Borders reflect the many social, historical, and political forces that shape global movement and identity. While borders often suggest fixed lines of division, the experiences within and around them increasingly influence national and global understandings of belonging, sovereignty, and human rights.

Recorded on October 1, 2025, this panel together a group of UC Berkeley graduate students from the fields of history, sociology, and ethnic studies for a discussion on borders and their impact, particularly through the lens of migration, mobility, and resistance across the U.S.-Mexico border.

The panel featured Carlotta Wright de la Cal, PhD Candidate in History; Adriana Ramirez, PhD Candidate in Sociology; and Irene Franco Rubio, PhD Candidate in Ethnic Studies. Hidetaka Hirota, Professor of History, moderated.

The Social Science Matrix New Directions event series features research presentations by graduate students from different social science disciplines. This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, Department of Ethnic Studies, and Department of History.

Watch the panel above or on YouTube. Or listen to the audio recording via the Matrix Podcast below (or on Apple Podcasts).

Podcast and Transcript

(upbeat instrumental music)

[MARION FOURCADE]

So we have, as you probably know, at Matrix we have several series. By the way, I’m Marion Fourcade. I’m the director here.

I forgot to say that. But we have several series, you know. We have Authors Meet Critics, we have the Matrix On Point, and we have the New Directions.

And New Directions is really one of my favorite series to schedule every semester because it’s a series that features the work of the graduate students in the social science division. And so it’s always particularly energizing when I see many of you here, you know, that suggests that that’s, this is where the future lies, the future of social science research lies. So today’s panel will help us explore how experiences within and around borders shape understandings of belonging, sovereignty and human rights.

And so we have assembled a group of UC Berkeley graduate student to think about this question through the lens of migration, mobility, and resistance across the US-Mexico border. Note that today’s event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of History, Ethnic Studies, and Sociology. And I should add that it was actually designed and put together by my predecessor as Matrix director, Corey Hayden, last spring, and of course, by our director of programs who’s sitting there in the back, Sarah Harrington.

Now, before I turn over to introduce our moderator, let me just say a few things about upcoming events at Matrix. Next week, there will be a first Author Meets Critic event with Patrice Douglass’s book. She’s from the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

And then in we have a succession of three Matrix on Point on conspiracy theories, on spaces for thriving, and on insurance and the climate crisis. And then we have two big lectures in December by Maximilian Kasy, who’s an economist from Oxford with a graduate from the Berkeley Econ Department, who will talk about his book, The Means of Prediction. And then finally, our Matrix lecture is journalist Alexis Madrigal.

Okay, let me introduce our moderator. Hidetaka Hirota, he’s a social and legal historian of U.S immigration, specializing in nativism, immigration control, and policy from the antebellum era to the progressive era. His first book, Expelling the Poor, which was published by Oxford in 2017, examines 19th-century deportation policies and received multiple awards.

He is currently working on the another book called The American Dilemma, which explores the tension between nativism and labor demand in shaping U.S immigration policy, as well as projects on Japanese immigrants and the history of anti-immigrant sentiment. His research has appeared in leading history and migration studies journals. And here at Berkeley, he teaches U.S immigration history, and he co-directs the Canadian Studies program.

He was also a Matrix faculty fellow last year while he was working on his next book. So without further ado, I will turn it over to Hide. Thank you.

[HIDETAKA HIROTA]

Thank you. Thank you, Marion.

(applause)

Hi everyone. Welcome to this New Directions panel on borderlands. I’m Hide Hirota in the history department, and I teach, as Marion said, I teach U.S immigration history here at Berkeley.

So borders, borderlands, we hear about these things all the time, right? And we constantly get information about those topics when we hear about this. But then in media, especially, we rarely get actual sense of what happened in the borderlands in the past and what’s going on in the borderlands today, especially from migrants’ perspectives and how multiple, you know, issues were interrelated with each other in different ways.

So what we hear often today, I think, is a really simplified version of this history of borders and borderlands. So today, you know, we are extremely fortunate to have three graduate students working on those subjects, and we’re very fortunate to hear, again, new directions, the cutting edge research on this subject. So each of the three panelists here will speak about their project for 10 minutes, and then after that we’ll, the panelists have some conversations, and toward the end, we will have time for Q&A.

So let me just first introduce our three panelists here from your left edge, I guess, right? It’s my right edge. It’s your left edge.

Carlotta Wright de la Cal is a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. Her research examines how indigenous and migrant Mex borderlands navigated and resisted overlapping systems of legal and corporate control from the 1880s to the 1940s. Drawing on archives in Mexico City, Washington DC, and various state and private collections, the project reveals how state and corporate actors deployed immigration law, federal Indian policy, and labor systems to display mobile racialized populations.

While workers strategically exploited jurisdictional gray zones to advance autonomy and resistance. Our second speaker panelist is in the middle is Adriana P. Ramirez. She’s a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology here at Berkeley.

Her research interests revolve around migration, citizenship, Latin America, political sociology, and race and ethnicity. The influence of growing up as a migrant student between Mexico and the United States is evident in her work, which explores transnational migration dynamics. Her current work examines how young return migrants adapt to different spheres of Mexican society and formulate their identity and a sense of belonging across context of reception in the cities of Oaxaca and Jalisco.

