Dying To Live

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 

 

# # #

 

 

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.

 

# # #

  

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.

 

Hyperthermia passes through six stages, the first two being heat stress and heat fatigue. Heat syncope, the next one, results in a fever, and, simultaneously, colder skin. The afflicted's face begins to pale and she or he becomes somewhat dizzy. Heat cramps follow and lead to tightening and aching muscles, ones so painful that it can lead one to double over in pain. Heat exhaustion results in greatly heightened fever, bad headaches, nausea, and vomiting; the victim's skin is cold, shivering might occur, and fainting or cardiac arrest might result. Heat stroke, the final stage, causes one's body to become so hot that migrants often strip off their clothes to free themselves of extreme discomfort; it leads to the body's organs and muscles essentially collapsing, resulting in death in many cases. As one passes through these stages, a person becomes increasingly disoriented, undermining one's ability to take remedial action.

# # #

The deaths of Julio César Gallegos and those he was traveling with generated a good deal of coverage in the news media in southern California. Indeed, the fatalities constituted the largest group of migrant corpses ever discovered in the state's border region. That Julio was trying to return to his family and home in Los Angeles and that his wife was a U.S. citizen led the media to privilege his story over those of the others who perished alongside him. And as had become routine since the mid-1990s in such high-profile cases, the deaths elicited official expressions of sorrow as well as outrage directed at professional smugglers, commonly known as coyotes, who federal officials blamed (and still do) for leading unauthorized migrants into deadly environments. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Western Regional director Johnny Williams characterized the migrants as "innocents" while voicing disdain for the people who had led the group into the treacherous terrain. "It's a terrible death, an excruciating death, and one nobody should have to endure," he said.

 

The day after the discovery of the bodies, Williams announced a $5,000 reward for information leading to "the arrest and indictment of any alien smuggler responsible for the deaths." "Alien smugglers," he stated, "present one of the greatest dangers facing illegal border crossers and must be brought to justice." The announcement marked the first time the INS had offered any such reward. Among other things, the reward reflected the federal government's frustration with the continuing fatalities and its need to appear to be doing something to remedy the growing death toll.

 

The INS's framing of the problem resonated with the larger public—at least as reflected by editorials in the mainstream media within California. The Imperial Valley Press, while issuing blame for the deaths to parties on both sides of the boundary, opined that "Mexican and U.S. authorities must hunt down the smugglers of human cargo and make them pay appropriate prices. If someone dies because of their crimes," the paper continued, "then the appropriate price for the ‘coyote' would be a murder conviction." Three days later, the San Diego Union-Tribune similarly pointed the finger at "ruthless and inhuman smugglers" who "take people into the remote desert and abandon them." The editorial argued for increased penalties for smugglers and called upon the U.S. and Mexican governments to "declare war on immigrant smuggling." And like the Imperial Valley Press, the San Diego newspaper recommended a charge of murder when "an immigrant dies of heat exposure in a smuggler's charge, or after being abandoned." On the same day, the Los Angeles Times characterized the smugglers as people who "too often do not care whether their clients live or die" and editorialized in favor of stiffer penalties for smugglers, including life imprisonment and even the death penalty. The Times editorial staff issued this call despite a small item in the paper's pages the previous day that reported that authorities had determined that two of the bodies found in the desert along with that of Julio César Gallegos were those of smugglers leading the group.

# # #

How and why Julio César Gallegos's body ended up on the scorched desert terrain of southern California is the outgrowth of many factors, contingent and structural, incidental and historical. One of the key factors is geography, but not geography as commonly thought of as a relatively static physical landscape or points in global space. Space, like time, is dynamic and ever-changing. While shaped to a significant degree by physical forces, geographic space is largely a social creation in terms of what is contained within it, how it is divided up and bounded, and how it is perceived and lived. It is thus a product of power relations and all the conflict—as well as cooperation—that they entail.

