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Section 7.1: Legal System

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    206991
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    Extrajudicial killings

    As a significant segment of the Latin@ population has Indigenous ancestry, the historical genocide against groups native to the Americas, including the United States, is relevant to their experience. In addition, although the lynchings of African Americans in American history have been better documented, there is also the lesser known history of extrajudicial and unlawful killings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, especially in the Southwestern part of the United States. For instance, historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb (2003) documented and analyzed hundreds of such extrajudicial killings that occurred between 1848 and 1928. In their research titled "The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928", they cataloged 597 lynchings of persons of Mexican origin in the United States, which they consider a conservative estimate. The lynchings were concentrated in Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico and were mostly carried out in the 30-year period immediately after the end of the Mexican-American War, which they described as a period of "unparalleled danger from mob violence" for people of Mexican origin.

    In her book titled "Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands", Hernandez describes the extrajudicial killing of Antonio Rodriguez that led to widespread protests and rioting in Mexico. According to the author, it was the 448th such murder on record, there was no official record of an arrest, "the local coroner's report said that Rodriguez's body was found 'burned to a crisp, lying in the ashes' ... and a local judge ruled that 'Rodriguez came to his death at the hands of parties unknown." (Hernandez, 2022)

    The Bracero Program 

    According to the Aguirre & Turner (2007), in the period after the Mexican-American war, the Mexican population in the United States experienced a significant loss of social, political, and economic status and was thus relegated to a source of cheap and expendable labor for the growing labor-intensive industries - agriculture, mining, and railroads -especially in the Southwestern part of the United States. One consequence of this increase demand for Mexican labor is that immigration policies were not restrictive between 1870 and 1930, allowing Mexican workers to enter the United States to freely. However, this changed during the Great Depression in the 1930s and there was a rising tension and an increase in anti-Mexican sentiment. As a result, a repatriation movement began to expel Mexican nationals (as well as U.S. citizens of Mexican descent) from the United States, and over 500,000 people were repatriated between 1929 and 1935 (Aguirre & Turner, 2007).

    During the Bracero Program, which was a labor contract between the United States and Mexico that operated from 1942-1964, Congress gave authorization for the Border Patrol to initiate "Operation Wetback." This gave the U.S. Border Patrol wide discretion to stop and search people who "looked Mexican" and who deport anyone who did not have the proper paperwork identifying themselves as participants in the Bracero Program. Between 1954 and 1959, approximately 3.8 million people were returned to Mexico (Aguirre & Turner, 2007).

    Additionally, approximately 5 million Mexican workers were granted temporary work visas throughout the course of the program, which operated from 1942-1964. Employers were required to pay prevailing local wages and provide workers with minimal worker protections and conditions. However, the program was fraught with problems including terrible work conditions, abuse, and many workers were not paid for their work. (Aguirre and Turner, 2007)

     

     

    Picture of Braceros working in Oregon.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Braceros in Oregon. (CC BY-SA 2.0; Oregon State University via Flickr)

     

    Deportation Regimes 

    In more recent history, there have been deportation regimes and ballot efforts to target and deport undocumented Latin@ immigrants, such as Proposition 187 (California - 1994), Senate Bill 1070 (Arizona - 2010), House Bill 56 (Alabama - 2011), and the Trump administration's 2017 Executive Order 13767 ("Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements"), and his recent threats to conduct a mass deportation regime in his upcoming term. Sociologist Douglas Massey (2006) suggests that although historically the average standard of living in Mexico may be lower than in the United States, it is not so low as to make permanent migration the goal of most Mexicans. However, the strengthening of the border that began with the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and more recent policies has made one-way migration the rule for most Mexicans. Massey argues that the rise of undocumented one-way immigration of Mexicans is a direct outcome of the laws and policies that were intended to reduce it.

    According the USDA, in 2016 over 70% of the farm worker labor force in the United States was foreign-born, mostly from Latin America. Approximately 21% of the farm worker labor force were authorized immigrants with permanent residency or green cards and 48% of the farm worker labor force was made up of unauthorized immigrant workers. As we know from other research studies, such as Milkman et al (2010), undocumented workers are more susceptible to workplace violations, low wages, and threats from employers.

