed up. My toes kind of go this way and that way, because of walking around barefoot, and it being so cold. The extreme poverty in which Steve’s family lived reflected the larger reality for many in Mexico who suffered from a lack of living wage employment, institutional support, and service infrastructure. In his sincere way, Steve bluntly told me, When we were in Tucson I shit on the floor. I’m serious. I didn’t know anything. My mom taught me how to use the bathroom. I don’t really remember that time, but we must have been so happy to be in Tucson. Coming from here, and having nothing, it must have been great... Later on, we moved off of 6th Ave, by Street 82 36th St. in South Tucson. That’s where I grew up, went to school, and everything... I tried to be a good kid. I did everything my mom said. She would tell me, “Mijo, you’ve got to do things right and work hard. And don’t ever take anything that isn’t yours.” And I don’t. I was a good kid, and I learned all that stuff. The relatively satisfactory life in Tucson that Steve speculates about in retrospect more forcefully demonstrates his family’s absolute privation in Mexico than any real opportunity for upward socioeconomic mobility in the United States. Deportees’ stories of hardship from the poor and working-class U.S. neighborhoods formed part of much larger trends of movement, shifting labor demands, and active labor recruitment. But the materialization of the neighborhoods itself was not happenstance. The relegation of poor Mexicans to underserved areas occurred through unique processes of spatialization, as I examine in the following section. Spatialization: Mexican Phoenix Racialized, socioeconomic forces shape not only social positioning of Latinx peoples in the U.S. southwest, but the physical spaces they inhabit as well. The largely racially segregated neighborhoods where my interlocutors grew up were structured through law and public policy. Discriminatory practices embedded within government lending, housing markets, zoning laws, access to health care and education, and disproportionate policing in the U.S. southwest arrange their everyday social and physical geographies (Molina 2014, 142). Below, I take Phoenix, where 21 of 57 of my interlocutors lived, as an example to reveal how historically racialized social relations and public policy have left deeply felt spatialized impacts into the present. The racial 83 mapping varied in Los Angeles (see Hernández 2017), Tucson, and other urban and rural areas, but Phoenix is not an outlier in its distinctly racialized development. Phoenix’s municipal government by the early 20th century concentrated power in the hands of mostly white and some Mexican-American local public officials. A power play by white politicians in 1913, however, led to the reorganization of city council that left these politicians exclusive, consolidated control and simultaneously disenfranchised Mexicans and Mexican-Americans politically and segregated them geographically (Sheridan 2012, 270). The change came about through a modification to the city charter that affected representation for the city’s four wards, which were divided along the axes of main north-south and east-west avenues that intersected at the center of town. Whites lived predominantly in the north, in Wards 1 and 2, while most African-American, Chinese, Chinese-American, Mexican, and Mexican-American people lived in the south, in Wards 3 and 4. Whereas prior to 1913 each ward elected its own council representatives, the new provisions stipulated that the council would be selected at large, insuring an all-white membership. This had several ramifications. For example, as the city continued to develop throughout the 20th century under the council’s authority, the Phoenix Real Estate Board prohibited realtors from selling properties in white communities to non-whites. Moreover, non-municipal forces compounded housing segregation. The federal Home Owner’s Loan Corporation racially profiled in setting property values and made no loans in south Phoenix due to a “hazardous” security rating. And in the 1940s, three racially segregated housing projects were opened and overtly segregated for Blacks, Anglos, and Mexicans (Sheridan 2012, 271). In general, the lack 84 of access to credit, race-based real estate covenants, and red-lining played a pivotal role in entrenching racialized social and geographic divisions. Even after these explicitly race-based policies had been replaced with race-neutral ones, the inertia of a culture of racial segregation persisted. This is evidenced in my interviewees’ experiences. Milton, for example, arrived in Phoenix in 1978 when the population was just under 800,000 inhabitants.28 Milton told of spending time on 35th Ave, which today is not far from downtown relatively speaking, since the urban area has subsequently ballooned,29 but at that time was close to the city limits. Milton remembers when many areas—now enormous residential neighborhoods and still largely segregated—were cotton fields that abutted the mostly Mexican and Mexican-American neighborhood where he lived off of West 35th Ave. Nicholas De Genova (2005) proposed conceptualizing places with significant Latin American immigrant populations as part of Latin American. De Genova sought to highlight these places’ legitimacy as social entities and challenge teleological notions that they are merely immigrant areas in the process of assimilating to some (white) “American” ideal (see also Stephen 2007, 63-64; 2012, 94). My interlocutors often highlighted themselves that their ‘hoods were “super Mexican” and one grew up in a central Phoenix neighborhood known as “Little Mexico.” The mapping of racial segregation onto the residential space of the city was evident to me on the visits I made to some of my interlocutors’ old neighborhoods in on occasional trips to Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Tucson. I walked several neighborhoods: West 35th Ave, Goldengate, and Central Ave, in Phoenix; Whittier Boulevard, Belvedere Gardens, and Hawaiian Gardens in Los Angeles; South 6th Ave and Ajo Way and the Fairgrounds in Tucson. I ate in mom-and-pop taquerías, noted my interlocutors’ former 85 schools, which often served predominantly Mexican-American student populations, took long walks through residential areas, walked block after block of Mexican and Mexican- American owned businesses, and explored corner markets. On one trip, to the Golden Gate and West Garfield neighborhoods in Phoenix, I saw sights that I had heard so much about in recounted memories and seen only on maps penciled for me on napkins. The wide, smoothly asphalted main avenues were lined with Mexican businesses with names in Spanish: small eateries offering tacos, birria [beef stew], menudo [tripe soup], and mariscos [sea food]; tortillerías; panaderías; businesses for alarmas [alarms] or polarizado [window tinting]; used car dealerships; minimarts; and endless llanteras [tire shops]. Many had Latinx names “Armando’s,” “Memo’s,” “Menudería Guanajuato” (see Figure 14). Figure 14. Llantera Hispana, one of many Mexican and Mexican-American owned rim shops in Phoenix. 86 I walked for almost an hour, in a neighborhood that one of my interlocutors had described, taking in the color: a strip mall with liquor stores; a birriería; yerbería [herbalist shop] with advertisement in the window, “Se lee la baraja,” Tarot card reading; scrap yards; a Christian church; an elementary school; and apartment complexes. There were also residential areas: brown, one-story houses made of stucco with cacti and other desert landscaping, a family barbecuing, tattooed men leaning against a truck talking, two kids riding bikes, a paunchy Mexican man in his 50s riding a BMX bike wearing a white straw hat and work boots. I remembered something that José, who lived in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale for 30 years, had said to me: “My area there—it’s all Mexican.” The legacy of racial segregation continued in my interlocutors’ Phoenix, and in the neighborhoods where they had made their lives. Crossing Back North and “Passing” in the Borderlands Spatialized racial segregation was also linked to social segregation and racialized ideas of cultural “authenticity.” When people discussed being seen as inauthentically Mexican in the United States, this was mentioned in racialized terms. Fantasma told me on one occasion, “My [10-year-old] son calls me a coconut. You know what that is?” I said, “Brown on the outside, white on the inside? Like an Oreo.” Fantasma said “Oreo is what Black people say. For Mexicans, it’s coconut.” I asked Fantasma if he had a word for himself or a way he identified. He said, “Well, to be honest, when I lived up there [in the United States] I was ashamed of my people... I see it different now. I’m proud of my roots. I try to raise my kids right, how I was raised. Teach them my culture.” I asked, “Like what?” Fantasma said, “Like Spanish. I want them to speak Spanish well. And know things about the food. You know, all that.” Fantasma links his son’s identification 87 of Fantasma’s “inner-whiteness” to Fantasma’s own shame of “Mexican culture” and his “roots.” An explicitly ethnic measure of his “authenticity” as a Mexican mediated his racialization and made Fantasma more or less white. In Nogales, a similar logic was also apparent. Dan, a 51-year-old who had been deported from Phoenix, told me, “My Spanish wasn’t good when I came down here! And they’d call me pocho or güero.” While pocho refers to Spanish that is marked as inauthentically Mexican because of influence—phonetic, lexical, or syntactical—from English, güero is an explicitly racialized term meaning something like “white person.” Dan went on to say, “They called me gabacho!” “Gabacho” is another word for white people and is also imbued with the cultural notion of outsider and is often used to reference white, U.S. Americans. “They’d be like, aquí viene el pinche gabacho.” Here comes the white guy. “After being here for a while I learned more Spanish. Now people tell me, ‘Ahh, ¡ya no eres tan pendejo!’” You’re not so dumb now. Dan’s shoulders shook from laughing as he told me this. “But my Spanish is different. They know right away I speak that different Spanish.” Dan’s Spanish, “that different Spanish” that he and other deportees speak, marked him immediately. Hearing him, one knew right away that he had learned Spanish in a heritage context in the United States. In Nogales, this made him a cultural outsider—a pendejo, or “dumb,” at that—and white. Among the many revealing aspects of my interlocutors’ social positioning and geographic emplacement in the U.S. southwest were the many attempts they made after deportation to return to the United States. To a person, every one of them wished to travel to the United States.30 Deported people in general have significant reasons for return. Researchers’ survey data that capture a broader range of deportees than I did working 88 with long-time U.S. residents suggest that people deported from Mexico were men with a mean age of 31 years who had lived in the United States an average of seven years (Slack et al. 2013, 12), over half of whom have a partner or minor child in the United States (Velasco and Coubès 2013, 10), and that as many as 70% of those who identify home to be in the United States (as opposed to Mexico) intend to return (Slack et al. 2013, 15). The desire to return was heightened for my interlocutors. Every one of them had family members in the United States and they had lived there 29.7 years on average. Given these circumstances, one deported man explained his view of a possible return: “If they don’t have no one [in Mexico], you’re basically forcing them to go back.” Nevertheless, with formal reentry bans—almost always for life but occasionally for 10, 15, or 20 years—and no legal path for obtaining U.S. visas, clandestine return was the only option. Although most interviewees had not attempted return, a significant number had—22 of them had been deported more than once. Roughly half of their return crossings were successful. This meant that their second or subsequent deportation was from the U.S. interior. Crossing attempts made by the other half led to immediate apprehension at the border and deportation. Their returns had been much different from their original crossing decades earlier. The gradual intensification of immigration enforcement through the militarization of the U.S. southwest border and harsh penalties for illegal reentry has increased the stakes for those that attempt clandestine crossings today. Nevertheless, the tremendous desire to be with family in home communities in the United States motivated some to attempt returning. The most common way to attempt return was misrepresentation of citizenship at ports of entry. What I want to highlight in what follows is the way that “passing”—the 89 deceptive adoption of an identity one does not have (Renfrow 2004)—as a U.S. citizen was a strategy for mobilizing U.S. southwest identities in attempts to return clandestinely. Passing often alludes to the subversion of stigmatized social categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. But considering it in the context of nationality, which is conflated with racial, cultural, and linguistic identities, highlights the ways that those identities are mobilized to assert belonging. The success or failure to mislead a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer on any particular attempt to cross at a legal port of entry depends on an array of factors that often have little to do with the crosser, e.g. whether an officer asks for identification, asks questions to verify admissibility, or even looks up from a computer screen when waving someone through. These point here, beyond the capriciousness of border-crossing scrutiny, is how the feasibility of attempts to pass reflect deportees’ sense of belonging in the United States and how their passing is often convincing, even to trained officials who are being attentive. In some cases, people experienced crossings even before deportation. Those with LPR status in the United States were able to cross back-and-forth legally with documents. Some occasionally traveled to Mexico to visit family while others never had the inclination or perhaps opportunity to cross. While most who were undocumented in the United States had never returned to Mexico before deportation, there were exceptions. Some passed as U.S. citizens. Alfredo, for example, who never had legal authorization to live in the United States since arriving before his first birthday in 1988, had grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins that lived in Nogales. He remembers summer vacations from middle school in the late 1990s and early 2000s with his mother, father, and sister. Leaving East Los Angeles, skirting Joshua Tree National Park to the south, the family 90 would drive southeast several hours in the oppressive sun to get to Nogales. When it was time to cross back to Arizona, Alfredo and his sister crossed with his grandfather. His grandfather crossed the border several times a week in his beat-up truck with a border- crossing card that allows Mexican citizens to visit the United States but not live or work there. In those days of less scrupulous inspection, he would simply ask Alfredo and his sister to pretend like they were asleep. Alfredo told me, I never had my papers when I was up there. But when I was 13 or 14 [years old] I would come down with my family. I would hang out and run around with my cousins. We would drink beers and party. Tobin: It was easier to cross back in those days. Alfredo: Yeah, for sure. My grandpa lived here, and I would ride with him. They would just be like, “Get in the truck with your grandpa.” And my parents would be in another car. They [CBP Officers] saw him every day. And I was just a kid, so I think they just didn’t think anything about it. Rodolfo had a similar experience in the late 90s, when going to Nogales to visit family at age nine, after having lived in Phoenix for six years already. “At that time you could just say you are an American citizen and cross over. I didn’t even know I was in Mexico. I just knew we were going on a trip.” Passing involves the deployment of borderlands cultural identities—English and Spanish proficiency, subtle mastery of local everyday practices, and knowledge of physical terrain—to create the assumption of belonging. The vast diversity of experiences growing up in the U.S. southwest or, for a few, in other regions—in rural, suburban, or urban communities; in poverty or within the working class; identifying with gangs or not; 91 having visited Mexico in their youth or never having returned since preadolescence— generated different relationships with the borderlands and various expressions of borderlands identity itself. Many of those that did attempt a clandestine return conscientiously tried to “act,” “look,” or “sound” “American” in order to convince border officers of their U.S. belonging. Adán’s experience reflects the importance of language proficiency in passing, despite having been one of the few interviewees that was slightly Spanish dominant. He was seven years old when he migrated from mountainous, rural Sinaloa to Los Angeles. Although he developed strong English competency over the 17 years he lived in the United States, he had moments of self-consciousness with certain lexical items in both languages, conversational fluidity, and use of conventional grammar. Nevertheless, he talked about the ease with which he had crossed in the mid-2000s. “I just said, ‘U.S. citizen. I lost my ID.’ I gave them my name and date of birth. They said, ‘Okay, go ahead.’ I mean, I speak English pretty good.” Traveling in groups, with U.S. residents or U.S. citizens, is also central in some passing stories. Alberto told of crossing the border with his cousin, “Decía ella nomás, ‘We’re all American citizens, sir.’ Y ya. Así.” We’re all American citizens. And that was it. Similarly, Marcos told me in 2016 about passing as a U.S. citizen in the company of his ex-partner, their daughter, and his ex-partner’s father, who were all U.S. citizens. Marcos’s first deportation was from home in McNary, in 2006. Subsequently, his ex- partner at the time and their young daughter moved to Chihuahua, where Marcos had extended family. 92 We were here for like a month-and-a-half, in this room, with my daughter. My girl wouldn’t let me get a job. She was scared. Her dad didn’t want to let her come down [to Mexico]. But she wanted to come, so he was like, “Well, we have to let her.” But after a month-and-a-half, she didn’t want to be here no more. She was like, “We gotta’ go back.” Her dad came down here. He said, “She’s going up with me right now. I don’t care if you come with us or not. You can come, but she’s coming with me.” And I said, “How am I gonna’ get up there?” And he said, “I got an ID for you” [with a Bisbee, Arizona address]. It was this ID that looked just like me! I had a long sleeve shirt [to cover tattoos] and a Bible. That’s all I had. They asked me what I was doing in Mexico. I said, “I was sharing the word of Jesus Christ.” They said “Oh, that’s cool. Are you going to Bisbee?” Marcos: No, I’m going to my grandma’s. Agent: Where does your grandma live? Marcos: In South Tucson. Agent: Okay, have a nice day. I crossed over to the McDonald’s. Got something to eat. [My partner and her father] were still down here being searched… They were calling me after they got over. I was like, “I’m already at the McDonald’s.” And then my girl’s dad was like, “Sometimes there’s another checkpoint [on Interstate 19]. I was kind of worried. But he said, “Don’t worry about it. We’re all American citizens. ‘Three American citizens,’ that’s our story.” The group made it to back to McNary that evening. For Marcos, returning was vital to maintaining relationships with his partner and daughter. Over the less than two months 93 that they spent in Chihuahua, it seemed less and less realistic that they would be able to make their lives there. Marcos relied on his native English, his pose as a devout Christian putatively proselytizing while on a so-called mission in Mexico, a fake ID with an Arizona address, and the fact of his traveling with other U.S. citizens. Shady also recounted how crossing over with others from the United States and his racialized identity—Shady identifies as Afro-descendent—factored in to assumptions that he was a U.S. citizen. His “girl” and her friends, who lived in the Río Grande Valley of Texas, picked Shady up on multiple occasions after deportation. They’d come over and get me. We’d walk up to the agent, I never went up driving, and they’d be distracting him. I’d be telling them jokes and shit—get them laughing. And we’d walk right up. I’d just say, “American citizen,” in an American accent. And that was it. Plus, I used to have dreads. My hair was long. And I’d be dark. I’m light right now, because it’s winter. But I’d be really, really dark. When encountering CBP officials at the border, Shady drew on racialized assumptions of Mexicaness and Americanness. His dreadlocks, sun-darkened skin, and “American” accent created the expectation that he was an African-American U.S. citizen visiting Mexico for vacation. Moreover, he drew on social connections that further reinforced the assumption that he was part of a group of U.S. citizens in order to pass as having authorization, to be able to return. Others told of not merely passing to regain entry to the United States after deportation, but about spending time on both sides of the border—and frequently crossing it. Roy, for example, had not left Sonora for many years. But after he was 94 deported, before 9/11, he frequently crossed into the United States to work. “I crossed over 14 times, back before everybody had to show a passport.” His strategy was to ingratiate himself to someone in the pedestrian line, so as to appear to officers that he was just returning to the United States with a friend or relative. Roy said, I would just blend in… I crossed over in Agua Prieta, Naco, Juárez, Tijuana… If I needed to go make some money, I would just go up there. Before I’d get in line [at a port of entry] I would just start chatting to whoever was walking to the line. “Oh, where are you from? Me, I’m from L.A.!” I’d say, “Artesia Boulevard” or “Lincoln Avenue.” They’d want to hear about the barrio. By the time we got up there [to the CBP officer], they’d think we were old friends. Shoot, and there I was [in the United States]! I’d use my thumb, get in with those truck drivers. Get somewhere where I could do a little work. That’s how it was back then. These crossing stories were not corroborated and I do not know if Roy’s recounting (or others) may have been exaggerated. Nonetheless, Roy’s projection of absolute proficiency at passing as a U.S. citizen demonstrated his own perception of U.S. social, cultural, and linguistic belonging. Ray, another deportee, was deported for the first time in 2006. We talked for a few hours on a hot August day in 2014, at a corner table in a soup kitchen that serves migrants and deportees. His subtle command of idiomatic English was impressive. I was surprised to learn that he migrated with family from the coast of Michoacán to Phoenix when he was 10 years old, in 1978, already substantially developed linguistically. Very soon after that first deportation, his wife told him that she was going to drive down to take him back. “I wanted to be with my kids. I mean, I’m a dad, a father. I had my driver 95 license. And they didn’t check everyone’s passport and everything at that time. She risked herself [and a criminal smuggling charge] and rented a car to come pick me up. I just said I was American and showed my driver license. And we came back in.” Ray’s life history over decades in the United States—as a U.S. citizen’s spouse, spa and pool maintenance worker, father of three U.S. citizens, including one in the U.S. Marine Corps, and felon convicted of drug possession charges—reflects the extent to which Ray felt “American.” At one point in our conversation, he said, “I speak English. I’m just a regular American like everyone else.” As I sat across from Ray, thinking about his native English and “feeling American,” I wondered what a CBP officer talking to him might have noticed about his embodied presentation and how they would interpret it. His pierced left ear and small, gold hoop earring? His gray cotton shirt from the Los Angeles Jeans Co.? The long tattoo of a cross on his right forearm? Would they encode (U.S.) “Americanness”? Conclusions The entwined social and economic historiography of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands reveal that migrations within the region were commonplace. Economic and social factors motivated family relocations that generated the stress that any move does but were not excessively dangerous. The result of this transborder mobility was the emplacement within U.S. communities, an embodied immobility. Although my interlocutors came to see the United States as home, they remained positioned on the lower rungs of racialized social hierarchies. Labor prospects may have been better in the United States than Mexico, but low pay, restricted access to public 96 services such as education, and residential segregation were persistent barriers to socioeconomic mobility. People came to see themselves, nevertheless, as belonging in the United States. After deportation, some attempted clandestine returns to the United States by passing as U.S. citizens. Their mobilization of U.S. cultural identities reflects their strong desire to return and their cultural proficiency. High stakes crossing attempts at the U.S.-Mexico border are not the only place where navigating social and spatial geographies are also crucial for wellbeing. Negotiating the everyday social and physical terrain of Nogales is also a key aspect of life after deportation, as we will see in the next chapter. Notes 23 Both are part of the private prison network operated by CoreCivic, a publicly traded conglomerate. 24 The U.S. government deports Mexican nationals on daily flights to Mexico City and to 16 land ports of entry on the northern Mexico border (Secretaría de Gobernación 2018). Deportees from Arizona often have stories of being shuffled from one detention center to another and of deportations to far-away cities, such as Matamoros, Tamaulipas and Tijuana, Baja California. Deportations to distant places were most likely intentional. So-called “lateral repatriations” are carried out through a program known as the Alien Transfer Exit Program, or ATEP, which explicitly aims to reduce unauthorized border crossing by disrupting would- be border crossers’ communication with smuggling networks (De León 2013; Slack et al. 2013, 33). 25 Electric grids themselves, which made heavy use of copper wire, spurred copper extraction beginning in the 1870s (Heyman 1992, 69). 26 According to the Colibrí Center for Human Rights (CCHR), “Between 1990 and 1999, the average number of migrant deaths in Southern Arizona was 12 per year. Following ‘prevention through deterrence,’ between 2000 and 2017, that average rose to 157 people per year. The average along the entire border during the same time period is at least 372 per year.” The CCHR recognizes that these statistics are almost assuredly undercounts. http://www.colibricenter.org/history/ 27 See Lauren Heidbrink (2014) regarding the considerable agency youth exert in decisions to emigrate alone from Central America. 28 https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab21.txt 29 By 2017 the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that the population of Phoenix proper had grown to 1,626,078 inhabitants and of the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale Metropolitan area to comprise 4,737,270 residents. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/phoenixcityarizona/PST045218?#PST045218 https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk 97 30 See Chapter III on navigating violence, space, and possible return to the United States. 98 CHAPTER III POST-DEPORTATION VULNERABILITIES: NAVIGATING VIOLENT SOCIAL-SPATIAL GEOGRAPHIES IN NORTHERN MEXICO Standing outside the small room that I rent, chatting with Bobby on a frigid November night, the conversation steers toward navigating Nogales. Bobby says, “I don’t know nothing about this Mafia [organized crime] shit down here, how anything works. And I been around up there [in Los Angeles] a little bit.” “You know the streets some,” I reply. Bobby says, “Yeah. But down here, there’s this side of the tracks, that side of the tracks, all the people, the puntos [Mafia lookouts] and everything. I mean, I’m a humble person. I’m not trying to step on anyone’s toes, but I don’t know how all this works!” Knowing how things “work” in Nogales confused Bobby. He had only been in town since his deportation a few weeks earlier. He was just beginning to understand the layout, both social and geographic, in Nogales: who might be suspicious of deported people, who might threaten violence, which areas of town potentially posed greater risk. Bobby felt that he had a lot to learn about this place that was completely new to him. Bobby was born in a rural area of Durango, in northwest Mexico, in 1958. He does not know how old he was when he migrated with his family to Los Angeles, where he lived almost his entire life—he was too young to remember. After his deportation in 2016, Bobby joked with me about the how “foreign” it all felt, struggling to speak Spanish, to get around, to not “step on anyone’s toes,” and, generally, how “crazy everything is in Mexico.” And although Bobby made light of his situation, the opening quote reflects the ways he also knew himself to be vulnerable because of a lack of knowledge surrounding the so-called Mafia, as the Sinaloa drug cartel is known in 99 Nogales; the puntos; the unmarked social borders in the city, such as the railroad tracks that bisect town; and the complicit relationships between the Mafia, the local police, and the military. This is one of several conversations that Bobby and I have. Just days earlier he had rented a small room in a building on a hill, a few doors down from the building where I also rented a room perched several dozen yards above a side street near downtown. We happened to cross paths tonight, so stand outside to talk, his lean frame inches from mine as we protected each other against biting gales. Bobby is streetwise and often cracks a wry smile but is also trusting and not only genial, but warm. He talks quietly in slow, west coast English. He is turned out in a white cotton shirt, sleek black leather jacket, and tightly wound wool scarf. Bobby’s slim-cut west L.A. fashion and thin, clean-shaven face make him seem much younger than his 58 years. Bobby goes on, telling me of the high stakes for getting around Nogales. Some people working for the Mafia had become suspicious of Bobby and upset with him. The Mafia is notoriously complicit with the corrupt municipal police and, somewhat, with the military, which also patrols urban areas. This punto guy was all pissed off. So they were looking for me, but I didn’t really know. I didn’t know they were gonna’ call the cops on me and everything. And one day, when I was at the house, all the guachos [Mexican soldiers] were there across the way. I saw a bunch of them, and I was like “Oh, shit.” And there’s only one way out, so it’s off to the chase. And I run, and the guachos start shooting at me! One [bullet] grazes me in the leg but doesn’t really do anything. Bobby thumbs the waist of his pants to show me a laceration near his hip. He continues, 100 But the bullet goes through my clothes! Anyway, I run, and I just jump this ravine. There was no other way to get away. This ledge, it had to be 60 feet. I mean it was crazy. It was just rock and dirt and everything on the side of this ravine and I hit my head and slid down. I swear to God I have the Nogales record for jumping off the highest hill of anyone around here. And there was this big [propane] tank down there, so I just sit there. This house had this motion sensor, so this fuckin’ light kept going off. But they didn’t know I was all the way down there. I saw all the guachos looking for me up above. And I heard them talking, “He has to be around here.” They were like, “There’s no way he jumped down off this ravine.” Bro’, the whole side of my head was bloody, and my tooth went into my cheek. Bobby peeled back his cheek, exposing a laceration. The soldiers eventually left, Bobby explained. Listening to Bobby, I was confounded by his tone when recounting events. He talked as if retelling the suspenseful ending of a sporting event, not of the sheer terror of being shot at only a few weeks before. Yet, upon reflection and after spending more time in Nogales, I came to assimilate that experience as not so unusual, either, given the way that violence and potential violence permeated deportees’ everyday lives. Seventeen of the 57 deportees that I interviewed disclosed experiences of violent victimization and many others spoke frankly about their fear of imminent violence. Bobby’s harrowing narrative reflects several key points that I explore in this chapter. First, that although he considers himself streetwise from his days in Los Angeles and in California state prison, he felt ignorant of the local social dynamics in Nogales. In 101 this case, those dynamics escalated a Mafia member’s problem with him into a chase from soldiers, ostensibly performing drug interdiction patrols, who had a Mafia relationship and carried out Mafia violence by proxy. Second, that the physical terrain, the intricate topography of hills and ravines in Nogales, also played a crucial role in both his vulnerability—he could have been trapped or boxed in—and his successful escape. Third, Bobby’s own movement across terrain and knowledge of it was critical. His getaway involved running, jumping, utilizing the cover of darkness, and otherwise navigating the hills. It also involved the soldiers’ presumed knowledge of local roads and rises and falls of the landscape—as well as their bullets. And lastly, Bobby’s story reveals the tremendous stakes of navigating local geographies. This chapter highlights the ways deported men in Nogales navigate threats of violence, attempting to attenuate the risks of violent victimization, as one aspect of place- making in Mexico. Deportees orient themselves to the social and physical landscape, as Bobby does here, by improvising and honing patterns of movement within the cityscape of Nogales. But deported men deploy other strategies as well. Lying low or staying in place are also ways of avoiding confrontation and victimization. And lastly, traveling elsewhere in Mexico is another approach to circumventing violence. Demonstrating the ways that place-making intersects with interpersonal violence provides insight into the ways global deportation forces are intertwined with local social and spatial geographies to configure embodied experiences of removal. Some deportees perpetually struggle to negotiate terrain and avoid the violent victimization to which they are at risk. The next section traces what I call Mafia-State geographies—the processes that enmesh Mafia and state control and spatially pattern illicit industries such as drug 102 trafficking and human smuggling. Then I briefly frame violence as not merely an interpersonal act but as a continuum of interlocking forms of conflict. From there, I lay out Mafia-State violence, suggest how its particular social and spatial distribution in Nogales can be understood, and discuss deportees’ strategies for navigating Mafia-State geographies by learning about their dynamics, moving tactically within the city, hiding, or leaving Nogales altogether. The Contours of Mafia-State Geographies The geographies that Bobby and others navigate are arranged through complex historical processes, many of which I described in the introduction to the dissertation. Since the first human presence in the region, the contours of the land and local human activity have shaped one another in an intricate dialectic. They cut the main footpath— which would become a horseback and then wagon route and eventually the Ambos Nogales settlement—through the Nogales Wash. Since the mid-19th century, the U.S.- Mexico boundary line itself shaped the location of buildings and streets in the basin and in turn organized social life. The intertwined social and economic geographies of Ambos Nogales—businesses, residences, and government and civil society institutions— materialized in and around the high-desert topographies of jagged ravines, imposing hills, and concentrated most heavily in the Nogales Wash basin between the east and west hills. The basin’s accessibility, convenience, and walkability contributed to its growing population density and attractiveness as the location for the residential and business core, what would become by the early 20th century more than a dozen active city blocks. At the same time, enmeshed within these notionally state-sanctioned social and economic geographies, and likewise impelled by global and local forces, illicit flows in 103 the region have simultaneously co-emerged in these spaces. These unauthorized operations—of migrant smuggling or illicit drug transportation—have alternately competed against, cooperated with, and coopted state forces. What has evolved into the state and the Mafia have sought, both in opposition and in cooperation, social and economic hegemony and have both deployed violence to that end, thus configuring and distributing violent victimization. I refer to Mafia-State geographies to capture the adversarial, parallel, interconnected, or colluding activities and discourses of the state and the Mafia in Nogales that are pushed into, out of, away from, and in between particular public spaces. In recent decades, increased circulations propelled by technological advancements and global demands have fueled anti-piracy concerns, drug prohibitions, and immigration restrictionism—animated by nativism, racism, nationalism, and xenophobia—and in turn intensified the struggle to control the Mafia-State geographies in the region. Ramped up state control, however, unwittingly incentivizes even more the subversion of regulations through clandestine circulations (Andreas 2001; Brown 2010; Heyman 2010; McGuire 2013) in a mutually reinforcing cycle. In this sense, state and non-state actors produce discourses and practices that are at once contentious and adversarial as well as interdependent and co-constitutive (Slack and Campbell 2016, 6). This does not imply a binary model of state/non-state governance, but instead points to the many linkages and relationships that exist between state and non-state actors, practices, and discourses (Boyce, Banister, and Slack 2015; Slack and Campbell 2016). Both the state and Mafia assert power through embodied coercion that is explicit and direct as well as through indirect means such as legal codification or assertive discourse that renders hegemonic 104 authority commonsensical. Through these intertwined direct and indirect forces people come to understand what practices are acceptable, when, and by whom as well as what consequences might follow the transgression of these norms. Smuggling and other circumventions of the authority to regulate movements of people and things in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands are historically rooted. Early modern genízaros (enslaved indigenous peoples) were forcibly extricated from their communities and enslaved (Magnaghi 1990) and taxes to the Spanish Crown were evaded. After independence, state and capital interests have sought to control flows of people and goods and others have resisted such regulation. Migrant smuggling on the U.S.-Mexico border originate in the late 19th century (Ettinger 2009). The legacy of avoiding governmental tariffs, duties, regulations, and prohibitions has developed today into sophisticated and specialized clandestine smuggling infrastructure at the territorial international border, at official ports of entry and between them, and in the surrounding communities and region. The smuggling of migrants and drugs (northward), and cash and weapons (southward), are among the many transnational commercial activities of Ambos Nogales. The present-day Arizona-Sonora borderlands have been an important smuggling site for Sinaloan opium since at least the 1940s, by which time local police, federal customs officials, and traffickers often colluded to smuggle drug shipments through Ambos Nogales, often hidden in produce loads (Astorga 2003, 117-125). The intensification of drug smuggling, facilitated by the rerouting of Andean cocaine from the Caribbean through the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1980s, further demarcated drug smuggling routes (Grillo 2011; Ravelo 2005). Simultaneously, it entrenched the collusion 105 between state and non-state actors in smuggling activity from the mid-20th century to the present. At times, non-state smugglers posing as law enforcement or military actors have become indistinguishable from actual members of the Federal Security Directorate, the National Center of Investigations and Security, the Sonoran State Police, the Municipal Police in Nogales, and the Mexican Army (which has been involved in drug eradication and interdiction efforts in various forms since the mid-20th century) who become involved in smuggling. In the 1990s and 2000s migrant smuggling also underwent refinement (Spener 2009) and clandestine crossings and their attendant industries of transportation, housing, apparel (De León 2012), and guiding/smuggling services reached their greatest volume in 2000. In that year alone the U.S. Border Patrol made 616,346 apprehensions in the Tucson Sector (Yearbook 2006, 156), compared with 52,172 in 2018.31 The pressures for migration and U.S. government attempts at its disruption have driven smuggling prices upward, from a few hundred dollars in 200732 to between US$5,000-US$7,000 in 2018. Organizationally, the various networks of people throughout Mexico who coordinate migrant, drug, cash, and gun trafficking activities incorporate both top-down as well as highly local, decentralized, and disjointed decision-making processes (Campbell 2009; Farfán Méndez 2017; Slack and Campbell 2016). These networks, often called Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs), or simply drug cartels, are often perceived in public discourse and portrayed in film, literature, and television as monolithic and homogenous top-down organizations. The best macro-historical sources of the burgeoning of Mexican drug trafficking history are journalistic accounts and some scholarly work (predominantly by Mexicans) on historical poppy and marijuana 106 cultivation and commerce (Astorga 2003), cocaine acquisition from South America’s Andean region (Gootenberg 2008); operational cooperation between cartels, which ushered in the so-called pax mexicana in the 1980s (Ravelo 2005, 2009); government cooptation and collusion (Astorga 2003; Hernández 2010; Grillo 2011; Osorno 2009; Ravelo 2005, 2011, 171-176); smuggling (Campbell and Hansen 2012; Poppa 2010); violence;33 and territorial hegemony (Ravelo 2005). In Nogales as elsewhere, territory, known as a plaza, and the operations that take place therein is identified as the possession of an individual at the top of a cartel hierarchy (e.g., “this is Caro Quintero’s plaza”), but control is recognized to be much more broadly dispersed. Nominal authority over the plaza comprising northern Sonora and southern Arizona (Esquivel 2012, 195-198), including Ambos Nogales, has been putatively held by the most infamous Sinaloan capos. These include, from the so-called Old Guard, Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo and Rafael Caro Quintero in the 1970s and 1980s until a handoff to the “younger generation” of Héctor Luis Palma Salazar in the 1990s (Ravelo 2005, 96) and then in the 2000s to the Beltrán Leyva brothers (Reveles 2010; Revelo 2009, 146-153), Joaquín Guzmán Loera (Esquivel 2012, 195-198), and Ismael Zambada García (Reveles 2010, 35). The Mafia that occupy the Nogales plaza is considered to be overseen by the ultimate authority of Sinaloa drug lords and their lieutenants. But, simultaneously, an insular group of nogalense business elites, known as las familias, exert tremendous control over day-to-day operations that are carried out by a nogalense and Sinaloan workforce who themselves have directives to follow yet also make decisions spontaneously and capriciously, independently from Sinaloan capos (Reveles 2010, 33). 107 My interviews and observations reinforced this understanding that street-level Mafia activities are quite dispersed and fragmented. The webs of authority that exercise control of U.S.