 

In seeking to explain the death—and life—of Julio César Gallegos, it is this type of geography that this book privileges. There are myriad ways in which to tell his story and those of the thousands of other migrants who have perished in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands since the mid-1990s. However, this book does so through a focus on places—the locations in which people live their lives, to which they attach meanings, which help define who they are, and thus shape to a large degree where they can and cannot go, reside, and work.

 

Just as places, like any social construct, are dynamic, so, too, are the boundaries that define them. And while bounded, no place exists in isolation. It is connected and shaped by other places, and by the individuals, collectivities, and institutions associated with them. As such, a place's boundaries, just as its contents, are ever-changing. In this regard, one must appreciate how these places have come about, the power relations and associated inequalities that they embody, the vibrant connections and divisions that bring places together and, often simultaneously, drive them apart. In the case of Julio César Gallegos, it was the intersection of a particular set of such connections and divisions that brought him during the summer of 1998 to southern California's Imperial Valley, one of the places that make up the geographical web that shaped his life and death.

 

# # #

 

EXCERPTS FROM CHAPTER FIVE: BEYOND THE BOUNDARY

 

Praise for Dying To Live: "In Dying to Live, Joseph Nevins and Mizue Aizeki have produced an important and visually moving book that adds to our knowledge of the border and its place in history. Nevins' painstaking research documents the development of the Imperial Valley—its industrial agriculture, its divided cities, and the chasms between rich and poor, Mexican and anglo, that have marred its growth. Through the valley runs the border, and Nevins' accounts of the growth of border enforcement on the U.S. side, and the racism of its legal justifications, will be a strong weapon for human rights activists. Mizue Aizeki takes her camera and tells the story of Julio Cesar Gallegos, who died in the desert trying to make it across. Her images of the stacked bodies of border crossers held in refrigerator trucks, and the barrenness of the ocotillo cactus on the flat hardpan are eloquent testimony to the terrible risks and human costs imposed on migrants. Her beautifully composed portraits of Gallegos' family make a direct appeal to the heart in a way that words cannot. And her documentation of border protests and immigrant rights demonstrations, including the rows of jugs of water put out in the desert to save lives, are all compelling evidence that there is a struggle going on to halt the human rights crisis she and Nevins document."   —David Bacon, author of Communities Without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration       "Joseph Nevins blows the red-neck cover off the right wing engineered scapegoating of "illegal" immigrants by meticulously and grippingly compiling the history of why so many try to come to the US, and, tragically, why so many die. His important work forces us to go beyond the simple debate of legal versus illegal and instead focus on the current government policy that is literally killing thousands. Nevins strikes at our very moral core when he asks: are we a nation that will continue to allow thousands of innocent people to die and do nothing to reverse this grave injustice?"   —Deepa Fernandes, author of Targeted, Homeland Security and the Business of Immigration       "...a fierce and courageous denunciation of the foul politics of immigration and the two-thousand mile tragedy of the Mexican border, snaking its way between two worlds, two nations, separated at birth but forever joined at the hip. Starting from one man's blackened corpse, the tale wends its way across the desert of racial amnesia to reveal the sources of America's reactionary (and futile) attempt at closure of a porous frontier. Deftly stitching together disparate times and places - from the Imperial Valley to Zacatecas to Mexicali and back to East L.A. - Nevins and Aizeki weave a memorial quilt to the hundreds of innocents in unmarked graves."   —Richard Walker, professor of geography, UC Berkeley, and author of The Conquest of Bread and The Country in the City.       "Dying to Live is a compelling, perceptive and invaluable book for our times. Our new apartheid, as explored here, is as bleak and hostile as the landscapes in which people lose their lives trying merely to survive. Those lives delineated here are unforgettable."   —Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales and Highwire Moon       "Invisible in life, like most exploited immigrants, Julio Cesar Gallegos now judges us from the hour of his terrible death. He reminds us - thanks to the passionate investigations of Nevins and Aizeki - that the eyeless corpses in the Imperial Valley are murder victims: abandoned to heat, thirst, and anonymous graves by a border politics compounded of historical ignorance and contempt for human rights."   —Mike Davis is the author, most recently, of Planet of Slums and In Praise of Barbarians

