By: Alexandra Mendez
Photo credit: Lucy Quezada
Francisco Gonzalez Castro is hunched over drawing a red line in chalk in the boundary between the street and the Oakwood cemetery sidewalk. After he has finished tracing this line through the two ditches that flank the cemetery’s main road, he begins to write a poem partially excerpted here:
This line is the limit, the limit between the land and the sky. This line is the surface, dividing what is up and what is down. Under this line are those who have been forgotten, who have been ignored. We forget and ignore the layers that constitute the land on which we walk and live. Under this line their bodies were placed, in this ground. Their matter is spread throughout the city. The city’s becoming is through them.
…
Under this line are the Tejanos, whose actions inhabit the landscape, and their echoes go through all the cracks.
Under this line are those who build this city, who fed this city, who moved this city.
Under this line are those who fought for their rights, who fought against racism, segregation and oppression. They teach us how to fight.
…
Francisco’s poem and performance were commissioned as part of an event that sought to honor the often-overlooked history of the Tejanos buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Austin Texas.
On a personal note, Francisco’s art performance was the last work of art I saw before lockdown of people gathering together to hold the space for a communal mourning a gesture that I did not yet have a sense would become all the more precious and rare in the coming weeks.
We cannot hold space physically now, but Francisco’s poetry resonates now in another totally different way as a way to hold space through a collective telling. Being unable to go outside I think of the physical act of him bending down to inscribe these words on the asphalt often. The laborious act of drawing and inscribing the history onto this space which would, perhaps, otherwise readily ignore its relevance and prior existence.
My interest with this essay is weaving together various histories that, while seeming disparate from each other are closely related and, I would argue, integral to craft a more nuanced understanding of our current political moment when it comes to understanding immigration, specifically Mexican immigration in Texas, and the current COVID-19 epidemic.I offer links and resources as a sort of informal syllabus to understanding the historical rooting of this moment and the way in which grasping this is incredibly important to urgent policy debates unfolding in the present.
What then do a poem about a plan in 1915, a tuberculosis outbreak in El Paso, a theory about death and dying, deferred action for childhood arrivals, and a video of essential workers in the U.K. all have in common?
1. A Poem about a Plan in 1915
Mirroring this poem, Francisco writes down excerpts from the “Plan de San Diego” on the opposite street. It reads:
To our compatriots
The Mexicans in Texas
A clamor of true indignation and anger has risen from the depths of our souls, as we see the crimes and atrocities that are being committed daily against defenseless women, elders and children of our race, by the bandits and miserable rangers who guard the riverside of the Rio Bravo.
…
How can we remain indifferent and calm in the face of such attacks? How can we allow such infernal offenses against our race? Has the feeling of humanity and patriotism already ended in us? No! It will be asleep but it is easy to awaken it.
Drafted in 1915 in San Diego Texas by an unknown group of Mexican rebels. The goal of the Plan de San Diegois contested, but mostly it is agreed upon that the plan sought to return the land of the Southern United States to Mexico and was carry out killing of all adult white men.
This Plan is important because it essentially stirs up already present racial animosities in the Southern U.S. and anxiety centered on the unfolding Mexican revolution. Ethnic Mexicans were already cast as a racial threat to the safety of white Americans and to the nation more broadly.
New Anglo residents who were starting to settle this area prompted in part by the U.S. government called for more policing on the U.S.-Mexico border. The United States in turn responded with increased militarization.
Although the plan de San Diego did not lead to mass uprisings, raid against the native Mexican community were carried out by Texas Rangers, a statewide investigative law enforcement agency based in Austin. This period called “Hora de Sangre” or Hour of Blood saw the murder of hundreds to thousands of Mexicans who were in no way politically involved with the creation of the plan.
Historians estimate that between 1848 and 1928 in Texas alone, 232 ethnic Mexicans were lynched by mobs but these numbers are only part of the story.
