Description
As immigration from Mexico to the US grew during the 1970s and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted increasing violence against ethnic Mexicans in San Diego’s volatile border region. In response, many San Diego activists rallied across the leadership of the small-scale print shop owner Herman Baca within the Chicano movement to empower Mexican Americans through Chicano self-determination. The combination of increasing repression and Chicano activism regularly produced a new conception of ethnic and racial community that included both established Mexican Americans and new Mexican immigrants. Here, Jimmy Patino narrates the upward push of this Chicano/Mexicano consciousness and the dawning awareness that Mexican Americans and Mexicans must work together to fight border enforcement policies that subjected Latinos of all statuses to legal violence.
By placing the Chicano and Latino civil rights struggle on explicitly transnational terrain, Patino fundamentally reorients the figuring out of the Chicano movement. In the end, Patino tells the tale of how Chicano/Mexicano politics articulated an “abolitionist” position on immigration–going beyond the agreed upon assumptions shared by liberals and conservatives alike that deportations are inherent to any solutions to the still burgeoning immigration debate.