"Security" in the United States is what some have referred to as a "God-word"—something universally embraced, and insufficiently questioned—at least among supporters of the status quo. Debate and polling within the country as a whole regarding the U.S.-Mexico boundary—especially since the September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks—show that the vast majority of the U.S. population sees the international divide as a protector, and a necessary one, against external threats. In a world of growing "flows" of people, goods, and ideas across boundaries, so the thinking goes, the potential for threatening forces to enter national territory is greater than ever. In this spirit, Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, a candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, stated in February 2006, "Yes, many who come across the [U.S.-Mexico] border are workers. But among them are people coming to kill you and me and your children."

 

Hyperbolic analyses are hardly new. In the run-up to Operation Wetback in 1954, for instance, Democratic senator Hubert Humphrey characterized Mexico as a country "in almost a death struggle to keep out of Communist control" and argued that Communist agents might infiltrate the United States across the insufficiently guarded southern boundary. Meanwhile Edmund Brown, California's attorney general, likened the divide to a door "open for potential saboteurs and fifth columnists."

 

Such rhetoric has a long history, one that goes back to the very first piece of immigration control legislation in the United States, the Alien Friends Act of 1798. In this regard, the novelty of post-9-11 boundary-related rhetoric lies not so much in its general substance, but in its specific forms. However, even in the case of terrorism—to say nothing about street crime—rhetoric linking it to highly racialized outsiders, U.S. territorial boundaries, and unauthorized migrants, long precedes 9-11. Regardless of the "race," ethnicity, and national origins of the particular targeted groups, all of them have been characterized as threatening, as populations that need to be guarded against, as the polar opposite of what is deemed to be the ideal American.

 

These analyses flow from and reinforce the assumption that the United States needs strong, heavily policed territorial boundaries to provide protection against these alleged threats. They also have provided the foundation for the massive boundary and migrant policing apparatus that now exists. The result of all this in terms of what have been presented as border-related security threats (i.e., drugs, crime, and terrorism) is highly questionable.

 

Never before has it been so difficult to cross the boundary or has the migrant policing apparatus been as big as it is. And never have as many "illegals" who have crossed from Mexico without authorization been present in the United States as there are today. This apparent contradiction speaks to the high number of people trying to enter the United States surreptitiously, the sheer length of the boundary, the challenges of policing the arduous landscape of the borderlands, and the great persistence and resourcefulness of migrants and those who smuggle them.

 

As for fighting terrorism, which is what the Border Patrol now says is one of its primary functions, as of 2007 there was no documented basis for any suggested link of terrorism with Mexico or with movement across the U.S.-Mexico boundary. Nonetheless, fears of terrorists emanating from Mexican territory fuels much vacuous discussion in Congress and provides fodder for many press accounts that typically highlight Border Patrol apprehensions of non-Mexican migrants as supposed proof of the threat. As in the case of the broader "war on terror" and similar to the emptiness of claims that link growing immigration to higher crime rates, political actors have grossly exaggerated the threat of terrorism as the lack of any attacks since 2001—despite a still permeable boundary—demonstrates. In response to those who would say that this "proves" that the security measures along the boundary are working, political scientist John Mueller writes in a 2006 article,

 

Americans are told—often by the same people who had once predicted imminent attacks—that the absence of international terrorist strikes in the United States is owed to the protective measures so hastily and expensively put in place after 9/11. But there is a problem with this argument. True, there have been no terrorist incidents in the United States in the last five years. But nor were there any in the five years before the 9/11 attacks, at a time when the United States was doing much less to protect itself.

