“For Us, There Are No More Back Doors”

Abstract

This article argues that the nativist-led referendum known as Proposition 187, which in 1994 sought to deny undocumented immigrants and their families access to many of the state’s social services, represents a set of paradoxes about Latino immigration to California and the United States whose roots, consequences, and implications are not yet fully understood. First, Prop 187 revealed the enduring place of undocumented people as “essential but unwanted.” Second, it represented both a victory and a defeat for the immigrants’ rights struggle. And finally, it represented both an end and a beginning in U.S. immigration history. By interpreting Prop 187 in this way, historians and other scholars should see the moment in more complex and elucidating ways than we have so far, not merely as a “turn” against undocumented immigrants characterized by a new form of nativism fueled by fears about demographic and cultural change, not merely as a moment that spurred action and a search for power among both undocumented immigrants and Latino U.S. citizens, and not merely as something that “foreshadowed” attempts to bring immigration policy under local control. Instead, a more holistic look, and one that takes a longer view of this story, stretching both farther back in time and closer to the present, reveals that Prop 187 was never an issue of importance only to California, and that while there was much that was “new” about this form of nativism, there was also much more that simply made Prop 187 the logical conclusion. Neither did California merely foreshadow other states’ attempts to take immigration into their own hands. Rather, California’s Prop 187 was a direct cause of their doing so.