The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity

IF 0.3 Q4 INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS & LABOR Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas Pub Date : 2023-09-01 DOI:10.1215/15476715-10581517
Celeste R. Menchaca
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Across seven chapters, Ordaz looks within the El Centro Immigrant Detention Center, from its origins in 1945 to its closing in 2014, to uncover state practices of migrant labor exploitation and punishment, and in turn she reveals migrant resistance as transnational radical solidarity.Ordaz's central claim is that the El Centro Immigration Detention Center was not simply an administrative site to hold and process unauthorized migrants but “a racialized and gendered administrative regime of punishment” (94). She documents how migrants in the facility faced physical and verbal abuse, experienced psychological intimidation, endured overcrowding, and suffered solitary confinement. They were denied lifesaving medical services, basic recreation, and adequate nutrition. Their confinement, she argues, was designed to be punitive, a claim that resonates with the work of Miroslava Chávez-García and Natalie Lira, both of whom analyze racialized punishment through the lens of juvenile detention and sterilization in California. Ordaz further situates her analysis of racialized punishment within the context of wartime mobilization. She reviews how World War II, the Cold War, and the civil wars in Latin America armed INS officials with the rhetoric to frame migrants as a threat to the nation and, consequently, legitimized migrant incarceration, which allowed the state to expand detention and deportation infrastructures.Most histories on twentieth-century US immigration enforcement generally center on law and policy, the Border Patrol, or immigrant inspection at ports of entry. While these works provide a brief discussion of migrant detention, few fully unpack its significance. Instead, Ordaz demonstrates that detention facilities were a key mechanism in a larger system of labor exploitation. It was no coincidence, she points out, that the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp was built just three years after the 1942 creation of the Bracero Program, a binational program where the United States issued short-term labor contracts to Mexican workers. Ordaz argues that the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp and the Bracero reception center were two sides of the same coin: both “agricultural growers and INS employees viewed Mexican migrant workers, regardless of their legal status, as a source of labor and profit” (37). According to Ordaz, Bracero workers and detained migrants fell victim to the whims of employers or INS agents, as they both faced similar experiences with immobility, inadequate medical care, harsh labor conditions, and food vulnerability. The larger system made them interchangeable; Bracero and detained migrants were necessary to maintain a reserve of labor that was “racialized as nonhuman, criminal, and disposable” (30). This is of special significance in a space like Imperial Valley, where corporate agriculture holds political sway. Dichotomies can be deceptive, and in this way, Ordaz is in conversation with historian Cristina Salinas, who demonstrates that immigration restriction and unregulated mobility were not incongruent policies but functioned simultaneously as a deliberate tool of the state to control migrant labor.Punitive practices did not go unchallenged. To trace this history, Ordaz examines internal correspondence, handbooks, and investigations within the INS, along with news reports, original oral histories, advocacy group materials, and migrant testimonies collected by legal defense officers. She documents how in the early years of the camp's history, “detained migrants collaborated and thoroughly planned their escapes” (42). Ordaz frames these escapes as a form of migrant politics, protesting and straining the system of containment through their mobility. By the mid-1970s and into the mid-1980s, detained migrants in El Centro began to engage in what Ordaz calls “transnational migrant politics, a set of strategies and solidarities used by migrant prisoners to resist state power” (4). For example, drawing on activist traditions from their home countries, migrant prisoners across the political spectrum joined in collective action to organize a hunger strike protesting conditions at El Centro on May 27, 1985. Ordaz describes how, due to the political and economic upheaval in Latin America and a US refugee policy that excluded people fleeing right-wing regimes, asylum seekers were forced into detention at El Centro, where their extended incarceration set the stage for organized activism.Ordaz weaves together immigration history and carceral studies to trace the geographies of violence that permeated migrant confinement. She draws attention to the spatial dynamics of racialized punishment within and beyond detention. She considers the prefabricated buildings that initially formed the El Centro Detention Camp in 1945 and highlights their connection to a larger history of militarization. She then explores the physical and psychological violence perpetrated in the hidden spaces of detention—bathrooms and isolation rooms—in the latter half of the 1980s. The period between could have benefited from her attentive analysis of space. For example, a map that details the geographical distribution of all service and nonservice detention facilities across the greater Southwest could illustrate her argument that detention shifted largely to the US-Mexico border after 1954. Furthermore, a comprehensive discussion of the expanded facility in 1971 could have highlighted the structural attributes of racialized punishment. 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Abstract