 

The overstated nature of the boundary-related threat is demonstrated by the Department of Homeland Security's own statistics. While it bills itself as an agency whose main goal is to fight terrorism, the Department filed claims of terrorism against only 12 (0.0015%) of the 814,073 people that it charged in immigration courts between 2004 and 2006. As has always been the case, the target of boundary and immigration enforcement is human beings born outside of U.S. territory. What changes over time are the labels attached to them—"Communist," "illegal," "criminal," and "terrorist" being among the most socially marginalizing—and the related ideological smokescreens used to legitimate their exclusion, one of the most powerful being "the law."

 

Invocations of the law as a justification for particular activities—especially in the United States, where the dominant view is one that it is a country with a deep devotion to the rule of law—has the effect of shutting down debate. That, combined with the state's power to mold the collective mind-set of its citizenry to distinguish between "right" and "wrong" (through "the law") and to perceive the country's boundaries as almost sacred, helps explain to a significant degree why "illegal" migration resonates so profoundly with the public at large. For the vast majority of Americans, the wrongness of unsanctioned migration and the need to prevent it are simply beyond question. The law and its defense becomes an end in and of itself.

 

Yet, history (as well as the present) teaches us that what is the law and what is just are often not synonymous. As Marlon Brando, in his role as a human rights lawyer in apartheid-era South Africa in the 1989 film, A Dry White Season, tells a client, "Justice and law could be described as distant cousins, and here . . . they're not even on speaking terms." One could just as easily make the same observation about boundary and immigration enforcement in the United States—and elsewhere across the globe—given the foundational injustices embodied by the very making of the country's boundaries and their related practices of exclusion.

 

Yet few of us—even those who perceive national exclusion as unacceptable—are willing to publicly say so. In part, given the ideological and material weight of the boundary and enforcement apparatus, it is for reasons of fear—fear of social ostracism—as well as of a sense of powerlessness.

 

I speak from experience: I recall being on a train in the mid-1990s traveling from San Diego, where I had been conducting research on Operation Gatekeeper, to Los Angeles. At the station in Oceanside, about forty miles north of San Diego, Border Patrol agents boarded the train and began asking passengers about their citizenship status, and then proceeded to ask anyone who hesitated or whom they suspected of lying for identification. In the process, the agents arrested, handcuffed, and removed a number of Spanish-speaking individuals from the train. Watching this, I was outraged, but I felt paralyzed, and, as a result, said nothing. Across the aisle from me, however, was a man in a suit and tie who appeared to be in his late sixties or early seventies. He began yelling loudly at the agents, saying that what they were doing reminded him of what he had witnessed the Nazis doing to people as a youth in Europe. No, the Border Patrol agents were not taking the arrestees to concentration camps or to death chambers. But the federal agents were treating them as permanent outsiders, as less than fully human, as people with fewer rights because of first and foremost who they were, where they were from, a characteristic the migrants had no control over. It took someone who lived through the Nazi era to have the ability to perceive it for what it was, and the courage to speak out.

 

Typically the individuals on the frontline who carry out such exclusion justify what they do by referencing the law, or by explaining that they are simply doing their job. But sometimes these agents of the state actually articulate a perception of migrants that is as shocking and inhumane as their actions aimed at expelling them from U.S. territory. One Border Patrol agent spoke about why he enjoyed his job, asking rhetorically, "Where else do they pay you to drive around and go hunting?" Another stated, "It's the thrill of the hunt, without the kill."

 

That so many fail to see the perverse nature of such rhetoric and, more importantly, of the underlying ideology of national exclusion, and continue to embrace the security-unauthorized migrant-boundary nexus speaks not only to the power of the international divide to shape our ways of seeing the world, but also the depth of societal fear of "foreigners"—especially those from low-income and nonwhite parts of the world. That migrants are constructed as geographically—in addition to sociopolitically—outside helps explain why fears about terrorists and criminals from abroad translate into a focus on territorial boundaries to a much greater extent than fears about purveyors of violence from within the United States.

