"Where's Your Birth Certificate, Pilgrim?": Analyzing Double Age In Immigration Policing and Chicano Community Organizing, 1975-1985

Abstract

"Where's Your Birth Certificate, Pilgrim?":Analyzing Double Age In Immigration Policing and Chicano Community Organizing, 1975-1985 Erin Mysogland (bio) In the late 1970s, Mexican youth began migrating to the US in growing numbers, expanding the "era of undocumented immigration" beyond a circular movement of adult male workers.1 At this time, the Border Patrol, the enforcement arm of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), detained and deported migrants at increased rates, particularly in San Diego. Policing in San Diego's Chicano communities also increased as the policies of the "unconditional war on poverty" and "war against crime" criminalized youth of color.2 As the deportation machine coalesced with the carceral state, police denied Chicano and migrant youth the protections of childhood through deportation and detention.3 This article examines two cases of immigration police wrongfully deporting youth—a fourteen-year-old and a fifteen-year-old—to uncover how a "double age" based on race, ethnicity, and citizenship expanded deportability. It also uses the contemporaneous practice of detaining migrant youth at the Metropolitan Correctional Center to show how double age enabled the exclusions of older youth from reforms in detention practices. Using the lens of double age to understand the tension between the age of these detained and deported youth and their treatment by police demonstrates how the selective application of a protected childhood served to expand policing.4 However, immigration police were not the only ones that used the porous boundaries of youth to their advantage in the 1970s and 1980s San Diego-Tijuana borderlands. Herman Baca, leader of the Committee on Chicano Rights (CCR), infantilized Chicano and migrant youth to build resistance to policing. Guided by notions of Chicano self-determination, the CCR forged solidarity between Chicanos and undocumented migrants. By evoking a double age [End Page 422] based on notions of child protection, Baca built community-wide support for his demands to end the policing of Chicanos and migrants alike. Ultimately, the utility of double age for both immigration police and community organizers warns that a focus on youth can serve to uphold systems of oppression based on race, ethnicity, and citizenship status. ________ In the early 1980s, 6 percent of all Mexicans expelled from the US were younger than eighteen, amounting to 20,000 a year from California alone.5 Immigration law permitted the expulsion of undocumented youth through either formal deportation proceedings or the voluntary departure process.6 However, community organizers gathered evidence of the INS also deporting US citizens and migrants with legal status. In examining these illegal deportations of youth, it is important to note that only migrants over eighteen were required to carry their residency card at all times, meaning individuals under eighteen did not have to immediately prove legal status when apprehended.7 Guidance for deportation officers also stated that "[n]o juvenile shall be detained in a Service or non-Service adult facility whether or not he is accompanying a detained adult." Because the INS defined "juvenile" according to the law in the state where they were detaining the individual, in California the INS was not supposed to hold youth under eighteen in adult facilities prior to deportation.8 In defiance of these guidelines, immigration police denied Chicano and migrant youth a protected childhood by deporting them, serving to expand the reach of the deportation machine. In February 1984, Mario Moreno Lopez, a fourteen-year-old legal resident, was talking with friends on the street outside a store in Santa Ana when INS officers apprehended him and thirty-two other individuals they assumed to be undocumented. The INS brought Mario to a detention facility in Los Angeles and held him for a day even though Mario explained that he had residency papers. Mario eventually signed a form agreeing to a voluntary departure because, having witnessed another youth get "shoved to the ground" for not signing the form, he "didn't know it was voluntary."9 The INS deported Mario to Tijuana, where he found himself away from his father for the first time in his life. On his third border crossing attempt Mario entered San Diego, where someone who had seen his picture in the paper recognized him...