-Mexico border plazas are particularly vital, since these plazas offer critical smuggling corridors into the United States, the principle human and drug smuggling destination. While global supply and demand as well as state and non-state authority influence Mafia-State geographies, these are also largely configured by the provincial dynamics of Nogales (see also Muehlmann 2014). The Mafia-State geographies of Nogales comprise several important socio-spatial locales. The broader region of Sonora, Arizona, and areas beyond constitute the Mafia’s (or Sinaloa Cartel’s) plaza. At the two vehicular and three pedestrian ports of entry into Nogales, Arizona, among the thousands of daily crossings the majority of large and small drug smuggling attempts are made. Several ounces to a couple of pounds of heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, or methamphetamine may be taped to a waist, groin, or calf. Alternatively, hundreds of pounds of baled marijuana or dozens of kilos of other drugs may be embedded in tractor-trailer cargo loads, hidden in bottles of Coke, limes, or stashed in a false trailer floor. People are secreted in car trunks, trailers, and surreptitious compartments. Under the urban surface, the extensive binational drainage culverts have been mostly secured, yet routine binational law enforcement sweeps often reveal newly built smuggling tunnels.34 Outside of Nogales proper, roads and open desert between official ports of entry, called the “Green Door,” are used for human and drug smuggling on foot and in vehicles to points north, sometimes with the cooperation of corrupt U.S. federal agents or land-owning ranchers (Esquivel 2012, 195-202). Southward cash and guns are smuggled through official ports of entry. The trafficking corridor comprises a 108 region that includes the urban area of Nogales, Sonora and Nogales, Arizona, as well as the surrounding desert. Everyday activities include coordinating transportation of drugs, cash, arms, and people to Nogales; gathering intelligence on U.S. Border Patrol movements, as well as those of the police and military in Mexico; storing and packaging drugs and smuggling them into the United States (mostly through official ports of entry); managing crossings of people with human smugglers; operating local retail drug sales points, known as tiraderos; coordinating payoffs and operations with politicians and police in Mexico and the United States; and overseeing the sicarios, or squads of armed men in the urban area of Nogales that seek to ensure compliance, through intimidation or interpersonal violence, with Mafia authority. Multiple Dimensions of Violence The places, activities, and people that historically materialize Mafia-State geographies also spatialize violence. A critical aspect of navigating Mafia-State geographies is strategizing the avoidance of violence. Violence perpetrated against bodies, what Johan Galtung called “personal somatic violence” (1969, 174), comprises several forms: violence to the anatomy (bodily structure)—such as crushing, tearing, piercing, or burning—and to human physiology (bodily function)—i.e. the denial of air, denial of food, denial of water, and denial of movement. Deportees suffer multiple forms of violence against their bodies. Here, the explicit focus is not on types of violent acts, although some are mentioned, but on the social and spatial distribution of violence and threat of violence to deportees’ bodies. 109 Violence can be considered both by how it manifests—directly, through bodily trauma or indirectly through, for example, the denial of potentially life-saving medical care—as well as by the structures, or Mafia-State geographies, that distribute it throughout society in time and space. As such, I conceive of the direct, bodily violent victimization of deported men to occur within a much broader context of state and non- state power that shapes the landscape of violence. The contortions and concentrations of violence in social and geographical space render it practically invisible in a day-to-day sense except to the most vulnerable people in Nogales—Central American migrants, gender non-conforming people, women, indigenous people, and deportees—who must navigate it. By focusing on the way bodily violence is structured socially and spatially, I follow Phillipe Bourgois (2002) in recognizing violence not to be perpetrated in a moment or a solitary act, but to constitute a process and exist within a continuum. In particular, three of the four categories of violence that Bourgois suggests are useful for my analysis (see also Bourdieu 2000, 2001; Galtung 1969). First, political violence is direct repression through police, the military, or other overtly oppressive organs of the state, as was witnessed in Bobby’s example that opened this chapter. Next, structural violence comprises the impersonal, political and economic forces that configure the inequitable distribution of resources. This includes, for example, the way that unhoused deportees sleep in public parks or abandoned houses and become especially vulnerable to Mafia-State violence. Lastly, everyday violence, originally conceived by Nancy Scheper- Hughs (1996), is interpersonal violence that flows from these same political economic inequities (see also Scheper-Hughs and Bourgois 2004).35 While poverty and political 110 repression do not directly and predictably generate or determine violence, they influence the uneven distribution of violence in society (Bourgois 2002, 223) along axes of gender, ethnicity, and class (Speed 2016, 282). These types of violence do not operate independently or in isolation. I conceive of social, economic, and political marginalization and Mafia-State geographies to reinforce the risks of everyday, direct violence to deportees. Both the Mafia and the state perpetrate violence in Nogales.36 Mafia violence in Nogales comprises intimidation through the threat of bodily harm and its consummation. The Mafia carry out various acts: intimidating words spoken or written as narco-mensajes in sharpie on cardboard and left on a dead body, vehicle patrols, and intimidating and visible handguns and rifles; levantamientos, or forcing someone into a vehicle (referred to by deportees in English as “getting picked up” from the Spanish ser levantado); beatings; electric shocks from a chicharra (Taser); or being shot or shot at. Such acts are orchestrated to carry out illicit activity and simultaneously are propaganda, “a form of psychological warfare and terrorism designed to intimidate, dehumanize, and dominate” (Campbell 2012, 64; see also Campbell and Hansen 2014). These acts are sometimes done as insults are shouted or after pulling down pants and underwear around knees or ankles to further humiliate those being victimized. Similarly, state forces—especially local, state, and federal police and the military, who also patrol the region and perform “drug interdictions”—carry out a variety of acts. Their actions carry the imprimatur of governmental authority and some use of force does indeed conform to law, policy, and international human rights, which grant them a monopoly on violence. Other actions, however, may violate the law and some are 111 perpetrated in direct collusion with Mafia or other criminal forces. Police officers and soldiers also intimidate through physical presence, often during vehicle patrols in uniform and carrying handguns and rifles, and likewise threaten with spoken words and through levantamientos and beatings. These acts are akin to the types of violence Scheper-Hughs refers to as “everyday.” That term is imprecise for my purposes, however, since the various forms of political, structural, and symbolic violence that deportees are subjected to also occur, quite literally, every day. The term “interpersonal violence,” is also insufficient, as it connotes the willful action, the lashing out, the explosion of brute force that humans inflict on other humans. I am wary of pathologizing violence or reifying essentialist notions of a “culture” of violence. My use of “Mafia-State violence” seeks to conjoin the social, political, and economic structures that spatialize violence. My aim in analyzing transnational and local forces of Mafia-State violence discussed above alongside the social and spatial geographies of Nogales, which I have briefly introduced but will sketch out in more detail below, is to demonstrate the structural processes at work in the distribution of violence. It is to these social and spatial geographies that I now turn. Social and Spatial Geographies of Mafia-State Violence The ordering and bordering of Nogales’s socio-spatial geographies are critical to making place after deportation. While the socio-spatial dynamics of Nogales are often unfamiliar, new, and anxiety-provoking for recently deported people, navigating place is not. Deported men recounted surveillance and circumscription of movement at many scales throughout their lives. Narratives of experience in the United States, mostly in working-class Phoenix, Tucson, and Los Angeles barrios, recount the pervasiveness of 112 police observations, stops, and arrests. Many spoke of home gang territories as refuge or, alternatively, of rival gang territory as inhospitable. Moreover, while incarcerated in jails, state or federal prisons, or immigration detention centers, they experienced unique and severe forms of constraint. Being observed and regulated was not new. However, unaccustomed to Nogales, deportees faced the challenge of adapting their place-making skills in new spaces. Landmarks and Borders Social and spatial geographies embed various meanings and engender varying responses. Fixed landmarks signal welcome as safe spaces or unwelcome as danger zones, divide or circumscribe certain activities, or become the “property” of the Mafia, the State, or both. Likewise, physical spaces symbolize authority, belonging, and impose activities and are circumscribed by borders, either visible or invisible, fixed or shifting. Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias—the juxtaposition in one place of a “series of spaces that are foreign to one another” (1984[1967], 6)—is a useful concept for envisioning the heterogeneity of social space in Nogales. Places of welcome and vulnerability are contiguous in space (and time) yet must be apprehended as such and differentiated from one another in order to mitigate the risk of violence. Learning the landmarks and borders and their shifting meanings depending on time, place, and who is involved is critical to navigating social and spatial geographies. People’s adeptness at recognizing and making their way through places and their meanings was driven home for me every time I passed a church, temple, or cathedral in heavily Catholic Nogales (or other places in Mexico). Catholic adherents would nonchalantly—while walking, talking, texting, riding a bus, or driving—make the sign of the cross when passing a church. Even 113 if traveling on a street a block away and the church hidden from a line-of-sight, a casual yet adroit recognition of the sacredness of the place. A basic yet importantly unfamiliar aspect of life for my interlocutors was the names of streets and neighborhoods and signage around the city more broadly. One deported man who struggled with spoken and written Spanish told me, Getting around is different here. You got to know all the streets, the neighborhoods. The monuments are different. All the streets have different names. Up there, I how to get around everywhere, no problem. But here, even the signs are different. I mean, I speak Spanish, but I’m not totally on it [linguistically competent in Spanish]. I know most of town. Obregón out to Periférico [two main avenues]. But all the little windy roads—no way [laughing]. I said, “You went to school up there, so when the street names are Washington, Lincoln, MLK, you know what all that is. Down here, the names are all different, like Alvaro Obregón, Elías Calles, Benito Juárez [Mexican historical figures] and all that.” He replied, “Yeah, you have to know a lot about Mexico and all that. It’s totally different here.” For him, the names were hard to remember without a mental reference to historical context. Beyond that, however, reading everyday signs with local symbols and national historical figures was complicated by their difference from the U.S.-style signs he was used to. Beyond official place names and explicit signage, other types of landmarks and borders required special knowledge to decipher. The north-south railroad tracks that bisect the middle of town divide Nogales into two Mafia factions. While unclassified U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration maps (U.S. DEA 2015)37 and journalistic 114 reporting on narco-routes (see Esquivel 2014 on Sonora) position Nogales squarely in undisputed Sinaloa Cartel territory, the two Mafia factions, each managed by separate business-owning nogalense families and their networks of workers, operate almost entirely independent of one another. This dividing of the city—of “este lado de las vías” from “aquel lado de las vías,” or this side of the tracks from that—has significant consequences. On one side of the tracks, one can be protected (or “untouchable”), unknown, or simply not of interest. This applies to the two groups of sicarios, Mafia enforcers or hitmen, who operate autonomously from one another. One may be sought by sicarios on one side of the tracks but not the other for violence because of a debt owed, a transgression such as selling drugs without authorization, or a perceived transgression. A simple crossing of the tracks can radically alter one’s vulnerability. Caín expressed the importance of the tracks explicitly. Caín is a deported “runner” whose work is hustling on the Line. He fetches possession amounts of drugs from an east-side tiradero for use in a Mafia-operated massage parlor. One day, he indicated to me the significance of this line of demarcation and its absolute rigidity. Pointing two feet over the tracks to the west, near where he and I were standing, he said, “If I sold drugs there, they’d kill me. I’d be dead. Over here, this is our territory. This is where me and Dreamer [another east-side runner] work.” I asked Caín if he could cross over to the other side of the tracks. Caín said, “Sure. I run around both sides all the time, to get people into the Black Door [the east-side massage parlor]. I just went over there to change money [to exchange dollars for pesos in a west-side exchange house]. But I can’t sell anything over there.” 115 The tracks served as a border—highly visible, yet imperceptible without special knowledge—an organizer of social and economic relations, between the two autonomous factions (see Figure 15). The tracks divided the complex social networks of the “families” in charge. It also divided the operations and territories of the sicario bosses, known as jefes; sicarios; tiradero operators; puntos, or lookouts, with two-way radios and binoculars; cadres of colluding police and army officers; and any number of neighborhood managers and street-level workers. Moreover, the tracks channeled the flow of psychoactive substances and structured Mafia activities. Each side of the tracks has its own network of permanently operating, 24-hour-a-day tiraderos. These are sales points where individual doses of non-pharmaceutical recreational drugs—crack and powder cocaine, methamphetamines, and marijuana—can be purchased for 50 pesos, a few dollars. Tiraderos operate in bars, out of houses, or in the open air on a street corner. Figure 15. Southbound view of railroad tracks that bisect Nogales. 116 Gaining Proficiency in Social and Spatial Geographies Learning social and spatial geographies of Nogales in general and of Mafia-State violence in particular may occur slowly yet persistently or happen quickly. Frequently, deported men were unable to recall moments of realizing aspects of the spatialization of Nogales. Those who had lived in Nogales for months and years were adept at articulating social and spatial geographies, despite being unable to recall specific encounters, interactions, observations whereby they learned these norms. In a conversation with Scooby, he outlined his understanding of Mafia control in Nogales and reflected the pervasiveness of this knowledge. He had been deported from Phoenix in 2015 at age 34. Scooby said, “You can’t sell drugs here. It’s all controlled… No one can sell drugs here, if they don’t have permission [from the Mafia].” I asked Scooby if control extended to other activities. Scooby described the rigidity with which the Mafia controlled not only drug sales but confined their use to designated areas and proscribed petty theft and other activities that detracted from locals’ quality of life generally. “You can’t steal here, do drugs, anything. If you steal something, they chop off your hands and leave them in a cooler in the plaza [town square] with a note. You can’t touch anyone around here.” I had never heard in Nogales of hands being chopped off and rarely heard rumors of other types of gruesome maimings that cartels do carry out in other parts of Mexico (Campbell 2012; Campbell and Hansen 2014). The Mafia did torture and kill people—I had ample journalistic and word-of-mouth evidence of that. And I had witnessed someone being levantado, “picked up,” and dropped off hours later with a red and swollen face from a pistol-whipping by two sicarios. Lack of corroborating accounts notwithstanding, I took Scooby’s point about the potential for 117 physical violence. Curious about how the knowledge of Mafia norms are transmitted, I asked Scooby who had told him about potential maiming. He replied, “Everybody knows it. I mean, I didn’t know when I came down here.” I insisted, “So how did you find out?” Everybody knows. Any old lady [would] know that… It’s like little Italy here. It’s like Sicily. The Mafia controls everything. I guarantee you that the second you walked in [from the United States] everyone was looking at you. And they let people know that you got here. Everyone’s in with the Mafia here. Everyone. They’re posted up [as lookouts], or they’re holding [drugs], selling, or something. Scooby refers to the ubiquity of Mafia surveillance and how this imagined omnipresence permits a totalizing control. This was repeated over and over by interlocutors. As one deportee said, “It’s dangerous here. I hate feeling like people are watching me every second.” And puntos themselves, with radios and often binoculars, were often plainly visible on hillsides, ridges, and overpasses. Beyond the powers to surveil, Scooby points out that mafiosos have unmitigated authority to police activity and exercise violence. This knowledge is not something Scooby had before deportation, but neither was it learned in a particular moment. Through a continual yet amorphous learning process, Scooby came to understand that which “everybody knows.” On the other hand, many describe specific moments in which they learned about the social landscape. These may emerge from conversations with others, or from more harrowing experiences of violence or potential violence. Fantasma, a deported 51-year- old, learned about Nogales’s bordering from a violent attack. During one of our frequent talks he explained a Mafia heroin prohibition in early 2015, first on the west side, but not on the east. Heroin was not supposed to be purchased, possessed, or consumed on the 118 west side. Suddenly, Fantasma digressed, asking me a question: “You know I got my jaw broken right?” This caught me by surprise. Despite the many hours I had spent with Fantasma since meeting him in late 2015, I had not remembered or did not know about his jaw. Fantasma clarified that the sicarios had attacked him two years earlier. He said, “They had a rule that you couldn’t use black [heroin] on this [west] side of the tracks. They didn’t send me the memo! How was I supposed to know?” Fantasma’s joke about not getting “the memo” highlights the informal and nebulous processes through which the contours of socio-spatial life are learned, even when these have grave consequences. Explicit learning may come in less pointed ways had anticipatory conversations in U.S. prisons or detention facilities about how particular border cities “worked”: what cartel(s) maintained authority, what U.S. prison gangs they were aligned with, how safe life was there, etc. During a conversation with a Mexican repatriation official, he mentioned that a frequent question he gets from recent deportees, along with general inquiries about places to stay and transportation, is “¿Quién controla la plaza?” This question—who is “in charge” of the trafficking area and activities—reflects an appreciation that local social complexities exist. “Eighty-Sixed”: Circumscriptions within and Prohibitions from Place Socio-spatial boundaries may also be delineated explicitly and directly. Checo, a deportee from Phoenix, provides an example with his story of direct confrontation by the sicario boss on the west side of Nogales. Checo was “eighty-sixed,” as Checo referred to it in English, explicitly told that his presence was not permitted in a specific area controlled by Bigotes, a sicario boss on the east side of the tracks. 119 I first heard the story from one of Checo’s friends, Ruli, another deportee. Ruli said that he and Checo had spent a long night drinking in Ruli’s kitchenette, when at about 4am two sicarios drove slowly through the neighborhood in their blue Chevrolet Blazer four-by-four. Checo happened to be standing in the open front doorway, getting ready to leave, stuffing a duffel bag with clothing a friend had given him. Checo had just zipped the duffel when they rolled down the tinted windows and Ruli saw their pistols and fully automatic rifles. Ruli said They thought we were making a move on them, they see that big duffel zipped up like that. They were like, “Open the fucking bag.” I said, “Ruco, todo bien. No hay problema. [It’s all good, Old Man. There’s no problem.]” Fucking Checo was just standing there. I told him to open the fucking bag and show them it was just clothes. He’s working like this [Ruli leans over and imitates someone struggling to unzip a duffel]. I tell him, “Just open that shit up now, show them that there’s nothing in there!” I told Bigotes, “Con todo respeto, no trae nada [With all due respect, he doesn’t have anything].” Finally Checo showed him those clothes and I said, “Take it all out and show them there’s nothing there.” They saw that and rolled up the windows and rolled out. Those fuckers are abusive man. Checo told me that same story a few months later. Three years later he told it to me again, laughing at himself for his dull-wittedness in being slow to understand what Bigotes wanted him to do: Bigotes was like, “Abre la bolsa.” He said it twice. I was like, “Who the fuck are these guys? And then the one guy gets out of the truck, with his big ‘ol gun [mimics holding a rifle across his chest]. Ruli comes out of his house, and he was 120 like, “¿Estás pendejo? ¡Abre la bolsa! [Are you stupid? Open the bag!]” And I was like, “Oh, hell yeah!” [Makes a motion as if unzipping a duffel very fast.] I’m all throwin’ clothes out, [and I say] “You can look at anything!” Both Ruli and Checo disclose their uncertainty about the quickly unfolding situation at first, but then reach a rapid understanding that there was to be no hesitation when it comes to the sicarios’ orders. Some months later, after Bigotes and Checo had already had this first face-to-face encounter, they had another. Bigotes suspected Checo of short changing a tiradero worker when Checo was buying marijuana. Checo recounted that Bigotes was like, “This is all my [pause] my territorio, you know. I run all this shit.” It’s like from la Héroes [street] to the Line, and from López Mateos [avenue] to the old cemetery. Tobin: How did you know? How did you know where his territory was? Checo: He told me! He said it, just like that! He told me that was where I couldn’t be. Tobin: What did he say would happen if he saw you? Checo: He said, “I’m gonna drag you by a chain. All the way down Obregón [avenue]. I’m going to drag you behind my truck!” Tobin: But when you lived way up there on the hill, with Johnny and Green Eyes, you were still close by his territory, or in it. You didn’t have any problems because of that? Checo: No, because I wasn’t down there, you know, where all his business is [in the tiraderos]. He didn’t have to see me around. I was cool up there. 121 Again, Checo recounts his deference to Bigotes’s authority and to the parameters set out for Checo’s physical movement. Critically, although Bigotes articulated the specific interpersonal violence that awaited Checo if he failed to comply with Bigotes’s prohibition, Checo decided to rent a room on the border of the demarcated territory. When we had this conversation, Checo had lived there for years, without a problem. Just as he avoided Bigotes’s territory, he felt secure living above it, out of sight, in compliance with the spirit of Bigotes’s 86 order. Ups, Downs, and Staying One Step Ahead Gaining familiarity with social and spatial geographies encompasses not only a knowledge of these geographies qua geographies, but also an embodied and kinetic awareness of how to navigate them. Reducing visibility to mitigate vulnerability was a stated objective when deportees feared violence. Sometimes called “lying low” (or “laying low” [sic]) this involved staying inside, utilizing less traveled routes, and concealing plans or whereabouts. These strategies are flexible and often spontaneous. And strategies might come in to conflict, for example lying low inside a house, apartment, or room to avoid people compared with leaving a residences for hours or days or to move permanently to somewhere more hospitable, known as being “on the run.” In conversation one day with Bobby, my neighbor (also mentioned in this chapter’s opening), he divulged his nervousness about the Mafia people some days after his first confrontation with them. He felt unsure about the risks he ran if he stayed in his rented room—a location that Mafia people perhaps knew about. Bobby says, I’m just nervous here now. I think that [Mafia] guy went and told the puntos and everything that I’m down here: “Bobby’s doing all this business. Bobby has this, 122 Bobby has that.” I just don’t know if they’ll come down here. I mean, if the sicarios want to come in here, they’re gonna come in [past the outer gate to the housing complex where he rents a room]. No one’s gonna stop them. I just don’t feel comfortable here… I’m gonna’ bounce out and get a hotel room for the night. I think it’s worth 350 or 400 pesos [US$19-22] just to chill out and get a place. I’m gonna’ go to that side of the tracks. I was wondering if you don’t mind watching my stuff. I told Bobby that it was cool, that I would be around. Bobby said, “Just keep your eye out and see if they come or anything. I’d appreciate it.” Bobby went on to describe his exit route. He said that instead of going down one of two staircases, 25 yards or so from the building to the street bellow, that he was going to take a windy gravel path up the hill, about 30 yards up to a series of zig-zagging, one- lane paved streets. He said, “I think I’m going to bounce out, go up the steps.” I told him, “That’s what I was gonna’ say. You know you can go up the [back] steps [to the seldom traveled gravel trail] and pop out down in the alley.” Bobby said, “That’s what I’m going to do, and just bounce over to the other side of the tracks.” Not only was leaving this area of town and getting to another across the tracks important, but it was critical that Bobby plan a path that would allow him to move undetected from one to another (see Figure 16). 123 Figure 16. One of hundreds of escalinatas (outdoor stairs) in Nogales. Beyond his movements, Bobby’s prominence is also key to his susceptibility. Bobby explicitly links his visibility and status—others perceiving that “Bobby has this, Bobby has that”—with his vulnerability. There was a perception that deportees had family in the United States to wire money or that as prison gang members they would be involved in illicit business, providing competition. Bobby feels “uncomfortable” and decides that it is wise to leave his room temporarily, even though it will cost money. He is unsure if anyone is actually looking for him or seeking to harm him. Nevertheless, the suspicion he has regarding the sicarios motivates him to move. Bobby identifies the other side of the tracks, where he has not been seen, as a place of retreat. He is conscientious of role of the tracks as a border in Nogales. Although people know there is communication between Mafia people on opposite sides of the tracks—in the rare case of an imposing military operation or an incursion on Nogales by members of an oppositional cartel— 124 they are also very familiar with the general division that exists between the two factions, and the general lack of coordination. While Bobby decided to temporarily leave his room on a bad feeling and a hunch, others have to literally leave on the run. For example, talking with Peter one evening, he told me about narrowly escaping the sicarios that morning. Peter had lived in rural California since kindergarten in the mid-1980s and was deported in 2003. For some time before this conversation, he had been selling black tar heroin without Mafia permission. In late 2015, the Mafia had prohibited heroin in the entire city and stopped selling it in the tiraderos.38 But a few people like Peter sold small amounts—blending in with passersby and walking from plaza to plaza, street to street, and house to house. These sellers are called “curberos” for having to move “under the curb” or “chapulines,” “grasshoppers,” because they “hop,” move quickly and elusively, from place to place. Peter recounted having gone to the casino in the early morning hours. He and another chapulín, were hanging out on the Line, outside the casino that abuts the railroad tracks one block south of the Garita Grande, the main vehicular and pedestrian port of entry. The sicarios suddently pulled up in a red Blazer. They picked up the other chapulín, forcing him into the Blazer, and Peter ran across the tracks and up into the east hills to hide. Hours later the sicarios dropped off the chapulín outside of the casino again. Peter was surprised he had not been more seriously hurt or killed; they had only left the chapulín’s face “all puffy and swollen, all red.” Peter explained the precariousness of always staying one step ahead. You just gotta’ know if they’re around and run. That’s what I do. If they’re coming, I just leave. I disappear. They want to fuck me up. They won’t kill me, 125 but they want to beat the shit out of me for selling this shit [black tar heroin]. But you gotta’ make a living. So you got to mix in. Sometimes I leave for a couple of weeks, when it gets too hot [dangerous]. I just go with a friend, out of Nogales. I asked Peter if the sicarios were looking for him on one side of the tracks or the other or both. He said, “Both. But they stopped looking for me on the other side. They just got tired—they’re not even looking for me [there anymore]. But they are here.” Peter relies on his sense of danger, knowledge of local geography, and narrow getaways to avoid interpersonal violence. This combination is not uncommon. One of Alberto’s stories was similar. Alberto had been deported at 39 years old, months before he and I met, after having lived most of his life in Nogales, Arizona. Getting an ice cream on the main street downtown one evening, I heard “Tobin! Tobin!” I turned and saw Alberto. He lives with his mother, who relocated from the United States after he was deported. Their house is perched high on a hill, which gives Alberto a line of sight to the movements on the main avenues in the city core. Despite his high positioning, and precarious dirt road to get to his house, the sicarios came. He said ¿Te acuerdas que te dije ayer que me estaban buscando los sicarios? [Remember I told you yesterday that the sicarios were looking for me?] Check this out, some crazy shit… Those fuckers came to my house! Escuché que las camionetas estaban afuera, lo ruidosas que son. [I heard their loud trucks outside.] I hid behind the washing machine [on my front porch], right there. Subieron hasta mi patio guey, entonces me fui corriendo y bajé hasta el Tahiti. [They went up to my patio and I took off running to the Tahiti bar.] Tobin: ¿Saliste corriendo? [You took off running?] 126 Alberto: ¡A güevo! No iba a quedarme ahí! [Hell yeah! I wasn’t gonna’ stick around there!] Tobin: Son los sicarios del otro lado. No pueden cruzar para este lado, ¿veradad? [They’re the sicarios from the other side. They can’t come over here, right?] Alberto: Así es, pero aquí me pueden levantar. Y si me llevan pa’ allá, ahí me chingan. [Yeah, but they can pick me up here. And if they take me back across, they’ll fuck me up.] I had a couple of dollars to help Alberto with a cab to a friend’s house on the outskirts of town. He asked me to find his mother, a cook at a primary school, the next day to let her know he was fine, had skipped town, and would be lying low for a couple of weeks. Bobby, Peter, and Alberto all used the hills strategically, to escape up and down, and shake those chasing them. Dozens and dozens of escalinatas, long stairs that connect hilly neighborhoods, run throughout the city. Heroin users, on the lookout for the Mafia, police, and soldiers, also use abandoned houses high in the hills to avoid detection. While they tell of utter respect for the Mafia and the military’s ability to administer violence, and complete deference to them, a high vantage point would allow them to simply lob rocks down at police officers, if necessary. Hills, roads, escalinatas, and menacing guard dogs are all used to facilitate movement, reduce visibility, and avoid violence. Imagined Returns, Places Beyond Fences, and Staying in Place Deported men not only navigate the social and spatial geographies here, in Nogales, but also contend with the notion of life somewhere else. Many expressed a persistent tension between carving out a life here and the desire to return home, to be there (see Zavella 2011). Almost all of my interlocutors couched their lives in Nogales as 127 transitional or temporary, even when they had lived there for five or ten years or more. Almost everyone held out vague, muted hope for a return home. (See Chapter II on attempted returns.) But reasons for which they had not yet attempted a clandestine return, or an additional clandestine return after multiple deportations, included the physical risk of a precarious desert crossing, particularly given the intensified threats of doing so in their fourth, fifth, or sixth decade of life (see Figure 17). Figure 17. Treacherous desert north of Nogales. Other forms of surreptitious entry—being smuggled through a port of entry in a vehicle or purchasing false documents—also posed the risk of more prison, and many cited this as a deterring factor. In an emotional moment, Javier expressed his desire not to return to prison while we chatted on a slow day at the car wash where he works. I was mostly silent, listening intently as the conversation swung toward his family, a possible return, and prison. He became wistful and tears ran down his cheeks as he spoke of how his 18- 128 year-old daughter had not come to Mexico to see him. I asked Javier what he would you say to her if you could return. He said with tears running down his cheeks I’d say, “I love you so much. I’m so proud of you, baby girl. I’m so proud.” Shit, I want to go up so bad. But I can’t go back to prison. I didn’t do a lot of time or anything, but I did enough. Inside, you’re just there. Not doing nothing. I don’t want to go back [to prison]. I want to be out. To be free. Javier, usually upbeat and affable, became pensive when feeling the poignant absence of his parents, son, daughter, and newborn grandchild. Federal statute punishes the felony crime of illegal reentry for between two to 20 years. Although deported men are well aware that judges are generally issuing sentences of around two years, the risk of prison is dissuasive. Sometimes, however, deportees choose to take on the risk, or at least consider it. One deported man who hustles on the Line within a few hundred feet of one of the pedestrian crossing gates, talked about often being hard up for money and hungry. He said he becomes obsessed by thoughts of walking up to the gate, through the turnstile, and “turning [him]self in to a guard [U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer]… At least that way I know I’d eat.” For Javier and others, their social worlds feel oppressed by the physical boundary to the north, which stifles the possibility of physical movement and family reunification. The fence, as material structure, constitutes not only an international political boundary, but also the symbolic separation between home and family. The 30-foot-high fence juts skyward, cutting through space, demarcating forbidden space. But the fence itself is by no means the only barrier. The Mafia and militarized Border Patrol forces simultaneously, but inharmoniously, control the netherworld beyond the fence. Both may 129 inflict interpersonal violence or other serious harms to life and free movement. And the extreme harshness of the desert, to which militarized immigration enforcement funnels crossers, is also formidable and deadly (Cornelius and Lewis 2007; De León 2015; Dunn 2009; Green 2011; Nevins 2002). José, a 39-year-old deportee who had lived more than 30 years in Phoenix, Arizona, told me time and again over months of frequent contact about his desperation to return to his wife and children. He explored several options for return. His wife met with attorneys in Phoenix. José and I visited an immigration attorney in Nogales twice. José had been preliminarily approved for a green card in the 1990s, but never followed through to obtain it. When he was deported in 2017, he had lost some of the paperwork he was given that may have given him more information on the legal reason for and terms of his exclusion. The FOIA request alone, to obtain these government records, could take up to a year and cost hundreds of dollars. Not to mention, submitting subsequent visa applications and waiting for the government’s review would be time-consuming. The entire legal process seemed onerous and lengthy and he was distressed. José turned his attention instead to expanding his small social network in Nogales, in hopes of being introduced to a coyote, a desert guide with Mafia authorization. He had dug up only one lead: a co-worker at the convenience store where he had landed a cashier job had a brother who crossed people in the desert west of Nogales. In telling me about it, José recounted again his desire to return despite the risk he felt he was undertaking: I just want to get back to my wife. I need to be with my wife and my kids… I keep asking that guy at work. So what’s the deal? Is this gonna’ happen or not? I ask him every week. He’s like, “It’s too hot right now. [There is too much U.S. 130 Border Patrol scrutiny.] Everything’s hot. But as soon as my brother says it cools down, I got you. Don’t worry about it. You know I got you.” He showed me photos of his brother and everything, in the desert with an AK or something. It’s for real. I gotta’ get back to my family. But the Mafia has my life in their hands right now. I’m telling you, Tobin. It all depends on them. With his future in the balance, José felt that the Mafia determined his chances at family reunification and for any chance of flourishing. The Mafia held “in their hands” the manner in which José would cross, the time and place of crossing, and, of course, José’s personal safety. Some deportees told stories of attempting clandestine crossings with Mafia guides. One recounted his work both as a guide and as a burrero, muling backpacks with 30-40 kilos39 of marijuana, an everyday smuggling tactic. Infrequently, people try to cross without paying the derecho de piso, or local fee the Mafia requires, of between US$2,000 to US$3,000 just to transit through the area (not including guide services). Occasionally, people did not perceive the risk of violence during crossings to be so high. Milton, who had lived in Phoenix from 1978 until his deportation in 2009, spoke nonchalantly about crossing the border to return home and to reunite with his oldest son who frequently asks when he will return. Milton said, “I tried to cross twice [in the hills west of Nogales]. Both times I made it as far as Peña Blanca Lake. I didn’t even have to pay the Mafia.” I asked, “They didn’t care that you crossed?” Milton said, Or they didn’t see me… The problem was the railroad tracks up there. They [Law enforcement officers] were waiting for three people by the railroad tracks, and I made a run for it and they got me on camera [and apprehended me]. Now I’m 131 waiting for an [black market] ID… that looks like me. I’m just going to drive right across with that ID. If I cross through the hills again, I’ll wait till it’s raining. The rain messes with the [in-ground, seismic] sensors. And also, the migra [Border Patrol agents] are in their trucks. The same with the Mafia. They’re not going to be out there getting wet. Milton recognizes the obligation to pay the mafia yet does not consider Mafia presence a deterrent from crossing. Although failed desert-crossing attempts in the past have led him to prefer crossing with a false identification, he has not ruled out trying the desert again on a rainy day. He highlights the arbitrariness of coming face-to-face with U.S. Border Patrol agents or mafiosos as a crosser, given his familiarity with the desert. Moreover, his understanding of Mafia and Border Patrol activities and his assumption of a natural aversion to getting soaked in the vast expanse of desert on a rainy day, influence what he wants to do in the future. Others describe crossing attempts in much starker terms and emphasize the interpersonal violence that accompanied their experience. Alberto’s choice not to pay the Mafia was motivated in part because of his knowledge of the physical terrain—he thought he could negotiate the desert undetected. But he was “picked up” by sicarios. Alberto and I spoke on a downtown sidewalk one day under the July sun and he told me about this crossing attempt. Alberto: I tried to go back, bro’. I went by myself. I was walking over here [motioning to the desert east of Nogales] but the sicarios got me. They were driving around over there, where I was crossing. I wanted to go over myself. I know how to get over there and everything. 132 Tobin: Oh yeah, you’re from Nogales on that side [Arizona]. You know all that. Alberto: Yeah! But they picked me up. They took [drove] me around and beat the shit out of me. They beat me up and said I had to pay if I wanted to cross. Alberto’s attempt to return was thwarted by sicarios who inflicted violence as a punitive measure for his transgression of not having paid and as a clear assertion of their power to regulate movement. The delaying of returns, again and again, coincides for many with the slow dimming of anxieties and hopes for a future back home. The internal tensions of an imagined future here and up there ease over time and seem less urgent, yet persist unresolved. After years and years, people spoke alternatively of intense desire to return and also of some resignation to life in Nogales. One persistent aspect of staying or returning, however, was the potential violence that might accompany either choice. To discuss crossing back after deportation, however, it is important first to note how shifting immigration enforcement practices over time shaped crossing experiences. The gradual intensification of legal measures and the hardening of the border over time, especially since 1986, are reflected in crossing attempts across specific historical periods. Although harsh enforcement had less impact on initial crossing experiences (discussed in the section above), it crucially shaped people’s experiences of crossing back after deportation, particularly after the mid-1990s and then the terrorist attacks of 2001. Crossing routes that traversed urban areas were much more common prior to the mid-1990s, when there was a concerted effort to funnel migratory routes to hinterland regions (Cornelius 2001; De León 2015; Inda 2006; Nevins 2002; Rosas 2012; Seghetti 2014). After the September 11th terrorist attacks, border hardening efforts were again 133 stepped up, as noted above. Rick, who has twice been deported, recounted the palpable difference in crossing experience over time. He told me once in 2015 how easy it was to cross “back then, before the terrorists took down those towers.” After 11 months in a California prison and deportation in the late 1990s, he said it was easy as an English speaker with a California driver license to cross without a passport or birth certificate. Rick worked as a truck driver for several years until a subsequent ICE arrest in 2005. Similarly, others spoke of successful crossings without any documents. Many cited potential federal prison sentences for the felony crime of “illegal reentry” as a reason not to attempt a return. Amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act passed over various congressional sessions in the 1980s and 1990s dramatically escalated immigration controls, including the bars to legal entry for removed persons. Pursuant to the 1996 IIRIRA, the punishment for illegal reentry is up to two years in prison, although upward enhancements for multiple misdemeanor convictions and some felony convictions set maximum statutory terms at 20 years.40 The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, catalyzed implementation of increased measures through legislation such as the REAL ID Act, that introduced biometric identifiers and generally more stringent inspection practices. Moreover, the risk of terrorism has been the primary motivation for border security since 2001 (Heyman 2013, 65). This has provided a convenient cover for ramped up border “security” by conflating terrorism, unauthorized immigration, and criminality in the creation of classes of Central American and Mexican people always already perceived as “preemptive suspects” (Stephen 2017; see also Inda 2006; Rosas 2012). 