 

Consider, for example, the case of Timothy McVeigh, who, on April 19, 1995, bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 167 people and injuring hundreds more. McVeigh was not from Oklahoma City, nor even from the state of Oklahoma. Indeed, he crossed state boundaries to commit his crime. Had such movement been restricted, it might have been more difficult for McVeigh to do what he did. Nonetheless, his horrific act did not result in any attempt to restrict movement across state boundaries within the United States. The reason why is clear: he was a U.S. citizen (and a native-born one) with the right to unimpeded travel across national territory. He was not an outsider. He was a white male and a military veteran. He was—in terms of the dominant perception of what an American looks like—one of "us." Thus, his crime did not involve a perceived geographical transgression even though movement across space was a key element of his act. Given this perception, territorial security—at least one conceived in any way similar to that applied along the U.S.-Mexico boundary—is not the response. In the case of threats, real or imagined, emanating from beyond U.S. boundaries, however, they are perceived as primarily territorial in nature and thus necessitate a response involving a buildup of physical boundaries. In other words, the territories from where these dangers come are seen as inherently threatening. It is hardly a coincidence that these areas happen to be places where wealth and income is significantly less than that accumulated in the United States and where the populations are largely nonwhite. In that regard, the divide and conflict is one between what is perceived by many as a civilized first world, made up of Western countries, and a barbaric third world, composed of the countries of Latin America, Africa, and most of Asia.

 

Antagonistic relationships between the so-called first and third worlds go back to the making of the modern world economy and nation-states. The conquest of what is today the U.S. Southwest, the dispossession and decimation of the indigenous population, and the settlement of the area by the conquering power was part of this process. And like all single events, it was unique. But it was also a manifestation of a much larger process of violence, slaughter, dispossession, and theft, one that began with the rise of European imperialism in the sixteenth century. At that time, levels of socioeconomic development across the world were generally equal. In fact in terms of political-economic development, Europe was in many key ways behind China, what is today Pakistan and northern India, and parts of West Africa, among other regions. In five short centuries, however, there has been a radical reworking of the global economy, resulting in the creation of great wealth for some, a mixed bag for most, and outright misery for many. 

 

# # #

 

Maintaining an unjust world order requires work, one that enshrines the type of double standards that form the foundation of a world order in which processes of racism and its internationally institutionalized cousin, nation-statism, are inextricably intertwined. In August 2004, some articles in the New York Times showed just how all this functions—and the simultaneously deadly and enlivening effects these processes have.

 

In a lead article entitled, "In Pursuit of Fabulousness" in the newspaper's "Escapes" section, the Times introduced its readership to the place where Mikhail Baryshnikov, the ballet star, has his vacation home. It is located close to the sprawling Southern Greek Revival beachside abode of his good friend and local native son, Oscar de la Renta, in the same town where the fashion designer and singer Julio Iglesias are partners in a luxury resort and club. Prices there range from $310,000 for a three-bedroom villa away from the sea to several millions dollar for property on the beach—such as Iglesias's home, a six-acre Balinese compound.

 

The place is "the new St. Bart's," a reference to Saint-Barthélemy, the tiny Caribbean island in the French West Indies that serves as a lavish get-away destination for many of the global rich and famous. This "new" St. Bart's, however, is better than the real one in so many ways according to the article. In addition to having more favorable prices, "it's so close," explains Margarita Waxman—only three and a half hours by plane from New York City. The SoHo resident, just retired from a public relations job at the upscale jeweler Bulgari, flies back and forth monthly.²⁴ She had recently paid $3 million for four acres of beachfront for a new villa there, instead of in the harder-to-get-to St. Bart's, where she has often vacationed.

 

"There's so much building going on," gushes Amelia Vicini, a fashion editor at Town & Country magazine, who was born and raised in the tropical paradise. "Every time I go home, I am amazed. The winter season is crazy, full of people—celebrities, A-listers, everyone."