Her previous work studied how young return migrants navigate their double Mexican-US citizenship to negotiate a sense of belonging and better opportunities in Mexico. The work was recently published in Social Province. And the third panelist here is Irene Franco Rubio.

She’s a PhD student in Ethnic Studies, again at UC Berkeley, and she’s pursuing a designated emphasis in gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and New Media. Her research examines multiracial coalition building, grassroots resistance, and social movement histories in the US Southwest, with a focus on how cross-cultural solidarity emerges in response to racialized state violence. Drawing on critical ethnography or histories and community-engaged methods, her work highlights how communities resist criminalization and reimagine abolitionist futures, offering new frameworks for understanding coalition-based resistance.

She is a Soros Justice Open Society Foundations Fellow, and the host of award-winning #SchoolsNotPrisons podcast, which examines the entanglements of the criminal legal system. Irene also received the Dr. Riz Hui Memorial Graduate Student Scholarship, a Social Science Matrix Award given annually to one graduate student dedicated to addressing urgent real-world issues throughout their scholarship. So, without further ado, we’re gonna start the presentation, first by Carlotta.

(audience applauding)

[CARLOTTA WRIGHT DE LA CAL]

All right. Hi, everyone. Thank you for being here today and thank you so much to the Social Science Matrix for putting this panel together.

Also to Sarah for organizing everything. And yeah, and to my fellow panelists and Hide. So my presentation today is going to offer a bit of a snapshot of, okay, there we go.

A bit of a snapshot of my wider dissertation project, which is a social legal history of railroad expansion across the US-Mexico border from the 1880s through to the 1940s. As you can see, here is a pretty expansive map of the ways the railroads spanned across the Southwest and into Mexico. I examine how railroad corporations, specifically the Southern Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, which is the railroad this map is of reshaped the social, spatial, and legal landscape of the region.

Centering, in my research, the experiences of especially Indigenous and migrant workers as they encountered, navigated, and contested lots of overlapping regimes of territorial and legal control in the borderlands. I look at the railroad line and the way it bifurcates and crosses over and crisscrosses over the line of the border. In, and I look at the ways it both facilitated, you know, state and corporate control over territories and communities that were deemed unruly and in needing of management but also the ways this infrastructure paradoxically facilitated resistance against this control through their strategic use of mobility legal gray areas exploitation of immigration law, et cetera.

And I expand upon this briefly in a case study that begins one of my dissertation chapters. Yeah, so project overview. And as part of kind of my methodology railroads are usually I studied in US history from kind of the east to west through the model of the transcontinental railroad, and I look at them north to south looking at connective tissues across borders and communities from the US to Mexico and back again.

And I focus on the US-Mexico borderlands, the US Southwest specifically Arizona, New Mexico, and California, and I look at the ways also these territories are shaped by these hybrid overlapping systems of colonialism different inheritances of conquest, so Spanish colonial, the Mexican national period, as you can see in this map, and the journey in the US federal system from territory to state. And evidently now, the US-Mexico border is constructed in popular culture as a site of division a dividing fixed line. But the border at this stage in, at the start of the 20th century, as historians such as Deborah Kang and Kelly Lytle Hernández have explained, was, you know, really not particularly professionalized and it was simultaneously tried to be a space that was open and closed.

Closed in the name of nativism, national security, but open really in many ways to serve the desires of local business, agribusinesses, railroads, mining, and their, you know, their need for Mexican labor, and the people, the communities that routinely spanned across the border. So how I see borderlands then for my project in the interest of defining them is as these kind of, you know, this moment of drastically porous zones that are rooted in spatial mobility, identities that are flexible by national ambiguities of legal and social power. I really like the work kind of more metaphorically of Chicana scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of borderlands as this kind of inherently effective relational intimate dynamics.

So I’m going to give just a brief context as to why railroads are important or interesting for borderlands history and history of migration. I mean, starting from really zooming out, railroads totally reshaped territoriality in American West and Southwest in the second half of the 19th century. So mass expansion through land grants into Indigenous treaty territory and the rise of, you know, checker boarding jurisdictions where you have this system of dividing land in these overlapping kind of, you know, intersecting parcels.

Also especially in Mexico, railroads really transform the land and relationships with mobility and indigeneity. Because there was such massive US investment into Mexico to establish a railroad system overnight from nothing. Through the courting of foreign capital investment by, you know, under the rule of President Porfirio Diaz, who saw railroads as the key to modernizing Mexico, unifying the country, and spurring economic growth through exports.

So, the railroad there in Mexico and the accompanying land laws that encourages construction led to mass dispossession of rural Indigenous communities from communal lands called ejidos. And then this displacement forced people into migrant labor stream, many of whom were then recruited into US, to work for US railroad companies on US lines, especially after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Railroad companies used the well-known process of enganchadores or labor recruitment agents where they would send agents to recruit on the southern side of the border, bring them to the north side of the border.

And they would house workers in often in boxcar villages, which were essentially company towns where the workers were lived in boxcars. There, from my research in the trade journals and the management literature, these railroads were really invested in establishing control over migrant workers. Not only in terms of space but also in terms of intimate lives, and space was a normal one.