134 The militarized conditions of the border itself, which also grew out of specific provisions of legislation putatively designed to promote border security, dissuaded others from attempting to cross. In recent years high smuggling fees to coyotes, vastly increased number of Border Patrol agents (who patrol areas between official ports of entry), and agents’ sophisticated surveillance technology and military-grade hardware have also made people warier of attempting dangerous desert crossings. And increased scrutiny by CBP officers (who inspect passengers and cargo at ports of entry) as well as computerized data bases, instant finger-printing apparatuses, and retina-scanning devices, discouraged others from attempting to cross by falsely claiming citizenship or residency or using fraudulent documents. Heading South: Real and Imagined Refuge Deportees imagined other places outside of Nogales, and away from the United States, as refuges from violence or, alternatively, as possibilities for opportunity. Some spoke explicitly of interpersonal violence and the need to leave to Nogales in order to avoid it. In a few cases, people plainly stated that they were heading south and leaving Nogales. In others, people I had met just once or a few times, were not seen again— possibly having attempted a return home or having headed south. In fact, it was these moments, when people’s stories of leaving had gone untold (to me), that often made me wonder about the circumstances surrounding their departure. Although a few of my interlocutors had been south of Mexico’s northern border, the majority had not. They asked me questions about Mexico City, Guadalajara, and other towns and cities, and mused about one day seeing such faraway places. Those who had been south, lived with extended family, usually in small towns in the western states of 135 Sinaloa, Durango, Jalisco, or elsewhere in Sonora, and then returned to Nogales for a variety of reasons. Some expressed a difficulty adjusting to rural living after having called Los Angeles, Tucson, Phoenix, or Las Vegas home for almost an entire lifetime to that point (see Boehm 2016). Others spoke of the difficulty of domestic life with extended family. Because of his unfamiliarity with Mexico, after Javier was deported to Nogales in 2013, he lived with his aunt in the small Sonoran town of Magdalena for nine months, before “getting kicked out.” He worked at her corner store but says that he felt manipulated by her. Javier received room, board, and some money; but then she stopped paying him. “She used me,” Javier says, Because she said I was crazy with the money. When she paid me, she knew I drank beer and smoked a little bud [marijuana]. But I wasn’t shooting up [heroin] or doing anything crazy. I would buy food and try to save a little bit. She would only see the bad things I did with the money, not the good things. But it’s my money! Why is she telling me what to do with it? You know how it is working with family—it never works out. Going south for some was a conscientious attempt to avoid interpersonal violence, a way to lie low outside of town. While at times this was motivated by the perception of a threat, at others it was after a violent incident. One hot July morning, Danny cured a hangover with beer while he and I talked with Jackie, a friend of his. On the dirt patio outside her house, jutting out of a hillside above downtown, we gossiped about Rubis and Marina, two other friends from Nogales. They had been accosted somehow—the details were fuzzy—on their way to a tiradero located high on another hill, where they were headed to purchase a dose of methamphetamine. Danny and Jackie thought this reflected 136 how El Flaco, the mafioso in charge of a portion of the west side, was not protecting everyday people. That Rubis and Marina could be hurt outside a tiradero, where the Mafia putatively kept order and provided safety, especially for their customers, revealed an internal Mafia problem and potentially an ongoing risk to Rubis and Marina. Would they be attacked again? Danny recounted the straightforward solution: César, a deportee friend, had purchased them each a bus ticket to Ciudad Obregón, a city in southern Sonora. Hundreds of miles away, they would be safe with relatives there. César later confirmed the story. He said it was an easy determination and asked me: “What other option did they have?” On another occasion, Paco spoke of an opportunity to live in Cancún, almost 2,000 miles away. Paco talked excitedly about a friend that had invited him to be in charge of maintenance in a hotel there. He would earn a steady paycheck and live in a nice resort. Talking about the opportunity, that he had first brought up to me in 2014, a year after his deportation, invigorated Paco. But the notion of leaving the border, the point closest to Phoenix, his life, and his family, was unbearable. “I can’t be that far from my family… I don’t get a lot of visits as it is. But at least sometimes. But if I moved all the way down there, when would I see anyone?” Over months and then years of our conversations in Nogales since 2014, Paco eventually stopped bringing it the possibility. Conclusions On one level, deportation is a legal removal. On another, it is an embodied removal executed across space (Peutz 2010) and over time. As an exertion of state sovereignty and state power on bodies designated for removal (De Genova 2010), deportation points to the importance of the spatialization of nation-state power in policing 137 its geographic and social boundaries, and in determining admissibility to the social and political body. States’ power to regulate immigration operates as an exertion of nation- state territorial borders through the selective and coercive exclusion of noncitizens at physical border sites and the interior. This has thickened U.S. borders (Rosas 2012), expanded the U.S.-Mexico borderlands (Stephen 2016), and intensified immigration policing or “social control” in the geographical interior of the United States, far from its physical borders (Kanstroom 2007). This exertion of state power is also transborder (Stephen 2007, 2012, 2016). It extends beyond physical nation-state boundaries and is shaped by non-state forces as well to configure the social and spatial geographies of Mafia-State violence. Developing proficiency in negotiating these geographies is a central aspect of life in Nogales. They are persistently visible outsiders41 in Nogales and unfamiliar with local social and spatial terrain. An important aspect of deportees’ life histories is what Elana Zilberg (2011, 10) calls “enclosure,” whereby in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and other urban areas people had to navigate social and spatial geographies that have been remapped by struggles between police, gangs, activists, and others over control of urban space. Nevertheless, the important differences and uniqueness of the northern Mexico border means that entirely new processes of learning “how everything works” must be undertaken. Considering social and spatial geographies in conjunction with the global deportation regimes, whose operations displace populations on a grand scale, helps elucidate the embodied experiences of the displaced and provide insight into the consequences of deportation. Moreover, it demonstrates the struggles and contestations 138 between simultaneous processes, on the one hand, of separation and exclusion from place—home in the United States—and, on the other, of participation, activity, and inclusion—no matter how partial and contingent—as another sort of home is made in Mexico after deportation. The geographies of Mafia-State violence reproduce other forms of deportee marginalization within the global system of nation-state expulsions. The stark options for traversing social and spatial geographies—that include perilous desert returns, negotiations of police and the Mafia in Nogales, or heading south—make clear the role of state exclusions and Mafia-State violence in reconfiguring the vulnerabilities of everyday life. Deemed unworthy of inclusion in the United States, the U.S. government’s technique for managing unworthy subjects outsources their punishment to a place outside—over there—to effectuate their exclusion. Navigation of social and spatial geographies, deportees’ fundamental mobility, is central to not only to reducing the risk of violence, but to almost all aspects of everyday life. Mobility in town is a crucial factor for being able to work and make a living. It is to different forms of work that we turn in the next chapter. Notes 31 https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/usbp-sw-border-apprehensions# 32 Personal communication with Engracia Robles, immigrant and human rights advocate at the Kino Border Initiative. 33 (Bowden 2010; Campbell and Hansen 2014; Gibler 2011; Guerrero Gutiérrez 2011, 2017, 2018; Heinle, Rodríguez, and Shirk 2016; Shirk and Wallman 2015.) 34 https://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/tunnel-causes-pavement-to-collapse-at-port-of- entry/article_4ae0c732-41b3-11e9-bfe7-83ffd34490f4.html 35 Symbolic violence, the fourth category (Bourgois 2002), is the discursive struggle over moral conceptions that blame the most socially, politically, and economically disadvantaged from their grim circumstances. I leave this category to one side in this chapter. Here, I do not examine discourses 139 surrounding deportees’ culpability for the violence they suffered. I will mention, however, that Nogales police officers, community members, non-profit workers, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers, and deported men themselves all deemed deportees themselves to be blameworthy for their circumstances to some degree. 36 To focus here on Mafia-State violence perpetrated against men is, I think, important. But it is critical to point out that it fails to capture many other forms of everyday violence in Nogales and, as Shannon Speed (2016) points out, intimate partner violence, feminicide, violence by state actors in law and immigration enforcement and carceral contexts, and other violence that is enabled by the vulnerable subject positions of women, indigenous people, and the poor. Again, these broader forms of violence are not disconnected from my narrower conceptualization of Mafia-State violence but are intertwined with it, reflecting similar logics of human devaluation and enabling similar violations of human psychological, emotional, and bodily integrity. 37 The most recent map available is from 2015. The DEA ceased printing maps of Mexico in the 2016 and subsequent National Drug Threat Assessment Summaries. 38 The word on the street was that since Caro Quintero, the Sinaloan capo who had been released from prison and retaken control of Sonora, did not have a heroin supply to sell, he had prohibited it. Others speculated that “tecatos” or “jaipos” (heroin users) on the streets scared away tourists and the money they had to spend in the local licit and illicit economies. 39 Such a heavy weight that I thought it may be exaggerated. The other details struck me as plausible. 40 https://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-1912-8-usc-1326-reentry-after-deportation- removal 41 See Nathalie Peutz (2010) on deportees’ visibility in Somaliland and the de facto restriction on their movements. 140 CHAPTER IV “DOWN HERE YOU GOTTA’ START FROM ZERO”: WORK, HUSTLES, AND REDEFINING MASCULINITIES AFTER DEPORTATION Dreamer, as José Luis has been called since elementary school in Phoenix, works on the west side of the tracks near the bustling DeConcini Port of Entry in the heart of the Line. Like many other deported men, Dreamer makes money performing what deportees call hustles, the rendering of informal services. Primarily serving tourists, they help carry heavy luggage, wash cars, guide for the restaurant- and bar-scene, broker recreational drug sales from Mafia-approved street sellers, or connect people with sex workers. Dreamer has to be on the lookout for police officers who shake down hustlers for the pesos or couple of dollars they might have on them. Police especially target hustlers like Dreamer who, despite trying to tone down their U.S. cholo [gang] look, stand out as deportees. To avoid looking like a cholo, Dreamer has grown out his thick, black hair that was previously shaved and does not sag his worn jeans. Nevertheless, his tattered, black flannel shirt only partially covers arm and neck tattoos in Old English script: U.S. street gang name, a listing of years incarcerated, his daughter’s name, the phrase “Forever Blessed.” Dreamer is soft-spoken and shy but rushes to help border-crossers with large boxes—precariously duct-taped or tied with string—of clothing, electronics, toys, or regional specialties like machaca [dried spiced beef] and coyotas [large, empanada-like sugar cookies]. With his head in a deferential bow, Dreamer overcomes his timidity and inserts himself into these most common of scenes at urban crossing points along the U.S.- Mexico border: people being dropped off in taxi cabs or by friends and family, bearing 141 gifts such as regional cuisine, or with luggage for a trip into the United States. Likewise, he helps people who emerge from the port heading south, lugging suitcases, duffels, or boxes of electronics, clothing, or other items that are less expensive in the United States and prized in Mexico. Dreamer often gets waved off by those who do not want help—or do not want help from him. Sometimes, people accept his assistance and give him a few pesos or a dollar or two in appreciation. Despite Dreamer’s advanced proficiency in English and Spanish, desire to work, deferential demeanor, GED (certificate of high school equivalency) and computer skills certificate that he earned in an Arizona state prison, Dreamer has yet to find formal employment at any of the many manufacturing and service facilities where he has applied. He does not know why but suspects that they see him as a deported outsider, a pocho (“Americanized” Mexican) from the United States and a cholo who seems outwardly agreeable but may be concealing an inward danger. This chapter explores experiences with work. It asks: what facilitates or inhibits deportees’ integration into and reshaping of borderlands labor economies? How are deportees’ and their labor potentially valued and stigmatized? And finally, how are deportees’ expressions of masculinities redefined in ways that enable or hamper work? In attempts to establish stability in their lives deportees’ attempt to secure some material wellbeing in various ways. Many deported men exhibit remarkable ingenuity in drawing on human capital and cultural resources such as vocational training from the United States, English language proficiency, and outgoing and affable salesperson performances to secure work opportunities or innovate street hustles. Others struggle to find a niche. While some deported men achieve modest material stability, others’ material wellbeing is 142 wholly negligible. Deportees’ search for material security exposes the intertwined impacts of deportation, local social environments and labor economies, and masculine self-expressions in northern Mexico. In contesting their dislocation, deported “criminal alien” men reconfigure their understandings of themselves as men. In public spaces, many sublimate the signifiers of gang or prison identities and channel an energetic, affable presentation into hustles: ways of making money in the informal economy. A focus on deportees’ work and reconfigured masculinities throws into relief deportees’ resourcefulness as well as the fundamental impediments to ameliorating the stark circumstances of privation. The chapter continues by delving further into Dreamer’s story to understand work and masculinities. It goes on to briefly frame prior research on deportation and work, discusses the varied motivations deportees articulate for working, explores shifting masculinities, and traces the opportunities and obstacles to work in Nogales. I subsequently examine deportees’ work and hustle activities on the Line and elsewhere before ending with a brief concluding discussion. Dreamer’s Hustles, Persistent Stigma, and Changed Ways On a stifling August day, Dreamer and I talk in the shade of a dusty alley where his is on break from his street hustles, just yards south of the 30-foot bollard border fence. Dreamer describes deportation: “It’s like being dropped off on the other side of the world... Here, I’m nobody. I’m nothing here.” Dreamer speaks softly as he searches for words to describe what it is like to forge ahead in Mexico, after living in the United States for 30 years. His experiences improvising work, humbling himself and sweating in the sun for a pocket change, and his inability to get a steady job with benefits reinforce 143 his feeling of alienation. They stand in stark contrast to his past, when, Dreamer says, “[I] had rank in my neighborhood. I was somebody there.” In the past, Dreamer says, his sense of manhood came from the “respect” that he garnered as a gang member. Curiously, Dreamer’s difficulty with work in Mexico now is in a way connected with the first illicit work he performed before even becoming a teenager. Dreamer moved with his mother and two sisters from the northern state of Chihuahua to east Phoenix in 1983, at age six. At 11, Dreamer became affiliated with Hermosa Park, a clica, or local neighborhood-based gang, associated with a prominent Arizona street gang. Dreamer said that it was so that he could help his family financially. “I wanted to help my mom out. I started selling weed and stuff.” But gang life was also a way to relate to other boys and young men. “It’s real hard not to be in a gang. I mean, on Van Buren [Street] from like 6th Street, all the way down to 42nd, it’s all gangs.” Dreamer said he was “heavy into gangs. I was deep into all that gang shit.” In 2006, at 23, Dreamer was convicted of multiple weapons and drug felonies after police raided a house the gang used for storing arms, munitions, and drugs. Before release from an Arizona state prison in 2015, ICE identified him as a “criminal alien” and he was deported to Nogales. Not wanting to go back to prison, clandestine reentry back home to the United States seems too risky. Chihuahua is not an option either. It’s an unknown place now, where Dreamer has no contact with family. Dreamer’s attempts to attenuate outward expressions of gang identity, in addition to letting his shaved head grow out and not wearing baggy clothing or brands like Ben Davis and Dickies that are associated with gangs, have only been partially successful. Dreamer says that despite these changes, “They always know you.” When two 144 motorcycle officers on patrol saw us talking by the Line, they circled back and conducted a stop. They patted us down and rummaged our pockets, ran warrants checks over the radio, and separated us for several minutes of questioning. Overall, the interaction was amicable, but did reinforce the cloud of suspicion that follows Dreamer and the visibility in Nogales we shared, as a white U.S. American that might be purchasing drugs from a cholo. The officers received the radio clave [code] “catorce-catorce” from dispatch, that we were clear of warrants, and left. I was relieved and Dreamer and I laughed off the encounter. Offhandedly, I told him that I had asked the officer if we looked suspicious, to which Dreamer cut me off and guffawed, “I look suspicious, not you!” Dreamer’s personal narrative, his embodied identity as a former prisoner and gang member and his cholo-style English and Spanish, shape the suspicion that accrues to Dreamer and shape his work prospects. The Dreamer I know in Nogales is self-effacing, but he nonchalantly disclosed what he deems laudable experiences particular to his U.S. gang and prison background, defending his homeys in physical fights with gang rivals, holding five thousand dollars cash in his hand from drug sales, and completing time in “the hole” (or SHU, secure housing unit) in an especially tough Arizona prison. Dreamer asserts that he developed his defining values—loyalty, trust, and firmeza, or strength— “on the streets” and “on the [prison] yard.” Despite others’ persistent identification of Dreamer as a deportee and a cholo, he asserts over and over as our conversations deepen over several weeks that he has changed inside. He is much different than that when he was on the streets of Phoenix “gang- banging,” moving crack, handling guns, working a stash house, and cruising in his low- 145 rider 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass. Dreamer discusses his shift away from being “really into all that gang stuff” by saying, I’ve changed my ways. I’ve changed my person [sic]. I mean, you grow up. I’m not telling you that I don’t smoke weed and I don’t drink my beers. But I can tell you that I’m not crazy. I’ve been crazy in my life [prone to violence]. But I’m telling you I’m not crazy. I’m different now. I’m changed. In Nogales his changes are evident. They include redefining his notions of ideal masculinities that are evident in his daily interactions. Dreamer has “grown up,” and eschews “crazy” life, mi vida loca—a gang expression that reflects truculence or even violence. Now, he expresses his best self as a man through his passive demeanor, affable presentation, and consummate politeness on the streets. Despite feeling like a “nobody” because of his lack of status, his outwardly calm disposition is in harmony with what he describes as a desire to be a better man, a changed man. Dreamer’s experiences demonstrate how work opportunities after deportation are influenced by a lack of familiarity with local employers, work experience that is limited to illicit businesses, and social stigma as deported, formerly incarcerated gang member. Simultaneously, Dreamer’s persistence, energy, and flexibility, his English-language skills, and an affable masculine self-presentation allowed him to perform informal labor and generate a small income. Similar circumstances affected, to some degree, all of my interlocutors’ work prospects. Deportability, Deportation, Work, and Masculinities Deported men engage in a range of everyday activities—work, jobs, or hustles— in order to secure an income. These patchwork labor experiences mirror globalized trends 146 toward a gig economy, yet the work and hustles available reflect the uniqueness of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands and local Mafia-State geographies. Work and jobs that were both formal (government authorized) and informal (without governmental authorization) had somewhat explicitly defined terms: an hourly wage for assembly line work at a maquiladora, a handshake agreement for laying a brick wall at a fixed price, or piece work wherein a car wash pays employees per vehicle. Hustles comprised more improvisational or sporadic activities such as guiding tourists from the United States to recreational drug sales points, selling second-hand clothing door-to-door, or asking for handouts. Hustles and jobs had to be tacitly sanctioned by the Mafia or, alternatively, directly authorized in the case of work as a drug runner, punto with binoculars and radio, or desert guide, activities seldom undertaken by my interlocutors. Most commonly, hustles are highly visible and public, carried out on the Line, the 12 city blocks that abut the border. While hundreds of local residents fill most of the array of entrepreneurial niches in these spaces, dozens of deportees labor at any given time as well. Deportees express diverse orientations to the material, legal, social, and cultural dimensions of labor that mediate deportee work and hustles. Much more than the exchanges of goods and services, deportees’ social identities, access to governmental identity documents, issuance of city food handling or business permits, and labor law (and often its subversion) enable access to or create barriers from work. Social interaction and social stigma facilitate and foreclose possibilities for work and hustles. Examining deportees’ diverse narratives and practices up close does not reveal a simple, linear story of individual experiences, but instead exposes the tensions between work opportunities and the desire to work. 147 Migration, Deportability, and Labor Control My interlocutors’ lives are situated within a much longer story of migration, citizenship, labor, and expulsion. A thumbnail sketch points to the way that Mexicans have been constructed as laborers who may be expelled at any time, particularly when not conforming to expectations of them as workers. In the United States and other countries of the global north, population management via immigration enforcement provides capital interests ample control over a transnational labor force (Golash-Boza 2015; Ngai 2004). The risk of deportation, known as “deportability,” renders noncitizen laborers a tractable, pliable (De Genova 2005), and disposable (Ngai 2004, 132) population and has contributed greatly to noncitizen illegalization (Calavita 1992; Chavez 1997; Coutin 2005; Inda 2006; Plascencia 2009). In fact, Nicholas De Genova (2002) argues that the most salient aspect of immigration enforcement is not removal per se, but its mere possibility. In the U.S. southwest, Mexicans became constructed as a “one-dimensional ‘commodity function and utility’” (Ngai 2004, 132), the fullness of their personhood flattened out to be caricatured as laborers (Gerken 2013; Gomberg-Muñoz 2011; Holmes 2013; Jacobson, Tichenor, and Durden 2018), particularly in the case of men. The historiography of immigration politics in the early 20th century demonstrates the pressure agribusiness put on congress to waive literacy and head tax requirements to facilitate the entry of Mexican men (Plascencia 2009, 392; Stephen 2007, 70). Moreover, during the first several decades of the Border Patrol’s existence since its inception in 1924, ranchers and farmers pressured the agency and individual agents to turn a blind eye to unauthorized workers needed to work vast agricultural holdings (Hernández 2010; Kang 2017). 148 What happens when so-called disposable labor is disposed of? Several scholars have suggested that stigma that accrues to deportees, which sociologist Tanya Golash- Boza (2016) calls their “negative credentials,” and lack of social support hamper deportees’ efforts to find work.42 Evin Rodkey (2016) poses the question of whether noncitizen labor is best understood as disposed of. He suggests that transnational labor actually is not disposed of but instead is better understood as “repurposed.” In his ethnography of deportation to the Domincan Republic, Rodkey (2016) finds that although deportees are stigmatized and considered unemployable in most industries, they provide an important source of labor for bilingual U.S.-headquartered call center businesses. He notes the insidiousness of these U.S. companies locating call centers on the island in order to pay low wages to a conveniently displaced deportee population (Rodkey 2016, 41), a reduction in companies’ fixed costs that ostensibly lowers end consumer costs in the United States. Similarly, cultural theorist Jill Anderson (2015) situates call centers in Mexican cities such as Guanajuato, Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Mexico City within a complex transnational political economy. She also considers calls centers to be an “escape valve for the Mexican state” (2015, 24). And for deportees, she argues, they form a social and cultural “safe haven” where deported people make community. Beyond call centers, other research suggests that deported long-time U.S. residents do better in more urban, tourist areas where they can deploy their English language skills as, for example, servers in restaurants (Silver 2018). Formal, structured employment, however, is only part of the picture. To the extent that jobs provide an “escape valve,” it is wholly insufficient for helping accommodate vast numbers of deported people (and other returnees) in Mexico. There are hundreds of call center jobs in 149 Nogales, for example, many of them filled by hundreds of deported people. But of all deportees in Nogales, few are able to access these jobs because they do not have the necessary legal documents (as I will discuss later in the chapter) and linguistic skills or are simply viewed as inadequate or undesirable. Gender Shifts and Masculinities The lens of gender, moreover, aids in examining how deported men are understood and how they understand themselves as deported men who seek wellbeing by means of material stability. Masculinities are cultural constructions made at the juncture of social perceptions surrounding manhood and men’s gendered expressions of themselves (Connell 2005; Gutmann 1996, 1997; Inhorn 2012; Núñez Noriega 2014). Perceptions of masculinities and the spectrum of renditions of masculinities morph in accordance with local and global influences (Inhorn 2012; see also Connell 2005). Marcia Inhorn’s notion of “emergent masculinities”—in her study of patriarchy, reproductive technologies, marriage, and family life in the Middle East—outlines the fluidity of masculine perceptions and practices and her discussion of two types of “emergences” is instructive. She highlights a paradigm of cultural change that encompasses “New meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships” (2012, 30-31) over time. A second form of emergence refers to the circulation of misconceptions and facile stereotypes, in her case as a result of portrayals of Middle Eastern men as culturally medieval, religious and racial Other, aggressively proud of their manhood, and as generally threatening. Both of Inhorn’s emergences facilitate analyses of the potential of masculinities as a resource for deportees. Regarding emergence in the first sense, not only do regional 150 and class-based masculine ideals shift with time, but the context of population displacement brings about encounters wherein new social and labor economies must be negotiated. Secondly, stereotyped representations of gang members, “criminal aliens,” and immigrants broadly pervade popular, political, and media discourse. I heed Inhorn’s sensitivity to the stigma attached to certain masculinities—in this case to former gang members, incarcerated men of color, and Mexicans—and take that sensitivity as motivation to reject predominant film and television stereotypes, as well as those of anti- immigrant and tough-on-crime politicians, in the process of freshly examining ostracized “criminal alien” lives ethnographically. “Por necesidad [Out of Need]” Why did deported men seek work in Nogales in the first place? They described work in terms of material need and also articulated a moral imperative to work as reinforcing notions of strong masculinities as self-sufficient masculinities. In a few instances, recently deported men received hundreds or thousands of dollars from family members over time. Or a family member would facilitate the liquidation of a deportee’s own car, house, or savings and send them money to live off of. Far more common, however, was the need of some form of income. The urgency of this need was compounded by the services deficit in Nogales. Local NGOs provide a place to sleep and meals in the days following deportation, yet the limit such services to a week or two. This leaves deportees who are still in Nogales after two weeks with stark choices about where to sleep, what to eat, and what to do next. Several people talked about the harshness of not having money and sensing limited work prospects. This was omnipresent in the hours and days after deportation, but often persisted for months and years. Deportees at once 151 felt that their identities as pochos or cholos held them down and simultaneously that they were starting over. One deportee told me, “Down here you gotta’ start from zero.” Beyond the practicalities of social and financial stability, masculine ideologies about being the “right kind” of man also influenced desires to work. Many men expressed a perceived role as family providers and were disheartened about not meeting this expectation (see Golash-Boza 2014a). Fantasma was dismayed by not being able to send money to his family, and, on the contrary, having to ask his family for it. On one occasion, Fantasma recounted a text his son had sent him: “‘I put some money on your books.’ And he would send the number [for a money transfer from California].” Fantasma laughed at the expression “on your books,” which refers to a prison commissary account where family members can make a deposit. I told Fantasma that his son, then age twelve, must have become accustomed to sending money during his most recent five-year incarceration. Fantasma said yes and went on to tell me, “I’ve never asked for money from my kids. I just can’t do that.” I asked, “Why not? I mean, some deportees ask for money from their kids and others don’t.” Fantasma said Well, I’m the dad. I should be the leader. I should be the one that’s ahead of them—financially, professionally, emotionally, you know, whatever [pause]. I mean, I think that’s my responsibility. Don’t get me wrong. I have had to ask before. But I didn’t ask for money from my son, I asked to borrow it. I would tell him, “Let me hold that for you. Or let me double that money for you.” The cultural script of bread-winning men was salient in Fantasma’s thinking. Even when asking his son for money, he avoided asking explicitly. The euphemism “hold”—as in, “let me hold that for you”—allowed Fantasma a less discomfiting way to request a 152 money in the language of a loan that would simply never be repaid. Fantasma received money as a stopgap measure when his hustles bore little fruit, as often happened. Ideally, Fantasma and others told me, they would be providing for their own parents, now at an advanced age, as well as for their children. But at the very least, even when deported fathers could not provide for their children or aging parents, they were expected to generate their own income and not receive remittances from family. These notions of work and self-sufficiency as part of a masculine identity were communicated through the expression “doing for yourself.” Deportees reproduced work-positive notions that one way or another “you got to do for yourself” after deportation. These scripts were inculcated from pre-adolescence. Jamie was proud to have done lots of yard work, starting in his pre-teen years, in 1980s east Los Angeles. His father had started his own landscaping business in 1979. Jamie was the best English speaker in the house, so even at a young age he would take phone calls from customers. Mimicking a phone call during our interview, he said with a middle-class inflection, “Yes Mrs. Swanson. [Pause.] Saturday morning is good for you. Let me check with my father. Yes, he says that that will be great. We’ll see you Saturday morning.” Jamie emphasized that he also did his own independent jobs. He said his father would purchase gasoline for the lawnmower and string for the weed eater, but Jamie would drum up his own business. At age 16, Jaime got a job at McDonald’s and later went on to a career in restaurant management, the importance of work thoroughly instilled. The self-fulfillment and pride deported men expressed about their work animated their desire to innovate and adapt to changing circumstances. One deportee said to me, 153 I know how to do everything—framing, plumbing, tile, anything. If you give me an hour to start on a job, you’ll see what I can do. Give me an hour and a SkilSaw, a Mikita, whatever, and you’ll see. Give me half an hour. You’ll see how I start working the tile, am putting stuff in. That’s what I tell people, just give me that time. And if you don’t like the way I work, or what I’m doing, I’ll walk… If [they] say no, then that’s that and I move on. I’ve fallen on my teeth so many times. I’ve fallen down, read on my teeth, but I get back up. Miguel exemplified a similar approach. Miguel was born in 1958 and deported from Los Angeles in 2011. Over the years, I had seen him work various jobs and heard of others: dental assistant, barber, taquero, maquila worker, and waiter. I asked him one day how it was that he always seemed to find work, even though he had gotten fired from some jobs and quit others, when so many people struggled. How did he find a way to always have a job? He said, From my dad. We all got that, my sisters and me. He taught us you always have to be learning new things. I think to make it down here, you have to be willing to learn new things. You have to have an open mind, not be closed off. Otherwise you’ll never survived down here... I think that adapting is the most important thing about living here. You have to learn a whole new system. Te dicen que el agua corre para un lado, pero luego corre para otro. [They tell you water flows one direction, but it turns out it flows another.] And the words are different [in Spanish] and everything. You have to learn a lot of things… I’m done moping, 154 bro’. When I got down here, I was really depressed. But I think that life goes on, and you have to keep living. You have to move on. Miguel is explicit about his drive to adapt over time. The vocational training Miguel received in the United States, as a barber and a dental assistant, before his incarceration in California state prison shaped the opportunities open to him at various times in Mexico, as did his strong Spanish and English proficiency. This quote is noteworthy for referring to Miguel’s sisters, as well. Miguel implicitly acknowledges what often goes unsaid and is frequently invisible to men, deported or not—that although men speak about work as their responsibility “as men,” it is of course not their unique province in any sense. Work-positive masculine ideologies compounded the fulfillment work provided for some deportees, even when the material earnings were meager. Steve, a 38-year-old deportee from Tucson that I spoke with over several years expressed a consistently positive outlook, even though I know he often struggled to scrape together enough even to eat. When I asked him one day if he was still doing odd jobs on the Line, he told me, “Yeah, I’m doing good. And I’ve been doing other jobs too. They come by pick me up [to perform day labor].” I asked who was picking him up. “Whoever asks. I work hard. It doesn’t matter if it’s hot or cold.” Steve also explicitly linked his gendered self to this mode of work that relies on being highly visible and available. “That’s what makes me a man. I’ll work anytime, bro’. You got to. Imagine being like, ‘No, it’s too hot to work [laughs mockingly].’ I’ll work anytime.” I asked Steve if things were going okay, if he had been eating. “I’m eating good. I’m having birria [stewed beef] twice a day.” “Oh yeah?” I asked. “Yeah, 155 I’m helping this lady with her cart. The lady down on the corner [near the Line]. I asked, “What is that, like 20 or 30 minutes [of work] in the morning and 20 or 30 minutes in the afternoon?” Steve said, “[It’s] like 15 minutes [twice a day]. And she gives me a cup of birria each time. That stuff is good. She makes it with real meat. I gained like five pounds in two weeks.” Steve lived by himself in a small rented room. His most meaningful activity and social interactions existed on the Line. Indeed, over the years I could find him virtually any day of the week, from sunup to sundown, doing odd jobs on the Line. He would always accept a Coke and a few dollars from me to help out. Even as a dedicated hustler, Steve barely made enough money to make rent and eat but was incessantly positive. Steve’s attitude was not representative, since others tried but struggled to have a positive outlook, but neither was an outlier. Several others enjoyed their work and hustles and found meaning the interactions they had with those around them and derived satisfaction from the money they earned. Opportunities and Obstacles: Documentation, Hustles, and Straight Jobs Far from being merely a question of desire or positive attitude, complex bureaucratic and legal factors also shaped the work and hustle options available to deportees. One crucial aspect was having the work documents required by federal labor law. After deportation, those who at some point began to inquire about jobs on maquiladora assembly lines, as convenience store cashiers, or as security guards, quickly learned that official documents were often the first obstacle to securing work. To comply with government regulations, employers require job applicants to present an INE card (national voter identification), CURP (tax identification number), and social security number (for national health care access). Having never lived in Mexico as adults before, 156 most had never heard of these documents, much less possessed them. Although there has been an effort in the previous few years to support deportees—for example through expedited processing of Seguro Popular enrollment (subsidized health care for indigent citizens)—they have fallen woefully short in expediting the issuance of the most basic and necessary documents. In general, to the extent that a deportee paper trail existed within Mexico’s institutional bureaucracies, it was often just a nearly untraceable birth certificate in a musty cardboard box or file cabinet in a faraway town—that and their recent registration as a “repatriado” with the National Migration Institute. Otherwise, there was no documentation of their existence. To begin to acquire the bundle of documents needed to work, a birth certificate is the most basic. Without it, getting the others is impossible. In the best-case scenario, family members brought them their birth certificates from home in the United States. Deportees whose family members were undocumented, and thus could not travel to Mexico with hopes of returning home to the United States, had to get them another way. Dreamer’s mother had his original birth certificate in Phoenix, but she could not venture below the I-19 Border Patrol checkpoint, about 30 miles north of the border, much less cross the border into Mexico, and then return. She mailed Dreamer’s birth certificate and GED diploma to me at a mailbox I rented in Nogales, Arizona, so that I could give them to Dreamer. Even with a birth certificate, however, given often itinerant living situations, people would not have a water bill, electricity bill, or cable bill in their name as proof of address, necessary for acquiring an INE and for job applications. Commonly, deportees did not know where their birth certificates were or if their birth had been officially registered. People born in Sonora had the benefit of access to 157 state offices near the Line. The process of proving identity to request a replacement was onerous—often, someone had to serve as a witness, attesting to having known the applicant for some number of years. In addition, replacement birth certificates cost money. For those born outside of Sonora, some went through lengthy processes, with support of family in the United States, attorneys in Nogales, or others to contact the corresponding hospital or registro civil (civil registry) in attempts to secure a replacement. For Tiger, this meant that an attorney friend of his brother that worked in Durango, his birth state, had to rely on personal relationships he had within the government offices to get an official copy of Tiger’s birth certificate. Otherwise Tiger would have had to travel to Durango, the cost of which would have been prohibitively expensive. Dora, who had left her native Mexico City with family for San Francisco in the 1980s when she was less than two years old, had no idea how to go about locating her birth certificate through the registro civil. She did not know what hospital, or which Mexico City borough, for that matter, she had been born in. She was resigned to simply living without official documents, something not uncommon among the people I interviewed. Dora cited this specifically as a barrier to getting a waitressing job, like she had in Sacramento, California, and lamented that doing sex work several nights a week was one of few options. Those with work documents still had difficulty accessing institutional support through the Secretaría of Trabajo y Previsión Social (Department of Labor and Social Security) for grievances against unscrupulous employers. Either such support was nonexistent, or it was out of reach for people without the social standing or local 158 knowledge with which to access it. Jacob described his trabajo eventual, or temporary employment, on the construction site of a Korean-owned maquiladora in the northern state of Coahuila. His cousins from central Mexico had heard about the work opportunity and asked if he wanted to go. For almost two months, he made heavy-duty aluminum tables upon which machinery would be set. Although Jacob had been pleased with the pay throughout the project, his employer illegally withheld half of his last paycheck— 4,000 of the 8,000 pesos he was owed. “Me molesté mucho. Pero al final le dije, ‘Keep it. Pues vale madre.’ [I was really upset. But at the end I told him, ‘Keep it. Fuck it.’]” I told Jacob that the employer sounded crooked and asked why he had kept Jacob’s wages. Jacob said flatly, “Por culero nomás. [Just to be an asshole.]” Despite the difficulty in accessing legal recourse, deportees did have notions that some employment stability flowed from labor laws and regulations. They aspired to work in the formal economy, wherein there existed the possibility that capricious and arbitrary contract terminations would be restricted, benefits provided, and due compensation guaranteed. Puppet, for example, worked in the informal economy making 100 pesos a day, in addition to occasional tips, handing out two-for-one tequila coupons for a restaurant on the Line and fast-talking passersby, inviting them in. He explained to me the disadvantages of, in his words, “working under the table.” Puppet said that if he were to be sick or hurt, “he’s fired” that and there would be no further compensation. Beyond termination without just cause, a slew of other rights, benefits, and protections stipulated by federal labor are rendered ineffectual. These include the minimum wage, vacations, Sunday and holiday bonuses, overtime pay, working hour restrictions, severance pay, discounted enrollment in the Mexican Institute of Social Security for medical care and 159 disability or injury pay, and employer contributions to the National Institute for the Development of Worker Housing, which offers discounted home loans. Wages Although formal employment in Mexico was considered more appealing than itinerant hustles, its upside paled in comparison to work in the United States. Occasionally, deportees mentioned the attractiveness of consistent income at steady jobs in Mexico, including benefits such as home mortgage subsidies and bonuses, and some social prestige. But by far the most important factor was the prospect of higher pay. Nevertheless, when asking around about formal sector positions, they realized that jobs either paid much less in Mexico than in the United States, were tedious and difficult, or required skills that were unattainable. The aspiration to steady, high-paying work was persistent for most deported men. And considerations of what relatively “high-paying” meant were informed by life in the United States. After more than a year in Nogales Danny told me, “I don’t have an American dollar in my pocket right now… It’s tough down here. People lose their heads. Here it’s a peso for a piece of your skin. No one gives you nothin’ down here. There is nothing handed out.” Danny went on to talk about how these difficulties are compounded by wage depression and tough work. “This ain’t the U.S. You’re in Mexico. Mexico is hard. People down here work 60 hours a week for 70 or 80 dollars. If you’re working landscaping up there, that’s [what you would earn caring for] two lawns. You can make that in eight hours [in the United States].” Deportees’ difficulty earning higher wages are structured by the global forces of retrenched income inequality that are tethered not only to economic and fiscal policy, but 160 also to immigration restrictionism. Golash-Boza (2015) notes that trends in the global north toward the global integration of consumer markets occur simultaneously with labor and resource extraction from the global south, exacerbating the concentration of wealth in the north. Yet despite these global movements of capital and goods, rich countries perversely continue to coercively restrict the movements of people from poor countries, inhibiting them from selling their labor in the north. Golash-Boza calls this “global apartheid—a system whereby mostly white and affluent citizens of the world are free to travel to where they like whereas the poor are forced to make do in places where there are less resources” (2015, 3; see also Nevins and Aizeki 2008). For long-time U.S. residents who are deported, global apartheid relegates their labor to the economically exploited global south. The realities of wage depression in Mexico were manifest. In a conversation about wage disparity one cool December day, Johnny, a deportee in his 50s, idly chatted with me while weaving between multiple interminable vehicular lines crawling north toward the Mariposa port of entry. Johnny, who walks with a limp, managed his cane and a stack of coupons—for department stores such as J.C. Penny’s, Macy’s, and Stage—that he handed impatient drivers. He talked wistfully about earning US$27 an hour in Tucson: “When I first got down here, I would always think about how much I was making here [US$7 a day] and how much I made there. But hey, at least I’ve got a job.” Caín expressed a similar resignation. Caín said, “Down here, you have to do what you can. I do the work I do because [pause] por la necesidad [out of need]. I’m in a Third World country.” La necesidad that Caín refers to means being flexible about the type of work—activities, hours, and pay—that people perform. Caín is a welder by trade. In 161 South Carolina he worked on large crews building Home Depot locations and other large box stores. In an attempt to do similar work in Mexico, he got a job as a welder at a maquiladora when he arrived in 2010. But he was only paid 95 pesos a day. “I was making good money welding in the U.S. And here, I work eight or 10 hours and make 95 pesos? Six dollars? It’s hard work. I was going blind. I’m still going blind. And for that [amount of] money? No way.” Hustling on the Line, connecting sex- and drug-tourists with strip clubs, massage parlors, and cocaine, methamphetamine, opioids, or marijuana, Caín can earn US$50 or US$100 on his best days. Deportation impacts work prospects in terms of wages, but also of satisfaction. Luis, a call center employee, and his mother, Magdalena, both deported to Nogales from Los Angeles within a few years of each other, explained to me the various changes in their lives since deportation. Luis and Magdalena had always been close. Before meeting his mother for the first time on a visit to their second-story apartment one afternoon, Luis had told me how much I would enjoy speaking with his mother, saying “My mom’s cool, man.” He also emphasized how her work as a music promoter in the United States was lucrative and an important part of her identity. Luis said, “She’s real humble. But when she was working up there, she was making ducats [lots of money].” Inside their two- bedroom apartment, the three of us talked at the small kitchen table, crowded by a computer monitor and a few candles. Several family photos, an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe, and a crucifix, and added color to the white washed walls. Deportation undid important aspects of Magdalena’s life. She showed me more than a hundred photos from her work as a music promoter in Los Angeles. In photo after photo, she sported pantsuit ensembles and 90’s-style feathered hair while posing with 162 famous Mexican norteño and banda musicians who wore sport coats with multi-colored tassels and high-end, felt cowboy hats. While many of the acts originated in northern Pacific Mexico, their influence reaches across Mexico and into U.S. cities—Phoenix, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles—and beyond. The star-power in the photos amazed me: Magdalena stood with El As de la Sierra, Cruz Lizárraga and members of El Recodo, Sergio Rivera, Pancho Barraza, and dozens of other musicians. I only knew them from television, the radio, record stores, and occasional concert-going, or more recently the iTunes store. For Magdalena, the effect of deportation after decades of hard work making good money was swift. The Los Angeles police arrested her on a stolen vehicle charge in a McDonald’s parking lot after a simple license and registration check. Her ex-husband had stopped making payments, unbeknownst to her, on the Ford Explorer she drove. After the confusion, she ended up deported. In Luis’s words, She was a person that contributed. Her case is one that I say you have to criticize when they deport people like that—that are good people. She had her papers, she was paying taxes, doing everything the right way. My stepdad was the one that messed up her situation. Today, Magdalena’s maquiladora employee uniform—navy polo shirt and photo identification badge on a lanyard with small company insignia—suggested how much her work life had changed from the challenging chaos of entertainment promoting. She now punched a clock and performed repetitive tasks on a garage door motor assembly line. After talking and looking at pictures for an hour, she excused herself for her afternoon 163 shift at the plant, telling me to make myself at home. The glimmer remained in her eye— “You could make a movie about me,” she had said—but she sighed as she walked out. That afternoon after Magdalena left, Luis and I continued talking about his work at a well-known call center. I did not know Luis well, so started by asking questions about his background. He was born in a small town in Sonora in 1986 and moved to Los Angeles in 1988. He also had been doing lucrative work as an auto mechanic. After 30 months in state prison for drug charges, however, he was deported in 2010. As we began speaking, Luis wore his call center outfit of black slacks and loafers. He got hungry and offered to make us plates. Luis took his collared shirt off, revealing a white tank top and tattooed arms, and heated beans, rice, macaroni, and flour tortillas on the stove. Call Centers and Other Straight Jobs Luis, along with six other people over the years, explained bilingual call center work to me. Entry-level positions involved Spanish-English interpretation for a variety of U.S. entities, such as local hospitals; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children; or, ironically because of my interlocutors’ criminal records, local police agencies and county criminal courts. Everyone I spoke with agreed that this work was demanding. But some disclosed that it simply required skills that they neither had nor could attain. Javier realized after a few weeks that even with intense vocabulary study, he was not going to develop the technical, specialized proficiency in Spanish: I got a translation job, because Paco has a friend that’s a manager [who hired me]. But it was really hard and I couldn’t catch on. They deal with medical supplies and stuff. It was a lot of medical language. When I didn’t know something, I 164 would pass the phone to my trainer. And he would tell me, “Eventually you have to learn this yourself.” But I couldn’t get it. It was too much. Even those with superior Spanish and English competency were expected to sink or swim on the job. Employees did not receive interpretation skills training on note-taking, memory development, principles of interpretation, or interpretation ethics. Technical glossaries and sales scripts, called cheat sheets, were the only materials that they received, leaving them to figure out many important aspects of the work on their own. Nonetheless, call center work was lucrative for some. Those that were able to succeed at interpretation eventually were moved to sales departments within the call centers. They spend their days cold calling potential buyers in the United States to push, for example, third party appliance warranties or subscriptions to Us Weekly, the Orange County Gazette, and other publications. The biweekly salary jump from interpretation work to sales, from 2,200 pesos to 3,500 pesos, or about US$130 to US$206, was welcome. Sales was a grind, however. Workers did not earn sales commissions, but instead had to hit benchmarks—sales floors—to keep their job. Top performers could earn cash bonuses and prizes, such as electronic tablets, for winning monthly sales competitions. Those that worked up to the highest salary classifications made as much as 4,800 pesos (US$282) on their biweekly check. The only deportees I met that owned cars and could afford to maintain and put gas in them, were call center employees. Hiring at call centers also allowed for more tolerance of tattoos, which cause many other employers to look askance at job applicants. As one call center worker put it, You see a lot of guys here with tattoos. A lot of them were deported, and they came from prison. I think that 80% of the people that work here were deported 165 from the U.S. They can’t get jobs in other places. Here they don’t care. It doesn’t matter because there’s not a lot of people that speak good English. Indeed, many did not feel stigmatized at all. They could openly wear clothing that did not cover their tattoos, unlike other places in town (see also Anderson 2015; Rodkey 2016). Nevertheless, the six-day-a-week schedule and hours that included early morning, swing, and graveyard shifts led to burnout. Management at one call center made Jaime, who I mentioned earlier in the chapter did landscaping and restaurant management in the United States, responsible for training employees with poor performance evaluations. Jaime helped other employees field calls from a Texas energy contractor’s custom service line. He told me of the discipline and patience that was required to provide endless empathy to customers on the other end of the line. Jaime demonstrated for me, with an attentive lilt in his voice, how he would end all his calls: “Is there anything else I can help you with today? [Pause.] Thank you so much for calling. We appreciate having you as a customer. Have a blessed day.” For the extra time and extra responsibility, he occasionally received a 200-peso [US$12] bonus on his check. Other forms of work, less rigidly structured, become steady work nonetheless. Javier worked for years at a car wash south of downtown. The car wash had been in business for almost 30 years, operating in the cement driveway of the owner’s large, single-story house. A sign facing the street, “Autolavado Jiménez [Jiménez Car Wash]” and multi-colored plastic pennant streamers overhead projected a small-business feel. There was room for three vehicles under a tin roof, under which two vacuum cleaners, a garden hose, several buckets, rags, and chamois would be strewn. Javier and one or two others worked from 9am to 6pm, seven days a week, making a flat fee of 40 pesos [just 166 over US$2] for interior vacuuming and an exterior wash, which cost 85 pesos [US$5]. Occasionally, Javier would bounce from job to job, completing four in an afternoon. I would give a hand toweling, spraying, or scrubbing, or sit on a bucket and make small talk with customers or the owner. Other times, however, Javier and I would sit and talk for hours and by early afternoon he still hadn’t had his first customer. One Thursday, Javier gave me his running tally for the week: Sunday one car, Monday two cars, Tuesday four cars, Wednesday zero cars (the other employee got one), and today one so far. He averaged around 12 cars a week—480 pesos [US$28]. With such inconsistent pay and a low pay ceiling, Javier could only get by with the help of remittances his parents would send from Phoenix. Other jobs also carry with them the burden of long hours. Rick, deported from northern California in 2014 at age 43, worked on the campaign of a candidate for state representative from the Nogales district, passing out fliers in neighborhoods around town. The candidate won and, with his newly obtained political influence, got municipal government jobs for campaign workers. Rick cleaned public areas on one of the city’s many Imagen Urbana (City Beautification) crews. At 5am, Rick and a dozen or more others would crowd into the bed of city pickup trucks to be driven to their work area around town. They donned reflective vests and covered their faces with handkerchiefs, to protect them from dust as they hand swept city sidewalks, and picked up trash, pulled weeds, limbed trees, or removed large chunks of rock that had tumbled on city streets from high volcanic ridges (see Figure 18). Rick’s shift was officially eight hours, from 7am to 3:30pm, for 1,300 pesos [US$76] every two-week pay period. But with overtime—5am until 6pm, six days a week, and a half-day Sunday—he earned 2,300 167 pesos [US$135] every two weeks. Rick wakes up at 4am every morning to give himself time to drink coffee before leaving the house. Rick says he feels burnt out by the long hours but is saving some of his earnings for a commercial driver’s license and the opportunity to earn 4,000 pesos every two weeks as a truck driver for the city. Figure 18. Rick picking up roadside trash. Municipal beautification job. Hustling on the Line On the Line, transnational movements present unique work and hustle opportunities. Considerable border crossings and the arrangement of businesses that cater to crossers structure opportunities for dozens of deportees. Local residents, Mexican tourists and travelers from faraway, and visitors from the United States frequent the many blocks of dental offices, pharmacies, bars, curios (tourist trinket shops), sex work district, and illicit drug retail sales points. Transnational movements have shaped these areas in important ways for as long as the contemporary border has materialized. 168 The Line hums 24 hours a day. At night, compact white and yellow cabs—fuel efficient Nissans, Toyotas, or Chevys, some more battered than others by treks on ragged roads in the hills—slowly circulate under the streetlamps of main avenues and side streets, prowling for groups that trickle out of bars and strip-clubs. Of the dozens of casas de cambio (exchange houses), a few are always open, ready to exchange pesos and dollars. The vast majority of pharmacies, eateries, dentist offices, and other businesses shutter their windows. Carts well-lit by strings of bare bulbs can always be found for a late-night Sonoran hotdog or Sonoran beef tacos. But the Line bursts and buzzes during the day. Cabbies honk to prod traffic or to greet one another. Pedestrians dart across city streets. Men in baseball caps and jeans stand on street corners. They whistle at vehicles coming across from the United States, holding up a hooked index finger and extended thumb to indicate that they exchange money curbside. Paleteros push metal, two-wheeled carts full of paletas, or ice pops, made from banana, strawberries and cream, guayaba, pineapple, frutas (a fruit combination), and a host of other flavors. Groups of family and friends cross over from the United States and weave in and out of the streets and plazas. They walk briskly to a pharmacy, a predetermined family pick-up spot, or cabstand. Or they wander slowly, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells. The long, wide city blocks in Nogales, Arizona, just over the fence, stand in stark contrast. They are nearly devoid of pedestrians except for Morley street, lined with discount Korean stores that since the 1980s have sold inexpensive clothing, luggage, plastic flowers, car stereos, and sporting and household goods.43 But even Morley is deserted after 6pm. On the Arizona side the only sign of life are cars pulling in and out of fast food joints—McDonald’s, Burger King, and Jack-N- 169 the-Box—or swinging by the gas station, once the post office and county building close for the evening. But on the south side of the fence, day or night, there’s always a hustle to be done on the Line (see Figure 19). Figure 19. A portion of the Line, looking northward, just west of the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry. The border fence is visible in the background as is Nogales, Arizona beyond. When I first arrived to Nogales, the activity on the Line enthralled me immediately. On a walk after only a few days in Nogales, under a ferocious mid-morning July sun, I moseyed through a walkway under arched terracotta overhangs. Adjoining stucco walls connect pharmacies and tourist stalls. I try to look relaxed, but not knowing any faces or where I am going makes me antsy and I sweat into my fraying baseball cap. People talk at me, one after another. A thin man says in polished English, “What do you need? Pharmaceuticals, restaurant, whorehouse?” A paunchy twenty-something with dark hair came over gives me a three-minute spiel about trinkets in his store across the street. 170 His parting pitch is, “Come over buddy, I’ll get you a tequila shot.” Someone else says, “Pharmaceuticals, buddy? We got better prices than Walmart.” To take it in, I find a partially concealed corner set back from the sidewalk and observe the commotion for about 15 minutes. Becoming restless, I start walking westbound. A man in his 50s who I come to know as Valentín, his skin spotted by the sun, says, “Hey buddy, what do you need? Pharmaceuticals? Trying to find something?” I say, “I’m good thanks.” But his vibe is infectious. He looks right at me with wide set green eyes. I stop and have the first of dozens of conversations with Valentín, who I come to know as a fixture on the Line. I said to him “So you’re the guy who knows how to get stuff?” Smiling, he says, “You got it. Women, drugs, massage parlors. What do you need?” I tell him “Your English is great, it sounds like you lived on the other side.” He says, “I got deported from New Jersey three years ago. I worked on electrical up there.” Valentín’s eager but amicable hustle was emblematic of that of thousands that take place daily on the Line. The Evolution of the Line The Line, and the work deported men perform there, has evolved throughout the 20th century. The heart of the Line is a pedestrian promenade named Plaza Pesquiera after a local general. When Pesqueira street was still transited by horses and then automobiles, before being made a walkway, it and surrounding blocks on both sides of the railroad tracks leading into the United States blossomed into a tourist district replete with saloons, stores, and restaurants. This area became known as la Línea, or in English the Line, for its proximity to the border, which is also colloquially called the Line. In fact, Nogales was nicknamed “Line City” at the turn of the 20th century (Arreola 2017). 171 In the early 20th century, Nogales began marketing itself as a daytrip destination accessible from Phoenix and Tucson by automobile. U.S. government prohibitions on vice—most famously the Volstead Act that outlawed alcohol from 1919-1933 but also a series of laws against gambling and prostitution—shifted vice industries in the Southwest over the border and into Mexico (St. John 2011). Revelers from the United States sought escape over the border. Many middle-class U.S. day-trippers also ventured over. They are seen in iconic black-and-white postcards wearing tweed suits and ties frequenting restaurants with tables topped with white linens and candles next to wait staff turned out in white shirts and black bow ties (Arreola 2017, 170). At that time, the parking lot outside the plaza de toros, a mile to the south, adorned with murals several feet high of Spanish bullfighters, would fill with automobiles on Sundays. Affability on the Line Today, the relentless activity on the Line offers promise for work and hustling, particularly for those who gain a reputation for trustworthiness and cordiality. Alejandro, now in his late 60s, lived most of his life in east Los Angeles and was incarcerated in Folsom prison. He now works at one of the several ramshackle hotels in the red-light district, where rooms can be rented by the hour or by the day. Squinting to see and hard of hearing, Alejandro greeted everyone with a big silver-toothed smile and loud, “¡Qué onda!” or “Good morning!” or some other spritely phrase. Every time he and I spoke, he would take leave by booming, in thickly accented English, “If you need anything my friend, you let me know!” Seven days a week, Alejandro cleaned hotel rooms, performed routine maintenance, swept the sidewalk, and, to make money in tips, also fetched things for 172 guests—beer, a bottle of cheap liquor, snacks, or drugs. He never asked, but I would offer him a few pesos when I saw him, saying it was for a taco, soda, or some cigarettes. During one conversation, he told me, I work every day. I wake up early, come down to the Line, do my hustle. I like to work… I clean the rooms. I am a [pause] a maid service [laughing]! I like to work. When I was younger, I got in trouble. I ran around and get in trouble and went to prison. But now I’m good! I’m too old! People admiringly murmured behind his back about how all these years later he continues his “prison yard routine” of push-ups, sit-ups, burpees, and other daily exercises. Among other deportees, Alejandro had a whispered reputation as one of the toughest sureño gang members to come from California state prisons. Although he did not ever tell me explicitly, as Dreamer did at the beginning of this chapter, Alejandro had changed. He no longer “got in trouble,” and had become one of the friendliest faces on the Line. Good-natured affability is a key trait for most people doing hustles, walking up and down sidewalks offering fixer services. Martin was born in El Naranjo, Sinaloa. He lived for 33 years in south-central Los Angeles and speaks distinctive Black English. He was deported in 2011. He smoothly and confidently delivers his gambit, as he did to me the first time we met: Hello sir, how are you doing? My name is Martin. Anything I can help you with? [Pause.] I’m a facilitator. I won’t take much of your time, but I’d like to let you know what my services are. [Ticking off his fingers.] First, information. If you’re lost or if you need to know where something is, I’m your man. And that’s free. Second women, or men [sex workers], depending on your preferences. Different 173 strokes for different folks, you know. And third, substances. Preferably, illicit [laughs]. I got weed, I got cocaine, and I got pills. The good stuff. Martin’s approach to eking out a living depends on arrangements with sex workers, drug sellers, restaurants, and others that pay him a small fee for bringing in clientele. Most importantly, Martin’s hustle depends on instantaneously developing amicable relationships with passersby. Martin describes his hustle as a grind, yet also rewarding because of the variety of people he gets to meet. And, not uncommonly for deportees, he talks about appreciating contact with people from the United States and the opportunity to speak English and “click with people.” Deported men’s attempts to ingratiate themselves to visitors also reduce other vulnerabilities. People perceived by police to harass tourists with an approach that is too aggressive risk 36 hours in jail or a bribe of US$5 or US$10. Good- natured deportee hustlers, however, are often left to work as long as they share with police part of their earnings. “Getting By”: Other Hustles Other hustles were not concentrated in the geographical space of the Line but instead carried out in places around the city. Alfonso, for example, explained to me his second-hand clothing business that had supplemented the money his mother periodically sent over his three years in Nogales. “I go up to the tiangis [swap meet] on Colosio [boulevard] and sell stuff up there. I mean, you can make some cash.” I asked Alfonso how much. “On my best day up at Colosio, I started at 6am. By 11, I sold 3,300 pesos.” I assumed, “Eleven at night?” “No, 11am! That day was tight!” Alfonso said that on a 174 normal day he could make 1,500 pesos. In my head, I calculated around 5,000 or 6,000 pesos [US$294-353] a month. “Yeah,” Alfonso said, I’ll make that in a month. For down here, it’s not bad. But I think I’m gonna’ run out [of clothing to sell] eventually. All my family is helping me out. They’re sending me stuff down here. But eventually, they’re gonna’ have their garages and basements all cleaned out. It’s my cousins, my aunts; it’s a lot of people. They lived up there for years, like I did. So they live like people live up there, they have things and all that. But eventually there’s not gonna’ be anything left, they will have stuff to send me. Alfonso told me that eight to 10 households of extended family in Tucson have sent him clothing. I brought him a large suitcase of clothing from Oregon once as well. But in addition to his supply problem, he also ran in to seasonal demand issues: It depends on the time of year and everything. Like right now, with all the kids out of school, everyone’s worried about buying clothes and getting ready for next school year. But no one has any money. There’s no money in Nogales. I’ll stop in at [second-hand] stores. They’re not selling, so they don’t want to buy anything from me. If it’s just me walking around, I can make a few hundred pesos on a good day. That’s if I sell some clothes and some shoes and whatnot. Even when Javier and others did have things to sell, I was sometimes skeptical about their ability to turn much of a profit. One cool evening, chatting in the inky shadows of Javier’s second-floor apartment, he showed me the unopened, complete set of Inglés sin Barreras, an English-language learning program, that his mother had brought him the day before from Phoenix. All 12 DVD boxes sat on the couch in their original, 175 1990s-era packaging. Javier excitedly noted the US$800 price advertised in the Spanish- language television commercials for the DVD set some two decades earlier, something I remembered well. He said that he recently saw the set being sold online for 2,000 pesos. I couldn’t help but speculate that anyone with 2,000 pesos for a set of English-learning DVDs probably had enough media literacy and internet access to engage much more contemporary English-learning programs online. I had higher hopes that he could sell the 20 or so pairs of neatly organized jeans and trousers alongside several dozen folded blouses and shirts. Roy, deported from east Los Angeles, also had many ups and downs in his more than 20 years living in Nogales since he was deported. His wife, a native nogalense, became ill and died in 2015. In the emotionally difficult months and years afterward, he had many adjustments to daily activities to consider, in additional to dealing with the emotional toll. For years, she had run a changarro, a tiny neighborhood convenience store, out of the front door of their small, rented house up high up in the west hills. Roy halfheartedly kept it going to supplement the income he made panhandling, or “spinning stories, doing a song and dance,” as he called it, in either English or Spanish. In addition to the sorrow that her death brought Roy, it also meant a reduced household income. On our visits, Roy and I talked on his living room sofa behind a coffee table. It was always topped with a couple of ashtrays and stacks of VHS tapes of John Wayne movies, his favorites. We would inevitably be interrupted by intermittent knocks at the door. Neighborhood kids or middle-aged men would walk across his small dirt yard, past the small dogs Roy kept, to buy hard candy or loose cigarettes for a few pesos. But these days, since Roy spent most of his waking hours down by the Line, 176 business had slowed. “I’m hardly moving any candy at all. I’m not even restocking it really. I just sell a little bit here and there.” I craned my neck and looked more closely at the six transparent Nescafé instant coffee jars and two blue cartons of Sheriff cigarettes, neatly resting on their side on dark wooden shelves. Everything neat and organized. But dusty. “I’ve got the hard candies, the paletas de a peso [one peso suckers], the cigarettes, the sweets and the mints because there’s a lot of drunks around here. Before, my wife had the chips, and the sodas… [But] it’s just not the same.” Ingenuity, Deceit, and Compassion Other improvised hustles demonstrated varying levels of creativity and reliance on skilled artistry, human compassion, or some combination. Oso, deported from Phoenix at age 39, was a cartoonist and tattoo artist since his years in Arizona state prisons. He told me of an art-forgery scheme he and a friend had come up with. They had come across a Norman Rockwell painted plate. “We thought it was original and everything. The only thing is, it’s made in China. But I got all that off. I brushed it out and polished [off the “Made in China” label]. Now we just got to get the signature.” He said that his friend would pay him US$50 to carefully add a matching Norman Rockwell signature. Now he just needed to access the Internet, to Google an image of Rockwell’s signature so that he could forge it. Oso was sure they could convince a tourist it was an original. Other hustlers also occasionally devised ways to secure money through deceit. Some just asked for money, or a loan that would not be repaid, while others saw limitless potential for innovating outlandish hustles; more often nogalenses than deportees. Since I was a close acquaintance with only a few dozen deportees and others on the Line, many of the hundreds of workers and hustlers there only knew me vaguely as a person who 177 claimed to be a writer, or just as the recognizable face of some gringo kicking around town. I was approachable—and a mark. I would be hit me up for money frequently. Walking down the street, I could usually see who was eyeing me, about rush over with a joke, a high-five greeting, and a convoluted hustle or straightforward request for “a little help.” Someone needed to borrow 200 pesos [US$11] for their propane bill. Someone lent a police officer 100 pesos, but just needed to get by until they were repaid tomorrow. Could I help out? Someone else needed money until their boss paid them after closing tonight. Although some hustlers simply asked for money, few of the men that I worked with did this. Some said that they had “too much pride” to ask for “a little help,” i.e. money. They would say that “a man has to do for his-self” or that “you got to work if you want something.” Many times I saw deportees whom I knew to have little money give freely to help someone else, even people they did not know. They would buy strangers a Coke, a meal, or just give them some money. This also was important to some people’s self-conception as empathetic and compassionate. One man who was deported in 2013 after many years in Arizona state prisons made it a habit for several months, when he lived near the Line, to take his cousin’s small trailer-grill down to the Line to prepare burgers for deportees and give them for free. A similar ethos of deportee solidarity and compassion could be directed at nogalenses as well. Dan, who had made high union wages as a welder in the United States for many years, before a prison sentence and deportation at age 47, told me about trying to hustle the previous day. 178 I’m nice man! That’s my problem when I sell down here. When I’m at the tianguis [swap meet], or wherever, I listen to everyone’s story. I listen to what everyone says, and then I help them out. There was this lady [yesterday] that was telling me about her dog. Her dog died, she had to bury him, and all that. I gave her some of the clothes I was selling [for free] and gave her 20 pesos too! The Line carries both positive associations and negative stigma. Alejandro, well liked, reflected the outgoing amicability on the Line. Other people that hustled the Line were considered more predatory, however, and they also shaped perceptions of how social dynamics on the Line operate. I asked Marcos, a deportee from rural Utah who operates a small but busy convenience store on the Line, about the many hustles he must have seen over the years. He said, [There are] lots of hustles around here. And people mess stuff up a lot too. Guys are walking around offering to get drugs. White people come over and they give a guy 200 bucks or something to bring them drugs and the guy disappears. Those people [tourists] never come back. It hurts all of us. People come over. They get a hotel room or something and they spend money here, even if it’s just a little bit. But if they stop coming over, that messes us up. I had heard about people being defrauded on the Line for piddling amounts, but for US$200 would be rare. Nonetheless, Marcos’s point that out-and-out rip-offs do occasionally occur was well taken. Yet he also underscored the importance of trust and integrity in everyday interactions. People that do pull pernicious cons, in Marcos’s words, “hurt all of us” and are not welcome. One aspect of hustlers’ work is backing up their 179 friendly disposition with integrity—moving quickly to perform an arranged service, giving exact change, and being generally helpful and principled. Conclusions Deportees’ initial disorientation after deportation and struggles to insert themselves into the labor market make them feel like they are starting “from zero.” Social stigma, a lack of social ties, bureaucratic barriers to documents, and a local economy that flourishes on informal workers, compound difficulties in securing steady, fulfilling work for a living wage. Most of my interlocutors expressed the starkness of labor prospects after deportation. One deportee from Phoenix put in blunt terms the limitations he felt on economic wellbeing. These stem from deportation and family separation and the compounding effects of economic inequality between the United States and Mexico and inequality within Mexico: “There’s no way to make a living. Who do I know? Who are my people? I don’t know anybody down here... I make 10 or 15 dollars a day, maybe 20 [selling tourist souvenirs]. Some days two or three dollars.” He pointed to isolation from his U.S. citizen children and dismal job prospects as critical to determining the opportunities available to him. This was echoed by another deportee, from rural Nevada, who said, “I have no family here. I got no roots. They think, ‘Oh he’s Mexican, so he’s just going back with his family.’ They don’t know I got nothing here.” Nevertheless, deported people demonstrate ingenuity in performing straight work or hustles in order to secure some form of income after deportation. Call centers provide an important labor opportunity for some deported people (Anderson 2015; Golash-Boza 2016; Rodkey 2016). Yet deported people also engage in a broader range of labor activities, which go well beyond work in tourist areas (cf. Silver 2018). Deportee hustles 180 reveal ingenuous approaches to achieving some minimal economic stability. Nevertheless, both hustles and work provide a wide range of outcomes for financial stability. Beyond their economic dimension, work and hustles are inflected with legal, cultural, and social norms and practices that mediate opportunities. While noncitizen labor in the United States is seen as pliable and tractable, noncitizens’ personhood, beyond their labor production or potential—their affective selves and their embodied gender, race, and class subjectivities—becomes implicated in the aftermath of deportation. Deported men in seeking reinsertion into a labor market shift understandings of themselves. Their gendered selves as men undergo a redefinition whereby they innovate labor activities in the various niches that they are able to identify. On the Line, deportees are not the only sellers at curios or the only hustlers. Moreover, they remake the social and labor landscape in subtle but real ways. Dreamer, Steve, Caín, Roy, and others are prominent English-speakers on the Line who serve as informal care-takers for those who cross and make contact with them. But for English-speaking tourists their English language competency and U.S. cultural competency enable them to attempt a presentation as trustworthy, capable, and dignified men. They are of course not always successful. They are fully aware of the perceived menace associated with prison, cholo, and U.S. Latino masculinities and have different degrees of proficiency with the middle-class and middle-age, white sensibilities of many of the U.S. and Canadian tourists with whom they come into contact. Yet they find creative ways to subdue self-expressions that would alarm their potential clientele. While their labor may become repurposed in the interests of global capital and logics of public governance—in the case of U.S. municipalities, counties, states, and the 181 federal government—who contract with call centers in Mexico and around the world, essentially offshoring their bilingual skills to then exploit those skills at a much lower cost (Rodkey 2016). But only a minority of deportees have the skills that make them employable in call centers or in transnational maquiladoras in any capacity except as low- wage assembly-line workers. They struggle to find a variety of activities to fulfill the desire to work and to earn an income. Although they seldom are fulfilled with their circumstances, are highly active in the struggle to work and hustle to get by, reshaping their masculinities in the process. Redefined masculinities are critical to other aspects of deportees’ lives as well. Their everyday living situations in which they often share small homosocial residential spaces with other deportees demonstrate their capacity for solidarity and care, as I will explore in the following chapter. Notes 42 (see Anderson 2015; Bhatt and Roberts 2012; Coutin 2010; Golash-Boza 2015, 2016a; Hagan, Rodríguez, and Castro 2011; Rodríguez and Hagan 2004; Rodkey 2016; Silver 2018) 43http://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/small-korean-community-carves-out-big-niche-in- nogales/article_dc94e2b4-4b86-11e2-9f05-001a4bcf887a.html 182 CHAPTER V “WE FIND EACH OTHER DOWN HERE”: CARE CIRCULATIONS IN TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES AND LOCAL COMMUNITIES Paco, Javier, Danny, and I hang out one July morning in Plaza Hidalgo, several blocks south of the Line. Javier dangles his legs over the simple concrete stage, a public venue for activities I’d attended: political rallies,44 folkloric dances, and a concert by a Credence Clearwater Revival cover band. Red, green, and white paint has flayed off the chipped wall behind him. Danny, Paco, and I shuffle in place in a sliver of shade, fists jammed in our pockets. Three or four people in tattered clothes sleep on thin blankets among empty half pints of liquor; the overhang above the stage protects them, and us, from the sun. Car horns blare on the three-lane avenues that hem in the rectangular plaza. The plaza is no longer than a couple of basketball courts end-to-end and maybe a bit wider. No events today. Just a few shoe shiners, retirees telling stories under tall palm trees reaching here and there toward the incessantly blue sky, and passersby cutting a path across the pale concrete. Across the avenues, street sellers shout on busy sidewalks and families hustle to a crowded bus stop. I wonder for a second where Paco, Javier, Danny, and I would be hanging out in Phoenix if some hypothetical circumstance had brought us together there, where they had all lived since the early 1970s, before their prison stints and deportations. But then I can’t even think of what that circumstance could be. The mood had been light. Paco knows a guy running a casino in Panama who maybe has work. Wonder what Panama is like. Javier is looking for a job. Danny doesn’t have a peso to his name. We joke and laugh. The subject changes to deportation. Paco 183 insists that deportation’s harshest consequence is social displacement: “People don’t get it. We’re different here! We’re not,” he drags out, “fro-o-o-m he-e-e-r-e. We got no ties, no family.” Paco digs in: “You might as well have just let me off in Africa, I’d be on the same program. I think they should do that to a [immigration] judge. Send their ass to Africa so they can see what it’s like. You get deported. You don’t got no family, no friends. You’re down in this country where you don’t know no one.” Paco gets a laugh with “send their ass to Africa” for evoking the comeuppance of an immigration judge or anyone complicit in perpetuating this system of forced exile. Imagine some larger force coercively transporting them to some distant, exotic place, seemingly on a whim. But his assertions about being “different” in northern Mexico, feeling isolated and disoriented, no family or friends, is so obvious as to get little response. Javier and Danny know those disconnections all too well. After deportation, Paco, Danny, and Javier felt cut off from home in the United States, forgotten in many ways, and painfully separated from family. Yet their separation was not total. Javier’s parents, brother, and even his adult son had come to visit from Phoenix, a three-hour drive away. They wired him money to help make rent. Danny’s sister, brother, and adult daughter visited and sent him care packages with clothing and food. Their relationship was rocky, but they maintained contact. Paco’s sister came last year and stayed for two days. Paco, Javier, and Danny had difficult relationships with family, going back decades. But through ups and downs, years of jail and prison stints, and now deportation to Mexico, they had managed to maintain active family relationships—strained and frayed, but active nonetheless. 