 

This hot location is the Dominican Republic, a half-island nation (the other half of the island of Hispaniola being Haiti). "Until a few years ago, the Dominican Republic had a reputation as second-rate, and affluent shoppers for second homes largely stayed away," the Times explained. "Then, in the early '90s, developers . . . began attracting attention with luxurious gated communities on the water."

 

Only one day earlier, the Times had run an Associated Press article on the inside of the newspaper's main section about a different type of water-related escape involving the Dominican Republic. Entitled "Dominicans Saved from Sea Tell of Attacks and Deaths of Thirst," the piece recounted the horrific experiences of about eighty Dominican migrants fleeing the poverty in their homeland. Having paid $450 each—about a year's income for most Dominicans—they tried to sail clandestinely to Puerto Rico so that they would be then able to fly to the U.S. mainland free of immigration controls.

 

The engine of the small wooden boat died two days after the July 29 departure from the coastal village of Limón. By the next day, the vessel's water and meager food supply—chocolate, peanuts, sardines, and some coconuts—were depleted. The passengers began to panic.

 

Two lactating women reportedly dripped their breast milk into a bottle for passengers to drink. Another told of eating his tube of Colgate to survive. The boat drifted at sea for almost two weeks. People began dying on the fifth day, their bodies thrown overboard into shark-infested waters by those still living. Many jumped overboard in desperation and drowned. Forty-seven ended up perishing on the voyage. Another eight died of dehydration after Dominican authorities rescued a total of thirty-nine people.

 

In a follow-up article on August 16, the Times described the homes of the majority of the inhabitants of one of the villages of many of the migrants as being made of "lashed-together pieces of tin." Attempts to flee from such poverty to a better life in the United States had increased over the preceding year in the context of a severe economic downturn in the Dominican Republic. In the previous ten months alone, U.S. authorities had arrested more than 7,000 Dominican crossers, and thousands more had surely evaded the web of enforcement.

 

Such unauthorized crossings have a long and deep history given the intense migratory ties between the United States and the Dominican Republic. And so do migrant deaths. A 1998 report in the Los Angeles Times, for example, spoke of "human bones littering the small shoals and islets between the Dominican and Puerto Rican shores" as a result of crossing-related fatalities. In November 2003, the U.S. Border Patrol estimated that nearly 300 people had either died or vanished—undoubtedly an undercount—while crossing the Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico over the previous three years. And another 164 U.S.-bound migrants had reportedly died or disappeared elsewhere in the Caribbean.

 

In the late 1990s, the economy of the Dominican Republic was growing at a fast pace. But the economic expansion did little for the poor and middle class, many members of which also were attempting to make the perilous journey. By 2004, that expansion had disappeared. Unemployment stood officially at 16 percent, and the rate of inflation was 32 percent. Meanwhile, the Dominican peso had lost half of its value against the U.S. dollar over the previous two years, resulting in a doubling of prices during that period. Saddled with a $6 billion debt and under heavy pressure from the International Monetary Fund via a $600-million loan agreement, the government in Santo Domingo was promising austerity measures, ones that would presumably lead to cuts in social services and government jobs and a reduction in subsidies for basic necessities, which, barring an economic upturn, would surely fuel pressures for out-migration. In addition, the country's electrical system was a mess. The government privatized generating plants in the 1990s with the goal of lessening blackouts. The situation had worsened, however, as electricity was typically only available for a few hours a day.

 

Little of this profoundly affects the lives of rich Dominicans or the affluent foreigners eagerly buying up the country's prime beachfront property. As an envious real estate agent from St. Bart's explains, "You can be a king in the Dominican for very little money." Or, as Margarita Waxman effuses, "There's a quaintness about it. It has all the beauty of St. Bart's, only more bohemian."