It’s, I, there are a lot of comments like this one acknowledging that it was extremely rare and frowned upon to call for any kind of local police or sheriff authority. So, control of foreman was pretty much a kind of, they were legal intermediaries. And trade journals also began praising in the 1910s, especially boxcar family housing, insisting that patriarchal single-family domestic arrangements would improve behavior for the, I quote, “Mexican vagrant class,” and they ran Americanization and citizenship schools in the, for the workers’ children in very boxcars that also housed the workers.

So thinking about this context of railroads as these transformative infrastructures in the border and the context of specialized power, insulation from state oversight in many ways I was interested in whether we could find histories of resistance or of worker, you know, like examples of worker agency, especially Indigenous workers, because they’re such an important part of the story of the land here. And I think we can, especially through moments of encounter between workers and the state. And so for example, in May 1906, Mexican border agents arrested two Indigenous Yaqui men, Francisco and Cayetano Matus, on the Arizona-Sonora border.

And they were returning to Tucson for employment on the Southern Pacific railyards. At this time, Yaquis were in armed revolt against the Mexican states

[HIDETAKA HIROTA]

Railroad workers in US–

[CARLOTTA WRIGHT DE LA CAL]

–genocidal violence, and had established extensive refugee communities in Arizona, especially in Tucson, and worked were very integrated into the wage labor economy of the Southwest railroad mine on both sides of the border. So the Matus brothers told inspectors of their long-held strategy of working these jobs to cross onto the northern side to tap into family and kin networks in cities like Tucson, known for thriving arm smuggling networks. Alarmed upon hearing this from the Mexican War Secretary, the Mexican Consulate in Naco, Arizona urged Washington to use immigration checkpoints discreetly and privately identify and prosecute Yaqui rebels as violating international neutrality laws, weaponizing border controls to suppress Indigenous resistance.

Mexican diplomats also entreated US immigration officials to avoid confusing Yaquis with American Indians, who, you know, were at the have as many American Indian tribes in the Southwest have transborder specific rights and mobility and avoid giving them special privileges. This administrative paper trail and this moment of encounter further intertwines migrant labor, border surveillance, and the racialized state management of Indigenous people for me. Um, yeah.

And Francisco and Cayetano Matus, it seems clear and they mention lots of other Yaqui workers strategically using the mobility, money, and kinship networks of railroad infrastructure, railroad labor afforded them in the US to resist back home and put them in contact with communities of people who lived these transborder lives at the margins of state and in spaces of, you know, pretty accepted illegality. A Mexican detective sent by the consulate undercover to Sonora reported that smuggling networks formed a kind of society with links to powerful local figures on both side of the border. And he reported back that wives of ferrocarrileros were as involved in the smuggling trade as their husband.

The wife of a conductor was known to stuff bullets and cartridges down her stockings and personally disperse the merchandise in Sonora whenever her husband drove the train down from Tucson. There’s also recent research that shows that rail work fermented transnational alliances between the IWW, the anarchist-leaning Partido Liberal Mexicano among Mexican workers in the US Southwest, and that these movements were especially successful at recruiting Yaquis and Mayos in the mines and the rail yards that migrated from job to job and circulated these ideas across the border. So I’m running out of time.

But I want to sum up and say that these vignettes offer US insight into how indigenous rebels, indigenous migrants were made legible to the state as migrant workers. And that it seems clear there’s this dynamic here where corporations, especially railroad corporations, simultaneously facilitate mechanisms of control while also generating, in this time of more porous border and borderlands life unexpected opportunities that indigenous and migrant workers used to sustain their communities, resist state violence, and continue to living lives that existed on both sides of the border. Thinking about just quickly, implications of my research for today, it seems to me increasingly important for historians of immigration to understand indigenous history and its importance, and to understand how the frontier and the border overlap historically as regimes of racialization and labor control.

At the US border today increasing numbers of migrants speak indigenous languages as their first language and are fleeing land dispossession, identity-based violence in, from Central America, and often use La Bestia, which are dangerous freight networks that are used to travel north to the United States. Many migrants risk their lives by riding these dangerous trains as you can see here that carry goods like corn, cement especially to bypass immigration checkpoints and detention centers. Overall, by illuminating the long history of railroad infrastructure and in the lens of migration and indigenous history and how it served as both a tool of colonial control and a means of indigenous resistance my research aims to reveal colonial patterns that still structure migration and marginalize indigenous migrants today.

Thank you.

(applause)

(sighs)

[ADRIANA RAMIREZ]

Thank you all for joining us today. Thank you for organizing this. Thank you to the Matrix team.

Today I will be talking about my working dissertation chapter titled Ready or Not: The Road to Return. Since around 2010, more Mexican nationals have left the US than entered, reversing decades of increased migration. The sustained shift, partly driven by the 2008 Great Recession, represents a different type of return with three main characteristics.

Return migration has become less circular, more forced, and increasingly has been including more children and adolescents. These children and adolescents are moving to a place that they’ve either haven’t been there before ever or hardly have a memory of being there. Yet this move is shaped by their parents’ histories and expectations, and expectations of the communities receiving them in Mexico.