Located in California's southeastern corner, the city of El Centro sits in the mountainous desert of the Imperial Valley. It was home to the El Centro Immigrant Detention Center, “one of the oldest continuously operating detention centers in the United States (until recently)” (3). Despite its long history, little was documented of the detention facility in local archives. For Jessica Ordaz, this forgetting was representative of a larger historical erasure that masked violence against migrants under Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) custody. Her book aims to unpack the history of an otherwise buried yet important federal facility. Across seven chapters, Ordaz looks within the El Centro Immigrant Detention Center, from its origins in 1945 to its closing in 2014, to uncover state practices of migrant labor exploitation and punishment, and in turn she reveals migrant resistance as transnational radical solidarity.Ordaz's central claim is that the El Centro Immigration Detention Center was not simply an administrative site to hold and process unauthorized migrants but “a racialized and gendered administrative regime of punishment” (94). She documents how migrants in the facility faced physical and verbal abuse, experienced psychological intimidation, endured overcrowding, and suffered solitary confinement. They were denied lifesaving medical services, basic recreation, and adequate nutrition. Their confinement, she argues, was designed to be punitive, a claim that resonates with the work of Miroslava Chávez-García and Natalie Lira, both of whom analyze racialized punishment through the lens of juvenile detention and sterilization in California. Ordaz further situates her analysis of racialized punishment within the context of wartime mobilization. She reviews how World War II, the Cold War, and the civil wars in Latin America armed INS officials with the rhetoric to frame migrants as a threat to the nation and, consequently, legitimized migrant incarceration, which allowed the state to expand detention and deportation infrastructures.Most histories on twentieth-century US immigration enforcement generally center on law and policy, the Border Patrol, or immigrant inspection at ports of entry. While these works provide a brief discussion of migrant detention, few fully unpack its significance. Instead, Ordaz demonstrates that detention facilities were a key mechanism in a larger system of labor exploitation. It was no coincidence, she points out, that the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp was built just three years after the 1942 creation of the Bracero Program, a binational program where the United States issued short-term labor contracts to Mexican workers. Ordaz argues that the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp and the Bracero reception center were two sides of the same coin: both “agricultural growers and INS employees viewed Mexican migrant workers, regardless of their legal status, as a source of labor and profit” (37). According to Ordaz, Bracero workers and detained migrants fell victim to the whims of employers or INS agents, as they both faced similar experiences with immobility, inadequate medical care, harsh labor conditions, and food vulnerability. The larger system made them interchangeable; Bracero and detained migrants were necessary to maintain a reserve of labor that was “racialized as nonhuman, criminal, and disposable” (30). This is of special significance in a space like Imperial Valley, where corporate agriculture holds political sway. Dichotomies can be deceptive, and in this way, Ordaz is in conversation with historian Cristina Salinas, who demonstrates that immigration restriction and unregulated mobility were not incongruent policies but functioned simultaneously as a deliberate tool of the state to control migrant labor.Punitive practices did not go unchallenged. To trace this history, Ordaz examines internal correspondence, handbooks, and investigations within the INS, along with news reports, original oral histories, advocacy group materials, and migrant testimonies collected by legal defense officers. She documents how in the early years of the camp's history, “detained migrants collaborated and thoroughly planned their escapes” (42). Ordaz frames these escapes as a form of migrant politics, protesting and straining the system of containment through their mobility. By the mid-1970s and into the mid-1980s, detained migrants in El Centro began to engage in what Ordaz calls “transnational migrant politics, a set of strategies and solidarities used by migrant prisoners to resist state power” (4). For example, drawing on activist traditions from their home countries, migrant prisoners across the political spectrum joined in collective action to organize a hunger strike protesting conditions at El Centro on May 27, 1985. Ordaz describes how, due to the political and economic upheaval in Latin America and a US refugee policy that excluded people fleeing right-wing regimes, asylum seekers were forced into detention at El Centro, where their extended incarceration set the stage for organized activism.Ordaz weaves together immigration history and carceral studies to trace the geographies of violence that permeated migrant confinement. She draws attention to the spatial dynamics of racialized punishment within and beyond detention. She considers the prefabricated buildings that initially formed the El Centro Detention Camp in 1945 and highlights their connection to a larger history of militarization. She then explores the physical and psychological violence perpetrated in the hidden spaces of detention—bathrooms and isolation rooms—in the latter half of the 1980s. The period between could have benefited from her attentive analysis of space. For example, a map that details the geographical distribution of all service and nonservice detention facilities across the greater Southwest could illustrate her argument that detention shifted largely to the US-Mexico border after 1954. Furthermore, a comprehensive discussion of the expanded facility in 1971 could have highlighted the structural attributes of racialized punishment. Regardless, The Shadow of El Centro will serve well in an undergraduate class because it touches on a wide range of subjects—immigration, labor, incarceration, policing, and migrant activism—in an accessible manner.