184 They also configured everyday care relationships in Nogales. Paco, Javier, and Danny had met one other. Over years in Nogales, they got together most days. They spent time in the plaza, at Danny’s small house, walking downtown or by the Line, going to doctor’s appointments, visiting each other in drug rehab. They connected emotionally, spending time joking, gossiping, complaining, storytelling, arguing, laughing, walking, planning, eating, walking, hustling, relaxing, and arguing. They shared, borrowed, traded, or sold clothing, food, cigarettes, and information about pawn shop loans, police patrols, and who’s on the sicarios’ shit list. Their relationship showed that they were homies. If you mess with one, you mess with all of them. And they lived together intermittently. Javier stayed at Danny’s house for a time, then at Paco’s apartment. This chapter examines both care practices and the configuration of care relationships after deportation, asking specifically: what transnational and local care practices emerge after deportation? And how and with whom are deportee care relationships configured? These questions help elucidate how care is performed in its emotional, material, and symbolic dimensions as well as the gendered aspects of care. The intimacy of local care circulations in Nogales—slipping in to domestic routines, developing emotional attachments, and sharing residential spaces—moreover, demonstrates the capaciousness of masculine expressions and shifting ways that men conceive of themselves as men. Masculinities of care in Nogales reflect how men adapt notions of themselves as resilient and tough to also incorporate compassionate forms. Intimacy was often couched in joking disparagement, sarcasm, and other forms of banter. Yet deported men’s interdependency exhibited the orientation of their lives toward one another and the enmeshing of a mutual existence that counters popular notions of gang 185 and prison masculinities as well as Mexican and U.S. Latinx masculinities as coarse, uncaring, violent, self-centered, and macho. In the analysis that this chapter undertakes, as important as activities of care—the how of gendered care action—are the configurations of care relationships—the who. Deported men’s networks of interpersonal solidarity in Nogales reflect considerable reliance on other deported men. While some care relationships form with nogalenses, to be sure, the most common, most critical, and most intimate care relationships were developed with other deported me. Deported men formed care communities, affiliations with one another wherein support was given, reciprocated, ongoing, and came to be expected. The who of care group formations also revealed the primacy of U.S. Latinx identifications. Deported men came together in intimate and trusting relationships rooted in similar personal histories and life experiences in U.S. communities, U.S. gangs, and U.S. prisons. They saw themselves in one another and demarcated social difference in opposition to nogalenses. Moreover, this U.S. Latinx identification transgressed group divisions that existed in the United States. Prison gang social life in the United States was organized around gang rivalries that are territorially based within urban neighborhoods, for example in Phoenix, Tucson, and Los Angeles, and that have broader regional scope, such as in California the Northerners, Southerners, and Bulldogs in central California (Lopez-Aguado 2018). Intra-group solidarity and inter-group animus continue in U.S. neighborhoods after incarceration (Lopez-Aguado 2018). In Nogales, crucially, these divisions are transgressed. U.S. Latinx care relationships overcame gang divisions as 186 deportee solidarity was formed in the face of marginalization from the larger community of Nogales. The chapter continues with a brief introduction to care circulations as an analytic lens and the ways that masculinities shape the expectations, obligations, and practices of care. Then, three ethnographic sections address care in different contexts. In the first, I tell of care in U.S. prisons through my interlocutors’ narrative of prison experience to understand the intimate living, solidarity, and gang animus that materialize in carceral contexts. Next, I analyze care among natal families and examine how deportation reshapes transnational family care as family relationships intensify, shift, or fray. Last, I examine local care relationships in Nogales, in the rare instances that family members relocate or, as much more frequently occurs, when local care ties become vital to everyday living. Care Up Close and from Afar Care as an analytical tool helps elucidate the myriad ways that people come together in solidarity. Care—defined in my analysis as the reciprocal exchange of support within ongoing social relationships—focuses on intimate mutual obligation. It is important to define care narrowly enough so as not to become “analytically vacuous” (Holy 1996). The definition that I provide excludes institutional forms of support from churches, governments, and non-profits for not implying reciprocity nor the maintenance of an ongoing relationship. Likewise, human lives are filled with small transactions of support—words of encouragement in conversation with a stranger, a hand with a heavy door, money in a pinch from an unexpected source—yet, again, when these occur outside 187 the parameters of an enduring social relationship wherein future exchange is expected, then they do not meet the standard of care referred to here. One of the conceptual merits of studying care is its practice-based character. It is a move beyond everyday relational categories such as “family” or “friendship” that are laden with assumptions about how these social formations are constituted as well as notions of how they operate. This follows one of Loretta Baldassar and Laura Merla’s (2014, 30-31) central assertions, that instead of taking for granted care obligations within, for example a familial context, the study of care brings into view all of the actors and activities of caregiving, both actual and ideal, regardless of place or country of residence, immigrant or nonimmigrant status, gender, generation, age, etc., and so captures all of the care action (including its absence when expected or longed for) that comprises transnational family life. The idea here, then, is to focus on caregiving practices to understand how care is given and received, but also in order to trace care circulations interpersonally and better understand the socialities to which care leads us. The “circulations” component of care circulations emphasizes several key aspects: the multidirectional distribution of care; the diversity of geographically proximate or geographically distant formations of care; the acceleration, deceleration, or cessation of care over time; and the disproportionate burdens across care networks. Care expectations and care distribution across time and space is asymmetrical and multidirectional and, within interpersonal and individual life histories, care practices are made, remade, and become frayed (Baldassar and Merla 2014; Boris and Parreñas 2011). 188 As people move, transnational care is a means by which people come to maintain and shift collaborative intersubjectivities across distance and over national boundaries (Morgan 1996). In examining globalized economies of care (Leinaweaver 2013), notions of “care deficits” and “care surpluses” became ways of understanding shifting care practices that respond to shifting geographical locations and social worlds (Hochschild 2000). This has led to important scholarship on how gendered caregiving morphs, for example when mothers migrate to the global north and seek to provide financial and affective care at a physical remove (Ábrego 2014). Kristin Yarris (2017) proposed an alternative to understanding the disjuncture between care and mobilities as an undersupply of care, however, suggesting instead that reconfigurations of care (in her case, the intergenerational care between grandparents and grandchildren) are an important site for analyzing the ways that a putative shortage of care actually comes to be fulfilled. I draw on Yarris’s notion that flexible caregiving networks often accommodate new ways of giving and receiving care in response to global movements such as deportation. It is in this way that I conceive of transnational care and local care as overlapping, fluid, and not mutually exclusive categories. Transnational care becomes local and vice versa as people physically come together and move apart. The notion of care circulations encompasses caregiving forms that are physically proximate and embodied, yet also recognize the importance of different ways of doing care work from a distance. What I argue in this chapter is that in Nogales many deported men—like Paco, Danny, Javier, and others I interviewed—struggle to maintain transnational care circulations and came to rely principally on local care circulations with other deported 189 men. Deported men came together as a response to social stigma they encounter for their U.S. gang and post-prison identities (Albicker and Velasco 2016; Anderson 2015; Pinedo et al. 2015) as well as social affinities as mutual recognition. The same masculine, pinto (prison), pocho (“Americanized” Mexican), and cholo (gang) subjectivities that subordinate them socially in Nogales are the basis of collective experiences and collective memory anchored in U.S. communities. These spaces obey some affective and embodied patterns of hard street and prison homosocial masculinities, such as one-upmanship and blunt and aggressive posturing— either serious, in jest, or both—yet also are heterogeneous and reflect flexible notions of ideal masculine expressions. Men construct a range of masculinities (Connell 2000, 2005; Gutmann 1997) and deported men (as all people) can be emotionally withholding and inhibited, or show emotional vulnerability, verbalize intimacy, and be physically affectionate. The routinized structures of prison life also shape both masculine expressions and deportee care communities. In intimate living spaces in Nogales, men developed “programs,” or daily routines that mimicked homosocial prison life, sharing their intimate living spaces and activities with other men, e.g. preparing and eating “prison spreads” (following prison culinary practices) or developing prison exercise routines and daily schedules. Deported men’s lives, when seen through the lens of intersubjective experience, reveal the expansive possibilities of emergent masculinities (Inhorn 2012) demonstrated through shared, collaborative living. These forms illuminate the broad diversity of Latinx gender expressions, pushing beyond ideas of fixed, homogenized notions of Latino masculinity (Cantú 2011; see also Gutmann 1996, 1997). While a few of the men that I 190 interviewed described aspects of their masculinities as defined through aggressiveness and violence in the United States (Ríos 2011, 129), some of these same men also articulated redefined notions of self, as men, that eschewed antagonism and embraced “doing good,” “working hard,” and “doing right by my people [family],” both as fathers and “beyond fatherhood” (Inhorn 2012, 89). Deported men’s care communities, while makeshift and often insufficient for overcoming the multiple exclusions of deportation, nonetheless provide insight into struggles to carve out spaces of belonging. Prison Animus, Prison Care Prison antagonism and care are significantly structured by strict control and confinement. From arrival at a prison reception center, standard operating procedures, administrators’ decisions, and the built environment shape incarcerated people’s social lives. Intake screening procedures take several days. In addition to the issuance of clothing and toiletries and taking care of other logistics, intake includes review of criminal records, medical checks, and interviews in order to make determinations regarding so-called security risk, gang affiliation, and, ultimately, cell assignments. Race, U.S. regional origin, and gang affiliation, if one is deemed to exist, play a large role in this categorization and separation of people into different tier-blocks and yards. The nominal reason for racial, regional, and gang segregation is to minimize violence. However, as sociologist Patrick Lopez-Aguado (2018, 29-34) has argued, segregation reinforces race and gang animus. Although only a small portion of incarcerated people affiliate with gangs, all inmates are racially segregated in California and Arizona state prisons, following the assumption that gang reach—such as that of the Aryan Brotherhood (for whites) or Black Gorillas (for African-Americans)—beyond that 191 of gang members themselves if there is a violent incident. Latinx people are further divided based on origin. In California, a division is made between Northerners, those from the central part of the state, and Southerners and those from Mexico. In Arizona, those who are born in Mexico are separated from U.S. Latinx people, to mirror the membership of the Paisa and Chicano gangs, also known as the Sureños and the New Mexican Mafia. Lopez-Aguado (2018, 34) asserts that these strict spatial and social divisions configure relationships with other inmates such that new arrivals are inserted into networks of previously existing relations of animus and collaboration. Lopez- Aguado (2018) calls this meticulously arranged institutionalized schema of spatial and social segregation the “carceral social order.” Five of my interlocutors spent time in supermax SHUs because they were identified as mid- to high-level members within their gangs hierarchical structure. They had little contact with others, receiving less than three hours of “recreational time” outside of their cell a week. Isolation was not total, however. In the SHU, depending on the layout, people could yell through the walls to communicate with others around them. Or they would devise “kites,” folded paper with written messages, or pass drugs or other contraband through a “wire,” string tied to objects that would be tossed to another cell. Wires and kites were much more common on non-SHU tiers. While a handful had lived in SHUs, most people lived in clusters of cellblocks, often arranged vertically on tiers several stories high. During the day, people would work jobs doing laundry, custodial work, or preparing food in the kitchen. Jobs offered opportunities to gossip, complain, banter, and joke. They also presented gang members with chances to “politick,” or coordinate “putting in work” for the gang. They also 192 permitted opportunities for other unauthorized activities, such as fashioning wallets out of burlap bags from the kitchen. Kitchen workers had one of the most coveted positions since they could smuggle out food. Carceral social groups also meant close living in shared cells. In my interviews, people’s memories of prison highlighted shared life in small spaces—two bunks, sink, and toilet—where people read books, watched TV, wrote letters, sang, rapped, shared stories, told jokes, bickered, made plans, ate, slept, and went to the bathroom. The relationship with a “celly,” or cellmate, was critical to many aspects of everyday living. Jacob said about having a celly, “It ain’t easy. Your celly is going to the bathroom, but you want to sleep. Or you’re working out but your celly wants to sleep.” Despite the difficulty of cell life, deportees recounted some of the closest relationships in their life having been developed in prison. And just as prisons themselves had intake processes, social welcoming on the tier- block was an important part of integrating into prison and configuring care relationships. This often depended on gang affiliation or one’s reputation from the streets. Being welcomed with clothing and food from commissary was common among my interlocutors. Dan, a Sureño, told me, “My first day in the joint, my first day, they came and got me. The Sureños, my people. They had more new things than I’d ever seen: brand-new shoes, new sheets and blankets, all this food, everything. Everything you needed in the joint.” Dan’s experience was simultaneously part of a process of introduction to life “on the inside” as well as a symbolic acceptance by his cellmate on behalf of the gang. These experiences of hospitality contrast with experiences of unwelcome. For example, “being asked for papers,” or providing the physical 193 documentation of the criminal convictions that led to incarceration for others to review, was a sign of mistrust. Although one’s word is supposed to be taken about one’s record, when there is a suspicion that someone is not being truthful, they are asked for their papers to verify that were not convicted of sexual abuse of minors or had not cooperated with others’ criminal prosecutions, for example, as these were particularly stigmatized in prison. The consequences for either was social isolation or antagonism. Institutionalized living in prison shapes other aspects of everyday life. Deportees described culinary practices known as “prison spreads.” These involved kitchen access by inmates who worked in food service or the purchase of certain foods from the prison commissary or from one of the many inmates in any tier-block who run informal “stores” as a business venture. Notable components of prison spreads include pruno (also called “hooch”), or prison wine, made from obtaining fruit such as oranges and surreptitiously fermenting it for weeks and then smuggling it out in plastic bags to provide for someone’s birthday or other celebration, as a trade commodity, or for someone to drink on their own. Tamales made from Doritos are another important dish. They are especially common for celebrating Christmas. Fantasma described the process: You take Doritos and you smash them up into little pieces. That’s how you make the masa. I mean, what are Doritos? They’re made out of tortilla. So you’re just reversing the process. You add some water to make masa. Then you lay it out, just like a tamal. Luego le doblas así de los cuatro lados, como si fuera un tamal, pero con lo que le echaste en medio. [You fold the four sides like a tamale and add whatever you’re putting inside.] 194 “Sopa pinta,” another dish, is a noodle soup made from a microwaveable instant soup to which raw egg, mayonnaise, Tapatío salsa, Cheetos, and mustard are added. Reading was an additional prison practice that was widespread for deportees in Nogales. Marcos, who spent five months in federal prison and three more in immigration detention told me, You got nothing to do. All I did was read and draw. You can’t do nothing, especially if you’re on lockdown, like when I first got there. You can get three books a week. And that’s about how many you can read. I’d finish a book every two or three days. Genre fiction was a favorite. Marcos loved paperback westerns. At Javier’s house in Nogales in 2014, he excitedly showed me his stack of a dozen or so mysteries and crime thrillers, running his finger down the “Other titles by this author” page to indicate 30 or 35 books he had read and telling me which ones were good. Others named authors like Louis L’Mour, Stephen King, John Grisham, Dan Brown, James Patterson, John Grisham, Dean Koontz, and Tom Clancy as favorites. Some non-fiction books, like The Black Hand: The Bloody Rise and Redemption of “Boxer” Enríquez, A Mexican Mob Killer were widely known, and I took them as recommended reading. I also took requests over the years and would take used books to Nogales as often as I could to give them away to readers, who struggled to get books in English. Transnational Families: Separation, Transition, Support, and Frayed Ties After prison, care relationships are renegotiated. After prison—once release is determined through a combination of statutes; prosecutors’, defense attorneys’ and judges’ recommendations; and parole boards—ICE custody in detention facilities 195 signifies similar highly constrained imprisonment and intimate, segregated living for additional months or years. Then, in the days after an order of removal is issued and deportation is physically carried out, deportees find themselves in Mexico and again navigating relationships (see Figure 20). Some deportees received family support to compliment that of local NGO shelters and the Mexican government, as Javier’s experience highlights. When he was deported in 2011, he stayed at an NGO shelter for three days, but then received money from family, through a sequence of communication and solidarity, to pay for a hotel room. Javier’s parents, in Phoenix, called Javier’s older brother, who lived in southern Arizona, asking him to help Javier out. Javier’s brother’s wife took him US$40 so that he could get a hotel room for a few nights, before driving down themselves, and picking up Javier to take him to an aunt’s house in Santa Ana and figure out another plan. Figure 20. Recently deported person, with no shoelaces and belongings in DHS-issued bag, makes phone call. 196 Over half of the men that I interviewed had received some remittances from family for food, a place to stay, and clothing after they were deported. Family members sent their own money or sometimes facilitated the sale of a car or help send deportees’ own money in other ways. For example, state Departments of Corrections [DOCs] return the balance on inmates’ commissary accounts (their “books”) when releasing them. But people released from the DOC into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and deported do not have access to banks to cash their DOC check. Fantasma, who since age two in 1966 had lived in Los Angeles until being deported in 2014 told me, “I had money on my books when I got out, like six hundred dollars.” I asked if he had been issued a check by DOC. Fantasma received help from his ex-wife. “My girl took care of all that. When they sent me to CCA [immigration detention], she cashed the [DOC] check and put it on a debit card.” She mailed the debit card to Fantasma in CCA and he was able to use it when he arrived in Mexico. Alfredo laughed when remembering his mother’s well-intentioned yet awkward effort to provide support when he was deported from east Los Angeles in 2011 at age 24. Alfredo drank a beer after work as we talked, sitting in old chairs on the oily gravel outside Jorge’s (another deportee) small mechanic shop. It was early March, but the temperature had reached the mid-80s. Alfredo wore a baseball cap backwards, shielding his neck from the sun. The three of us were engulfed in stories but somehow broached the subject of clothing. Alfredo said, When I got deported, my mom sent me this big box of Mexican clothes. She was like, “People dress different down there. So you’re gonna’ need these.” It was all, 197 like, cowboy stuff. All tight shirts and all that! [Laughing] I was like, “Come on Mom, this isn’t the 1970s. I don’t need these around here.” Despite the laughter the incident elicited in hindsight about his mother’s notion of what kind of clothing Alfredo would need to live in Mexico, the gesture reflected her genuine concern for Alfredo’s wellbeing. In a crucial moment of his transition to Mexico, the material support Alfredo’s mother and others provided were a start to working out ways to care from a distance. Support also may come in anticipation of an impending deportation. Milton explained to me how clothing upon release from prison was a sure sign of family support. He and I were people watching on the Line one day, waiting for customers to enter the curio where he works. Two short, stocky men in their 30s with mustaches and tattoos sauntered down the middle of the pedestrian promenade lined with curios and pharmacies wearing tan jumpsuit pants and white T-shirts.45 Milton told me, “These guys are coming straight from the joint [prison]. And they did some serious time.” As they passed us with loping steps, looking around as if mesmerized by the activity on the Line, Milton said, “¡Bienvenidos a la libertad! [Welcom to your freedom!]” To which one of them replied, “¡Simón! [Yeah!]” and gave an enthusiastic arm pump. Milton turned back to me and said, “Look at that shit they have to wear. They don’t have no people taking care of them. When I was getting out, no way. My people sent me something like a month before: pants, shirt, everything.” Families aided deportees’ transitions, complementing short-term government support through Grupos Beta and the consulate with international telephone calls, discounted bus tickets to other places in Mexico, and transportation to NGOs that provide 198 meals and shelter. My interlocutors’ U.S. citizen and LPR family members were established in the United States, having lived there for decades in most cases. Nevertheless, the working-class wages they earned in most cases hampered their ability to send remittances (Dreby 2015). And physical family separation was reinforced for undocumented family members who, even if they had the time and money, were unable to travel to Mexico to be with recently deported loved ones during their transition. Some families, however, were able to visit. Family Visits Family visits brought people together to share in everyday activities, to transfer material support to deported people, and to forge ahead with relationships. Recently deported men described processes in which they renegotiated their ongoing relationships with family. Those that had lived in Nogales for several years, however, had generally defined the expectations of family visits, if family members did visit, for example how often they would come and what they would do. Raul, deported in 2000 after living all but the first of his 44 years in the United States, mostly in Arizona but also repairing railroad tracks in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, told me about an upcoming family visit. His brother and a family friend were coming from the small town of Central Heights, Arizona, a little less than four hours away, for a weekend trip. Raul’s brothers, sisters, and adult children visited several times a year. They would go eat tacos somewhere, maybe drink beer at a bar, and figure out a sleeping situation in Raul’s small, two-bedroom house. They also helped Raul makes ends meet. Money selling Mexican handicrafts was tight, especially in the summer heat when snowbirds—U.S. and Canadian retirees that spend several months from autumn to early spring in southern Arizona— 199 returned to homes further north. Raul said about his brother’s impending visit: “He’ll help me out. Give me 150 bucks or so. Something to help keep me going.” Javier also received a handful of visits a year from family in Phoenix. His parents, born in the 1940s and for whom travelling was becoming more laborious, and some contingent of brothers and sisters, cousins, nephews and nieces, and his 21-year-old son would make the three-hour trip. Similarly to Raul, they would go out to eat, and spend time walking around touristy areas of the Line. A couple of times since being deported in 2011 Javier took the six-hour bus ride to meet them in Puerto Peñasco—a three-hour drive south from Phoenix—to stay at a rented house and enjoy a weekend of beach, sun, and beer drinking with his family. After a 2014 trip, Javier excitedly described to me how nice the beach had been and that he had fun with his niece, a public policy student at Arizona State University, drinking beer for her first time. Javier missed his two adult children and over the years would express from time to time his hope that they come down and visit more often. He was very proud of his 18- year-old daughter, telling me with wide eyes about her high school graduation and enlistment in the U.S. Marine Corps. Then, when she graduated from boot camp, he showed me Facebook photos of her in dress uniform, posing by a U.S. flag. The two of them often did not communicate for months, however, sending brief Facebook messages when they did. Although he grew melancholy at times, in general Javier had become resigned to the constraints of physical distance and occasional visits, and moments of both emotional intimacy and desolation. Aside from the cost of family visits in time and money, transnational family life can be complicated by other factors, as Juan José’s experience demonstrated. Juan José’s 200 wife, Claudia, lived and worked in Nogales, Arizona and lived with their three young children in an apartment there, while Juan José lived in a small room in Nogales, Sonora. Claudia brought the children over a few times a month. Juan José always wanted to see them more, but their lives were busy with work, school, and sports and, Claudia told me, there was another complication. We were talking on a day that Juan José had asked if I could go with Claudia, a friend, and the kids to pick up some large stereo speakers he had found on Craigslist in a town an hour from Nogales, in Arizona. He could resell them in Mexico for a profit. Claudia was telling me about how the children, especially Joselito, talked about not liking Mexico. Claudia told me (in Spanish), It’s quite a change for them. Especially this one [nodding back to Joselito]. He doesn’t like going to Mexico. He just doesn’t like it at all. I mean, we’ve been to other places [besides Nogales]—Magdalena, Sonoyta. Day trips, to go eat, get an ice cream. And that’s fine. But he doesn’t like Nogales. He thinks it’s ugly and dirty. That’s what he says about Mexico. That it’s ugly. For him Mexico is Nogales. I try to tell Juan José, because his feelings are hurt when Joselito doesn’t want to come visit. But I tell him to imagine what it’s like for Joselito. When he talks about Mexico, he says that the mountains make him feel closed in. Imagine that! He says that for him, Mexico feels like a jail. For him it’s really psychological. After about 45 minutes of conversation, Joselito piped in from the back seat: “Can you guys stop talking Spanish? Talk English—my head hurts.” We all laughed and Claudia and I switched to English. Claudia said, “You see what I mean!” For Joselito, Mexico 201 itself, the idea of Mexico, and Spanish, all compounded the psychological difficulty already inherent in the separation from his father that resulted from deportation. Long-Distance Family Care Families also circulated transnational care at a distance, improvising various forms of caring independent of or in addition to face-to-face visits. The process of redefining family relationships within the context of deportation was, particularly for those that had spent years in prison, another in a series of changes to family dynamics. Fernando for example told me, When I first came to Nogales, I didn’t have much contact with my family. I was in prison four-and-a-half years, but I got a lot of letters from my brothers and sisters and from my nephews. And when I came to Nogales, I would try to call my family about once a month and they would send some money. When I got money, I would just try to eat something with it. You have to make the money stretch. But I didn’t have enough to get a place to live. This occasional financial support indeed was not enough to secure stable housing, even when supplemented by income from the occasional jobs Fernando held as a uniformed supermarket security guard and parking lot attendant. Now approaching 60 years old, Fernando felt too old for going homeless for stretches, but at times had no other options. He was last deported in 2009—42 years since he moved to Superior, Arizona at age seven, with his family from rural Michoacán. He even checked into a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center for six months when he had nowhere else to turn. Fernando slept for months at a time under a tarp in the small clay and grass parking lot where he worked security. On a walk through the parking lot (since abandoned) one day, 202 he said “You had to be careful. There were always mosquitoes, ants, roaches, lizards. One time I woke up because I felt something on my face—it was a big lizard. And it was always wet sleeping outside.” On a long afternoon he and I spent together in 2014, Fernando said he had been very lonely, but dared hope that things might be turning up. A visit from his sister a couple of weeks earlier had animated him. He spoke nonstop about the day she had spent with him. And he was emphatic with me: “I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad that you can listen to me.” She had spent the day with him, talking. They had gone out to a quaint restaurant downtown. And she rented a one-room apartment for him, paying several months in advance. He showed me inside his spartan room, of maybe 300 square feet, and detailed everything she had given him: a small gas stove, a square fan, a tiny refrigerator, a small TV, and a new bed. He showed me a model sailboat he had made in prison and gave her years ago. His sister had brought it to Nogales, asking if he could re- string it and replace one of the torn cardboard sails. He spoke gravely about the importance of the repair job—then halted. His words failed him, but his ashen face left me thinking that he was moved to his core about the opportunity to fix it for her, one of few opportunities to have a meaningful connection with her. The infrequent and unpredictable nature of material support, when families even had the means to provide it, often decreased over time. Several deportees described the immediate support when the news of their deportation, in many cases a surprise, circulated among family, only to taper over time. Frodo, a souvenir shop owner who over the years had employed many deportees, told me about the phenomenon from his perspective. “They get deported and in one week they get a thousand dollars. From aunts, 203 uncles, parents, everyone. People send them money for a couple of months. Pero dejan de mandarles y ya.” But then they stop sending. For some deportees, physical and emotional separation from family led to acutely felt absence, emptiness, and longing. Frayed family ties became manifest in different ways. Burning Your Family and Frayed Ties Some transnational families reconfigured their relationships: moving to Mexico, effectuating a de facto deportation; arranging visits; or communicating, perhaps sporadically, through phone calls, texts, and social media. Others however, described ties as temporarily or permanently frayed. Some deportees had not had any contact with family in many years. Others had been back in touch with family after such a long time that there was the literal belief that deported loved ones had died—what else explained years and years without a telephone call or other contact? On three different occasions, people recounted calls home in which a loved one in the United States exclaimed something like: “You’re alive? We thought you were dead!” Deportees sometimes framed frayed ties as family members’ ignorance of hardships. Fantasma insisted to me several times that his family just did not understand the struggles of deportation to Mexico. “I tell them, ‘Walk a day in my shoes and you’ll see what it’s like.’” Yet Fantasma also admitted that at times he had brought on contention himself: “I burned my sister for 1,000 pesos. She wanted me to get a birth certificate for her brother-in-law.” Fantasma picked up the wire transfer and was supposed to go to the Registro Civil, a short walk from the Line, to request a replacement birth certificate to be sent to Los Angeles. But instead, Fantasma pocketed the money for 204 food and a heroin fixes. “She tried to call me twice, but I never answered her. I burned her.” I asked if she was still bitter. Fantasma shrugged his shoulders. One scorching afternoon in west Phoenix in 2014, I went to see Danny’s sister Laura at the house where they had grown up and where Laura was now raising her three children. The sun pounded the bus stop outside my hotel. When I arrived in her neighborhood, I walked by cute brick and stucco one-stories on quarter-acre lots with Spanish arches, plastic toddler slides in the yards, and desert landscaping with prickly pears, magueys, and occasional paloverde and velvet mesquite to shade the sidewalk. Laura wore black shorts and a black cotton tank top. Leather strap sandals wrapped around her ankles just above a cursive tattoo that I couldn’t make out. She talked matter- of-factly about how Danny had helped the family out when he was making a lot of money in the 1990s, as a mid-level drug trafficker, before his incarceration in 1998. He had purchased cars and houses for himself and family members. But now she had sent him a good deal of money since his deportation in 2013. She had become exasperated at his inability to find work and his frequent phone calls asking for money when Laura already struggled to make ends meet off of her salary as an office administrator in a family doctor’s office. Laura told me, You can’t keep picking leaves from the same tree and not expect to eventually come up empty. We want him to take steps to be successful. To get it together down there. Danny still lives in a fantasy of how his life was many years ago. He needs to realize the reality he is living now. He’s smart, and a problem solver. He says he can’t get a job because of his [prominent gang] tattoos—he’s not the only one with tattoos. He also says because of his age and not having the right 205 schooling, he can’t get a job. I have five kids and I figured out a way to work a job. And I’ve seen the guys that work in the curios. Some of them are deported too and have more tattoos than Danny does. Over Danny’s years living in Nogales, Laura struggled to provide Danny support, even when she was exasperated. She would emphasize that Danny needed to adjust to Mexico, be responsible, and work. Yet she continued to help him with food and paid the expensive intake fees when Danny went into a residential rehabilitation center for drugs and alcohol. Even when she was frustrated with Danny, Laura made clear, “With his circumstances now, he’s not any less family. I love him just the same. He’ll be a part of our family, always.” In cases of greater economic stability, the affective strains of separation manifest themselves in unique ways. Marcos told me about frustrations he was having with relationships in Mexico and the difficulty of not being able to see his mother to talk about them. He said, “Sometimes I feel like I don’t have any back up. I feel like an ant carrying 100 pounds on its shoulders. It’s all just inside me. My mom listens to me.” Marcos and his mother talk frequently on the telephone. “I tell her a lot.” Knowing that Marcos gets visits from his father and other family once in a while, I asked when she had last come to see him. Marcos said, “She can’t come down. She’s illegal.” “Oh shit, my bad,” I told him. He had mentioned her undocumented status a year or two earlier and I felt sheepish to have even asked about a visit. It was then over ten years since they had seen each other, separated by a complex set of legal exclusions. Transnational care work was highly gendered—the burden falling predominantly on women—both because of cultural expectations of male privilege and because men felt 206 ill-positioned to give care. Time and again men talked about the affective and material care work that their mothers, sisters, and daughters performed. Men infrequently spoke about their own obligations to give care, although I did sometimes witness them being affectionate or materially generous with sisters and brothers, romantic partners, parents, and their children. Rodrigo sent monthly remittances to the United States to help pay clothing, food, and living expenses for his ten-year-old daughter who would come and visit him once a year. Others had some contact with their children via occasional visits, telephone calls, or social media. Many men talked about having grown apart from their children during their years in prison—a separation that became only further exacerbated by deportation. Fantasma often reminisced about his days caring intimately for his teenage children when they were young, before he went to prison. He would prepare their formula, rock them, tuck them in bed, and, when they were older, attend their school activities, spend hours talking, and give frequent hugs. On a March day in 2016, Fantasma told me, “My son Abraham would say, ‘Dad, can I have some one-on-one time? Can you tell me about BA?’ That’s something we would say to each other. ‘BA’ stands for ‘Before Abraham’ [was born]. He liked to hear my stories, about back in the day. Kind of like you, he just likes to listen. So I told him a lot of stories.” Fantasma admitted feeling shame, however, at his incarceration, deportation, and itinerant life as a heroin user in Nogales. Although he talks with his children once in a while, he said that he feels awkward and that he is not meeting his responsibilities as a father. Fantasma’s inability to live up to the masculine ideal of “leader” complicates his conflicting desires to maintain contact and the shame he feels about the life he leads. 207 Local Care: Families and Deportee Care Communities After deportation, social isolation was a recurring theme. Although seven of my interlocutors managed to arrange co-residence with family members who relocate to Mexico, the other 50 did not. They crafted various relationships in Nogales and simultaneously struggled to greater or lesser degrees to manage feelings of loneliness. Often, people could trace their isolation back to experiences in prison. I stopped by the pharmacy where Marcos works one morning to see what he had been up to. Things were slow. During our conversation I mentioned to him that I had started volunteering with a legal advocacy group, providing legal orientations to immigrant detention center detainees in Eloy and Florence, Arizona. Talking about the conditions I had seen in detention centers and prisons struck a chord with Marcos. He had spent three months in an immigration detention center after trying to reunite with family, crossing clandestinely through the desert after his first deportation—his first time in Mexico in 18 years, at only 23 years old—and was sentenced to five months of federal prison for illegal reentry. He talked quietly about family separation in detention while organizing bottled water on a shelf: It’s horrible. You’re in there thinking you’ll never see your family again. I thought I’d never see my daughter again. It’s terrible. My eyes would tear up at night. They’d [other detainees] be like, “What? Are you crying?” I’d be like, “Shut the fuck up. You don’t even know.” Similar feelings of desolation persist for many after deportation. The day that Fernando showed me what his sister had gotten him for his rented room (above), the emotions conjured made him to cry. He told me how happy he was to talk with someone 208 and asked me for a hug. On another occasion, Rick told me simply, “I would get lonely! Especially on holidays and everything. You’re just there by yourself.” Loneliness was one reason people sought to share living arrangements. On two occasions people told me the opposite, that their preference was to live alone, couching it as a way to avoid problems. But others were adamant about the social importance of making relationships with others. Family Members’ Deportations and De Facto Deportations Family members are usually not deported together, with some exceptions for minors or married couples apprehended together when crossing clandestinely. Nevertheless, some of the people I interviewed lived with other family members that had also been deported. These deportations happened at different moments and possibly at different points of entry. But some family members found each other, often with the help of other family still in the United States, through calls, texts, or social media. Jorge and Ricky for example, brothers from East Los Angeles ages 36 and 30, rented an apartment with Jorge’s wife Pati, a woman from Nogales, and Jorge and Pati’s three-year-old daughter. Toward the end of my fieldwork, a third brother, the eldest, was also deported. As they were all in frequent contact with their mother and father in East Los Angeles, they were easily able to connect with one another. The eldest brother moved into the apartment and worked with Jorge and Ricky at their small auto mechanic shop. Luis, a 30-year-old who lived in Los Angeles with his mother Magdalena until she was deported in 2011, made a home with her in their second-story two-bedroom when he was also deported in 2015. 209 Rubén, originally from the capital of Querétaro, was deported to Nogales from Tucson in 2010 at age 32. He returned to Querétaro for one year. “I don’t have any family there. I mean, I was with my grandma, but that’s it. I didn’t know anyone.” When I asked Rubén why he had returned to Nogales, he gave a common answer, saying simply, “To be closer to my family.” Rubén worked in Nogales for a short time, but then got even closer to his mother and brothers, successfully crossing clandestinely back to Tucson. Just months later, however, Rubén was stopped by Tucson police. He thought that everything was fine, until he realized that his brother had an unautorized gun in the car. Rubén got a criminal conviction and was eventually deported again. He felt disoriented and isolated in Nogales: I didn’t know no one in Nogales man, no one! Aquí llegas y estás en terreno apache. [Here you’re on foreign soil.] But my homeboy came down from Tucson. I knew him from the joint [prison]. And his family had an expendio [small store] and they said I could work there. And we lived in this place right next to it. Rubén had a small social circle with his friend and his friend’s family. He eventually got a call center job that paid more than US$400 a month, enough to allow him to begin paying the mortgage on a small, worn but comfortable townhouse in a public housing development—that Luis called “the projects”—for US$40,000. He got married and had two daughters (and one more from a previous relationship). Rubén, his wife, and all three daughters lived together in 2014, when his mother was deported from Tucson and moved in. When we met in 2016, Rubén took me to his house to meet his family. I held and rocked Rubén’s four-month old son while looking around the compact, dark living room 210 adorned with plastic flowers, TV and X-Box, stringy-haired dolls and doll clothing here and there, Christmas lights and image of the Virgen de Guadalupe in one corner. Rubén told me how special it was to have his mother living with him, but that at first it was difficult. “When she got here, she was like, ‘This is it?’ She couldn’t believe it.” Rubén said it was hard at first to not be able to afford a nicer place. “I gotta’ be honest with you. I would look around and get really sad, really down. I would think, ‘What am I doing here?’ It was hard.” But Rubén went on to say that having a family made him want to “be a better person, get educated, be responsible, and pull myself up. Having this one [pointed to his son in my arms] made me realize that I have people behind me, and that I need to do good.” Sixteen of the 57 men I interviewed were born in Nogales. And although some had no contact with family over the decades, those that had maintained some contact sometimes then lived with family members. Gato, deported from Tucson in 2015 at age 37, lived with his mother in the small house where he had grown up until age 10 in the east hills, until moving to Nogales, Arizona in the third grade. Chef, 39 years old, was from a large nogalense family. Although he had lived in the United States for more than three decades, his LPR status and frequent visits to Mexico allowed him to maintain close with his family. After he was deported in is early 30s, he lived in a large house near downtown Nogales with several aunts, uncles, cousins, as well as his wife, from Nogales, their five-year-old daughter, and his young nephews and nieces. De facto deportation is when family members who are U.S. citizens, LPRs, or undocumented “choose” to relocate in order to live with deported loved ones (Boehm 2012, 134). From the people that I interviewed, I only heard of two such cases. Caín born 211 Chihuahua was deported in 2011. His younger sister and brother are both U.S. citizens, as is his mother. One cold, cloudy February morning outside of the Black Door massage parlor, where Caín works trying to get people through the door and occasionally running to a tiradero to get patrons small amounts of drugs, we began chatting. He had told me previously that his mother lived with him, that she comes and goes to North Carolina, and I asked how she had been. “She’s good. She crosses to the other side every day.” When I asked how it was that she lived with him, he told me that he like it. He said, I’ve done so much shit and my mom has always been by my side, through thick and thin. Now I just want her to see that it was all worth it. All the trouble that I was in. All the courts, all the problems. I just want to see her happy. Just have a smile on her face sometimes. I want her to understand that everything she did for me was worth it, and that I understand it now that I have sons. Do I want to be bad and keep doing the crimes I was doing? No. I’m done with all that. You grow up. All that is behind me. I do good now. I don’t care what people think about me working at the massage parlor. I’m doing good. I work hard and bring people in and earn my money. Caín’s notion of himself as a father and a grown man emphasize the importance of “doing good.” This is in part motivated by the care and nurturing that he credits to his mother and that he would like to repay. Caín also talked about wishing he could impart that care to his sons, now age 10 and 12, who live with their mother in North Carolina. He said, The last time I saw them I was in state lockup. They came and visited me, and they were tiny. I watched them walking away. In my head, they’re still tiny. But I 212 talked to their grandma a few months ago, my ex-mother-in-law. She sent me a picture of them now. They’re grown-up, so big. They’re so different than when I remember them. If I could talk to them, I would tell them not to get into gangs and all that stuff like I did. That’s the one thing I would want them to know. That they could do something else. They could be in the Marines or something. That’s what I wanted to do. Caín’s separation from family was partially mitigated by having his mother living with him in Nogales. But he was pained by his ongoing separation from his sons. I wondered what they thought about their father and what effects had flowed from Caín’s incarceration, which some have called “secondary prisonization” of family (Cuhna 2014, 223), or a sort of incarceration once removed. Caín said that despite the pain of separation, he understood his deportation and considered it justified. He explained his dispassionate assessment of state expulsion: I don’t blame the government for deporting me. I really don’t. I’m not a bad person, but I was charged with attempted homicide. I don’t blame the government for deporting people that commit crimes. I don’t want my kids to be around that. I don’t want my kids to grow up in a place with all kinds of criminals and everything. It struck me as paradoxical that the very self-transformation—“doing good,” “growing up,” “working hard,” and not “doing crimes”—that Caín described and that I had seen of his innocuous life, was what permitted him to internalize the logics of a state expulsion regime that continued to separate him from his sons. Shared Identities: “We Find Each Other Down Here” 213 Deported men framed connections with other deportees in terms of shared ways of understanding the world and collective life experiences. Not only were these affinities a basis for creating relationships, but they also demarcated identities that stood in contrast to the broader community of Nogales, called “the people here” or “the Mexicans here.” Collective acculturation processes, linguistic development, gang and prison lifeways, and experiences in U.S. communities as Latinx “other” produced collective identities among deportees in Nogales that demarcated them as outsiders within the broader community. On rare occasion, deported men knew one another in the United States: from school, the neighborhood, a family connection, or the prison yard. Javier, for example, had met Paco in their Phoenix neighborhood years earlier, had heard that Paco had been deported, and sought him out on Facebook while in Nogales. In other instances, there were chance meetings. Puppet and Dreamer, who hustled together on the Line, had met in an Orange County jail and both been deported to Tijuana years ago. In another instance, in 2015, I was caught off guard when, walking around the Line with Scooby, someone from down the block started calling him by name: “Scooby! Scooby!” Two men in their late 20s, wearing white T-shirts and khakis, came walking toward us. They gave Scooby energetic high fives and asked if Scooby remember them “de la pinta,” from prison. After a few moments the men left and Scooby said, laughing, “I don’t have no idea who they are! I don’t even remember them.” I never saw them again and did not know if they were just visiting, and crossing back into the United States, or had been deported. Much more commonly, men met in Mexico for the first time and developed relationships anchored in shared life experience and collective memory of the United 214 States. Alfonso talked about his relationships with people from the United States and spending time with deportees like Tommy, with you, whatever. That’s how I feel comfortable. We just always end up together. No sé, me entiendes, es que te sientes mucho más a gusto with your own people, with people that grew up there. Like you. With deportees and everything. ¿Me entiendes? [I don’t know, you know, you just feel more comfortable with your own people, with people that grew up there.] I asked if he could put his finger on why it was like that. Alfonso said, “That’s just how it is. You just feel more comfortable. They lived the same thing as you, you know? Con la gente de aquí, todo bien, pero [It’s all good with the people from here, but] people from up there just get you.” “Getting you” also meant fewer misconceptions or suspicions of people’s backgrounds, including why they went to prison. Wicho told me, “People around here don’t understand what you lived. Prison, your ‘hood, if you killed someone. I didn’t kill no one! Your whole life from up there, they don’t understand any of it.” People explained demarcations of difference in other terms as well. On several occasions deportees articulated a “mentality” that marked them as different. Damien said, “Everything’s different down here. I don’t have the mentality. You know, the Mexican mentality.” Another time, hanging out with sellers at a souvenir shop on the Line, Indio told me about the broader community of Nogales, “It’s our people but it’s not our people. I mean we’re from here, but we’re not.” To which Milton added, “Our mentality is different.” 215 Lexical Distinctions Deportees described their social positioning as “other” in Nogales in terms of gendered social categories. I heard some labels more frequently than others, and they all had meanings that had shifted from earlier in their etymological trajectories. Pocho circulated broadly in various linguistic domains and connoted a non-local variety of Spanish marked by code switching and syntactical, phonetic, and lexical constructions used by heritage Spanish speakers in the United States.46 Cholo was also used frequently, with a pejorative valence, to describe an urban, masculine, working-class, gang- influenced Mexican-American “street” culture identified with certain aspects of youth clothing, music, and art. Pinto, much less frequent, was a label for prisoner or former prisoner that deportees themselves sometimes used. The term pinto incorporates a bilingual play on words. It is at once short for penitenciario (penitentiary), as well as the vernacular past participle form of pintao’ (painted or marked) in reference to prison tattoos, imbuing it with the potential for counterhegemonic transgression (Olguín 2010, 30). Chicano was likewise uncommon but referred to Mexican-American prison gang members—who may be Mexican-born but Chicano identified, as many people I worked with were. Prison gang members used the term to distinguish themselves from Paisas, or culturally “Mexican” U.S. prison gang members. Paisas themselves and municipal police in Nogales who surveilled and often exploited deportees used Chicano and plasticón (plastic person, inauthentic) as derogatory designations for English-speaking deportees who were “not Paisa enough,” or “not Mexican enough.” Plasticón was a word only used by Paisas themselves to refer to Chicanos as English-speaking gang members who are 216 “wanna’ be’s,” “soft,” and “inauthentic Mexicans”—not real gang members. I was struck by the potency of these social categories. Street or prison gang affiliation in the United States, it was explained to me over and over and I witnessed through the circulations of care, mattered little after deportation. Cholos, pintos, and plasticones were outsiders in Nogales. Despite the connections wrought for many through shared gang and prison experiences, deportee networks also reflected intragroup heterogeneity. Paco, Javier, and Danny, from the opening of the chapter, had several social experiences and aspects of their demographic backgrounds in common. They had all been born in northern Mexico in the early 1970s, moved with working-class families to Phoenix neighborhoods by age six, gone to U.S. public schools, participated in (different) street gangs as young people, worked and had children, and belonged to (the same) Arizona prison gang before being deported in the early 2010s. Yet most care relationships in fact were marked by their diversity. Often the most important commonality was the significant portions of their youth and adulthood in the United States. Care Community Diversity Fernando had been in prison but never identified with gangs or signifiers such as street or prison gang tattoos or hip-hop music and clothing styles. He expressed reticence about being around deported former gang members. Born in 1960, Fernando was 16 years older than the mean age of my interlocutors. He was also one of only two interviewees that was clearly Spanish dominant, a reflection, in part I assumed, of the mostly Mexican and Mexican-American demographics of the small Arizona town where he had lived since age seven. 217 The handful of times that I saw Fernando, he was dressed more conservatively, not unlike many men in Nogales, in slacks and tucked in button-up shirt. On this day, he wore forest green trousers, a leather belt, a polyester green-and-white striped polo buttoned to the top and tucked into his pants. I noticed his gray, wool socks and thought that they must be hot. When talking about how he thinks people perceive him on the streets, his perception was very different from most deportees I had spoken with: “I think people see me as normal. I dress like a normal guy and I talk like a normal guy.” I thought to myself that were I to profile him on the street by his dress and his very strong Spanish skills, at first blush I would think he was someone who had lived in Mexico for much longer than a mere 14 out of his 54 years of life. Fernando said it is easy to recognize other deportees because of their tattoos, how they dress, and their English. He mused out loud about not having much in common with many deportees. I have always been a church type guy. And I don’t like all the swearing. When I’m around Tony [another deportee] and his friends it’s too much for me. I can be around just Tony. That’s okay. But with his friends—they’re crazy. I like Tony, but not his company. I have to be alone. I’m always by myself. It’s easy to get in trouble when you’re around those guys. Nonetheless, I would run into Fernando at Tony’s house. And I did not know Fernando to have relationships, beyond work with nogalenses. In fact, despite his trepidation about other deportees, he talked about his shared identification with them, and of perceiving a marked distinction between nogalenses and himself: “They [nogalenses] are different. They treat each other different. They have different ways of acting, of thinking. We don’t have anything in common with them.” 218 Dora, one of the few deported women that I spent time with on several occasions and interviewed, had her own take on the similarities between herself and others who had grown up in the United States and on the unifying power of commonalities. We spoke at Danny’s house, on his stained purple, green, and yellow sofa. Dora wore dark blue jeans, a short sleeve blouse with horizontal purple and black stripes and sequins that spelled “Diva” across the front. Her straight, shoulder-length hair was pulled back in a bun. She wore dressy sandals that exposed pink toenails. Dora, as usual, was reflective yet warm. She laughed heartily, showing straight, white teeth, when Danny or Paco would clown— improvising parody rap lyrics or making ridiculous faces—in order to make her laugh. Dora was born in Mexico City in 1989 and moved to San Jose, California with her family in 1991. She said about her recent years since deportation to Nogales, Before I moved here I didn’t know what cholos were like. I didn’t know they were so funny! [Tilts her head toward Paco and Danny.] They’re more like me. I can relate to them. It’s like being in the States. I can relate to white people. I liked how they were, they were nice. Most of my friends are skaters. Dora’s reference to “skaters” refers to an urban and suburban youth subculture revolving around the daredevil stunts of skateboarding and also the social relations, racialized as white, that emerge from spending time in authorized or unauthorized skate areas. This identification with “skaters” was associated with the move Dora’s family make “out of the Mexican neighborhood” when she was young and attending a mostly white school in a mostly white neighborhood. “If I saw a group of cholos coming, I would cross the street.” Dora described herself as “a total rocker,” someone who listened to rock music (and not Mexican regional music or hip-hop) and wore large gauges in her ears and had 219 nose and lip piercings. After deportation, she said, “When I first got here I couldn’t stand Mexican music. Everything was banda, norteño, rancheras. Now I’m proud of my Mexican culture.” Although Dora understands some Spanish, she speaks almost none. She articulates pride in her Mexican heritage and yet communicates much more easily, for cultural and linguistic reasons, with other deportees. Fantasma put deportee solidarity to me in another way. On a crystal clear, temperate March day in 2016, told me “I don’t know what it is, but we always find each other. There’s maybe 100 of us [deportees in Nogales]. Well, probably 200 or more, but 100 right now that I could tell you. And we all know each other. It’s like we all know each other.” I knew there were many, many more deported people living in Nogales than what Fantasma had estimated. Nevertheless, Fantasma’s point was well taken. In fact, it felt the same to me, that I knew all of the deportees in Nogales that had spent most of their lives in the United States—which of course I did not. Alfonso echoed Fantasma’s sentiment about the density of the social networks deportees created among themselves: “We mostly hang out with each other. I mean, we speak English [pause].” I asked what they had in common. English of course, but what else? “They’re your homie, your friend, your brother. It’s people that [pause] they’re more normal. They’re a lot more like you.” Alfonso put a pop culture spin on what forms the basis for relationships. “It’s all that stuff we grew up with. Thunder Cats, Three’s Company. Just everything you have in common. And you can talk to them just normal, like you and I are.” Other tight-knit groups were more homogeneous, however. Rabbit and Rodolfo shared a small apartment in a low-lying neighborhood west of downtown. They both received several hundred dollars a month from their mothers in Phoenix, even though 220 they were struggling to make ends meet. Rabbit’s mother, for example, worked as a house cleaner. But with the remittances sent, they were able to pay their rent, eat, and have stylish clothing and cell phones to be in touch with family via Facebook. They were born in Sonora and Chihuahua in the early 1990s and taken to the United States before age four. Rabbit was deported in 2012 and Rodolfo in 2015. But while Rodolfo was very involved in an evangelical Christian church while in the United States, Rabbit was very involved in gang life and had gone to an Arizona state prison for several months. When I spent time with them at Danny’s house and interviewed them, Rodolfo wore a knit polo shirt with colorful horizontal stripes, blue jeans, and white basketball shoes. His hair was closely cropped, and he had no tattoos on his exposed arms. He had begun using marijuana and then methamphetamines in ninth grade and was selling drugs to make ends meet. But, after that, Rodolfo stopped using meth, something he credited to his frequent involvement in church activities and enrollment in a charter school linked to the church. Rabbit, on the other hand, considered gang life to have organized much of his life in north Phoenix. He described his time hanging out with others from his neighborhood gang, Locos 13, getting in fights, avoiding police, and trafficking guns. On the day Rabbit and I did a life history interview, he wore black jeans, a black t-shirt with white horizontal stripes, and black and purple Nike basketball shoes. Rabbit had grown out his dark hair, which now creeped over his ears, and no longer sported a cholo shaved head. Despite his unexceptional dress and hair, however, Rabbit tattoos reflected an embodied a gang identity. He had a large 602 (Phoenix area code and gang identifier) on his left hand and AZ on his right. On his baby face, next to his large, green eyes, he had a teardrop tattoo on one side, “earned” from the gang by carrying out a 221 gang-prescribed violent act. He had three dots on the other, signifying “Mi vida loca,” or gang membership. Elaborate flowers and skeletons adorned his forearms and he had several names written in cursive script on his forearms and across his neck and Adam’s apple. Rabbit and Rodolfo presented contrasting expressions of masculinity but, nevertheless, developed a close relationship in Nogales. They ate together, watched TV, smoked marijuana, and talked and joked for hours. They often shared the money they earned in Nogales or had sent in remittances as well—even talking to each other’s mothers, in Phoenix, on the telephone to arrange remittances and to check in generally. While deportees’ social identities in Nogales marked them as outsiders, they obviously had daily contact with people in the community and some deportees developed closer relationships with nogalenses than others. They had nogalense bosses, landlords, neighbors, acquaintances, and friends. Although I heard some community members call deportees malandros, maleantes, malandrines—troublemakers, criminals—and other names, some people I knew simply did not subscribe to facile stereotypes. Javier’s boss at the car wash, Don Toño, had been born in Nogales in the 1940s, although his parents were from Mexico City and his father, born in 1890, had attended the military academy and fought in the Revolution. Don Toño had a well-manicured salt and pepper mustache, slicked-back white hair and always tucked his t-shirt into his jeans. One morning in 2017 he was outside the carwash entrance as I passed by. I said good morning and asked if Javier was around. He said that the son of a bitch hadn’t shown up yet. (“No ha llegado el desgraciado.”) Javier had worked for Don Toño off and on for years, and I knew Javier was thankful for the many second chances he had received, even after not showing up for weeks at a time. I told Don Toño that he seemed more open to deportees than others. He 222 had hired Javier, and given him second chances, despite Javier’s pocho Spanish and gang tattoos, not to mention his penchant for not showing up or smoking marijuana in the storage shed. Don Toño said without hesitation: “He’s an honorable person. He’s got to get it together. But that son of a bitch is a good person. I look at the person. If someone is messing up, it’s different, I put a wall between us.” (“Es que es muy noble. Tiene que ponerse las pilas. Pero es linda persona el cabrón. Yo veo a la persona. Si la persona anda acá, bien malandro y todo, entonces pongo un muro entre la persona y yo.”) Four of my interlocutors had gotten married to women from Mexico (three from Nogales and one from Mexico City living in Nogales). Two of them had young children and were very active caregivers: feeding, changing diapers, walking, dropping off at a local nursery. They had lived in Nogales for several years each and all four had stable work and housing situations. Jorge and I would often go to Alfredo’s small apartment on Sunday or Monday nights to watch NFL football games. Jorge’s wife, Verónica, from Nogales, would usually join us, still in her department store uniform, after work. She was quiet, but would occasionally make jokes, and was always friendly. Usually, the game was just background noise. The four of us would drink beer, order pizza or hot wings, and take turns playing with their three-year-old daughter—although Jorge and Verónica were both affectionate and attentive to her, her questions, and to feeding her dinner. Jorge, Alfredo, and I would gossip and make jokes in English, then sheepishly apologize to Verónica for being inconsiderate and be sure to translate for her. In the case of other nogalenses, their ostracized identities, for example as heroin users, configured the relationships they would have with deported heroin users. People confirmed this for me on a handful of occasions 223 in which they talked explicitly about the unique communities that form around procuring syringes and needles, cooperating to inject one another, and connecting with a heroin supplier in the first place (see Bourgois and Schonberg 2009). But despite the occasional instances of personal affection or strong work or personal relationships, their infrequency spoke volumes about the marginalization that deported people felt. I was often asked what I was doing spending time with riff-raff. And when walking down the street, I sensed many more stares and disapproving looks when I was with deportees than when I was alone. Of the 11 times municipal police officers stopped me for questioning and frisked me while on routine patrols, 10 of those times I was with deported men. And beyond social stigma, cultural and linguistic understanding complicated relationships. Several deportees told me that they did not think they would have a romantic companionate partner from Nogales. On New Year’s Eve in 2016, Alfredo told me, You know one thing I noticed about girls down here? I can’t even talk to them! I don’t know what to say. They don’t understand anything I say. You know how up there, you would say like a line from a song to be funny or something. Here they just look at you; they don’t even get it. I’m telling you, up there, I could talk to a girl all day: what do you think about this? What you think about that? What color do you like to paint your nails? How far away do you think the moon is? How long would it take to get there? I swear to god, girls just laugh. We can go all day in English. But down here it’s totally different. Or I don’t know how to talk to them, or something. There’s just no connection. 224 Alfredo echoed on a separate occasion what several other deportees had told me about relationships in Mexico: “What the hell do I say? Up there I know what the hell to say! Down here I don’t know.” This difficulty connecting with people in companionate or even intimate situations constrained opportunities to build affective intimacy. Prison, Residential Spaces, and Domestic Lives Deportees’ living spaces after deportation are, similarly to prisons, an important site from which to trace circulations of care. Co-residential spaces, across societies and within various social strata, shape and are shaped by social, political, and cultural configurations (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Lévi-Strauss 1982). Built environments and their inhabitants co-create the everyday rhythms of life that generate social continuity. As social organizers, residences provide gathering places, storage spaces, and common eating and sleeping areas, and symbolize alliances. They also constitute fundamental nodes for distributing care (see Figure 21). Figure 21. Two-bedroom deportee house in the east hills. 225 In Nogales, deportees shared a variety of living spaces: small houses; rented rooms; rented studio, one-, or two-bedroom apartments; or abandoned houses. Built residential structures warm bodies on frigid nights; shade bodies from scorching afternoons; dry bodies during desert downpours; and hide bodies from the police, army, the mafia, and others. They offer psychological refuge; a sense of physical security; and their size, location, material type, and state of repair reflect social status. Within the walls of living spaces men circulate affective, material, and symbolic care. They joke, tell stories, flatter, share local knowledge, gossip, give advice, antagonize, and aggravate. Deported men trade, barter, sell, or give away clothing, food, cigarettes, drugs, cell phone minutes, jewelry, cologne, toiletries, electronics, auto parts, tattoos, pesos, and dollars. They provide a space for people to demonstrate their friendship, solidarity, and brotherhood and occasionally enmity and hostility (see Figure 22). Figure 22. Shipping bay converted into a studio for a single deportee occupant. 226 Welcomes in Nogales mirrored prison experiences in some ways. Among deportees who were prison gang members, social hierarchies based on street reputations, “work” people had put in for the gang (e.g. in drug sales operations, participating in riots), and neighborhoods people were from organized the types of welcomes people received. And the mechanics of welcomes themselves were similar to those of the streets or prison spaces. People were given a proper verbal greeting, akin to “What’s up,” or “Qué onda,” and a handshake—open right hands slap sideways, palm to palm, followed by a light bump, straight on, fist to fist—and offered something to eat or drink, often a “soup” (instant noodles) and a Coke. Group and individual acceptance and rituals of welcome were an important part of both prison life and the ways people came to share living spaces in Nogales (see Figure 23). Figure 23. Shared deportee studio. The intimate, shared living of prison co-residence influenced deportees’ everyday intimate living in Nogales—reflected for example in the fact that many actually called 227 their co-residents “celly”—and the ways men reconstructed domestic lives in Nogales. Choice in co-residents, for example, often depended on knowing the masculine prison codes of respect and firmeza, or trust. People occasionally lived with others that they had known before deportation. In a discussion about his living situation, Fantasma explained it in relation to his familiarity with homosocial prison living thusly: “Pues es que te cambia. Estar tantos años ahí, te cambia mucho la vida. Y llega un momento en que prefieres estar casi con puros hombres.” [Prison living changes you. Being there for some many years changes your life a lot. You end up preferring to be with guys.] One day in 2016, Fantasma was talking about someone who had moved into his tiny apartment with him, referring to him as “my celly.” I told him that it seemed many aspects of post-prison life were begun, or reinforced and compounded, in prison. He smiled, seemingly amused by this insight, and immediately added, “My celly wears chanclas [sandals] from prison! And he watches a TV from prison!” I asked if he had brought it down to Mexico—prison TVs are usually heavy. Fantasma said that he had seen this prison TV on sale second hand somewhere in Nogales and bought it. Nostalgia for prison chanclas and TVs aside, Fantasma agreed that living in close spaces with a celly, having routines, or programs, that include exercise, what Fantasma calls a “prison shower”—bathing with sink water—and eating soups, were integral to his prison life and everyday living after deportation. Deportees’ foodways reflect collective and personal preferences; the means available for purchasing ingredients or prepared food; and subjectivities shaped by social class, gender, and heritage ethnic identity. Food nutrients, and the making and sharing 228 food, are critical to everyday living. Beyond that, however, shared foodways symbolically link deported people through common cultural practices (see Figure 24). Figure 24. Fantasma prepares a meal. Overcoming Prison Animus Critically, Lopez-Aguado points to the post-prison maintenance of these gang identities—as Sureños or New Mexican Mafia—in the United States in home communities and on “the streets.” The logics of solidarity with those who share group identity in order to achieve collective security persist after release. Boundary maintenance on the streets becomes internalized through various generations of criminalization and is reinforced even in juvenile facilities and local jails who similarly segregate people according to race and region irrespective of an actual gang affiliation. Danny, of the New Mexican Mafia from Phoenix, and Miguel, a Sureño from Los Angeles were from rival prisons. They would often joke about having to kill one another 229 if they met on a prison yard. As another deportee put it to me: “Out on the yard, we probably wouldn’t talk. He’s from this one group, and I’m from another. But it don’t matter down here. Here, we’re all plasticones [laughing].” A contrasting situation also highlights this dynamic. Scooby had problems with some Nogales cholos—who had never lived in the United States—that he allowed to stay with him in the large, fire-damaged abandoned house where he slept up in the west hills. He said, “They were like window washer guys and they were staying here. But they were too hard.” I asked Scooby what he meant. “They’re just,” Scooby searchs for the right word, “They’re just sprung.” They were too sprung, too insolent, for Scooby. He went on to explain that they were messy and would not pick up after themselves. They showed disrespect. Scooby ended up asking them to leave, saying he could not be around people like that. Fantasma mentioned being from the same gang might facilitate a good living situation, but that the fact of being a deportee was paramount: We’re all deportees. We all came from up there, so we have that in common. Down here, it doesn’t matter where you come from. I mean, a Sureño might be a total dickhead. We might not get along at all, but I might get along with another guy, from another ranfla, from another clique [gang]. So he might be my celly or whatever. It just depends. Over time, multiple institutions of state control reconfigure men’s social lives: jails, criminal and immigration prisons, and the physical expulsion and confinement of deportation. While incarcerated, men are grouped and clustered, ferried and shuttled, hustled and bustled, herded and prodded, from rec yard to cell, to mess hall, to jobs in the kitchen, the laundry, mopping long corridors, or maintaining the yard. They are also 230 removed, barricaded, and separated, locked up and locked down, and confined to a SHU or an isolation cell, “the hole.” These spaces structure social relations in particular ways that in turn continue to shape people’s everyday lives even when they are no longer physically confined there. Conclusions This chapter demonstrated how transnational and local care become central to forging ahead with life. Care practices are highly variable across societies and are culturally mediated. The expectations and practices of caregiving for deported men are shaped by their collective experiences and acculturation processes in the United States, including sometimes gang and prison living, families in the United States, social marginalization in Mexico, and ability to recognize and develop relationships of care with one another. Men’s understandings of themselves and their lifeworlds, as men, are critical to the ways they conceive of care obligations and the circulation of care. Moreover, deported men’s mutual recognition of U.S. Latinx gang and prison identities permits them to come together and circulate care. Importantly, regional and gang animus is overcome through these care relationships, suggesting the robustness of U.S. Latinx identities themselves. Transnational and local care circulations demonstrate the potency and variability of human connection and blur notions of care as based exclusively or predominantly in biological families. Fantasma once said about two cellies he had, “I guess they’re family. I would have to say that they’re family. They’re there in tough situations. And the way we live together, so close. They’re family.” Danny put it another way: 231 I think the people around you make you what you are, they give you that image. Down here, it changes. I think you leave behind a lot of what you are, because you’re not with your family every day. You don’t raise your head off the pillow in the morning and give your people [loved ones in Phoenix] a hug and do stuff with them. If you’re not with them every day, how do they continue to mean what they did before? It’s funny man. I’m actually closer to people down here. Examining moral economies of care and being “close to people” helps push studies of human mobilities beyond political and legal realms to understand people’s affective and embodied experiences. Moreover, analyses of circulations of care highlight the active, agentive subjective and intersubjective experiences of deportees. Far from being merely passive victims, they exert agency as they strive to innovate creative connections with others. These creative connections are formed through various cultural ties, among them to U.S. civic cultural and U.S. popular culture, to which we turn our attention in the next chapter. Notes 44 On September 25th, 2016 Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, then a candidate, held a campaign rally. The plaza was packed with hundreds of attendees. 45 On the Line, I saw deportees wearing prison-issued jumpsuits and Crocs or sandals on a handful of occasions. Often, deportees arriving at the Kino Border Initiative’s dining hall are clad in prison garb, but they are issued a change of clothing to change before leaving. Being marked as formerly incarcerated may increase vulnerability to the Mafia, as discussed in Chapter II. 46 Sociologist José Manuel Valenzuela Arce (2003) suggests that “pocho” has a Sonoran origin. Etymologically, it migrated to Spanish from the Opata word for “short” and is a derivation of “potzico,” which means “cut the weed” or “pull it from the roots” (Valenzuela Arce 2003, 39). 232 CHAPTER VI “AMERICANNESS”: CULTURE, SELF-REPRESENTATION, AND NATIONAL BELONGING “I grew up the same as everyone else,” Marcos told me. “I went to school there [in the United States] from kindergarten through 12th grade. I played football… I used to volunteer at the senior center. I would go and work there every Saturday and help out with whatever. They didn’t pay me nothing. I was just volunteering.” Marcos and I were sharing a laid-back, sunny but temperate February afternoon. He had been praising Hacksaw Ridge, Lone Survivor, and other war movies he had seen recently when the conversation turned to Marcos’s youth in the United States and volunteerism. Around us the Line pulsated as usual: money changers sidled up to car windows with pesos or dollars; taxis blared horns; U.S. tourists sauntered down jagged sidewalks, clutching schlocky plastic-beaded bracelets or, occasionally, fine Mexican pottery; the aroma of a Chinese buffet wafted from down the block. In one of a line of boxy curio shops, Marcos sat behind the counter, turned out in a Chicago Cubs cap, blue Cubs jersey, and dark jeans. I rested on a squat wicker bench, my back slackened against the stucco wall. As usual, he was easy to talk to, considerate, and soft-spoken unless vociferating about the National Football League or Major League Baseball. Marcos brought up youth experiences because he had been rankled a few days earlier by a Mexican-American day-tripper from Arizona, “a Chicano” in Marcos’s words. The day-tripper had come by the shop, struck up a conversation, and told Marcos about his support for recently inaugurated President Trump, expressing intense national pride. Marcos told me, 233 He’s like, “I’m 100 percent American. Of Hispanic descent, but American.” I was like, “And where do you think you came from four or five generations back? Where do you think all your aunts and uncles are from?” I mean, come on. Just because he was born there [in the United States], now he thinks he’s more American than everyone. Marcos’s rejoinder challenged the notion that birth within territorial borders is sufficient to underpin the claim to be (U.S.) “American” and suggested that a narrow focus on birthplace ignored a broader confluence of factors. His invocation of inter-generational cultural heritage suggested that Americanness can be achieved despite family migration histories which cross national boundaries. Indeed, Marcos’s claim in the chapter’s opening about “growing up the same as everyone else” in the United States is a forceful declaration of community and national affinity, collective belonging, and shared Americanness. Such pronouncements of Americanness, a concept developed in this chapter, suggest compelling questions. Despite nativist portrayals of noncitizens as perpetual outsiders, might some deported men claim cultural Americanness? If so, how? And how might culture be productively examined without consuming immigration discussions with distinctions between cultural similarity or difference? The noun “Americanness” captures my interlocutors’ sense of themselves as possessing a (U.S.) American substance (see Leinaweaver 2013) while reflecting an ambivalence toward claiming to be (U.S.) “American.”47 Although some occasionally self-identified as “American,” most did not. Here, the concept that I call “Americanness” is borne of assertions of cultural belonging to the United States, made through claims 234 such as Marcos’s about “growing up the same” or declarations of being “like an American” and more broadly through popular culture and civic culture proficiency. Circumstances socially coded as “non-American”—Mexican birth, racialization as nonwhite in the United States, and recognition in the United States as ethnic Other— produce equivocation around embracing an identification as (U.S.) “American.” Categorical self-identification with the more slippery notion of “Americanness,” however, evinced strong perceptions of U.S. cultural belonging. Popular culture and civic culture comprise two cultural literacies through which deported men assert Americanness. Marcos was one of many who expressed a strong sense of Americanness through the popular entertainment culture in which he had been immersed his entire life, such as the Hollywood films and major professional sports leagues mentioned here. His pop culture literacy validated, for him, U.S. cultural membership. Civic culture did as well, as Marcos asserted in his conversation with the day-tripper the fact of U.S. public school attendance and explicitly drew on notions of civic participation and volunteerism that were critical to Marcos’s own sense of U.S. national identity. In fact, through his enumeration of civic engagements, Marcos was taking exception to the implication that he himself was less (U.S.) “American” than the day-tripper, merely because of the happenstance of his birth in Mexico. Marcos continued, I told him that I would pick up trash on the highway. And I gave out boxes of food at the food bank. We used to have to check their papers to make sure they were eligible for the boxes. I did all of that. And this guy never did that! He sits around smoking weed. He’s so lazy! So I asked him, “What do you do for other 235 people?” I wasn’t just up there selling drugs or being a negative influence on the community. I did more for the community than he did! Marcos directly confronted the day-tripper regarding community contributions. Marcos took gratification in his extensive volunteer record and community participation. Moreover, what is most noteworthy here is not Marcos’s volunteerism, but the connection that he makes between his literacy in the civic values that he deems to be American, such as volunteerism, and his own Americanness. This chapter explores the ways that deportees understand cultural proficiency to underpin their belonging to the United States. Although some deploy the adjective “American,” as I briefly describe below, I am concerned here with getting beyond these labels to more indirect yet equally potent assertions of U.S. belonging through the resonance that civic culture and popular culture has for my interlocutors. It draws on my interlocutors’ relationships to civic and popular cultures and the conception of themselves as having Americanness. The importance of a focus on cultural identification is to consider subjectification within a cultural milieu in a new light. It momentarily removes direct attention from legal subjectivities and permits contemplation of the role of mass culture in producing belonging among its consumers. Complex matrices of belonging of course can never disentangle the variegated legal statuses—e.g. citizenship, legal permanent residence, unauthorized—from social identities such as race, gender, social class (Coutin 2003, 58). But highlighting cultural membership is a temporary reprieve from the obsession with legal status that creeps in to considerations of the social and cultural dimensions of belonging. By temporarily isolating legal from cultural subjectivities as a conceptual 236 exercise, when seeing them again as inextricably enmeshed a possibility has been created to reconsider the relationship between cultural belonging and access to formal legal recognition. The chapter proceeds by first outlining concepts related to identification and mass culture. Then, two ethnographic and theory sections explore civic culture and popular culture in the context of national belonging and an anticolonial Chicanx approach to avoiding cultural essentialism. Next, I discuss potential pitfalls of introducing culture into discussions of immigration and its potential for articulating an inclusionary stance toward noncitizen legal recognition and then make brief concluding statements. Cultural Imagination, Self-Representation, and Mass Culture The discussion that follows relies conceptually on cultural imagination, self- representation, and mass culture. Cultural imagination refers not to imagination as creative power or fancy, but rather as memory—a harkening back to images, concepts, or objects (see Scher 2003, 16 on “reproductive imagination” and the Trinidadian transnation; see also Appadurai 1996, 5-11). Cultural imagination is not, however, a sphere only of an individual. It is an act of remembering meaningful cultural forms that hold significance for a collective and are facilitated by institutionalized ritual (e.g. the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance) or mass media (e.g. the televised dropping of the apple in Times Square at the new year). I emphasize deported men’s cultural imagination as a way that they discursively link memories of cultural forms to the nation. And by seeing themselves as connected to others for whom those cultural forms also have resonance, they thus triangulate their belonging to both the nation (“America”) and to (U.S.) Americanness. 237 It should be pointed out that reliance on consciously held beliefs of cultural belonging through a reified, monolithic “culture” risks reinforcing a narrowly essentialist and ethno-nationalist politics (Scher 2003, 4) that is frequently deployed by anti- immigrant activists. Yet I combine ethnographic insight of deportees’ deliberate deployments of civic culture and popular culture as evidence of their Americanness with the unconscious ways in which they relate to these mass cultural forms and inadvertently buttress claims of U.S. belonging. Moreover, I argue in the concluding discussion for immigration policies that enshrine legal inclusion on social and cultural grounds yet do not create a cultural test as a requirement for legal recognition. I advocate for immigrant inclusion on non-cultural ethical grounds, for example fleeing violence and poverty or seeking family reunification or a better life. Self-representation—identification based on interpersonal differentiations— involves delineating boundaries between groups and recognizing oneself as belonging (La Barbera 2015, 2). Self-representation is contextually contingent and mutable, shifting over time and different social circumstances. Social visibility, recognition by others that one does or does not belong to a group, is critical to how individuals negotiate self- representations. Moreover, there is a moral and political significance to my interest here in the self-representation of deported people—that deportees’ voices are seldom heard. Popular and scholarly discussions of noncitizen identity, belonging, membership, and inclusion rarely incorporate perspectives of noncitizens. Privileging their voices—a motivation of much ethnographic research with migrants and displaced persons—is a response that attempts to simultaneously enrich the theoretical conversation while also redressing social and political subordination. Here my point is, in short, that a social 238 constructionist approach to cultural identifications is crucial to drawing attention to deportees’ discursive production and eschewing fixed identities to instead consider the way multiple self-representations are constituted, expressed, and remade in relation to the surrounding world (see Butler 1990; Goffman 1959). Multiple identifications are the result of complex self-representation that perceive a confluence of identities and simultaneous belonging to many groups (see Judith Butler’s “matrix of intelligibility” 1990, 24). They all also labeled themselves “Mexican.” When talking about life in Nogales, deportees drew distinctions between themselves and “the Mexicans down here;” however, when reflecting on life in the United States, “Mexican” was usually deployed as a marker of the way they were perceived in their Arizona and California communities. (“Latino” and “Hispanic” were rarely used; “Chicano” was somewhat common.) I use “Americanness” generally to get beyond these labels (which I occasionally use when quoting a deportee) and to denote my interlocutors’ sense of their approximation to a (U.S.) “American” identity (see Coutin 2013 on “approximate citizenship”). Jessaca Leianaweaver’s (2013, 67) notion of “national substance” is useful in conceiving of how people make sense of an assemblage of national identity markers through national labels. National substance, according to Leinaweaver is the aggregation of “kinship, religion, ethnicity, culture, and belonging” that can be glossed through a national identification (in her case, “Peruvianness”). In draw from Leinaweaver’s broader concept of “national substance” while focusing narrowly on civic culture and popular culture. 