Thus, here return migration refers to the migration to one’s own or parents’ place of origin after residing in another country. When it comes to return migration, the literature is largely focused on adults. Part of this literature is focused on the motivations for return, distinguishing between voluntary return such as for economic recessions or an economic plan being completed or forced, sorry, or fear of deportation.

On the other hand, there is forced return which is deportations. Now when it comes to the reintegration of adults into their country of origin, research tells us that reintegration is more challenging for forced returnees who experience more difficulties with employment, access to services, and social networks.

(sighs)

But when it comes specifically to children’s return migration far less is known. The literature tells us that children experience de facto deportation when following deported parents to Mexico, thus facing difficulties in school, disorientation, and emotional withdrawal during their reintegration to Mexico. However, children’s return motives are rarely examined because they’re seen as dependent on adults with little choice in the migration decision.

My dissertation focuses on these young returnees. And in this talk specifically, I will focus on this aspect of the return process that has been less explored. In particular, I ask, how do children experience a time between when their families decide that they will be returning to Mexico and actually leaving the US?

I argue that for children, the migration experience is not just about the reasons for return, whether forced or voluntary, but also about whether families prepared children for this return, as well as the degree of agency that children are given in the decision to return, all within the structural constraints of the U.S. immigration system. In this sense, preparation matters because it shapes children’s psychological adjustment, ability to navigate new environments, and a sense of security, thus reducing anxiety and building resilience. While agency is crucial because it operates differently based on age and legal status.

For the purpose of this talk, however, I will only focus on the first part of my argument regarding preparation for children’s return. I carried out this research for this project from September 2022 to November 2023 in the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Jalisco. I conducted a total of 115 interviews, 98 of these interviews were with young returned migrants and 17 with organization employees.

The average age at the time of interview was 20, but all but five of my respondents returned as minors. 60 were born in the U.S., 38 were born in Mexico, 59 identified as female, 39 identified as male, 15 were de facto deported, and 83 were returned voluntarily. The first thing I found by looking at all these interviews was that about half of the respondents stated that their parents prepared them for their return in one or more of the following ways.

Usually, the mothers would give children informal Spanish lessons after school, sometimes lasting one to two hours. Many parents use technology such as Google Earth or YouTube to show their children what their future home would look like, the streets around it, and videos of the town’s yearly fiestas or festivities. At the same time, many told their children from a very young age about their plans to return to Mexico in the near future, and to help them ease their transition from the U.S. to Mexico.

Take the case of Gabriela, who was born in Mexico and lived there until the age of two, when her parents brought her to the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bay was the only place that Gabriela knew until that point, but she never freely called it home because as she shared, “My mom, when I was very little, she always said, ‘We’re here and well, we’re going to be here for a while, but this isn’t our house. It’s not our home.

We come from Mexico. We have family there.’ So they were always telling us, and I think that got to us, as a way of helping us not be so affected by the change.”

As Gabriela and other returnees mentioned, by framing return as an expected part of a family’s trajectory rather than an abrupt disruption, parents help children develop psychological readiness for the move and a framework for understanding their transnational identity. This was not the case for the other half of the young returnees that I spoke to, who were not prepared by their parents in any of the previously mentioned forms. Some parents may not have had the time to prepare their children because they were working multiple jobs and long hours.

However, some withheld vital information from their children, such as their legal status and their plans to return. And others instead told their children they were going on vacation to Mexico, thinking this would ease the difficult transition for their children from the– of moving from the U.S. to Mexico. However, this lack of preparation created significant challenges for children.

Children arrived emotionally unprepared and without understanding why their lives had changed, leading to feelings of powerlessness and resentment that complicated their reintegration. For example, David was a baby when his parents brought him to the US, and when I asked him to walk me through the moment he found out he would be returning to Mexico, he said, “We thought we were going to go to Mexico for vacation for one or two months, and then we were going to return to the US. I don’t even remember saying goodbye to my friends.

It was like really fast And I didn’t think much about it. I didn’t think much about the fact that we were leaving.”

Once David realized this wasn’t a vacation, but a permanent move, his excitement turned to anger and deep sadness. Even when happiness existed in certain moments, sadness and fear remained inescapable. Among those who were unprepared for return were 15 whose fathers were deported, and whose mothers decided to return to Mexico to reunite their families.

Some fathers were detained for weeks or months, leaving little time for children to learn Spanish or mentally prepare themselves for this return, all amid the family experiencing state violence and family separation. For all of the 15 respondents, this limited time to prepare and the sudden return manifested in deteriorating mental health. This was the case for Leo, who was born in Mexico but was brought to Southern California as a baby, where he grew up until the age of 12 when his father was detained by ICE.

Leo’s future briefly seemed clear when his father might win his case and stay in the US, but this hope vanished when his father lost his case and was deported to Mexico. Leo stated, “And the day when my mom gave us the news, there was more of a letdown. You feel more sad, you feel more, more lost, feel nervous.

You don’t know what’s about to come. I had to go through the process of overthinking, you know, not paying attention in class. I mean, going to Mexico, what can I say now?

It’s like a huge restart.” Leo’s father’s deportation erased any hope for a clear future in the US, intensifying Leo’s sadness and uncertainty. Settled in the US, he was not prepared to restart in Mexico.

