Immigration Explorer

Great job with the blog responses everyone. You've contributed some great input to the material we've looked at.

Here is an "Immigration Explorer," compiled by the New York Times. Adjust the date at the scroll bar towards the top, and select Mexico as the country. You will see the fluctuation in the Mexican population over time, specially around the 1920s. What events could these fluctuations be attributed to?

NY Times Immigration Explorer

Drugs, Violence, and the Militarization of the Border

Last week, we continued our discussion of maquiladoras and ended with the screening of Maquilapolis. To finish off this discussion, we are pleased to invite guest speaker Garrett Brown, coordinator of the Maquiladora Health & Safety Support Network.
From their website:

The Maquiladora Health & Safety Support Network is a volunteer network of 400 occupational health and safety professionals who have placed their names on a resource list to provide information, technical assistance and on-site instruction regarding workplace hazards in the 3,000 "maquiladora" (foreign-owned assembly) plants along the U.S.-Mexico border. Our goal has always been to build the capacity of workers and their organizations to understand occupational health and safety issues and to be able to speak and act in their own name to protect their health and to exercise their rights. Our activities have included providing information and trainings to workers, plant-wide health and safety committees, and to community, human rights and professional associations; technical assistance to workers filing complaints under international trade agreements; and technical information for grassroots organizations monitoring the performance of transnational corporations and government health and safety agencies in the global economy.

We hope you can bring your questions from the film and our class discussions for Mr. Brown.

This week, we would like to discuss drugs, violence, and the militarization of the border. The TWO readings are Narcovirus by Alma Guillermoprieto and Stage of Siege by Denise Dresser. If you took the course The Southern Border, you may have read these articles. Denise Dresser discusses the "militirization of Mexico." This following quote was taken from another reading:

"The growing military presence at the border is a "low-intensity warfare against immigrants."

How do you think this "militarization of the border" has come to affect immigrants? This changes the security and drug discussion to one about social justice and human rights. Think about projects like Operation Gatekeeper and the Secure Fence Act of 2006. Currently, the Obama Administration is still following Bush's plan to build "The Great Wall of Mexico," as some have coined it. There have even been talks of bringing U.S. troops to the border. This NYTimes article sheds some light on the current immigration and security discussion in politics. Also think about our discussion with Michael Dear and his images of the border to answer this question. Post your response on this blog.

In class, we will be watching some video clips from the documentary project, "The Wall" and try to connect two different perspectives on this issue.

Gender, Health, and Environment

Following up on the discussion on NAFTA, we will be looking at the maquiladora industry more in depth, with a focus on gender roles, health, and environmental degradation. For your reading assignment, there are two articles to read. The first is "Women, Migration, and Household Survival Strategies: Mixtec Women in Tijuana," by Laura Velazco Ortiz, from the book Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. This reading is important as it gives insight on the rural populations that migrate to the border, which includes indigenous groups like Mixtecs. In contrast, the film we will be watching in class presents a different group of women working in the maquiladoras. These women come from urban areas around Mexico and are generally more educated and skilled, as the article will mention.

The second reading is an "Environmental Justice Case Study," which provides an introduction to environmental issues around the maquiladora industry. This article mentions the case of our community partners in Tijuana (Metales y Derivados), which also appears in the film.

Please respond with a blog comment to these readings, either one or both, with a paragraph after this post. Are there any questions that you still have after these readings?

Midterm Books

For the midterm, we ask that you choose a book from the following list. Each book is a work of non-fiction that serves as a more personal account of life at the border or the life of immigrants and will aid you to undestand the issues that we study academically. On the day of the midterm, come prepared to present your book and what you've learned with this personal account of the US-Mexico border. Hopefully you can find the book in the library or at a bookstore. If you find another memoir that you would like to read, please let us know so we can check it out. Please COMMENT below with the book you'd like to read - do not choose a book another person has already selected. Thanks, and happy reading!

Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail
Ruben Martinez

Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders With America's Illegal Migrants
John Annerino

Dead in Their Tracks: Crossing America's Desert Borderlands
John Annerino

The Devil's Highway: A True Story
Luis Alberto Urrea

Enrique's Journey
Sonia Nazario

Journey of Hope, Memoirs of a Mexican Girl
Rosalina Rosay

Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant
Tianguis Pérez, Dick J. Reavis

Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border
Luis Alberto Urrea

Undocumented in L.A.: An Immigrant's Story
Dianne Walta Hart

Lives on the Line: Dispatches from the U.S.-Mexico Border
Miriam Davidson

The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez
Jimmy Breslin

By The Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border
Luis Alberto Urrea, John Lueders Booth

Politics, Economics, and Transnational Power

This week we will transition from history into contemporary and multidisciplinary issues around politics, economics, and transnational powers. Some of these issues have been a result of history. For example, NAFTA went to efect in 1994 as a development of neoliberal president Carlos Salinas. Even physically, the way the border looks has been a result of political events and actions, such as Operation Gatekeeper. Politics and economics are largely interrelated with society and migratory patterns, and from southern mexico, to the the northern border, effects are noticeable. We will discuss why people migrate in the first place, a major factor being the economy and the rise of free trade and biotechnology. The communities that we will be visiting during our trip are representations of these political and economic processes whose inhabitants rely on maquiladoras for work and are for the most part newcomers from around Mexico.

Your reading for this week is Happily Ever Nafta, a collection of four articles of commentary on the North American Free Trade Agreement. After this reading, what are your thoughts on NAFTA and in what ways has the border region been shaped by this trade agreement? You can answer this question or COMMENT with any other sort of response, about a paragraph in length. Another idea is looking for current articles on the progress of NAFTA. Where are we today? What is the future of NAFTA? This article might be beneficial to understanding NAFTA's background and provide a simple introduction to the assigned reading, in case you are new to NAFTA.

Histories of the Border

Next class, we're very lucky to have guest speaker Michael Dear. Professor Dear is a newly-appointed professor of City and Regional Planning at the College of Environmental Design. He completed a multi-year 4,000-mile trip along the U.S.–Mexico border and uses this experience to reflect on the current and future status of the line between the two countries. We are hoping that Professor Dear will provide his personal insight on past and present events of the border.

To prepare for this discussion, have a look at this assigned reading handed out last Wednesday. This reading will give you a very brief break down of what the current Mexico-U.S. relationship looks like. Mexico history and U.S. history are heavily intertwined and the border is surely a result of hundreds of years of political, economic, and social processes between the two countries. Notice how even this introduction notes the importance of history.

In addition to this reading, check out this PBS timeline. Pick an event and come to class prepared to tell us a little about it. We recommend looking at outside resources. We hope that you will be able to connect this event to the reading: Can you trace any effect this event has had on present border issues or U.S.-Mexico relations? Why is this event important for us to know?

Please do not choose the NAFTA 1994 event, as we will be talking about this in the following class, though of course, your input is more than welcome then!

COMMENT after this post with your event of choice, in order to avoid people doubling on events, if possible, before Sunday.

This assignment is due Wednesday, February 10th.

SYLLABUS

This is a link to the course syllabus, including our community partner list and tentative itinerary.

We will keep it updated, so check back occasionally.