From DuBois to Anzaldua, the racial and ethnic minority experience in the United States is a story of simultaneity — of multiple, overlapping identities, and conflict. It is a struggle for belonging somewhere, while lacking full membership anywhere. This is the major analytical frame within which I approach my research. From questions concerning immigration and the content of citizenship to the broader impacts of state-contact on marginalized communities, I approach my work with the knowledge that the world these questions address is fundamentally shaped by the negotiation, and management, of social identities. My dissertation, Broken Mirrors: Identity, Duty, and Belonging in the Age of the New La(tinx) Migra, is a clear example of this commitment. Bringing together parallel, yet hitherto isolated, threads of inquiry in the study of immigration, Latinx politics, and bureaucracy, I explore the role of social identity in the institutional roles and personal lives of Latinx immigration law enforcement agents. What does it mean to be both the police and the policed? To be part of both an ostensible problem and the organized state solution? To be caught between, yet immersed within, two distinct camps?
While many scholars have studied the targeting of Latinx communities by immigration law enforcement agencies, little attention has been paid to the context of these encounters — namely that today more than any other period in history, the workforces of immigration law enforcement agencies reflect the demographic profile of the populations they police. That is, when Latinx immigration enforcement officers come into contact with their clientele, they often find themselves looking into ‘broken mirrors’: face to face, in many cases, with people with whom they share language, ascriptive traits, and common origins. How Latinx immigration law enforcement agents internalize, and deal with such tensions is the central focus of my dissertation.
The lack of attention to the changing face of immigration enforcement might be partly explained by the fact that Latinxs who work in immigration law enforcement are thought to self-select into this field (see e.g., Garcia Hernandez 2012; Heyman 2002). Scholars take the mere existence of Latinx immigration agents as prima facie evidence that ethnic identity does not matter to Latinx agents; they contend that a relative distance from the immigrant experience, or a disassociation with ethnic identity, leads Latinxs to positions in immigration law enforcement. Where Latinxs do not self-select into immigration agencies, scholars contend that organizational cultures and socialization serve to constrain the effective role of broader social identities (see e.g., Lipsky 2010 [1980]; Wilson 1989; Kaufman 2006 [1960]). Thus, when such agents act, they do so on behalf, and in the interest of the state or the institution itself. These theories contend ethnic and racial identity is subordinated by the uniform. I find these assumptions untenable.
My dissertation offers and develops empirical evidence to support an alternative explanation in which Latinx immigration enforcement agents, despite donning the uniform, remain vulnerable to simultaneous pressures arising from membership in two distinct social identities. Drawing on one-hundred interviews with, and observations of, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — with an over-sampling of Latinxs — across Texas, Arizona, and California, I find that ethnic identity plays a larger role in the daily institutional (and extra-institutional) lives of immigration enforcement officers than we should expect given extant scholarship.
Latinx immigration agents not only wrestle with competing, cross-cutting identities in the course of their duties, but develop and deploy means by which to cope with the tensions they engender. While some opt into agency units dedicated to service, where they feel they can help immigrants acknowledged as co-ethnics navigate the appeals process, others choose to adopt strict enforcement attitudes and practices in which their ethnic identities — and sympathies — are less likely to be activated. Others, still, tread ground in-between, and while attempting to wall off their over-lapping identities and remain ‘professional,’ respond to a combination of national and Latinx community interests in exercising their authority. These findings — and the implication that identity matters — contribute not simply to the study of immigration or Latinx politics, but to the way we think about community-level regulatory and social service provision, and other points of contact between the public and the state.
A National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship was instrumental to the completion of my dissertation research. Today, as I near the half-way mark of writing, I am supported by a Cornell University Sage Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Upon completion and defense of my dissertation in May 2017, I will revise the manuscript for publication as a book. Beyond my dissertation, however, my research agenda remains tied to questions of liminality, migration control efforts, and the relationship between the state and the public. There are two projects, in particular, that I plan to pursue, and they both stem from observations made in the field.
Over the course of my dissertation fieldwork, I became fascinated by the marks, both physical and psychological, left on Latinx border communities by a growing immigration industrial complex. Immigration checkpoints along the edge of the one-hundred mile buffer zone created by the 1975 Brignoni-Ponce decision effectively demarcate areas of the country in which militarized border enforcement agencies operate using battlefield technologies. Predator and dirigible drones that fly over small, predominately Latinx border towns communicate not only the state’s perception of immigrants as an enemy threat, but a blanket-suspicion of the communities being surveilled. Residents in these communities, thus, encounter and experience the state in ways unique within American society.
The first of the two projects, recognizing that the emergence a of disproportionately Latinx immigration workforce has shaped Latinxs’ perceptions of those agencies, will focus on the broader effects of border militarization. I am specifically interested in how the evolution of the border as a militarized space has affected the day-to-day lives of residents in those communities — residents who aside from being caught between two inherently political boundaries, also reside in, and reflect, a literal intersection of nations, cultures, and people. To what extent do these communities recognize an increased state presence? Do these communities feel as though they, themselves, are being targeted? And to what extent do residents attribute the effects of border militarization to political leadership or the federal government? These preliminary questions will serve as a roadmap for planning my next ethnographic study of the region.
The second project will focus on the emergence of the immigration industrial complex as a massive jobs program. During my dissertation research, I found that Latinxs predominately enter immigration law enforcement in service of self-interested rationales, which raises important questions about the effects of militarization on struggling border economies. To what extent has the broadening footprint of immigration law enforcement and incarceration strengthened the economies of border communities? To what extent do these economies now depend economically on these institutions? What might such communities look like without the employment provided by immigration enforcement? I plan to write a series of articles based on these projects.