239 How do deported men highlight Americanness? In constructing and asserting their selfhood in relation to culture—“a system of symbolic and expressive structures” (Danesi 2015, 3)—my interlocutors draw from the vast U.S. cultural archive. They invoke the breadth of culture, diffuse and geographically widespread or eclectic and narrowly localized, which they deem uniquely “American” and that includes particular social behaviors and norms, political organization, expressive culture, and folk culture, as well as the two mass culture forms examined here. In attending here to civic culture and popular culture as two important forms of mass culture, I follow John Durham Peters (1997), who dubs mass culture “middle range.” Peters describes a tripartite taxonomy in which the two outer ends are, first, culture as “a whole way of life”—the sum total of everyday human actions and experiences—and, second, culture as “high art”—the elitist, Euro-centric artistic works canonized as perennial (1997, 82-83). The latter is the purview of classical studies and some corners of cultural studies, while everyday culture has traditionally been the raison d’être of folklore and anthropology. The middle range is often neglected by ethnographers, Peters suggests, because of its broad circulation and lack of rootedness in place, its alienating disconnect from those who consume it, and its nakedly capitalist orientation (1997, 83). Mass culture is not as soulless as it may seem, as the cultural imagination of my interlocutors demonstrates, as their relationship with it is a critical aspect of their Americanness. Here, the civic culture discussion focuses on national symbols, nationalist historiography, civic tropes, and national icons, while popular culture, here, comprises commercially produced movies, television, books, and music. I focus on these most 240 salient media because my interlocutors did not as closely engage newspapers and FM or AM radio. Internet access in Nogales was infrequent for a few of my interlocutors and nonexistent for others. Many were incarcerated in U.S. prisons before widespread internet proliferation and so felt that the opportunity to learn to navigate it had passed them by. Even those that had become digitally literate in the United States or Mexico were mostly unfamiliar with the newer, decentralized cultural production of vloggers, livecasters, singers, and podcasters via YouTube, Instagram, iTunes, or similar sites. These were completely irrelevant to their lives, or at least less important than Hollywood studios, Nashville labels, Manhattan publishing houses and other centers of mass culture production and distribution. Civic Culture Fluency in national symbols, nationalist historiography, civic tropes, and national icons, which I will broadly refer to as civic culture, is acquired throughout childhood and adolescence and is a critical link to cultural imagination. Civic culture becomes ingrained through its prominence in everyday U.S. life and ubiquity in U.S. public schools. National symbols, official representations of the nation’s people, values, or goals such as the Liberty Bell, bald eagles, the White House, and the Statue of Liberty are highly visible ornaments of national life from primary school onward and are repeatedly held up as explicit signs of national character and simultaneously omnipresent as the backdrop of life in government buildings, schools, military installations, and through quasi- nationalistic spaces, for example professional sports venues. Nationalist historiography is likewise central to understanding the origin of the nation and its place within world history. Moreover, it arranges people within the nation 241 vis-à-vis this history: pilgrims, settlers, Native Americans, African slaves, the founding fathers, Confederate and Union soldiers, and many others are all characters ascribed central or peripheral roles and become heroes, victims, or villains within nationalist stories. Civic ideals, for example those advocated formally in schools, the Boy Scouts, the Boys and Girls Club, and other organizations—fairness, service, freedom, pluralism, and militarism—were likewise parroted as emblematic of national life. Lastly, national icons are non-official cultural artifacts that accompany and come to represent aspects of civic culture, such as grilled burgers and fireworks during celebrations of independence and turkey on Thanksgiving. Deported men invoked aspects of civic culture at particularly relevant moments, for example on U.S. holidays, as a means of overtly asserting national belonging, or while simply describing or reminiscing about their daily lives in the United States. The symbols of civic culture were at once mundane, superficial tokens and yet simultaneously charged as palpable emblems of the nation itself. Deportees brought civic culture in relation to the national, racial, and linguistic self-identification of themselves and their recognition of others; notions of community and home; and space and place “up there” and “down here.” In telling me his life history, Ray described his Americanness in terms of English proficiency, an extensive social network, taxpaying, and an understanding of U.S. history. One of the first things Ray told me was, “I speak English, and I’m just a regular American like everyone else.” Ray had lived in south Phoenix since arriving to the United States at age 10 in 1978. When Ray told me his life history, he had just been deported to Nogales the night before. This was his second deportation; he had been 242 removed in 2006 and had lived in Nogales and Puerto Peñasco for six years before a clandestine crossing back to Phoenix in 2012. We talked for three hours, on a walk through west Nogales streets but mostly in the Kino dining hall, taking advantage of the breezy shade on a searing July day. A handful of volunteers worked around us, organizing donated clothing, preparing food, sweeping. Ray folded his slender, six-feet one-inch frame into a bench at a long, empty table. He wore a gray Los Angeles Jeans Co. t-shirt and beige jeans with a gold hoop earring and closely shorn hair. I could make out his inconspicuous but visible prison tattoos on his forearms: DOC (for “Department of Corrections”), PHX (a prison gang affiliation), and Christian cross with miniature script underneath. With the rawness of his recent immigration detention and deportation still palpable, Ray said, “I’m just happy to talk to someone about what happened to me.” He went on: “It’s been a while since I’ve been able to speak English with anyone!” Ray had been surprised in 2006, after two years in prison on drug possession charges, to learn that he had an ICE hold and would be sent to immigration detention pending a Notice to Appear for removal proceedings. Ray found himself in a high-stakes immigration adjudication, in which he made an explicit claim of Americanness before an immigration judge. Ray described the proceedings as an event: There was like 100 people in the courtroom to support me. My cousins, family, people from the community. The president of the Tile Council of North America is my brother-in-law, and he was there… But the judge said “I’m gonna’ deport you.” He said, “I don’t care how many supporters you have, or how many times you come back to his courtroom. I’m going to deport you every time.” 243 Ray had been unsuccessful in requesting a cancellation of removal based on his time living in the United States and family ties and was devastated. He narrated his exchange with the judge, about which Ray said, “I blew it. I went too far.” Ray went on The judge was Russian. So was the prosecutor, too. Like, from somewhere else. I said, “How can you guys be doing this to me? My English is better than yours.” They had these accents. I said, “I’m more American than you.” I disrespected them and I think it made them more upset. But I asked the judge, “What is the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence?” He said, “Well, I don’t recall right now.” I said, “We the People.” I assumed that Ray’s rendition exaggerated the melodrama of his confrontation for effect. Having observed courtrooms myself at the CCA Eloy, Arizona detention center, I saw that judges tend to have the upper hand in exchanges with respondents and would be very surprised by an immigration judge being caught off guard by Ray’s challenge. Also, I could not imagine that any judge would listen to someone confuse the Preamble to the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence and fail to point out the discrepancy. But Ray grew more animated as he continued telling the story. “I asked him who the 11th president of the United States was.” I smiled and told Ray that I could not tell him that off of the top of my head. Ray blurted, “John Adams,” and we both laughed. Ray’s capper was, “I asked what the first ingredient of apple pie is. He just sat there. I mean, come on,” Ray said laughing, “It’s right there in the name!” Ray resolutely insisted on his Americanness. Ray’s confusion over the provenance of “We the People” and unwitting swapping of the second president for the 11th does not invalidate his claim and, according to the cliché of U.S. Americans’ poor 244 knowledge of history, could be seen as reinforcing it. The potential exaggeration of his supposed indignant haranguing of a judge does not undermine Ray’s attestation to me of his U.S. belonging. Although we laughed at the story, Ray’s umbrage during the proceedings reflected the utter sincerity with which he and many others claimed Americanness. While some deportees came to confide in me over time about embellishing so-called moral character in court or in everyday life—admitting in a somber moment that they had not been good fathers, sons, and husbands; hard-working; law-abiding; etc.—the claim of U.S. belonging through appeals to cultural competence were fervent and unwavering. Historical Referents and Race In another instance, during a conversation with Daniel on a sunny but template March day, he explained his complex perceptions of the interconnections of race, historical referents, and national symbols. Daniel had ridden a bus downtown to meet me for lunch after his shift as a security guard. As usual, he wore his standard-issue uniform: long-sleeved, white polyester shirt tucked into his navy slacks. Rectangular framed glasses sat on his broad face. His crew cut, stout build, and tattooed arms give him the look of a club bouncer. We sat across from each other in the cramped table of a narrow, cheerless taco shop. Daniel explained belonging by highlighting how social connections produce home. “It’s not my country. But it’s my home. I got my family up there, friends.” Daniel had told me on multiple occasions about his friends from the block where he grew up and from school. Although he grew up in a predominantly Mexican area of Las Vegas, the friendships—including interracial ones—that he cultivated over time, growing up, further 245 solidified his position as a social member. “Friends. White friends. I speak English. It’s where I grew up.” The whiteness of his friends, and the racialized assumption of unquestionable Euro-American belonging, in part validated Daniel’s own social belonging in his mind. Daniel conflated several aspects in asserting his belonging— hegemonic whiteness, a social network, English language proficiency, and long-time Las Vegas residence—as constituent parts of his belonging. Daniel appealed to knowledge of U.S. historical tropes and, when talking to me, referred with the second person possessive to his familiarity with Americanness and simultaneously legitimated my U.S. belonging. “I grew up with your flag, in your country, with your history, your Pledge of Allegiance, with Martin Luther King, with your presidents.” Daniel spoke with conviction, but also snickered at the paradox of growing up immersed in a civic culture that he was now excluded from. I responded, chuckling, “You know George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and John Adams. Not Benito Juárez and Alvaro Obregón.” He said of the well-known Mexican presidents that I mentioned, including the latter, from Nogales I don’t even know who they are! I know the Mexican flag, but I don’t know the history. I don’t know the Mexican Pledge of Allegiance!... I know who Juárez is, and Colosio. But I didn’t go to school here and learn about history. I don’t know that much at all about my own history. The collection of social entanglements and intimacy with the symbols of U.S. patriotism, bound up in an assumed hegemonic whiteness, made the United States home for Daniel. Despite not perceiving belonging in its fullest sense—as he is racialized as non-white and sharply aware of the consequences of noncitizen deportability in the United States—the 246 feeling of some membership nevertheless pervades Daniel’s orientation to both the United States and Mexican nations. Daniel referred to himself as feeling “more American” and, simultaneously, as “100 percent Mexican.” At times, Daniel’s views of the United States as “not my country” seemingly contradicted his sense of himself as (U.S.) “American.” He described this experience as feeling (U.S.) American yet recognizing simultaneously that, “you’re not. I’m Mexican—100 percent Mexican. But I grew up like an American. I mean look, I don’t even read about Mexican history. If you give me a book in Spanish, I would be, like, bored. But I love these books.” Daniel flipped the pages of an Ann Rule murder mystery in English that I had brought him. He also expressed these contradictory feelings in terms of national symbols and cultural practices such as holidays. I asked him, “Are there times you feel more American down here? Or more Mexican?” He said, I feel more American. You grow up someplace from when you’re two or three, and you feel American. You’re not, but you grow up exactly like them. When you’re a kid, you’re used to the Pledge of Allegiance every day. I learned all about Lincoln, Jefferson, everyone. And the holidays man. Thanksgiving, Fourth of July. My brother called me on the phone and was like, “We’re doing Fourth of July.” I said, “Bro’, I’m in Mexico.” He’s like, “That don’t matter.” And they bring Fourth of July to me! They’d come down here before, to barbeque, eat corn dogs, all that stuff. I asked if the holidays made him feel American. Daniel said, At work they make fun of me. They’re like, “You’re in Mexico, not in the States.” And I’m like, “You can take the homie out of the ‘hood, but you can’t take the 247 ‘hood out of the homie.” It’s in you. They can’t ever take it out of me, you know. It’s how I grew up. Daniel has a strong sense of belonging to both a U.S. national community and to his local “hood” in Las Vegas. He grew up “exactly like” other Americans. Nonetheless, his racialized Mexican political and cultural identity mean that he somehow does not fully belong. U.S. Militarism and Patriotism Deportees expressed other forms of U.S. patriotism as well. Javier, for example, beamed when telling me of his daughter’s graduation from U.S. Marine boot camp in South Carolina. He showed me photos of her in dress uniform, in front of a large American flag. Others proudly showed me photos of their children in Marine uniforms and one deportee told me of his son’s goal of earning an officer commission at the Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. Connections to national events evoked other emotions as well. On the morning of one September 11, I was sitting at Alfredo’s taco cart when Alfonso came sauntering toward us, with headphones, bobbing his head and singing off key: “It’s my birthday! It’s my birthday!” I could tell he was in a convivial mood. He went on, “Today’s my birthday. Hoy es mi cumpleaños cabrones, ¿cómo ven? ¡Hay que celebrarlo como se debe!” I’m gonna’ celebrate right! I gave Alfonso a birthday hug and slipped around the corner to the pharmacy to get him a cold Coke to drink while he sat and talked, to which he said, “Thanks bro’! Now that’s how you tell me happy birthday!” Still in a boisterous mood, after going on about the upcoming Cowboys versus Giants NFL game, Alfonso suddenly switched topics. 248 Ever since 2001, you know what my birthday’s been like? Every single birthday since then? They’re always talking about the terrorist attacks and those twin towers! Every year! That’s all that’s on [television]—the anniversary. And that shit makes me cry every year. That’s how I start my birthday every fucking year, is by crying about 9/11. To the day that I die, that’s how I’m gonna’ celebrate my birthday! Before we could get in to a discussion about September 11, 2001, what our experience was that day and what it meant, the conversation moved on. But I was fairly certain that Alfredo was in east Los Angeles and that Alfonso was in Tucson. Maybe they had an experience similar to mine—watching national news with my family, in my living room in Oregon—or maybe it was somewhat different. But the terrorist attack on the United States produced in Alfonso feelings of loss every year, including over five years living in Nogales since being deported. Resistance to U.S. Empire This affinity with U.S. Americanness is expressed through cynical modes of understanding the nation as well. When I spent time with Paco, conversation would often turn to geopolitics. Paco frequently repudiated laudatory notions of the U.S. government. He would put forth forceful claims of a hegemonic U.S. nation as a blustering empire that actively contributes to the global concentration of wealth, environmental degradation, and rapacious capitalism, in particular by propagating rampant militarism. One lazy September day, when Eric, another deportee from Phoenix, had finished hustling—selling homemade bracelets and tattoo services on the Line—he joined Paco and me at the mall to wait for a Western Union transfer of US$50 that was supposed to be 249 sent from friends in Phoenix. We ate ice cream in the middle of the food court, amid dozens of tables, mostly empty on a weekday morning, surrounded by the walk-up counters for Panda Express, McDonald’s, and Carl’s Jr. Paco was schooling Eric on U.S. imperialism and egged me on to spin histories of U.S. government intervention in Latin America, which Paco and I had discussed on a few occasions. Eric was surprised to hear of CIA involvement, at least the details I could recall, in the 1954 overthrow of democratically elected President Arbenz in Guatemala, the 1971 overthrow of President Allende in Chile, and the support of the Nicaraguan Contra forces in the 1980s, in part by facilitating cocaine trafficking to the United States. Paco nodded, backing me up, and repeated, “Yup. Yup. Yup.” Paco was fascinated by this history. My accounts of U.S. government interventionism fully comported with his worldview of the U.S. government’s covert influence in world affairs. At one point, he wrapped his own identity into his disdain for the U.S. government. “I’m a true American,” he said, “because I know what the United States government does. I educate myself about that. Most people don’t care. They just go around and do the same thing every day. But I understand the power of the U.S. and what they do to people. That’s what makes me a true American.” Paco not only considered himself savvy regarding U.S. government action, but an American because of this understanding. He found U.S. Cold War intervention in Latin America reprehensible and cared about its greater meaning for the identity of the nation. Paco had lived in the United States since he was six months old, felt “American,” and recognized that to some extent the U.S. government exerted influence in his name. Paco made an implicit distinction between being an “American”—which had a legal and ethno-racial valence— 250 and a “true American,” which implied an open-eyed awareness of the historical implications of U.S. power. In discussing middle-range cultural artifacts as particularly U.S. American, it is important to caution against reifying so-called national cultures or national character. Although the U.S. foreign policy that interests Paco has an obviously transnational reach, it is important to always consider the elastic boundaries of the concepts of “nation” and “culture” and the historical processes that create them, even when they are seemingly contained within a national context. Descriptions of so-called national culture emerged during and after the independence movements of the 18th through 20th centuries, as political and economic elites sought to consolidate hegemonic national identities through, in part, the extension of new technologies, e.g. newspapers and books, and institutions, e.g. schools and museums (Anderson 2006; Hobsbawm 1990). This diffusion propagated teleological historical narratives of a shared past, present, and future and created the illusion of national cultures (García-Caro 2014, 13). Designation of cultural artifacts as simply “U.S. American” or “Mexican” is merely a shorthand for a highly complex cultural economy of production, circulation, and consumption. Arjun Appadurai (1996), Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997), and others have delivered robust indictments against notions of cultural stasis and fixity—the possibility of a “U.S. culture” or a “Mexican culture.” Isomorphic place and culture, the coinciding of territory and cultural identities, is an illusion. Dynamic, heterogeneous cultural forms are inspired in and diffused through the globalized circulation of mediated information and human movement (Appadurai 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). While the presupposed links between place, people, and culture have been naturalized, the work 251 of Appadurai, Gupta, and Ferguson, along with Peters (1997) and others, also recognized the opportunity for granular ethnographic examinations of culture—and people’s sense of being in place or out-of-place—and the re-linking of people with place and culture through attention to highly localized human experience. Popular Culture Popular culture artifacts, a universe of middle-range mass media—movies, television, genre fiction, and music—likewise existed within a cultural imagination. Attention turned spontaneously to popular culture when a hip-hop song blasted on a car stereo or a television show was broadcast (and dubbed, infuriatingly to my interlocutors, into Spanish); at moments when U.S. popular culture was explicitly associated with an assertion of national self-identity; when recounting a memory or significant event; or simply during a conversation about preference, taste, artistic craftsmanship, or the pleasures and frustrations of popular culture consumption. Culture’s persistent mutability—as U.S.- and Mexican-origin popular culture circulate across national borders, are locally appropriated, translated, and recrafted, and creatively spun into reimagined works—precludes broad generalities about this or that “culture,” as Lila Abu-Lughod (1993, 6-15) asserts in her provocative call to write against culture. Abu-Lughod suggests “writing of the particular” (1993, 13-14), because it is in the specificity of conversations and practices, as I attempt to show in my discussion of Ray, Paco, and others, that broader understandings may be achieved. This approach renders visible differences within seemingly unitary domains, compelling the redrawing of the crude boundaries of “this” or “that” culture and demonstrating the complexity of people’s relationship to amorphous and shapeshifting cultures. It thus 252 encourages a rethinking of how those assumed to be cultural outsiders—such as noncitizens in the United States—are also marked by their participation, membership, and inclusion in cultural knowledge and practice. In Nogales deportees were by no means the only ones who related to U.S.-origin commercial culture, as its wide dissemination attests, yet they described that having grown up in the United States shaped their relationship to it. Fantasma, for example, said he “understood” the west coast social and cultural landscape of the 1980s alternative rock music he grew up with in his southeast Los Angeles neighborhood. As an avid music lover, Fantasma went to local rock shows and, later, grunge from Seattle and Los Angeles ska punk were important influences when he became the guitarist of his own band. Fantasma listened incessantly to Nirvana and Sublime, but also to L.A. hip-hop group Cyprus Hill; gothic rock group Smashing Pumpkins from Chicago; and many others, including several that I had not heard of. And he had an eclectic and voracious musical appetite in general: The Doors, Beastie Boys, Run DMC, and many more. Fantasma also talked about the unique understanding of pop culture because of his deep exposure to it, and how most “good” culture either had not penetrated or was not understood by people “down here.” In a discussion of the hit ‘90s television series Martin—known for Martin Lawrence’s elongated delivery of the catchphrase “daaaaamn, Gina!”—Fantasma told of a jealous misunderstanding with a person he was dating in Nogales. He said, The mentality is different down here. I mean, the way people think. And the way we joke. I was talking to my girl and I said, “Damn, Gina!” You know, like from Martin… I was joking around. Do know what she said? ‘Who’s Gina?’ She’s like, 253 ‘Let me see your phone. Is Gina texting you? Who is Gina?’ It’s just different down here. The profound significance of culture for deportees, mediating their understanding of the world from a young age, was also reflected not just with familiarity with it, but in a particular cultural literacy. Fantasma again talked about cultural difference through the lens of pop culture by bringing up another ‘90s hit show, Seinfeld. Fantasma talked disparagingly about how people “down here” did not understand the ironic humor. He again appealed to cultural difference saying, “Even sarcasm doesn’t exist down here.” I did not push back, although I immediately thought of both mass-produced and vernacular forms of humor in Mexico that drew on rich, multi-layered irony. Nevertheless, I could not deny the point that ironic humor is deeply context-dependent and may be completely imperceptible. Popular Culture as Generational Marker The place that popular culture has in people’s lives was a generational marker as well. The cyclical nature and short life and of most music, television, book, and film output configures the way people of particular ages relate to them, age-grading them as cultural items become more popular with some groups than others. Among the first times that Daniel and I met and were talking about our relative ages—I was born in 1978, one year before him—a quick pop culture excavation confirmed our shared familiarity at similar ages with, for example, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the comic book and cartoon property) and Vanilla Ice (the rapper).48 When meeting me, many other deported men spontaneously did the same with professional sports franchises. We would quickly determine age, fandom, and place of residence through conversations about the Chicago 254 Bulls’ six championships in the 1990s, the Celtics/Lakers rivalry of the 1980s and the 49ers dominance in that same decade, the Bears “Superbowl Shuffle” music video from 1986 or Icky Woods’ “Icky Shuffle” end zone celebration. On the other hand, some people identified with sports figures I was too young to have seen and of whom I had only read or seen grainy footage. Some of the oldest deportees I met, now in their 60s, told me of their memories of Oakland Raider “The Assassin” Jack Tatum, Pittsburg Steeler Terry Bradshaw, or Muhamad Ali, the heavyweight boxer (see Figure 25). Figure 25. Deportee tattoo of the Phoenix Cardinals’ logo. Professional football logos are a common tattoo motif. These generation-graded relationships to popular culture reinforced belonging in social groups home communities in the United States. My interlocutors described lives shaped by the communal and experiential consumption not just of sports, but of other forms of culture that influenced their social group identification and that they expressed through, for example, dress. Gato, who was born in Culiacán, Sinaloa in 1961 and moved to Montebello, in Los Angeles County, in 1965 told me about his countercultural 255 experience growing up in the late 1970s. “I was a rockabilly. Do you know what that is?” I asked him to expain. He said, “I had a pompadour and everything.” I asked if it was like Elvis Presley’s. Gato said, “Yeah, but more like John Travolta’s, you know? We had a group. It wasn’t a gang. But we all wore leather jackets, bomber jackets.” I asked, “Was it a neighborhood group?” Gato said, “Yeah, I guess. We had the hair, the jackets, and we smoked a lot of weed. I was a pothead [laughing].” Gato’s pothead days were cut short, he said, when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. After deportation in 2001, Gato’s sense of connection to people like him, who had lived most of their lives in the United States, eventually led him to conscientiously seek solidarity. Gato had gone through hard times since deportation, living on the streets and struggling with drugs and alcohol. He had gotten sober in 2013, however, and had connected with deported U.S. military veteran activists from Tijuana and he relocated there. His informal orientations for recent deportees—for avoiding police and attaining housing, food security, and work—led him to draft a guide in which he set this information down formally. Gato’s U.S. belonging, like that felt by so many others, led them to seek out one another, as I discussed at length in Chapter V. Popular Culture as Pedagogical Tool Other relationships with mass entertainment became manifest as well. Since arriving to the Los Angeles area in 1979, at age 10, Jaime intently watched—or more importantly, listened—to any U.S. television program in English that he could. He conscientiously used television as a language learning aid, striving to imitate phonetically the people he heard on the air. His father would question him about why he was imitating English language TV at home. He said, “I’d tell him, ‘I want to sound like an American. 256 I’m working hard Dad, to sound American.’ I had a thick accent. A very thick accent.” It was hard for me to believe it, given Jaime’s smooth voice modulation and precise syntax—he reminded me of an NPR reporter. Jaime, who had also been in the U.S. military and honorably discharged from the Marine Corps in 1994, also told me about often watching the cable channels ESPN, CNN, and C-SPAN while in his bunk, to continue to develop his English. During another part of our conversation, while telling me about years in the restaurant business, Jaime demonstrated deft linguistic creativity. He talked about motivating his employees as a manager at Denny’s, saying “I would tell them, even on a Sunday [the busiest day], “Let’s wow everyone today. I want this to be a wow day… And I’d look at the board at the end of the day—goose egg. No complaints. I’d tell them that they were special.” “Wow” as a modifier for “day” and “goose egg” as an idiomatic expression caught my ear as particular reflections of Jaime’s adroit and spontaneous production in English. I imagined that Jaime’s interest in language made him a meticulous bilingual call center employee and English teacher—two jobs he had held since being deported. Pop Culture, Self-Expression, and Masculinities Alfredo also remembered a deliberate attempt at fitting in through popular culture. He had a vague memory of an elementary school production of Mary Poppins in which he participated, in east Los Angeles in the 1990s. He wanted to sing proficiently enough to fit in with his classmates and co-performers. He was slightly embarrassed to tell me about an elementary musical, but then laughed about it and, to demonstrate, he sang for 257 me with an enormous grin, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidious, even though the sound of it may sound quite atrocious.” He went on, “We sang all of those songs!” Paco demonstrated advanced music proficiency, in his case with rap. He cited many favorites, from 1990s west coast rappers Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre to contemporary southern trap-style rappers like Gucci Mane. A friend of Paco’s had come to visit from Phoenix in a Jeep Liberty and we took advantage to cruise Nogales, eating at an open-air taqueria, going apartment hunting for Paco, swinging by to say hi to other deportees. A 2011 song, “Wish Me Luck” by Governor, ft. 50 Cent, blasted over the CD player. Paco exclaimed, “This song gets me through every day!” Paco rapped loudly along with the staccato lyrics: I got everything on the line I’m right here on the ground Trying to get it right At least you could wish me luck… To win and make a straight It’s hard to turn a snake At least you could wish me luck… I’m riding with the top down Trunk full of yola [cocaine] Ghetto pharmaceutical I move that Coca-Cola The tropes resonated for Paco: precarious street activities, illicit drug sales, and the everyday gamble of life (reflected in the hope to “win” a poker hand with a “straight” or a dice game with “snake” eyes, i.e. double ones). Although Paco did not glamourize his 258 life history of street gang and prison gang life and drug trafficking when telling it to me for the first time, or in subsequent recountings, they were important aspects of his personal narrative and he was impassioned about pop culture representations of gang and criminal life. He always had an opinion about which east and west coast rappers were phonies and who had actually “lived the life.” Paco’s own artistic production reflected the deep significance that rap music help for him. One afternoon, he showed me shoeboxes in a bedroom closet with the lyrics of dozens and dozens of rap songs that he began writing, in neat script on lined paper, in prison and had continued in Nogales. Paco’s lyrics about gang life, drug trafficking, and incarceration reflected those of the rappers who had influenced him, but he also made thematic choices that allowed him to explore his own journey of growing up and navigating family and friend relationships, loneliness, Christianity, suffering, and the nature of morality itself. One semi-autobiographical song hit several of these themes: He’s only nine Already on the grind Runnin’ the streets Just tryin’ to find A better way For easier days… Regular people think he’s so damn strange Cause he’s got that lingo In codes he talks Broken up English 259 Plus the way he walks Yeah! The little boy You know he got older Carrying the whole world Upon his shoulder Made him what he is A cold little soldier Learning the streets The only way he could No gettin’ out He’s part of the ‘hood (see Figure 26) 260 Figure 26. Lyrics to one of Paco’s many rap compositions. When Paco was able to get an Apple desktop computer and music mixing software, he began recording himself on vocals and mixing his own songs into impressive tracks. He would have me over to listen to new tracks for hours, to hear his innovations in tempo, backbeats, lyrics, and lilting delivery. But despite hopes that a local producer would give him studio time, Paco complains that people in Mexico cannot connect with 261 his raps—Paco has passed many lonely Nogales afternoons recording and mixing, his music a solo venture. Here, I return to the notion of culture as constantly unstable and in flux. The broad and eclectic cultural consumption of Paco and others reflected an appetite for hip- hop and other Black cultural products, as well as Chicanx-inflected, and Mexican cultural artifacts, as I discuss below. One way to think about the wide-ranging consumption is through the notion of subjective cultural identification as a process (Cutler 2015, 14). Cultural theorist John Alba Cutler’s (2015) reading of Chicanx literature urges acknowledgement of Chicanx people’s rootedness in history, yet approaches culture as constantly shifting. The constant incorporation and reimagining of cultural material means we ought not to think of the ways that “ethnic” Others move unidirectionally toward some “mainstream” culture nor, at the other extreme, imagine the preservation of some “pure” or “authentic” and unchanging culture. As Cutler (2014, 14) points out, racialized gender and sexuality are always implicated in the process of cultural identification as well. The cultural invocations of my interlocutors were often masculine, as evidenced by the chapter’s mentions of gangsta’ rap and sports and was a constitutive aspect of masculine performativity. When I was taken cruising on car rides down Nogales’s main streets, to see people and be seen, my interlocutors would play songs with particularly aggressive percussion and lyrics, most often of hip-hop in English. The examples I give throughout the chapter often revolve around normatively heterosexual masculinist cultural artifacts. During my fieldwork, deported men had usually expressed little interest in non-masculine subgenres, such as 262 rom-coms, chick lit, or dance pop, much less in queer popular culture that transgressed or subverted gender and sexuality binaries. Chicanx and Mexican Popular Culture Another example of broad consumption, within the bounds often of heavily masculine culture, was Chicanx cultural material, a staple among deportees. Chicanx cinema in particular spoke to people’s sensibilities and life experience. Conversations often came around to iconic films, for example Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s Born in East L.A. and La Bamba starring Lou Diamond Phillips and to prison movies—which particularly resonated with those who had been incarcerated—such as two favorites, American Me with James Edwards Olmos and Blood in Blood Out. Other aspects of Chicanx culture were important as well. Several talked about at some time in their lives owning or aspiring to own a lowrider, the colorfully painted classic Chevrolets, Fords, or Buicks with lowered chassis. Some produced lowrider art. They showed me drawings that they had done of lowrider cars, religious iconography—the Virgen of Guadalupe or Christ on the crucifix—long-stemmed roses, Aztec pyramids or calendars, women’s faces with large eyes engulfed in flowing hair, theater masks of the muses of comedy and tragedy, Emiliano Zapata’s face with crossed bandoliers and sombrero, and the names and birth and death years of friends who had died, with the initials R.I.P written in Old English (see Figure 27). 263 Figure 27. Alain Ojeda’s rendering of “criminal alien” experiences, with ballpoint pen on cotton. On the right: a prison watch tower, face of sad partner, hourglass and list of years imprisoned, and self-portrait behind bars. After deportation and the crossing of the border fence, on the left: lady Mexico represents violence and drug use. People spoke as well about Mexican cultural products. They had viewed Mexican golden-age era films starring Pedro Infante, María Félix, Cantinflas, and Jorge Negrete; listened to Vicente Fernández, Gloria Trevi, la Banda el Recodo, and Antonio Aguilar; and watched El Chavo del Ocho, Chivas or América soccer broadcasts, or one telenovela or other. In addition to Mexican-produced culture, they consumed Latinx media in Spanish that originated in Miami and Los Angeles, such as Sábado Gigante, Jenni Rivera’s rancheras, and norteño music by Los Tigres del Norte. Narcocorridos, often produced in Los Angeles but sung in Spanish and well known throughout Mexico, deploy hyperbolic braggadocio to suggest ways that the danger and profitability of drug trafficking validate social identities that are otherwise socially and economically marginalized. From the original narcocorridos by Chalino Sánchez in the 1990s to the vast array of movimiento alterado hits from the 2000s and 2010s—by Antrax, Calibre 264 .50, Gerardo Ortiz, El Komander, and Roberto Tapia—a few deported men knew these songs, played them, sang along, and identified with their counterhegemonic messages. Literacy with Mexican pop cultural also demonstrated my interlocutors’ eclectic cultural literacy, borne of the local specificity of their lives in the United States. Although they started the school day with the Pledge of Allegiance and went to cineplexes showing Hollywood movies, they also interacted with Spanish-dominant Mexican immigrants, attended mass in Spanish, and listened to Spanish language radio. On my occasional visits to Phoenix, Tucson, and Los Angeles, I often found myself in “Mexican” cultural spaces that made me think of my interlocutors in Nogales, such as the neighborhoods I discussed in Chapter I. For example, Arizona-Sonora regional transportation companies had tiny offices in strip mall spaces—a counter and cash register, a few plastic chairs to wait in, a bathroom, and television in the corner— that served Spanish-speaking clientele. The shuttles themselves, white 15-passenger vans with “Livery Shuttle” in worn lettering and rates for Phoenix, Tucson, and Nogales trips, carried passengers the three hours on I-19 between Phoenix and Nogales, Arizona. Certain details in the offices would remind me of the multi-layered complexity of popular culture: televisions tuned to Univision telenovelas or a radio loudly playing thumping corridos. One July day, sitting in the shuttle office waiting for my departure, a DJ from a Phoenix-based Spanish language FM station said she was only spinning records of the “corridos más perrones,” the most bad-ass Mexican regional songs. She proceeded to play “Ando bien pedo,” about getting drunk and living it up; “El niño de la Tuna,” about drug lord Chapo Guzmán’s humble, small-town Sinaloa origins; “El Camaro y la 265 Cheyenne,” which asks if the punchy sports car or slick pickup is better; and “Mi pasado y mi presente,” a song about a contemporary, well-known drug capo in Nogales. That same day, when it turned out that the shuttle company cancelled their service because a driver had gotten sick, a couple in their 40s and mother, in her 60s, offered me a ride across town to another shuttle service. I sat in the bed of their beat up, black Nissan truck. Hitching a ride reminded me of years earlier when I was younger, with friends in rural Mexico, bumping down dirt roads lined with luscious sugarcane crops. Snapping back to the moment, I squinted my eyes in the wind and cranked my neck to gawk at the gleaming, modernist glass towers of downtown Phoenix. The Politics of Culture, Assimilationism, and Chicanx Anticolonialism Infusing culture into discussions of migration carries risk. Over the last 150 years in anthropology generally, culture has a muddled past. Historically, anthropology’s essentializing distinctions of a cultural Us and Them as well as its connections to colonizing powers have positioned it at the crux of multiple technologies of oppression (Pels 1997, 165). Robust critiques of orientalist and marginalizing discourses (Clifford 1983; Said 1978; Smith 1999) and advocacy for more collaborative ethnographic renderings (Lassiter 2005) have dominated since the 1970s. Such reflexivity (Clifford and Marcus 1986) has alerted anthropologists to the potential influence, always skulking in the shadows, over perceptions of social veneration or stigma which are instrumental in identifying and extolling or denigrating cultural Others. For immigrants and other noncitizens, determinations to be cultural members—or, alternatively, cultural Other—often carry colossal implications for discussions of inclusion generally and for policy debates over legal recognition. The concept of culture 266 has been misunderstood, abused, and deployed to bolster pernicious stereotypes that carry serious political consequences. This is evidenced in the persistent nativism of Patrick Buchanan, who stokes aggrievement by commenting on “immigrant invasions” and a “third-world conquest;” Lou Dobbs, who repeatedly links immigration to disease and economic hardship; Steven K. Bannon, who portrays non-white Latin American immigrants as incommensurable with “Judeo-Christian,” ethno-nationalist values; and Donald Trump, who repeatedly constructs immigrants as non-human, savages, and animals. In addition, Anne Coulter, Victor Davis Hanson, and Heather Mac Donald are others in a sea of similar voices whose deployment of “cultural” arguments directly or indirectly validate immigration restrictionist public policy. Scholarly Approaches to Culture In the early 20th century, scholars focused on culture in order to combat similar xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment yet inadvertently reinforced the primacy of “Euro- American” cultures. Assimilationist sociology, intended to be explicitly anti-racist and inclusive, arose in the Chicago school as a social scientific attempt at explaining processes whereby migrants seek to become members of so-called host societies through “acculturation and assimilation, and accompanying amalgamation” (Park 1929, 890; see also Gordon 1964; Park and Burgess 1924). Contemporarily, assimilationism as a research pursuit considers the class and racial stratification of “destination” societies and emphasizes generation as a critical variable of social mobility (Portes and Zhou 1993; see also Alarcón, Escala, and Odgers 2016; Alba and Nee 2005). Assimilationist models incorporate acculturation—the social acquisition of practices and perceptions—and, methodologically, often rely on quantifying social outcomes such as language 267 acquisition, labor market integration and mobility, access to public services, and the development of social networks (Alarcón, Escala, and Odgers 2016; Portes and Rumbaut 2014; see also Chavez 1992 on migrant “incorporation”). The difficulty with assimilationism, and a further risk of examining cultural membership even when from a nominally pro-immigrant perspective, is that despite originating as a response to racial essentialism, assimilation can reinforce immigrant cultural differences (De Genova 2005). Nicolas De Genova argued that cultural membership has became the central sociological question of immigration in the 20th century. He signaled assimilation studies’ ongoing preoccupation with typologies of invasion and transplantation, symbiosis and culture contact, adjustment and adaptation, accommodation and acculturation, and assimilation and amalgamation. [T]hese and other well-worn distinctions in the hegemonic sociology of immigration were formulated and have continues to be elaborated in a tireless effort to produce a knowledge of the overall “assimilation cycle” by which immigrants supposedly “become Americans” (2005, 80). De Genova asserts that to unrelentingly interrogate immigrant assimilation is to obsess over and ultimately reinforce notions of difference. Assimilationist thinking reduces a potentially expansive inquiry to narrow set of questions (De Genova 2005, 82). How different are immigrants? How are immigrants different? And different… from what? De Genova’s sensitivity to the potency of difference is vital and I take it seriously here. It usefully acknowledges the role of social difference in arranging political power that has resulted in pernicious inequities and injustices and highlights how notions of difference become naturalized. This insight recognizes the social sciences themselves, 268 through self-important theorizing and decisions about the very questions posed (see also Smith 1999), as wittingly or unwittingly complicit in developing schemata of difference that further justify social and political oppression. De Genova (2005) follows this defiance of difference to an extreme conclusion— resistance to acknowledging what he calls “culturalist” approaches to social theory (2005, 27). I join his skepticism and full-throated repudiation of explanations that reify static, hermetic “cultures” and which circulate in popular discourses and even some contemporary anthropological ones. De Genova’s anti-culturalist argument loses its potency, however, when deployed against a straw man. He maintains a “general suspicion [of] all social theories or descriptions that rely on notions of self-enclosed, bounded, thinglike ‘cultural’ realities posited as separate, distinct, and relatively autonomous spheres of sociopolitical life” (2005, 27). De Genova goes too far when “reject[ing] the usefulness of the concept of ‘culture’ altogether” (2005, 27). I find analytic value in conceptualizing patterns, in perceiving of shapeshifting and overlapping “cultures”—while insisting emphatically in their broad variation, mutability, and inconsistent expression in groups and within and across individuals. More importantly, exploring cultural formations enables the revelation of the tensions that always exist between cultural affinity and cultural difference within and among people. When paying attention to culture, the Self/Other distinction need not be reified. Instead, when one looks close enough at cultural phenomena, when one writes against culture, there is always difference and sameness in simultaneous operation. Beyond legal and policy considerations, which are of course significant, examining noncitizen cultural belonging can further promote social empowerment. In 269 heeding Abu-Lughod’s preoccupation with ethnographic specificity and its implications for social power, I join it with an explicitly anticolonial Chicanx politics that endeavors to redress Chicanx marginalization in the United States. Chicanx consciousness, as developed through cultural and artistic consumption and production, has been a critical space for negotiating identities and struggling for recognition (Cutler 2015; see also Limón 1994). Deportees’ connections to U.S. national culture, when a Chicanx consciousness reaffirms their validity and undermines assumptions of noncitizens’ cultural liminality, upend notions that they are cultural outsiders and, instead, suggest unambiguous positioning within a U.S. cultural imagination. Conclusions The cultural imagination of the deported men I worked with incorporated an array of sensibilities yet broadly reflect “American” cultural literacy. The examples here of civic and popular culture demonstrate the deft way in which long-time U.S. residents come to navigate cultural life in ways that may be indistinguishable from U.S.