Joseph Nevins and Mizue Aizeki spent several years working on the book, researching and documenting life in southern California, the U.S-Mexico borderlands, and central Mexico. Aizeki is a documentary photographer and activist on issues of workers rights and immigrant detention and deportation. Nevins is an associate professor of geography at Vassar College, and the author of A Not-so-distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor, and Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal Alien" and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary.

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON LANGUAGE

Dying To Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid   By Joseph Nevins | photos by Mizue Aizeki List Price $16.95   ISBN-10 0872864863 ISBN-13 9780872864863   Publication Date June 2008   City Lights | http://www.citylights.com The Open Media Series is edited by Greg Ruggiero and archived by The Tamiment Library, New York University.

In writing this book, I’ve struggled with what to call people, how to categorize them. Terms such as "illegal immigrant," for example, effectively criminalize individuals for entering or residing in a country without the sanction of the national government, while privileging the perspective of the state. In the contemporary political climate, "illegal" has become for many a code word for ethno-racial hatred toward unwanted migrants. For such reasons, whenever I use the term "illegal" in relation to migrants or immigration, I put it in quotation marks. More typically, I use terms such as "unauthorized."

 

Regarding ethno-racial distinctions, I sometimes use the term "nonwhite." While it is far from ideal to utilize a term to describe people by what they are not, it sometimes serves as an effective shorthand given the diverse ethno-racial composition of particular areas at specific times. More important, in discussing places like Southern California in the 1880s and early 1900s, "nonwhite" is appropriate given that the primary social divide—as dictated by the region’s political elites—was that between people who were deemed to be "white" and those who were not. Indeed, "white" was the effective equivalent of "American."

 

If, during the time period mentioned above, racial categories were clear—at least rhetorically—those of citizenship were less so. People of Mexican descent born in the territory annexed by the United States through its war with Mexico, for instance, were—by the terms of the treaty that ended the conflict in 1848—U.S. citizens. Nonetheless, local, state, and federal officials rarely accorded them the full rights and privileges of such citizenship in the many decades that followed. Instead, they often perceived and treated all people of Mexican descent—regardless of citizenship status—as, at best, second-class inhabitants of what had become the United States. As such, the term "Mexican" was typically applied to the entire Mexican-origin population without any distinction made between those who were U.S. citizens and those who were not. Thus, in much of the literature I draw upon for this book, the citizenship status of the specific people of Mexican ancestry in question is often not clear. (This is also true for other ethno-racial groups such as people of Japanese ancestry.) Although the process of distinguishing between Mexican nationals and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent was a gradual one, World War II and its aftermath seem to be a time of marked change. As such, I use the term "Mexican" for all people of Mexican descent until the World War II era, while employing "Mexican-American" when appropriate in discussing the post-World War II period.

 

Despite having made these choices, I hardly feel comfortable with them. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation that "words are deeds" highlights why it is so difficult to figure out the proper terms to categorize groups of people. As Wittgenstein suggests, words embody our ways of life. To the extent that they are meaningful, they flow from, and help produce our worldviews and everyday practices. But given the complex and ever-changing categories of identity and the larger social relations of which they are part, our words are significantly limited in terms of what they can illuminate. At the same time, to the extent that one wants to challenge language that contributes to a devaluing and marginalization of human beings simply on account of their ancestry, geographic origin, or on what side of an international divide they were born, the effort to identify appropriate terms is part of a larger struggle—one to create a different, more just world.

 

— Joseph Nevins 

 

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CHAPTER one: The Bodies

 

It was a little after 9:00 a.m. on August 13, 1998, when Ralph Smith, the deputy coroner for California‘s Imperial County, received the phone call. About two hours earlier, a ranch foreman passing through a United States Border Patrol checkpoint on State Route 86 had informed agents that there was a group of people in trouble in the desert about six miles south of nearby State Route 78.

 

Using an airplane and some agents on the ground, the Border Patrol located the group of seven individuals—six men and one young woman—huddled together under a clump of salt cedar trees about twenty-five miles north of the U.S.-Mexico boundary. They were no longer in distress, however. They were dead. The bodies had been there for at least a few weeks, and possibly for six to seven. Some of the deceased were only wearing their underwear, and there were no water containers located near the corpses. But there was no indication that any of them had suffered foul play. Photos showed bodies that were, in parts, pitch black—signs of putrefaction or mummification, ones that looked like they had been charred.

 

One of the dead was Julio César Gallegos, father of a 2-year-old boy, Julio Jr., whose photo the authorities found in his clutched hand. Gallegos lived in East Los Angeles with his son and his wife, Jackie, eight months pregnant at the time that his body was discovered. He worked for the minimum wage ($5.15 per hour) in the nearby city of Vernon at a Chinese frozen-food factory. The 23-year-old was on his way home from a stay in Mexico, where he was visiting his elderly father.

 

Border Patrol officials guessed that the seven had originally been part of a group of twenty-two migrants who had crossed into California without authorization from Mexico, and had arrived in the area by automobile and were waiting for someone else to pick them up; they also determined that the group’s members were all headed to Los Angeles and New York. Among the dead were Julio César Gallegos’s 18-year-old niece, Irma Estrada Gutierrez, and Fernando Salguero Lachino, a 48-year-old father of six children—none of them older than twelve.

 

According to Smith’s report, Gallegos’s body, like the rest, was mummified, and so severely decomposed that his eyes were destroyed. He was clad in a pair of blue jeans, and had a broken watch on his left wrist. He also was carrying a black wallet, the contents of which included a California identification card, which noted a date of birth of September 14, 1974.

 

It would reach 108 degrees at the height of the day in El Centro, where Smith’s office and the local Border Patrol headquarters are located. On the desert floor where Gallegos lay, it was considerably hotter. By 11:00 a.m., as the coroner’s office was collecting the bodies, it was already 120 degrees.

 

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Entering the United States from Mexico without U.S. government authorization has long been potentially fatal. As early as the late 1800s, a number of unauthorized Chinese immigrants died in the desert while trying to circumvent boundary policing resulting from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. During the 1980s and the early 1990s, many deaths occurred on an annual basis, the annual totals reaching a high point in 1988 and gradually diminishing through the early 1990s. But with the dramatic buildup of the boundary enforcement infrastructure initiated during the early years of the Clinton administration, the number of crossing-related fatalities has steadily grown, reaching historic highs, averaging more than 350 documented deaths per year between 1995 and 2006, and doubling in terms of annual average between 1999 and 2005.

 

In both relative and absolute terms, the number of migrant deaths brought about by environmental factors, especially extreme heat, has also increased since the mid-1990s. Along the U.S.-Mexico boundary, heat exposure today appears to be by far the most common cause of death. At the same time, greater numbers of fatalities are taking place in fairly remote areas as migrants cross in increasingly isolated zones to avoid detection by the ever-larger enforcement web throughout the border region. Because of that, and because agencies such as the Border Patrol have used extremely narrow criteria over the years for counting fatalities of unauthorized crossers, the true death toll is certainly higher than the numbers based on actually recovered bodies and official counts.

 

The grisly deaths of Julio César Gallegos and his compatriots in 1998 reflected the shifting geography of migrant fatalities and the increasing importance of environmental factors as the immediate causes of such tragedies. The discovery of their bodies raised the number of migrant corpses found in California‘s Imperial Valley that year to a minimum of fifty-four—the highest on record for that area at the time. Hyperthermia—or excessive body temperature—and a lack of food and water brought about their demise, according to the Imperial County coroner’s office.

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