Given these findings, we can see that when studying the return migration of children, it’s not enough to study the motivations for return and the reintegration experiences, but we must also focus on the time in between to see how US immigration enforcement directly affects the kind of return families experience, and thus, affecting parents’ ability to prepare children for a return. Noting that children’s preparedness is significant in easing their transition to their new lives in Mexico and lessening depression, anxiety, and isolation upon their return. Thank you for listening.

I look forward to our discussion and your questions.

(audience applauding)

[IRENE FRANCO RUBIO]

Well, hi. It’s nice to meet everybody. I, yeah, would like to say thank you to the Social Science Matrix for inviting me. I would also like to note I am not a PhD candidate. I know it says that.

(laughing)

But, yeah, so I would say the way I’m approaching this presentation is a little bit more about my research interests, what brought me to this work, and how I sort of situate myself in relation to borderlands. And then using my own lived experience as like testament or as method for making sense of the kind of research that I hope to do.

So yeah. So just to preface that.

But yeah, so my name is Irene. I’m a second year PhD in Ethnic Studies and I’m presenting on Contested Borderlands and the Carceral Laboratory and thinking about Arizona immigrant detention and abolition and the interlocking system between those.

Yeah. And I’m hearing we’re talking about, everyone’s talking about Arizona, so I was like, “This is actually perfectly situated to help us, help me position what I’m thinking about.” So I guess to start, you know, I grew up in Phoenix and I was talking to my dad about this yesterday, like, oh, I’m gonna be presenting on SB 1070, and it was this, something that we all think about and we all remember.

And I was like, oh, what do you remember about it? And so, so yeah.

So my dad is a Guatemalan immigrant still living in Phoenix, Arizona and lived during the SB 1070 era, like myself, and he described it as a time of panic. Panic, Latinos were worried, we had to worry. He remembers the checkpoints that are described in Latino neighborhoods on Friday nights where the sheriff’s deputies would stop people because they looked Latino with policies allowing the collaboration between local law enforcement, the sheriff, and ICE.

And for many, this meant avoiding whole parts of the city, changing work patterns to working night shifts, and even fleeing the state altogether. But this lived experience reminds me that borderlands are constantly contested spaces, prone to breeding resistance as well like myself. Arizona became one of the most visible contested borderlands where racist spectacle politics turned everyday life into a site of border enforcement.

So it also became a place where migrants, youth, and everyday community members learned to challenge these logics of exclusion and mass criminalization and where grassroots resistance redefined belonging and possibility. So when I describe Arizona as a contested borderland, what I mean is that the borders aren’t fixed lines. They were sites of struggle and shaped by competing political, social, and cultural forces.

So in Arizona during the Senate Bill 1070 era, are folks familiar? I feel like if, you know, folks, yeah. Yeah, okay.

Well, if not, I feel like this is a good intro. It was notoriously known as the Show Me Your Papers bill, and so in a lot of ways we’re seeing the repercussions of that today. And it was, the contestation was particularly evident.

Policing detention in everyday life collided in ways that blurred the line between the border, the state, and beyond. Arizona passed SB1070 in 2010, and it remained one of the strictest and most draconian anti-immigrant laws in US history, as it allowed police to racially profile and detain people that they suspected of being an immigrant, much like we’re seeing today. The law unleashed widespread racial profiling, mass displacement, deportations, and a culture of fear and fearmongering that shaped everyday life for immigrant communities.

Its core, SB1070 was built on the doctrine of attrition through enforcement, so the idea that daily life should be made so hostile, so unbearable that people would feel forced to self-deport, which we explored a little bit in these presentations. It deputized not only local law enforcement, but also police officers and even neighbors, effectively turning entire communities into immigration enforcers. And Arizona was not an isolated case.

SB1070 became celebrated by anti-immigrant legislators as a model law and quickly copied in other states like Alabama and Mississippi, spreading this punitive blueprint well beyond the Southwest. So I won’t go too much into it but 287 G is really key here and we’re seeing this now as on a sort of national scale. But it was a provision in federal immigration law that allows ICE to delegate immigration enforcement authority to state and local law enforcement.

So under Joe Arpaio’s leadership, which, well, I’ll get into in a second, Maricopa County operated what was called a task force model. So this meant that deputies weren’t working in jails. They were empowered to conduct street level immigration enforcement, blurring the line between local policing and federal immigration control.

Deputies conducted the sweeps that I mentioned in Latino neighborhoods, pulling over Latino drivers up to nine times more often than others and made unlawful stops and arrests based solely on race. So I have a little bit of a timeline here ’cause this also helps me situate how I, again, approach this work and why, you know, I’m in ethnic studies and how I sort of came to be. So similarly to SB1070, there was an attack on ethnic studies that formalized, was formalized through House Bill 2281, which prohibited courses that promoted to, quote, “Overthrow the U.S. government resentment towards a race or class of people or ethnic solidarity instead of individual treatment.”

Hence my interest in multiracial coalition building. In 2010, this program became the epicenter of national controversy and the law dismantled the Mexican American studies program in Tucson, which stripped students of a program that had affirmed their histories and identities. Some of the books that were banned include, which we talked, you mentioned in your presentation Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera Pedagogy of the Oppressed House on Mango Street, among others.