2. A Tuberculosis Outbreak in El Paso
While parallels between the 1918 influenza and the current COVID-19 outbreak have been continually teased out in the media landscape. Even in coverage of the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak echoes of the disproportionate impact the pandemic had on communities of color reverberates. The various newspaper clippings featured here from El Paso and Austin featured here begin to speak to that story.
The Austin American (Austin, Texas) · 22 Oct 1918
El Paso Herald (El Paso, Texas) · 14 Oct 1918
El Paso Herald (El Paso, Texas) · 14 Oct 1918
However, perhaps the clearest example of the disproportionate impact of pandemics on socially disenfranchised communities is not the outbreak of the Spanish flu, but an outbreak of tuberculosis happening almost simultaneously.
Between 1890 and 1920 flocks of people suffering from tuberculosis came daily to El Paso. Many of those suffering from the disease looked to the city’s dry, warm climate to provide a cure from the disease. At the time, it was believed that “hot dry deserts” would provide a superior climate for tuberculosis patients.
Before 1880, physicians declared tuberculosis was exceptionally rare among the region’s ethnic Mexicans. This absence was, in turn, interpreted as evidence that the disease could not be contracted in the Southwest’s environment. However, by the end of the century cases of infection among the ethnic Mexican population reached a “frightful’’ mortality rate of 555 to 607 per 100,000.
Instead of looking to the influx of mostly white Americans moving from the northeast as a cause for the spread of the disease and inequalities in care, the high death rate was attributed to the biological inadequacies of the working-class Mexican body.
Dr. Ernst A. Sweet, Assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General, in a statement in 1915 insisted that this development, contrary to the opinion of some, was not a result of contact with health seekers: ‘‘[T]hough certain physicians contend that contact with invalids is the source of their infection, [there is] absolutely no connection between the coming of tuberculous invalids and the greatly increased prevalence of the disease among the Mexicans, although, strange to say, they were practically synchronous.’’
The health official claimed that the mortality rate among the Mexican community could be attributed to poor living conditions and malnourishment. After describing the poor quality of the homes a, Sweet questioned how ‘‘we wonder why these miserable people who are forced to live in such structures have a tuberculosis death rate of 609.7 per 100,000, and attribute it to the influx of northern visitors.’’
Heather M. Sinclair, whose article “White Plague, Mexican Menace” is the source of all of the information previously detailed, underscores that Sweet, by changing the narrative of an infectious disease to one of racial susceptibility, was able to deflect blame and place unfair emphasis on ‘‘Mexican’’ biology and culture. This rhetorical strategy, in turn, simultaneously freed the federal government from financial responsibility. Later this narrative was used as a justification for the expulsion of Mexicans.
No climate, it was proven, was better at preventing the spread of tuberculosis or helping with recovery, rather, the key to recovery was an “early diagnosis and the opportunity for rest, peace, adequate nutrition, and care.”
3. A theory about death and dying.
Necropolitics is a theory by Achille Mbeme that underscores that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”
Mbeme asks; “What place is given to life, death, and the human body?” Here I want to specifically ask and question the sick body. “How are they inscribed in the order of power?”
4. (DACA) Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
Currently the U.S. Supreme Court is starting its litigation on whether it should revoke DACA.
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals also known as DACA is an immigration policy set up by President Barack Obama in 2012. DACA allows individuals with an “unlawful presence” in the United States after being brought to the country as children to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation. DACA also grants recipients the ability to be eligible for a work permit in the U.S. However, DACA, unlike the DREAM Act, does not provide recipients with a path to citizenship.
The program also has strict requirements. To be eligible, applicants cannot have committed serious crimes. They also must have arrived in the U.S. before they turned 16 and cannot have been older than 30 at the time the policy was put in place in 2012. DACA recipients must have also lived in the U.S. for at least the previous 5 years and be in school, have graduated from high school, received a high school equivalency diploma, or be honorably discharged veterans.
The Trump administration, said Obama had acted unlawfully in creating the program and proceeded to tell the supreme court it should end. It is now up to them to decide if these individuals can retain their work permits.
