Subaltern Citizenship: Mexican American U.S. Citizen Illegally Deported to Mexico

A Mexican American man who is a U.S. citizen illegally deported to Mexico? Yes, it's true and the story speaks to subaltern forms of citizenship that make its conferral seemingly meaningless for the ethnically marked Chicano body. The LA Times call this a case of "mistaken deportation." Surreal.

From ACLU site

U.S. Citizen Illegally Deported From Jail Is Missing in Mexico
ACLU and Law Firm Seek Federal Help to Find Developmentally Disabled Man

Monday, June 11, 2007 printer version

LOS ANGELES — Federal immigration officers and the L.A. County Sheriff's Department illegally deported a U.S. citizen last month, the ACLU/SC has learned. He is missing in Mexico, and today the ACLU/SC and the law firm of Van Der Hout, Brigagliano & Nightingale file a lawsuit in U.S. District Court seeking his safe return.

Pedro Guzman, 29, was born in Los Angeles and raised in Lancaster, California. He was serving time at Men’s Central Jail for trespassing, a misdemeanor offense, when he was deported to Tijuana May 10 or 11. Mr. Guzman is developmentally disabled, does not read or write English well, and knows no one in Tijuana. He declared at his booking that he was born in California.

He spoke to his sister-in-law by telephone from a shelter in Tijuana within a day of his deportation, but the call was interrupted. Family members traveled to the city in an attempt to find him and have remained there, searching shelters, jails, churches, hospitals, and morgues.

There are no circumstances under which government officials may deport a U.S. citizen. Federal officials have refused requests by family members and a private lawyer to assist in the search for Mr. Guzman.

"This is a recurring nightmare for every person of color of immigrant roots," said ACLU/SC legal director Mark Rosenbaum. "Local jail officials and federal immigration officers deported the undeportable, a United States citizen, based on appearance, prejudice, and reckless failure to apply fair legal procedures."

"What has happened to Pedro Guzman is a tragedy," said Stacy Tolchin of Van Der Hout, Brigagliano & Nightingale. "His life may be in danger, and the government must act immediately to locate him and return him to the United States."

Jail and Department of Homeland Security officials failed to identify Mr. Guzman’s disability and improperly obtained his signature for deportation from the United States. "The procedures for determination of legal status implemented by Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs … fail even minimal criteria for constitutional due process," the lawsuit states.

Sheriff's deputies trained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conduct immigration checks at L.A. County jails. The ACLU and immigrant-rights groups warned that involving local law enforcement in immigration policing would lead to mistaken deportations and violate the due-process rights of inmates.

Anyone with information about Mr. Guzman can call the ACLU/SC at (213) 977-9500.

Black Bodies and Unequel Justice in Jena, LA.

"The tree was on the side of the campus that, by long-standing tradition, had always been claimed by white students, who make up more than 80 percent of the 460 students. But a few of the school's 85 black students had decided to challenge the accepted state of things and asked school administrators whether they, too, could sit in the tree's shade."

That "black students" have to ask where they can sit for shade is disturbingly reminiscent of Jim Crow era racist practices and laws meant to deprive Blacks of their civil rights through institutional and quotidian obeisance to whites. Is deep south Louisiana still in the murky waters of uncivilized race-hatred? Yes.

" 'Sit wherever you want,' school officials told them. The next day, the nooses were hanging from the branches."

And then a past of ignorance and racism emerged untouched by reason or state protection...

See Howard Witt's story "Racial demons rear heads" in Chicago Tribune.

The War at Home: Guns and the Policing of the Subaltern Body

Guns and “gun rights laws” have a coterminous and nearly forgotten history in the Americas. When white or Criollo elites were the “minority,” guns were used to control enslaved bodies which were (depending where you were in the Americas) black, mulatto, Amerindian, or some combination of these or other taxonomies used to describe the enslaved majority.

Policing the enslaved body and quelling slave insurrections were part of the fiber and logic of a racism that created both the taxonomies of race and the pseudo-science that legitimated its various guises in order to sustain the emergent national economies. Whether they were called “pattyrollers” or “verdugos,” slave catchers and armed white militias protected the slave-owners’ lands from insurgent bodies on the plantation and beyond as property to be returned if any slave managed to escape.




So it is without irony, or the hint of satire, that we see the latest “insurgents” in the leaked National Rifle Association’s graphic novella (alert thanks to Salon.com and the always amazing Tex[t] Mex blog). The subaltern bodies are constructed anew as threats to the now white majority, necessary targets of the fearless head-of-household dads who must protect this perverted justice a la Michael Douglass in Falling Down.

Subaltern Body Politics: How the Right Uses "Colored" Bodies

"White supremacy, sensing the need to repackage itself for consumption in polite company, partially fills the demand for racist bile by outsourcing to mercenary writers of color." See Margret Kimberley's timely, "How the Right Uses People of Color to Foster Racism." My thanks to William Anthony Nericcio's post for alerting me to this.