So what’s important here and the reason I even mention it is that Arizona wasn’t only policing bodies at the border or in neighborhoods under SB1070, it was also policing knowledge and identity inside the classroom. The state targeted ethnic identity and belonging on multiple fronts at the same time, criminalizing Latino presence in public space while simultaneously dismantling the programs that affirmed and empowered students, students of color. This reveals the mechanics of state-sanctioned violence and control where legislation, law enforcement, and education intersect to regulate racialized populations, basically in many ways extending the border into every dimension of life.

And then as you all know, with the recent Supreme Court decision expanding enforcement and the increase in ICE detention centers, which we’ll get into as well. So from this book called Inventing Latinos by Laura Gomez there’s a quote that I was reading about last week And I was like, “Oh, this is perfect.”

So he, Arpaio, brags about helping write the “Trump playbook,” telling a reporter in 2012 that he planned to turn every illegal immigrant he was forced to release from county jail into “the Willie Horton” George H.W. Bush had in 1988. In this way, Arpaio was drawing on a long history of racist political strategy in the U.S. So for context, Willie Horton was a Black man whose image was infamously weaponized under the Bush administration under their campaign.

And Horton’s case was used in attack ads to stoke racial fear, portraying Black men as inherently dangerous and linking that fear to policy about crime. And so Arpaio used and intended to use the same playbook by now situating Latinos and immigrants as a political symbol meant to justify harsher policing, detention, and deportation. This isn’t fully relevant, but I just like to include this every time in anything that I do.

So this also illustrates the deep interconnection between the criminal legal system and the immigrant detention system. So people move from county jails to ICE custody, from prisons to detention centers and are caught in overlapping systems designed to criminalize their existence. So Arpaio’s rhetoric, which we’ll also see a few other examples made this pipeline explicit, equating immigrants with the logic of criminality to expand both prison and detention infrastructures.

So Arizona, in many ways, I see it as and I argue, it became a carceral laboratory or testing ground for the longstanding fusion of mass incarceration and detention and a convergence that has historically and continues to shape national policy today. So one of the key things that sticks out from SB-1070 and we are seeing replicated is this notion of tent city. So Arpaio had styled himself as America’s toughest sheriff since the early 1990s, focusing on drugs and gangs.

But in 2007, as Arizona began to be a main gateway for migration he focused his efforts on this. Also, it’s important to note he is the son of Italian immigrants, which I always thought was so funny.

(laughs)

Okay, so he created an outdoor jail close to downtown Phoenix, and this is something we would see on the news all the time. His own tough on crime creation which was often described as a concentration camp. So for months at a time, incarcerated people who were sentenced for minor crimes slept in these green cloth tents that were actually surplus military tents that were left over from the Korean War laid on bunk beds, on large slabs of gravel.

And in the summer, most notably –I don’t know, has anyone been to Arizona? Have you been there during the summer? Okay, someone –Okay.

The summer is brutal, I don’t know if folks know. But in the summer, temperatures inside could reach up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the dry Arizona heat and there’s no air conditioning, and they were often given expired food expired Gatorades, and I think they would sometimes allow people to go inside But I don’t know how often that was.

And they were also issued pink underwear. So this was, like one of his most notorious things And I actually saw last year, he started his own, like campaign since Trump pardoned him so he didn’t have to serve a federal sentence.

But they were issued pink underwear, long sleeves, sandals and the sheriff said that he chose pink so prisoners wouldn’t try to steal them, though we know that these were a humiliation tactic in larger questions about men and masculinity. And in jails, Latino inmates with limited English proficiency were also punished and denied services while critics of the sheriff’s office faced retaliation. So proud of his prison experiment, Arpaio frequently invited the media to witness these new cohorts of detainees being sent to Tent City.

He said this was an inexpensive way to get his anti-immigration message out to the public, and we would. We would see it in real time on the news and this would be like a regular occurrence. Inmates were also forced to work on chain gangs which had been abandoned by the US in 1955, but Maricopa County also ran the only all-female chain gang in the country.

So other detainees had mandatory work inside the jail and some were part of a furlough program that they were able to go work outside and come back to the Tent City to sleep and created this super production tough on crime image. So Tent City ran for more than 20 years and stood within a larger jail compound, in an industrial area near, like south of downtown Phoenix, and at its peak it consisted of 82 of those war era military tents and housed 1,700 inmates, and then after 2009 it could hold up to 200 immigrants at a time. But to call the borderlands contested spaces is also to recognize the power of resistance.

So community members didn’t simply endure these policies, we saw these things happening right in front of us and decided to resist. So grassroots organizers, community members pushed back and redefined what it meant to belong. So contestation in this sense wasn’t just about state violence, it’s also about the ways people survived and organized in a state that had not been strictly, that had been strictly defined by its borders, and was also a fairly young movement that had not historically engaged in movements of resistance before.