One of the discursive traps I can see us falling into in this during the current COVID-19 epidemic continually repeating that this moment is without precedent. While this is true in many ways, in others it is historical precedent that has allowed the current political inequities we are facing during the pandemic to unfold as it has.
It is by calling on historical precedentand mobilizing an obscure provision of a quarantine law first enacted in 1893 and revised in 1944 which authorizes the Surgeon General to suspend “introduction of persons or goods” into the United States on the grounds that a “communicable disease in a foreign country”poses “a serious danger of the introduction of such disease into the United States.”Calling on this provision has allowed the Trump administration has been able to deport More than 20,000 people,including at least 400 children in just the first few weeks of the outbreak.
The parallels between what we are experiencing now in the intersection of immigration and the pandemicare multiple and still unfolding. However, one readily apparent overlap that presents itself is the incredibly varying access to choice we hold during the time of the pandemic. I think of the story of those suffering from tuberculosis in El Paso in the 1920s, how Americans with access were able to choose to move to an area whose climate they found more hospitable, how the Mexican families facing the danger of racially motivated bias did not possess the same access to choose what environment and place would prove most accommodating for their worsening ailments. How they perhaps did not have the choice to tap into the rest and relaxation that would allow them to heal or to keep the distance necessary to keep from contracting the disease. And ultimately, how the responsibility for the spreading of a virus was put on them and their lifestyles instead of putting the responsibility on individuals rather than assuming collective responsibility for the spread of a highly contagious illness. I think about how all of this happened in tandem to the creation of the militarized border we know now.
Necropolitics, by contrast, is the ultimate choice enacted by those in the highest seats of power. It is how those who wield influence in policy make choices that disproportionately affect who gets access to care and who deserves to be cared for and, as a result, who gets to live and who gets to die in ways that are both direct and indirect. Through directly creating a violently enforced system to prevent immigration, by delegitimizing individuals who they consider to be in the U.S. unlawfully, and by creating systematic inequalities that make access to care, rest, relaxation, the necessary components for healing inaccessible to some.
5. A Video by Essential Workers in the U.K.
A supreme court filing made March 27 underscores that “Termination of DACA during this national emergency would be catastrophic.”
The subject of the filing, Mr. Martinez, underscores it would be foolish to take doctors, nurses, pharmacists, technicians, researchers and other health care workers away in the midst of a pandemic. If DACA is rescinded during the ongoing pandemic it would effectively strip work permits from 27,000 health care workers.
Bringing this story back to Texas, where it began, it is important to note that the Trump administration in 2017 moved to end the DACA program after Texas among other states threatened to sue. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was among the first to publicly support Trump’s decision after noting the DACA program was a “lawless exercise of executive power.”
The Center for American Progress estimates that more than 30,000 DACA recipients in in Texas, work in industries the federal government considers “essential critical infrastructure.”
So many DACA recipients, immigrants, and undocumented immigrants are essential workers during this time period; janitors, mailmen, workers in grocery stores, nurses, doctors. All working to protect the public and make the pandemic easier to deal with.
The brief sent to the Supreme Court by Mr. Martinez notes that we must take into consideration our current context when making decisions about immigration policy; “To ensure health security, the country needs a robust health work force…Rescinding DACA, however, would deprive the public of domestically educated, well-trained, and otherwise qualified health.”
It is also no surprise that immigrants, undocumented immigrants specifically, have been bearing a disproportionate share of the burdens of the current crisis. However, even when confronted with a severely restricted set of choices, many immigrants, documented and undocumented, have made choices to keep working. When, then, in the midst of the pandemic do we selectively choose to see immigrants during time of pandemics as risk or assets?
A video that the Guardian circulated titled “You Clap for Me Now” featuring a number of UK residents of foreign heritage speaks to the crucial role immigrants are playing during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Both the poem that we began with and the poem that we end with speak to a weaving together of the past and the present and offer a call to support and defend. They offer a stark warning that the relationship created between the historical the biological, and the political is quintessential to survival.