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《埃尔森特罗的阴影:移民监禁与团结的历史
埃尔森特罗市位于加利福尼亚州的东南角,坐落在帝王谷的多山沙漠中。这里是埃尔森特罗移民拘留中心的所在地,该中心是“美国(直到最近)仍在运作的最古老的拘留中心之一”。尽管历史悠久,但在当地档案中几乎没有关于该拘留设施的记录。对杰西卡·奥尔达兹来说,这种遗忘代表了更大的历史抹去,掩盖了对移民和归化局(INS)拘留下的移民的暴力行为。她的书旨在揭开一个被埋没却很重要的联邦设施的历史。奥尔达兹在七个章节中考察了埃尔森特罗移民拘留中心,从1945年的起源到2014年的关闭,揭示了国家对移民劳工的剥削和惩罚,反过来,她揭示了移民抵抗是跨国激进的团结。奥尔达兹的核心主张是,埃尔森特罗移民拘留中心不仅仅是一个关押和处理非法移民的行政场所,而且是“一个种族化和性别化的行政惩罚制度”(94)。她记录了该设施中的移民如何遭受身体和语言虐待,经历心理恐吓,忍受过度拥挤,并遭受单独监禁。他们得不到挽救生命的医疗服务、基本的娱乐和充足的营养。她认为,对他们的监禁是为了惩罚,这一说法与Miroslava Chávez-García和娜塔莉·里拉(Natalie Lira)的研究产生了共鸣,两人都通过加州青少年拘留和绝育的视角来分析种族化的惩罚。奥尔达兹进一步将她对种族化惩罚的分析置于战时动员的背景下。她回顾了第二次世界大战、冷战和拉丁美洲的内战是如何武装移民归化局的官员,将移民视为对国家的威胁,从而使移民监禁合法化,从而使国家能够扩大拘留和驱逐基础设施。20世纪美国移民执法的大部分历史通常集中在法律和政策、边境巡逻或入境口岸的移民检查上。虽然这些作品提供了对移民拘留的简要讨论,但很少有作品完全揭示了其重要性。相反,奥尔达兹证明了拘留设施是一个更大的劳动剥削系统中的关键机制。她指出,埃尔森特罗(El Centro)移民拘留营是在1942年建立“布拉塞罗计划”(Bracero Program)仅仅三年后建成的,这并非巧合。布拉塞罗计划是一个两国计划,美国向墨西哥工人发放短期劳动合同。Ordaz认为,El Centro移民拘留营和Bracero接待中心是同一枚硬币的两面:“农业种植者和移民局雇员都将墨西哥移民工人视为劳动力和利润的来源,而不管他们的法律地位如何”(37)。根据Ordaz的说法,Bracero的工人和被拘留的移民都是雇主或移民归归局特工的受害者,因为他们都面临着类似的经历:行动不便、医疗服务不足、劳动条件恶劣和食物脆弱。更大的系统使它们可以互换;Bracero和被拘留的移民对于维持劳动力储备是必要的,这些劳动力“被种族化为非人类的、犯罪的和可抛弃的”(30)。这在帝王谷这样的地方具有特殊的意义,在那里,企业农业拥有政治影响力。这样一来,奥达兹与历史学家克里斯蒂娜·萨利纳斯(Cristina Salinas)进行了对话。萨利纳斯证明,限制移民和不受管制的流动性并非不一致的政策,而是同时作为国家控制移民劳动力的蓄意工具发挥作用。惩罚性做法并非没有受到挑战。为了追溯这段历史,奥达兹查阅了移民局的内部通信、手册和调查,以及新闻报道、原始口述历史、倡导团体材料和法律辩护官员收集的移民证词。她记录了在集中营历史的早期,“被拘留的移民如何合作,并彻底计划他们的逃跑”(42)。奥尔达兹将这些逃亡者定义为移民政治的一种形式,通过他们的流动性来抗议和紧张遏制体系。到20世纪70年代中期和80年代中期,被关押在埃尔森特罗的移民开始参与奥尔达兹所说的“跨国移民政治,一套移民囚犯用来抵抗国家权力的策略和团结”(4)。例如,利用他们祖国的激进主义传统,不同政治立场的移民囚犯于1985年5月27日加入集体行动,组织了一场绝食抗议埃尔森特罗的条件。
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London's Working-Class Youth and the Making of Post-Victorian Britain, 1958–1971 On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Making of Gender Equality Law The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity Editor's Introduction Tending the Fire
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