Latinxs in the Attic: (Erasing Latinx Presence and the) Policing (of) Racial Borders in Faulkner's Light in August

Abstract

Latinxs in the Attic(Erasing Latinx Presence and the) Policing (of) Racial Borders in Faulkner's Light in August Paul M. Worley and Melissa Birkhofer For Gabriel, Miguel, Jesús, and Elenaporque el Nuevo South is por and para Uds. On November 13, 2013, 17-year-old Jesús "Chuy" Huerta of Durham, NC, was felled by a single gunshot to the head while in police custody. Having just been placed under arrest, Huerta was in the back of a patrol car with his hands cuffed behind him when someone fired the fatal shot. Police reports of the incident claim the arresting officer missed a small handgun when patting Huerta down, the same gun with which Huerta then killed himself. The police also released previous information from Huerta's family in which family members stated they feared for his safety and described the young man as suicidal. Family members and those in the wider community contested these assertions, asking how an officer could possibly miss a handgun when patting someone down and, far more disturbingly, how could a young man with his hands cuffed behind him even draw said handgun, much less manage to shoot himself in the head? There were protests, some of which supposedly turned violent. To cite one example, on Thursday December 26, 2013, armored police deployed "an irritant gas" against protestors who marched in demand of a full and honest account of these events.1 Despite this incredible turn of events, the death of Chuy Huerta and the gassing of protestors in Durham, NC, never registered on the national radar. Almost a year later the August 9, 2014, police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, would spark a similar response from protestors and police alike. Unlike in Huerta's case, Brown's death and the events of Ferguson erupted into the national consciousness and spawned debates on racial profiling, the terrifying number of people of color who are shot by police or who die while in police custody, and the militarization of ostensibly civilian police forces. In as much as this is the case, these events and countless others highlight not just the tensions between people of color and local police forces, but also what Carol Anderson, in writing on Brown's death, refers to as "white rage" that comes "cloaked in the niceties of law and order." In her op-ed published in the Washington Post, Alderson traces the long, historical dialectic [End Page 324] between white power and government, and frames recent events from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to stand-your-grounds laws as "more subtle—less overly racist—than in 1865 or even 1954," yet nonetheless "a remake of the Southern Strategy crafted in the wake of the civil rights movement to exploit white resentment against African Americans" (n.p.). If the events surrounding Huerta's death mean anything in this context, they demonstrate that what transpired in Ferguson is not an exception but indeed the terrifying new rule. This position, of course, contradicts the facile narratives many media outlets constructed in the wake of the February 10, 2015 police shooting death of Mexican migrant worker Antonio Zambrano-Montes, in which many reports saw in Zambrano-Montes's death a kind of "Latino Ferguson moment."2 While well intentioned, the comparative framework not only obscures the generalized, ongoing historical fact of police violence against communities of color and the responses of these communities to this violence, but also lays bare one of the fundamental ways that white people construct race in the US. Namely, race tends to be constructed along a black/white binary, with other non-white populations being "exclude[d] … from full membership and participation in racial discourse" (Perea, "The Black/White" 1215). Hence Michael Brown's murder becomes a mechanism for understanding Zambrano-Montes's, a move that divorces each incident from the structural particularities of Ferguson, MO and Pasco, WA, respectively, that produced these police murders in the first place. Further, when events such as Ferguson are positioned key, almost necessary preconditions for even speaking about police violence against Latinx peoples, this comparative framework glosses over the extent to which the presence of many...