Anzaldua once described the frontera [the border] as an ‘open wound,’ a liminal space where people are caught between camps, unaware of where they, specifically, belong. That today this border is the site of a battle over national sovereignty and security only heightens these tensions, and identity conflicts therein. My work brings these voices out of the borderlands, where they are known quantities, to contextualize complex social and political theories in the study of American Politics and thus contribute to our understanding of social identity, migration control, Latinx politics, and bureaucracy.
While many scholars have studied the targeting of Latinx communities by immigration law enforcement agencies, little attention has been paid to the context of these encounters — namely that today more than any other period in history, the workforces of immigration law enforcement agencies reflect the demographic profile of the populations they police. That is, when Latinx immigration enforcement officers come into contact with their clientele, they often find themselves looking into ‘broken mirrors’: face to face, in many cases, with people with whom they share language, ascriptive traits, and common origins. How Latinx immigration law enforcement agents internalize, and deal with such tensions is the central focus of my dissertation.
The lack of attention to the changing face of immigration enforcement might be partly explained by the fact that Latinxs who work in immigration law enforcement are thought to self-select into this field (see e.g., Garcia Hernandez 2012; Heyman 2002). Scholars take the mere existence of Latinx immigration agents as prima facie evidence that ethnic identity does not matter to Latinx agents; they contend that a relative distance from the immigrant experience, or a disassociation with ethnic identity, leads Latinxs to positions in immigration law enforcement. Where Latinxs do not self-select into immigration agencies, scholars contend that organizational cultures and socialization serve to constrain the effective role of broader social identities (see e.g., Lipsky 2010 [1980]; Wilson 1989; Kaufman 2006 [1960]). Thus, when such agents act, they do so on behalf, and in the interest of the state or the institution itself. These theories contend ethnic and racial identity is subordinated by the uniform. I find these assumptions untenable.
My dissertation offers and develops empirical evidence to support an alternative explanation in which Latinx immigration enforcement agents, despite donning the uniform, remain vulnerable to simultaneous pressures arising from membership in two distinct social identities. Drawing on one-hundred interviews with, and observations of, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — with an over-sampling of Latinxs — across Texas, Arizona, and California, I find that ethnic identity plays a larger role in the daily institutional (and extra-institutional) lives of immigration enforcement officers than we should expect given extant scholarship.
Latinx immigration agents not only wrestle with competing, cross-cutting identities in the course of their duties, but develop and deploy means by which to cope with the tensions they engender. While some opt into agency units dedicated to service, where they feel they can help immigrants acknowledged as co-ethnics navigate the appeals process, others choose to adopt strict enforcement attitudes and practices in which their ethnic identities — and sympathies — are less likely to be activated. Others, still, tread ground in-between, and while attempting to wall off their over-lapping identities and remain ‘professional,’ respond to a combination of national and Latinx community interests in exercising their authority. These findings — and the implication that identity matters — contribute not simply to the study of immigration or Latinx politics, but to the way we think about community-level regulatory and social service provision, and other points of contact between the public and the state.
A National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship was instrumental to the completion of my dissertation research. Today, as I near the half-way mark of writing, I am supported by a Cornell University Sage Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Upon completion and defense of my dissertation in May 2017, I will revise the manuscript for publication as a book. Beyond my dissertation, however, my research agenda remains tied to questions of liminality, migration control efforts, and the relationship between the state and the public. There are two projects, in particular, that I plan to pursue, and they both stem from observations made in the field.
Over the course of my dissertation fieldwork, I became fascinated by the marks, both physical and psychological, left on Latinx border communities by a growing immigration industrial complex. Immigration checkpoints along the edge of the one-hundred mile buffer zone created by the 1975 Brignoni-Ponce decision effectively demarcate areas of the country in which militarized border enforcement agencies operate using battlefield technologies. Predator and dirigible drones that fly over small, predominately Latinx border towns communicate not only the state’s perception of immigrants as an enemy threat, but a blanket-suspicion of the communities being surveilled. Residents in these communities, thus, encounter and experience the state in ways unique within American society.
The first of the two projects, recognizing that the emergence a of disproportionately Latinx immigration workforce has shaped Latinxs’ perceptions of those agencies, will focus on the broader effects of border militarization. I am specifically interested in how the evolution of the border as a militarized space has affected the day-to-day lives of residents in those communities — residents who aside from being caught between two inherently political boundaries, also reside in, and reflect, a literal intersection of nations, cultures, and people. To what extent do these communities recognize an increased state presence? Do these communities feel as though they, themselves, are being targeted? And to what extent do residents attribute the effects of border militarization to political leadership or the federal government? These preliminary questions will serve as a roadmap for planning my next ethnographic study of the region.
The second project will focus on the emergence of the immigration industrial complex as a massive jobs program. During my dissertation research, I found that Latinxs predominately enter immigration law enforcement in service of self-interested rationales, which raises important questions about the effects of militarization on struggling border economies. To what extent has the broadening footprint of immigration law enforcement and incarceration strengthened the economies of border communities? To what extent do these economies now depend economically on these institutions? What might such communities look like without the employment provided by immigration enforcement? I plan to write a series of articles based on these projects.
Anzaldua once described the frontera [the border] as an ‘open wound,’ a liminal space where people are caught between camps, unaware of where they, specifically, belong. That today this border is the site of a battle over national sovereignty and security only heightens these tensions, and identity conflicts therein. My work brings these voices out of the borderlands, where they are known quantities, to contextualize complex social and political theories in the study of American Politics and thus contribute to our understanding of social identity, migration control, Latinx politics, and bureaucracy.