    Farm workers picking cucumbers
    Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): "Farm workers picking cucumbers." (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; Bread for the World via Flickr)

    Segregation

    An example of de jure segregation relates to the education of Mexican American children in California in the early 1900s. Moll & Ruiz (2002) argue that two methods of social control were employed at this time to undermine the educational attainment and social mobility of the Mexican population: 1) exclusion from schooling, and 2) control over the content and purpose of schooling. The latter was done mainly through the official segregation of schooling by playing Mexican kids into "Mexican schools". In the important court case Mendez v. Westminster (1947), Sylvia Mendez was denied entry in to the neighborhood school in Orange County, California and was instead assigned to the "Mexican school" by school officials. Her parents sued the school district, organized with other parents and filed a class action law suit against several districts, and the case made its way to the U.S. District Court. The District Court judge agreed with the Mendez family and ordered that the school districts to cease their discriminatory practices against students of Mexican origin in their public schools. Several organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), filed amicus briefs (friends of the court briefs) in support of the Mendez family. Eight years later, its author Thurgood Marshall would present to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), a case that would help to end school segregation throughout the United States.

    Sylvia Mendez's First Day of School
    Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): "Sylvia Mendez's First Day of School." (CC BY 2.0; YoTuT via Flickr)

    More recently, demographers have found that Latin@-white residential segregation, as measure by the dissimilarity index, has remained constant over the decades. Furthermore, De la Roca et al (2018) found clear quantitative evidence that residential segregation in metropolitan areas has a strong, negative association with the educational outcomes and labor market attainment of native-born Latin@ people and Black Americans. Among the Latin@ groups, they found residential segregation has a more significant negative outcomes for young adults of Puerto Rican and Dominican ancestry.


    Incarceration 

    According to the Public Policy Institute of California, in 2023 Latino men were overrepresented among California prisoners. While they make up 38% of adult Californians, they make up 46% of the all male prisoners in the state system.  Similarly, although there has been an improvement in the disparity of youth in juvenile facilities, Latin@ youth are still 16% more likely to be incarcerated than their white peers, nationwide. 

     

     

    Contributors and Attributions

    Works Cited

    • Aguirre, A. & Turner, J. (2007). American Ethnicity: The Dynamics and Consequences of Discrimination. 5th Edition. New York: McGraw Hill.
    • Carrigan, W. & Webb, C. (2003). The lynchings of persons of Mexican origin or descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928. Journal of Social History, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Winter) Oxford University Press.
    • Castillo, M. & Simnitt, S. (2020). Size and composition of the U.S. agricultural workforce. USDA Reports.
    • Cisneros, H., Morales, S., Racho, S., Galán, H., Moreno, M., Cozens, R., Beasley, B., ... NLCC Educational Media. (1996). Taking Back the Schools. In Chicano!: History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. [Video]. Los Angeles, CA: National Latino Communications Center.
    • De la Roca, J., Ellen, I., & Steil, J. (2018). Does segregation matter for Latinos?. Journal of Housing Economics. Vol. 40, p. 129-141.
    • Flores, A. (2013, May 8). Disney withdraws trademark filing for 'Dia de los Muertos'. Los Angeles Times.
    • Harris, H & Cremin, S. (2024). California's Prison Population. September 2024 Fact Sheet. Public Policy Institute of California. 
    • Hernandez, Kelly L. (2022). Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands. New York: Norton.  
    • Massey, D. S. (2006, August). Seeing Mexican immigration clearly. CATO Unbound: A Journal of Debate.
    • Moll, L. & Ruiz, R. (2002). The Schooling of Latino Children in Suarez-Orozco, M. and Paez, M. (Eds.). (2002) Latinos: Remaking America. Berkeley: UC Press
    • Swerzenski, J.D., Tomaskovic, D.T., & Hoyt, E. (2020, January 27). Where are the Hispanic executives? Latino USA. The Conversation.

    This page titled Section 7.1: Legal System is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Carlos Ramos.