This created an emerging era of movement building informing young people lived experience like myself and other Latino youth, the children of immigrants, and included civil rights and immigrant rights groups like the ACLU, the National Day Labor Organizing Network, and then more local grassroots spaces like LUCHA, Living United for Change in Arizona. So framing Arizona as a contested borderland helps me situate this story as more than just, like an Arizona history. It’s about how the state became emblematic of broader struggles over who belongs, who gets policed, and how communities resist, and how it created the framework we’re seeing today with the recent Supreme Court racial profile ruling that now allows federal agents to consider factors like race, ethnicity, and language in immigration stops, among other tools the state that seek to replicate these logics.

And so a key example of this is seen through Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. One of the orgs that I’ve had the chance to work with is called Detention Watch Network, which is a national coalition of immigrant rights groups. And they released their report in October 2024 compiling decades of abuse at the detention center.

So Eloy is operated by CoreCivic, which is one of the leading private prison companies, and has become one of the most notorious immigration detention facilities in the US. It holds over 1,500 people and it is considered to be the deadliest detention center. And really Eloy’s history reflects the broader evolution of immigration policy during, from Trump’s zero tolerance era.

It was one of the few sites detaining, yeah, sorry, I got mixed up. Anyway, so those are two reports that are available online. Here’s a little bit on what we’re seeing in terms of the detentions expanding today.

And then, I guess the last thing I’ll think about is, so Tent City symbolized the spectacle of punishment under Arpaio. It created the manifestation of what we’re seeing today. We were living in Trump’s America long before Trump took office as America became a testing ground where humiliation, racial profiling, and carceral spectacle were normalized.

So what began as a local experiment foreshadowed the more surreal and grotesque landscapes of punishment we see today, like Alligator Alcatraz as an example, where cruelty and spectacle combine in even more militarized and dehumanizing ways. Yeah. Let’s go on with that.

(audience applauding)

[HIDETAKA HIROTA]

Thank you. Thanks so very much. These are really interesting presentations and I think this panel really reflects the interdisciplinary spirit of the social science matrix.

And we have historical project sociological project, and an, a project in ethnic studies. And, and really enjoyed looking at those projects, you know, that are characterized by different perspectives. So, we have 10 minutes actually for the conversation among panelists, and then I wanna make sure that we have enough time for Q&A.

And perhaps I can also ask questions during Q&A if there’s any chance. But, I just came up with one question which I didn’t mention to you earlier. It’s a new one.

So apparently, you know, all of those projects have various strong implications for today, and let’s say that a journalist approaches you saying that “I’m writing this episode on US-Mex borderlands,” or, you know, you’re asked, you’re invited to write an op-ed in a newspaper or any kind of journalist outlet. What is, what do you wanna do to write about? You know, if you have those kind of opportunities or just got a interview request.

So in other words how would you want to, so with your project, you know, how would you sort of try, hope, you know, hope to, how would you try to inform the broader, you know, public about the history or the situation of the new US-Mex borderlands? It can be from historical perspective. It can be from more political perspective.

Any approach is fine, but again how does your project kind of help us better understand yeah, like, you know, better understand sort of contemporarily developments and issues? So it, sometimes this is a hard question for historians.

So but yeah, anybody can start, yeah. Carlotta, if you want go first, that’s okay.

[CARLOTTA WRIGHT DE LA CAL]

Okay. And everyone can hear me?

[HIDETAKA HIROTA]

Yes.

[CARLOTTA WRIGHT DE LA CAL]

Yeah, okay. Well, I spoke a little bit about it at the end, but I think for me, it would be the ways I think the just like the legacies of colonialism, especially like settler colonialism in the US are still present in the border. And I mean, I feel like in this imaginary op-ed a nice hook would be the recent tweet by the Homeland Security Twitter account where they use a painting of railroad expansion called American Progress, where they show the railroads expanding and the kind of like–

And it’s called American Progress And it’s has this image of, I suppose, Lady Liberty, and it’s a very clear idea of expansion and civilization through industry and infrastructure. And then I think the caption there was like, “A homeland worth defending,” or something.

And it’s also interesting that Kristi Noem, the current secretary of Homeland Security actually I think she used to be the governor of South Dakota, and she got into a lot of controversy and was banned from reservations in South Dakota for saying that she was worried about cartels being present in reservations. And so there’s still all of these interesting layers of border control settler colonialism, imperialism And so I think one thing I would want to I guess put forward from this research is that sometimes it seems like, historical research seems very bounded in the past, but especially when you research I think his yeah histories of the borders, it’s important to see the kind of the echoes into the present and also something else I would highlight is that for me, it’s important to kind of explain the ways that the bor– the ways the border looks today is not the ways it’s always looked.

And not to say that it was like any kind of like wonderful space or anything throughout history, but that these spaces were not by any means as defined by division as they are today.

[HIDETAKA HIROTA]

Great. Thank you. Adriana.

[ADRIANA RAMIREZ]

This is a question I always struggle with ’cause I wanna tell everyone everything. I would probably start with–

[HIDETAKA HIROTA]

But you only have like 750 words.

[ADRIANA RAMIREZ]

50 words? Okay.

[HIDETAKA HIROTA]

In op-ed.

[ADRIANA RAMIREZ]

Okay.

[HIDETAKA HIROTA]

Maximum of 1,000 words.