-born peers. They themselves come to see this cultural inclusion as underpinning claims of national belonging and in direct tension with their legal exclusion and expulsion. Cultural connections to the nation form part of broader public discourses about immigration, as well as theoretical debates surrounding cultural connection, assimilation, and connection to the nation more broadly. Moral and political philosophers who advocate greater openness to immigration, such as Joseph Carens, José Jorge Mendoza, and José-Antonio Orosco, as well as those who favor some immigration restrictionism, for example Isaiah Berlin and Michael Walzer, all consider cultural membership relevant to rights claims and legal recognition. The ways in which we come to order our world 270 through collective symbols and meanings—through cultural systems—is vital to how we make our place within social, political, and economic communities. Even if it is accepted that culture matters, the focus here on mass culture may seem frivolous. Memories of learning the U.S. presidents and of budding Harry Potter fandom appear trivial vis-à-vis everyday cultural practices that might be within the purview of ethnographers. And they look all the more trifling in the face of a U.S. government immigration enforcement apparatus that exacerbates inequality between nations, denies refuge to many of the world’s most vulnerable populations, and expels hundreds of thousands of people each year. But in pursing such a focus, the aim is to conscientiously center one critical aspect of cultural inclusion and thus reposition the importance of legal and political identities to normative questions of legal inclusion. The value of focusing on cultural self-representation, of considering cultural subjectifications, is to see the subject in a new way and to rethink the implications of cultural, social, and legal belonging. Deportees’ fluency in U.S. American mid-range culture demonstrate the importance of cultural participation within a capacious cultural milieu that comprises tremendous heterogeneity while also rending particular cultural artifacts legible. It also undermines the denigration of immigrants as perpetual cultural outsiders, which has been woven throughout U.S. history from the alien and sedition acts of 1798, to the Know- Nothings of the 19th century (Kanstroom 2007), to early 20th century nativist condemnation of immigrants as bringing an “ethnic” scourge. These anti-immigrant movements are themselves a struggle over national identity and seek to conflate native birth, whiteness, and neoliberal discipline as law-abiding citizen laborers (Cacho 2013; 271 Gerkin 2013). But a focus on civic and popular cultural acquisition of those represented in this chapter contests the persistent nativism, xenophobia, and racism that pervade many policy discussions of noncitizens. The racial and ethnic essentialist logics that underpin these assertions both reveal and reinvigorate racialized anxieties about cultural others who “refuse to assimilate.” Cultural proficiency ought not be required for legal recognition, but legal recognition should not be denied those who culturally belong. From my discussion of noncitizen cultural affinity and proficiency, it does not follow that there need be nor should be a cultural test for legal membership. Immigration policies and practices should not be subject to intensified linguistic or cultural scrutiny. By virtue of my interlocutors’ cultural belonging in the United States, their expulsion is a form of cultural exile. As Marcos’s words about “growing up the same as everyone else” demonstrated to open this chapter, my ethnographic interlocutors come to see themselves as belonging culturally to local communities and to the U.S. nation. Notes 47 I reproduce the demonym “American” as my interlocutors do, despite the term’s problematic elision of most peoples of the Americas. 48 Of course, culture artifacts often have staying power and live on intergenerationally. An example for many of my interlocutors are gang and mob films such as The Godfather (1972), Scarface (1983), and Blood in Blood Out (1993). These films had pervasive cultural influence even for those who were not born or too young to have seen them when they were released. 272 CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION What do the stories of deported “criminal alien” men reveal about social, cultural, political, national, and place-based belonging? What can we learn about the confounding ways belonging is contingent on time, place, and relations of social power? Millions of deportations have been carried out by the United States government in conjunction with the issuance of orders of removal that bar legal reentry for a period of time or, as with all but one of my interlocutors, for life. Although deportees’ lives reflect a diversity of experiences and circumstances, they have in common that the United States government has claimed sovereign authority to bring about their removal. Social and legal marginalization and exclusions, such as those of my interlocutors, reflect the shifting and contradictory notions of who belongs as well as evolving mechanisms for effectuating exclusion. Historical displacements and removals both within and from the territorial British colonies and post-independence United States have targeted various groups. Native peoples and non-indigenous people of color, women, and the poor as well as those perceived as anti-normative—sex workers, law-breakers, and so-called vagabonds—in addition to undesirable because of religious beliefs or ideology have at various times faced forcible displacement (in addition of course to disenfranchisement, enslavement, genocide, and other atrocities). The right to presence in the United States today is underpinned by strictly circumscribed boundaries of legal belonging around national citizenship and harshly enforced by the government’s deportation apparatus. Although all legal noncitizens are 273 susceptible to exclusion, vulnerability accrues especially to particular groups, including Mexican nationals and those racialized as nonwhite, deemed “criminal,” and considered threatening Other. As the U.S. government’s deportation regime has become more robust in recent decades, it has also redoubled efforts to expand designations of who “criminal aliens” are and to effectuate their identification, apprehension, and expulsion. The participants in this research, racialized and criminalized Mexican national “criminal aliens,” were singled out for deportation through processes that stigmatized them socially and rationalized their embodied expulsion legally. Of the deportee population, the subset whose experiences are related in this dissertation—those who migrated as children, grew up in the United States, and were deported back to Mexico as “criminal alien” adults—the hardships of deportation are compounded. Their life histories are entwined with local communities in Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, and other cities and towns; U.S. families and social networks; and the U.S. nation. They make meaning of the world around them through eclectic identifications with civic culture and popular culture. They experience removal as not merely physical. Their expulsion simultaneously impacts their social, cultural, psychological, and economic lives. The lives of “criminal alien” deportees reveal the inherent tensions between inclusion and exclusion within and across local communities, social networks, and nations. In unfamiliar northern Mexico receiving communities, deportees endure family separation and, as stigmatized pochos and cholos, encounter a sense of alienation, a lack of work, and interpersonal violence. Nevertheless, they mobilize U.S. Latinx identities to carve out narrow spaces of belonging, building solidarity communities with other 274 deportees, harnessing memory, and struggling to work, hustle, and make home in northern Mexico. Deportees seek individual and collective inclusion in and across nations, to communities, and interpersonally, while navigating complex political-legal, social, and cultural identities. The men highlighted in this research seek to belong. They struggle to navigate place, find work, and come together with others. Simultaneously, their birthright Mexican citizenship, formal orders of removal by the U.S. government, life histories enmeshed in U.S. communities, shape the how peoples, governments, and labor markets conceive of their membership and the deservingness of recognition. It is at the boundaries of belonging—the structural, cultural, and moral limits which determine perceptions of insider status and also consummate expulsion for outsiders—that the myriad ways in which we all are at once estranged from and intimate with the surrounding world come into clearer focus. Their experiences also reflect the contradictions and tensions inherent in belonging. Their precarious legal status in the United States; removal from “the community,” imprisonment, and immersion within a carceral community; expulsion to a “country of origin” where, in Mexico, they feel far from home (in the United States) as they simultaneously make home there (in Mexico), at the border of the Mexican and U.S. territories, demonstrate that belonging is always negotiated, partial, and contingent. Danny This project began when I met Danny. And his story helps highlight how the starkness of deportation and perpetual exclusion from the United States and confinement to Mexico compounds multiple vulnerabilities, complicates possibilities to flourish, and 275 intensifies social alienation. In the years after Danny’s deportation, he often asked me, “What am I supposed to do here in Mexico?” I understood his question to be rhetorical and also literal. He struggled to identify purpose in his day-to-day living. At times Danny attributed his difficulties in Mexico to his criminalized, masculine social identity. At others, he lamented his drug and alcohol use and blamed himself. But more fundamentally, Danny would express a profound disorientation and an inability to interpret meaning in a world in which he was excluded from the United States. Danny had a complicated and profoundly layered life narrative of, in his words, “ups and downs.” Family members, gang acquaintances, and Danny himself recounted to me the money he had earned as a mid-tier drug trafficker in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, before prison and deportation. During the time he and I spent together in Nogales, he was often stone broke, “running on empty” as he would say. But his ups and downs were also affective. He spoke with yearning about his life before deportation in 2013, in proximity to family in Arizona, even when prison walls blockaded that proximity and family ties were frayed. He also talked of being a “broken person” and “going crazy” in Mexico and cried to me about his bleak future—but he could also be vivacious, sociable, and generous. Danny’s health suffered. He had detoxed from heroin and alcohol, but then on top of his chronic health problems developed in prison, Danny seemed to suffer a stroke. His speech became impaired and then worsened to the point of not being able to talk. Bad News At a few minutes after 7am in June of 2017, with a gray drizzle outside my third- story apartment window in Eugene, Oregon, I was grading student essays when my 276 telephone rang. Seeing the caller ID—“Laura Quintana,” Danny’s sister—shot anxiety through my legs. Danny had been sick and was getting worse when I left Nogales at the end of March. And from my occasional text exchanges with Laura since I left, I knew he was not improving. Laura’s steady voice reflected her characteristic and unwavering stability: —Hey Laura, how are you? —Good, Tobin. What are you up to? —Grading papers. How about you? —Things are okay. I have some bad news. Danny’s been getting worse and I wanted to tell you he passed yesterday. It was late, so I didn’t want to call you. You’ve been there so much for him, I wanted to call and let you know. —Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry for your loss. —It’s okay. I’m just glad he’s not suffering now. He was just doing worse and worse. And I just saw him on Saturday. I just think he’s in a better place. —I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can help the family with or anything I can do? —No, we’re fine here. I asked where Danny had been and when she had talked with him. Then I stumbled around for another minute or two, agreeing that he was no longer suffering, talking about how I was sorry and how I would be in touch when I was in Phoenix. And just like that, the call was over. Numb, I jotted notes of the conversation. I wondered how Danny had been in his last days and wished I could have seen him. I couldn’t write another thing about it for a couple of days. Then I finally wrote a simple field note saying 277 that after two days, “It still hasn’t sunken in.” I asked myself how Laura and Danny’s brother Roberto were doing. I struggled to process what his death meant and what I felt. I still wonder what Danny’s last days in 2017 were like and regret not being there. I ask myself what he and his family may have suffered. And I do not have words to describe the emotions that Danny’s death has evoked in me. The perpetual exclusion of deportation and its seeming finality, however, are brought home by the yearning he felt to return to Phoenix from the day he was deported in 2013, the sensation of being “stuck in Mexico,” and the existential concern for what Danny was supposed to do there. Despite resisting his deportation, Danny did forge ahead with life in Nogales for the time he was there. In some sense his life felt snubbed out, but in many real senses he was alive. We had planned his birthday for weeks the previous September and spent the entire day together. He invited me to be his guest for the celebration dinner at the residential drug and alcohol rehab center where he spent his final Christmas. He had lived and I had lived with him. Danny was gregarious and charming if at times sullen and obstinate. Since his death, many people—deportees, neighbors, co- residents at a drug rehab center, and even police officers who had stopped us—have reminisced to me about what a character Danny was and how they miss him (see Figure 28). 278 Figure 28.7. Danny. Belonging and Non-Belonging The stories of Danny and others in this dissertation are complicated, but in their humanity we see a little clearer the tensions of belonging. As street and prison gang members who committed felony crimes, my interlocutors garner little sympathy in popular discourse for the fact of their deportation. Within the context of anti-Latinx racism, global wealth disparities, immigration restrictionism, mass incarceration, and mass deportation, the contours of their lives I hope become more understandable, if still complex. But at the same time it is possible to see their existence as not so complicated. Their community participation, U.S. families, personal narratives rooted in U.S. communities and the nation, cultural affinity—and sense of cultural alienation in Mexico—all point to significant attachments to and within the U.S. nation. Social and cultural membership should be one consideration in normative policy deliberations for noncitizen inclusion. Policy discussions surrounding legal inclusion, 279 often grounded in stereotyping and fear-mongering about immigrant Others, must also consider more lucid approaches to cultural membership. If inclusion in or forced exclusion from home—whether social and geographic communities or cultural communities of shared affinity—indeed does shape well-being, then an examination of self-representation and cultural imagination represents one way to go about understanding how (U.S.) Americanness is possessed and experienced by noncitizens within the territorial borders and by those who have been expelled. At the same time, I want to be absolutely clear about my opposition to cultural semblance as a criterion for denying legal inclusion to noncitizens who seek it in the United States. Many compelling factors surrounding hardship, human flourishing, and global inequality may create a moral imperative for inclusion. Those factors must be considered on their merits, irrespective of cultural difference and without a cultural test. With this caution in mind, I suggest that conscripting the concepts of self-representation as well as popular culture and civic participation, frayed transantional family ties, and care and coming together with people “like us” in Mexico, allow us to rethink “Americanness” and other ways of belonging. The innovation that deportees demonstrate in moving around the spaces of Nogales, refashioning ways of earning an income, and their masculinities and care relations reflect tremendous ingenuity. They forge ahead with their lives despite alienation, disorientation, and disillusion. Yet there was always a hope, albeit faint, that once again life would take them to the United States, with family, back home. For Danny and so many others that possibility is foreclosed. 280 Deportee experiences illuminate the complex ways belonging operates at transnational, national, local, and interpersonal scales. They encounter multiple boundaries of belonging—embodied, social, cultural, linguistic, economic, and institutional—across their life histories. They simultaneously resist, accommodate, refuse, and accept various inclusions and exclusions. “Criminal alien” personhood is a site for defining social and politico-legal belonging to the nation and, by richly contextualizing deportees’ lived experiences within broader structures of power, reshapes understandings of their belonging to the nation, to local and transnational communities, and to each other. My hope is that there can be greater understanding of connections to place and to people such that greater attention can be placed on the possibility of a world that recognizes and reveres the ways we belong. 281 APPENDIX A LIST OF ACRONYMNS CAP- Criminal Alien Program CBP- U.S. Customs and Border Protection CCA- Corrections Corporation of America (now CorpsCivic) DHS- U.S. Department of Homeland Security DOC- Department of Corrections DOT- Department of Transportation FCC- Florence Correctional Complex FIRRP- Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project ICE- Immigration and Customs Enforcement IIRIRA- Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 INFONAVIT- Institute of the National Workers’ Housing Fund IRCA- Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 KBI- Kino Border Initiative LPR- Legal Permanent Resident SPC- Service Processing Center (Florence) SHU- Secure Housing Unit USIS- U.S. Immigration Service 282 APPENDIX B DEPORTEE CONTACTS WITH U.S. AND MEXICAN INSTITUTIONS Immigration and Customs Police – Criminal Apprehension Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations – Identification Criminal Courts – Felony Prosecution and Conviction DHS Detention Center or DHS-Contracted Private Detention Center – Detention State Federal Bureau Departments of of Prisons – Corrections – Incarceration Executive Office for Incarceration Immigration Review – Adjudication Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Enforcement and Removal Operations – Border Patrol – Apprehension Removal Department of Homeland Security – Immigration Enforcement Municipal Police – Law Enforcement National Institute of Migration – Immigration Enforcement State Police – Law INFONAVIT – Enforcement Housing Subsidies for Workers Federal Police – Law Human Repatriation – Enforcement Document Deportee Arrivals Social Security Grupos Beta – – Health Care Military – Illicit Drug Humanitarian Support for the Poor Interdiction Department of the Interior – Coordinate Repatriation 283 APPENDIX D RESEARCH METHODS At the time of the interviews, interviewees ranged in age from 21 to 66 years old. Mean age was 40 years old. Interviewees were selected using convenience sampling, a non-probability method. Having met Danny and Miguel, they then introduced me to people who in turn brought others into my social networks. I also met people opportunistically in outdoor spaces and at businesses. Participant observation was carried out with deported men in their homes, places of work, drug rehabilitation facilities, government offices, in parks and plazas, hospitals, drug rehabilitation centers, and in and around public spaces in Nogales was an additional aspect of field research. From my experiences in these spaces, I documented everyday aspects of social and work life and paid particular attention to the difficulties faced after deportation, including police extortion, lack of work, discrimination as “Americanized” outsiders and former prisoners, lack of work and housing, and separation from family. I observed strategies for mitigating, or attempting to mitigate, hardships such as sharing housing, work, money, and food; providing friendship and emotional support; developing hustles, often by using English and U.S. social capital; and avoiding police and organized crime activities. I met study participants in various ways. Serendipitously meeting Danny and Miguel, as described in Chapter I, led to several contacts. Over the years, Danny introduced me to countless people from his network, about 10 others who turned out to be post-prison deportees that ended up consenting to a formal interview and usually much more unstructured conversation and time spent together. Danny was sociable, lived just 289 two blocks from downtown, and talked to people easily. He greeted people almost indiscriminately when we were out on walks—whether on our way to the store, a food cart, a friend’s, the hospital, or just getting fresh air—and we introduced each other when we ran into acquaintances. Danny would mention “our project” and that sometimes led to a conversation. I would unassertively say that I was happy to talk anytime and leave it at that to avoid placing undue pressure on people. Later, they would sometimes find me through Danny or we would meet again when out and about and express interest in talking. On a few occasions, other interlocutors introduced me to potential participants. Again, some would be interested in participating and others not. I did not actively pursue introductions by Danny or others, however, because I feared that unfamiliarity with anthropology could lead to confusion about my motives. When others explained the research and then made introductions, I felt uneasy about how the contents of interviews and the purpose of the work would be described. I also met a few people over the years at the Kino Border Initiative’s [KBI] comedor, or dining facility. KBI is a not-for-profit organization that provides direct services—meals, first aid, clothing, housing for women and children—to migrants, asylum-seekers, and deportees and also provides educational experiences for students. I emailed the volunteer coordinator before traveling to Nogales in 2014 offering my support. Starting in 2014, and continuing anytime I have returned to Nogales, I spent one day a week volunteering. I began in the kitchen and then took on roles serving meals, handing out clothing, administering short demographic and migration history surveys, performing data entry, transporting migrants between the comedor and shelters and bus 290 stations, and giving brief human rights talks. I became better known, as did my research, among advocacy workers and volunteers over the years. Eventually, workers and volunteers would occasionally connect me with people and a few of my interviews were conducted with people I met at KBI’s comedor. Over the months and years, however, I would meet the majority of my interlocutors fortuitously. My routine movements through the spaces of the city led me to meet a surprising number of people who fit the study participant profile. Given the many months that I was able to spend in different parts of the city: on the line, in another part of town, in the neighborhood (and even in my building) surrounding my rented room near downtown. Meeting people through fortuitous circumstance, became the most comfortable and unintrusive way to meet people and it became how I met the majority of those who would eventually become study participants. Each fortuitous meeting, like each day in Nogales and Puerto Peñasco, was different. Aspects of daily living seemingly had no direct relation to fieldwork. Daily and weekly routines included cleaning or tidying my living space; doing laundry at a neighborhood with well-worn, household style non-industrial washers; purchasing nonperishable foodstuffs for my small room without refrigerator. I also lifted weights— occasionally with deportees who wanted to join me—at a prominent local gym about five blocks south of my room, where I met an array of people from the community: maquiladora supervisors, construction workers, a municipal court judge, produce brokers, shop owners, hair stylists, a junior college instructor. Line blurred, however, and routine activities often led to interactions with deported men. I met deported people who came and went—staying a few days or a few months—in the two-story building in Nogales or 291 one-story, run-down hotel in Puerto Peñasco where I rented small rooms, at the gym, the laundromat, the grocery store, or just purchasing the morning paper at a corner store. These chance encounters often led to longer conversations, which shed light on new dimensions of post-deportation dynamics, and sometimes to consent to participate in the research. Occasionally—more often toward the end of fieldwork than the beginning— preplanned commitments, either directly or tangentially related to research, consumed long hours: stop at someone’s house to pick up an envelope to mail in Nogales, Arizona; meet up to accompany during an appointment with an attorney; drop off much needed T- shirts I had purchased for someone in Nogales, Arizona; visit someone with questions about setting up a Facebook page to connect with family. More often, however, I would have unstructured time in the day with which to undertake activities that reflected a sort of planned spontaneity. I balanced time between exploration and follow-up. Particularly in the early days, I made it a point to trek up and down the hilly streets of unknown neighborhoods, often at first light between 5:30 and 6:30 AM, to familiarize myself with far-flung areas of the city. Once I had located and purchased a city map, some weeks after my arrival in 2014, I would spend several minutes most days. The spontaneity and improvisation that characterized many of my interlocutors’ everyday lives became reflected in interviews, both semi-structured and unstructured, and in when carrying out life histories. Usually I would get to know people on various occasions before conducting formal, semi-structured or life history interviews. Many of our unstructured conversations took place during walks through the streets, on benches in 292 plazas and parks, in homes, and at places of work. I always sought input on where people would feel comfortable and paid attention to contextual signs of relative appropriateness of venue. As I write in Chapter III, there are often places in Nogales that either deported men or I would feel uncomfortable, because of the risk that organized crime, the police, or soldiers on patrol would be suspicious of us. I strove to not exacerbate any jeopardy that existed already by mere presence in Nogales. Semi-structured interviews lasted as little as 30 minutes in three cases but averaged around two hours. Life history interviews usually took three to five hours, over one or two sessions. With those with whom I conducted follow up interviews (39% of my interlocutors), follow ups usually consisted of recurrent contact over months and years. This allowed me to gain additional perspective and depth of understanding of what they had told me previously and what aspects of their lives were in flux. Critically, these people, with whom I had the closest relationships, offered feedback on my analyses. They both confirmed and controverted my developing understandings of what, how, and where they had lived and theories about what it all might mean. In Nogales, safety—that of my interlocutors and my own—was a primary concern. The logics of social hierarchy in Nogales privilege white U.S. citizens. The Mafia strictly prohibit crime or violence perpetrated against U.S. citizens because of the unwanted attention and disruption of business that would result. This did not eliminate the risk of violent victimization, but by the transitive property of the streets, deportees (and I) assumed that my presence generally reduced risk for those I was around. Municipal police also tend to leave U.S. citizens alone, except when they can be caught in flagrante delicto. Police stopped me 11 times, once by myself and other times 293 with deportees, when walking in Nogales near the Line or downtown. Officers told me that I was suspicious because of the cholos (street people/gang members) I was with. I would explain that I am a writer. Stops ended innocuously. After a few minutes of questioning and maybe a warrants check, we would be released from questioning without have to pay a bribe—the US$2-US$10 (or more, if available) a deportee might have to pay to avoid being taken to jail for a 36-hour stint on an obscure ordinance violation. To mitigate risk, I was conscientious about conducting most of my work during daylight hours and being hypervigilant of my surroundings. I critically evaluated my safety constantly. When possible, I avoided police, military, and Mafia and places where they gathered. When I did walk by puntos (cartel lookouts) or municipal police, or when sicarios (hitmen) drove by, I would get anxious and do my best to steel myself with controlled breathing, even though I was among the least vulnerable people. Over time I learned that affective responses were ethnographically informative. I focused on being attentive to my own emotional states and to recognize the subtle movements, expressions, and speech of those around me that could reveal information about others’ orientation to the risks of navigating the city. My own emotive states and gut reactions often heightened my awareness about the experiences of those I was with. I only used audio recorders for formal interviews with government officials and NGO workers. Out of concern for safety, I did not audio record interviews with core participants. Even though I did not ask deported men specifically about Mafia, police, and military activities, I preferred there not be the impression that sensitive information could have been audio recorded, particularly given my interlocutors’ vulnerability. 294 I include few photographs of deportees in this work. I was sensitive to the hopes of eventual return that my interlocutors harbored and to the potential risk photographs could pose to law enforcement. Photographs of deportees included here are reproduced with their understanding of the implications and in accordance with their wishes that images be shared to better tell the story of deportation. I spent unstructured time with community members and public officials in Nogales. I conducted structured, formal interviews with a U.S. Border Patrol spokesperson; officials from Grupos Beta, a Mexican government agency charged with protecting migrants; Repatriación Humana, the agency in charge of receiving deported people; the Nogales director of Seguro Popular, universal health care for poor people; an attorney from the Defensoría Pública, a federal government attorney assigned to assist deportees; a psychologist with the Programa de Apoyo Psicológico para Migrantes Deportados; the Director of the Secretaría de Desarrollo Económico for the city of Nogales, who operates an online employment clearing-house; and an attorney for the Programa de Defensa e Incidencia Binacional; and U.S.-based family members of deportees. Formal interviews or informal contact was maintained with migrant and deportee advocates and service providers. After beginning at KBI by cooking and serving meals and distributing clothing I was asked to begin giving occasional brief talks on human rights. I also supported KBI with specific projects. For example, I drafted a document on the effects of U.S. policy on Mexican migration and conducted interviews with migrant advocates in the northern Mexico migration hubs of Altar and Caborca, in support of a KBI special report. On limited occasions I also volunteered with the Tucson Samaritans 295 and Border Links, two other NGOs, to scout water drop locations for migrants isolated in the desert and helped migrants, asylum-seekers, and deportees place international telephone calls with No More Deaths, another NGO. Lastly, I attended local events, and spent extensive time with residents in town. I monitored local print media in order to gain better qualitative understanding of discourses surrounding topics related to my research. I created an archive from the Nuevo Día and the Nogales International, the former a print daily in Nogales, Sonora and the latter a semi-weekly print outlet in Nogales, Arizona. The archive consisted of several hundred newspaper articles, clipped daily during my 17 months in Nogales, each one organized into one of 12 primary themes.49 I occasionally read PM (a yellow journalism tabloid) and El Diario de Sonora and Expreso (both published in Hermosillo, the state capital). The FIRRP research phase began with training sessions put on by FIRRP staff. Then I conducted one-on-one intake interviews in detention facilities—gathering migration histories, family networks, criminal histories, and narratives of people’s fear of deportation to their country of citizenship—in order to orient detainees about the specific forms of relief they may be eligible to pursue in immigration court. I also helped detainees with applications for relief from deportation. I gained insight into life inside immigration detention centers and observed removal proceedings in immigration courts for a day. I supported FIRRP attorneys with basic research on certain region-specific conditions (e.g. Central American gangs alliances, drug-related violence for specific places and times in Mexico) and more extensive research on police and drug cartel collusion, tattoos, and vulnerability to violent victimization in northern Mexico. 296 I took shorthand notes during interviews with core participants and at other times on the streets of Nogales. I digitized my notes on the same day, using voice recognition software to compose full fieldnote and interview note entries within, at most, hours of conducting interviews. I conducted interviews in English, Spanish, and by code- switching, following interviewee preferences. I analyzed data using MAXQDA to code fieldnotes and interview notes according to 23 emergent themes.50 I used MAXQDA queries to conduct data analysis. In addition, I created a core participant matrix to organize 17 basic data points51 for my 57 interviewees. I identified theme frequency and rich points in the data surrounding experiences and perceptions of belonging. 49 Topics included: Migration, Border, Public Safety, Law Enforcement and Military, Social Life, Economic Life, Local History, Drug Use, Smuggling, Drug Trafficking, Local Politics, and Politics (Other). 50 Themes included: Ethnographic Setting, Physical Description, Personal Background, Gang Experiences in United States, Prison Experiences in the United States, Detention Center Experiences in the United States, Deportation Process, Family in the United States, Drug Use, Experiences with Police in Nogales, Nogales Residence, Mafia, Violence in Nogales, Navigating Space, Microeconomy, Health, Work and Hustles, Identity, Perceptions of the Good, Perceptions of the Future, and Ethnographer Analysis. 51 Participant matrix information included: Pseudonym, Place of Birth, Year of Birth, Primary Residence in the United States, Year Migrated to the United States, Year of Most Recent Deportation, Times Deported, Incarcerated in U.S. State or Federal Prison (Y/N), Identified as Former Gang Member (Y/N), Primary Hustle or Work in Mexico, Have Received Remittances from Family (Y/N), Disclosed Violent Victimization in Mexico, Incarcerated in U.S. Federal Prison for Illegal Reentry (Y/N), Age at First Migration to United States, Years Lived in United States, Years since Most Recent Deportation, Is a Father (Y/N). 297 APPENDIX E PARTICIPANT INTERVIEWS (DEPORTEES) Table 2. Participants Semi-Structured Follow-up Life History Interviews Interviews Interviews 57 57 22 17 100% 39% 30% 298 APPENDIX F INTERVIEW OUTLINE FOR CORE PARTICIPANTS Background 1. Where are you from? What is it like there? 2. What was your family like? 3. Where did you go to school? What was it like? 4. When you were growing up, were your parents employed? What did they do? 5. What work did your grandparents do? What about your siblings? 6. What was your first job? What was your income? Migration 1. Why did your family decide to emigrate to the United States? How old were you? 2. Who did your family know in the United States? 3. How did you get to the United States? 4. When you arrived in the United States, where did you go? 5. Did you return to Mexico? Immigration and Legal Status 1. What was your legal status in the United States? 2. How did people in the United States treat you as a Mexican immigrant? 3. What experiences, if any, did you have in the United States in which you think you were treated differently from others because you were born in Mexico? 4. Did you feel like you were taken advantage of or singled out because of your legal status? 299 5. Do you think that Mexican immigrants have a mostly positive or mostly negative image within U.S. society? Gangs, Prison 1. Were there gangs or clicas where you grew up? Why did people get involved in gangs there? What were the differences between people involved in gangs and those not involved in gangs? What are the differences between gangs in the United States and gangs in Mexico? 2. What involvement did you have in street gangs or in prison gangs? Why did you and others like you become involved in gangs? 3. Did you do time in prison? How long? Where? 4. What was your prison experience? What would you do on an average day? What were politics (gang activity) like on your tier or yard? 5. How did prison change you? 6. What contact did you have with family when you were in prison? Deportation 1. How many times have you been deported? 2. How did you find out you are going to be deported? What was your detention center experience? What was your deportation experience? 3. Where were you deported? Who did you know when you arrived? Who were you in touch with in the United States? Where did you stay when you arrived? What income did you have when you arrived? 4. Who did you meet when you arrived? How did you meet them, and where? 300 5. What contact you have with your family? How often do you talk to them, or see them? 6. Do you think you’ll return to the United States? 7. How is deportation different for men and women? Work 1. Tell me about each job you have had in the United States and Mexico, including the type of work you did, hours per week, how you got hired, and how much you earned. 2. In Mexico, have your coworkers lived in the United States like yourself, or only in Mexico? 3. Is it helpful for you in your job that you have lived in the United States? 4. What have your employers been like? How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and employers? You think you have ever been taken advantage of at work because you lived so many years in the United States? 5. How is work different for men and women? Family 1. What family are you in contact with in the United States? How often do you talk? How do you stay in touch? Have they come to see you in Mexico? 2. Do your family send you money? How much? How often? Do they send food, clothing, or other things? 3. Do you have children? What are things a father should do? What was your father like? How are you different from or the same as your father? Household Organization and Resources 301 1. Tell me about the places you have lived in since you came to Mexico, including for you lived with and what type of place (e.g. room, apartment, etc.). 2. How did you meet the people you’ve lived with? How did you come to live with him? 3. How is it different for deported women and deported men to live here? 4. Have you shared bills of the people you've lived with? How did you divide bills between household members and pay for them? 5. Have you shared household chores with people that you have lived with? How do you decide who has which household responsibilities? 6. Have you pooled money with the people you've lived with? 7. Have you shared clothing, food, or other things with people you’ve lived with? With others? 8. How have you in your housemates manage conflict between household members? Identity and Community Solidarity 1. Describe the type of people you think are most like you. 2. What is a pinto? What is a plasticón? What is a pocho? 3. What things are most important to you in your life? 4. What characteristics do you admire in your friends or family members? 5. Do you think deportees help each other out? How? How is help different between men and women? 6. 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