 

If, as Stuart Hall and Ruth Wilson Gilmore contend, racism is the fatal coupling of power and difference—fatal in the sense that it shapes one's life (and death) circumstances—the reporting on the Dominican Republic in the New York Times exposes (albeit unintentionally) the true face of what many have called global apartheid. It is one in which the relatively rich and largely white of the world are generally free to travel and live wherever they would like and to access the resources they "need." Meanwhile the relatively poor and largely nonwhite are typically forced to subsist in places where there are not enough resources to provide sufficient livelihood or, in order to overcome their deprivation and insecurity, to risk their lives trying to overcome ever-stronger boundary controls put into place by rich countries that reject them.

 

Apartheid might seem like an inappropriate metaphor to employ given the fact that there is no legally enshrined racial segregation between the so-called first and third worlds, and that there are many third-world-origin peoples who have citizenship, and live and work in countries throughout the West. Although discrimination in terms of who is allowed to enter and reside in a particular country regularly occurs, national governments determine who can enter a country first and foremost on the basis of the would-be immigrant's national citizenship and socio-economic situation, a form of discrimination seen as fully legitimate in international affairs. Nonetheless, if we move beyond the question of what are the specific motivations that underlie the system of immigration regulation and the particular mechanisms that are associated with it, and instead focus on effects and outcomes, there is little question that immigration enforcement in countries such as the United States or those of the European Union functions in an apartheid-like manner. No, it does not achieve "perfect" separation, but neither did South Africa. The idea of apartheid embraced by its champions there was never fully realized—nor could it have been. Indeed, the production and maintenance of the privilege enjoyed by white South Africans necessitated interaction with nonwhites—in a highly exploitative manner. As Lindsay Bremner writes,

 

While black and white bodies were, in theory, assigned to certain localities, fixed in space, in point of fact they were caught up in continuous circulatory migrations and asymmetrical intimacies. Black bodies were needed to nurse white children, to clean white houses, and to labor in white industry, to work on white mines. White bodies policed, regulated, and administered black space. Bodies moved through and interacted with each other's space on a daily basis.

 

In other words, interaction and mixing occurred but because it was necessitated to a significant degree by white South African society. Resistance by blacks and others to the legally enshrined segregation also undermined the proclaimed goal of purity. But the fact that there was a gap between the rhetoric and the reality does not alter the fact that apartheid, by allowing unequal access to and influence over the country's socio-political-economic resources and processes on the basis of who allegedly belonged and who did not, reflected and reproduced profoundly different life and death experiences for white and nonwhite South Africans as a whole, differential outcomes legitimated on the basis of geographic origin and ancestry.

 

Strikingly similar is the gap between the "ideal" of separate, sovereign nation-states and the reality of messy and racialized boundary-crossings based on systemic relations of domination and subordination between the West and the rest of the world. They are also similar in that nonwhite spaces outside of the West become the venues to pursue vices prohibited or difficult to pursue in predominantly white ones. Just as Sun City, the casino resort area in the nominally independent "homeland" of Bophuthatswana, served as a hospitable locale for gambling and topless female revues in apartheid-era South Africa, so, too, do many "third world" destinations today serve as the vice-ridden playgrounds for "first world" travelers seeking escapist pleasures at relatively low cost. Mexican border towns played a similar role in the era of Prohibition and continue to do so today (albeit far less than in the past).

 

In a world of profound inequality, there are few if any nations that share a land boundary with the level of disparity as wide as that between Mexico and the United States. Which side of a boundary one is born on—something that is permanent and that one cannot change—profoundly shapes the resources to which one has access, the amount of political power on the international stage one has, where one can go, and thus how one lives and dies. This is the essence of racism as it allows for double standards based on the assumption that some should have greater rights because of their geographic origins or ancestry. And given the unjust nature of the global political economy, which embodies this unequal allocation of rights and which national governments enforce, these double standards are also the essence of nation-statism as well.

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