[ADRIANA RAMIREZ]

I’ll give you four bullet points. Okay. I would probably start with the situation we’re in right now, right?

And how the current policies of the current administration are I think, we might not know yet the impact that it’s having on return migration exactly in this particular moment. Maybe we’ll know it in next year or the following year or more years after that. But I think speaking from what I see in my own community, what I see on social media, I do think more people are starting to ask themselves this question about self-deportation and also of just in general leaving the US.

So I would start with situating what’s happening now and say that there is a possibility that return migration or self-deportation, however, it, we can’t really call it voluntary, although the literature sometimes talks about it as forced and involuntary, right? Even when it’s considered voluntary, to what extent is there a choice, right? When your choices are so limited.

So it might become a more significant possibility that the graph that I showed is actually showing a higher number of returned migrants in the future. So it is important not only to highlight that the Mexican government is not prepared to receive migrants, even though they say they have Mexico te abraza, or embracing, Mexico embraces you, right? These policies that say they are welcoming, which symbolically they might be, and they might have some material aspects to them, but at the end of the day a lot of the work that ends up happening on the ground when it comes to helping returned migrants reintegrate into society happens through civil society and organizations.

So I think that’s where a lot of the bridges need to be made between the Mexican government in order to help more returned migrants. I’ll keep it there. I think that was more than 50.

[HIDETAKA HIROTA]

That’s right. Thank you.

[IRENE FRANCO RUBIO]

I didn’t get to it, but one example of something that I actually was able to write with Silki Shah, who I mentioned the org called Detention Watch Network, and so it is this national coalition of immigrant rights groups. And we wrote an op-ed arguing that, well, really, the outcome of that is like coalition building and building a movement of shared solidarity is one that can like tackle the entanglement of the criminal legal system, particularly in the ways that immigrant detention and like prison abolition groups primarily kinda operated in movement silos. What we’re seeing now is an entangled nature of the state and like in the same way that the state operates movements for resistance can also be intertwined and be interlocking to sort of challenge a competing interlocking system.

And so, yeah, I guess I would just generally argue coalition building.

[HIDETAKA HIROTA]

Thank you. Let me ask you one more question before I open up the floor for general questions from the audience here. This is a kind of devil’s question, and you know, it sounds really mean, but I try to be sort of, you know, stimulate the conversation here.

But in some ways, studies of migration, border control can be predictable, like in a sense that Yeah, so we can expect to see, you know, lots of racism, lots of suffering, so the regimes are racist, regimes are coercive, here are capitalists who exploited workers, here are the migrants who suffered a lot. So, you know, I think we are kind of prepared to see those kinds of things.

But what are some of the surprising findings in your research, you know, that kind of you know, some of the findings that really betrayed your, you know, assumptions or something that you already expected to see. Right? Yeah, anything is fine.

So, yeah. And then you can basically, you know, share, you know, your research trajectory or, you know, things that you felt as you did research, but yeah, so. What are some of the, yeah, surprising findings in your research?

[CARLOTTA WRIGHT DE LA CAL]

Sure, I can go. Well, for me part of it was the story that I was talking about in my presentation because I think it kind of does go against the story, and it shows this really thriving community of migrant workers who obviously were, you know, are dealing with at the time the Yaquis were being genocided in Mexico, are dealing with poverty, with dislocation, dispossession of community, or dealing with being refugees in Tucson. But I found these sources where they’re talking about, you know, like, “Lots of Yaquis are well-armed in the streets of Tucson.

Anyone will sell us weapons whenever we want to.” There’s these networks of people where this detective is sent to a few different towns on the border, and is just really frustrated because everyone in these towns is involved in the trade, and they live lives where they spend some time in the North of the border, then they go over to Tucson. Like it’s, it was a, it showed a society where this idea of like you, that the border was extremely militarized and you had to choose a kind of a dividing line was not present in the same way as it is now, and that allowed all these different opportunities for kind of resistance against forces of exploitation and, or, you know, they’re, you know, and I’m talking about like explicit resistance but also just like, you know, the forging of communities or being able to participate in a union or sharing political literature, that kind of thing.

And so I felt like that was a surprising find and sound to my idea of like mobility as a strategy of resistance.

[ADRIANA RAMIREZ]

I had a few surprising findings. Maybe some of them I don’t, aren’t part of this chapter. But I think the one that surprised me the most might be the resistance, or maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me, the resistance and rejection of the US in terms of parents not wanting their children to grow up in the US as being part of the reasons, compounding reasons why they’re returning to Mexico.

Also, some of those some of the young returnees I interviewed not wanting to return to the US. And the way it was talked to me or discussed with me was “Why would I want to return to a country that didn’t want me?” Right?

So they’re seeing it as a political resistance of, “I’m gonna make my life here in Mexico, because I don’t need to be, The US is not the only way to live.” And with that, the last thing I found really interesting was that in one of the towns I interviewed, even those that were born in the US and had the possibility of coming back to the US, they really only saw it as their grandparents and parents saw it before, as a means to come here, work, and then invest in creating a life in Mexico, building their house in Mexico. So continuing that culture of migration pattern that has been happening for a while.

So those were the things I found more interesting.

[IRENE FRANCO RUBIO]

Not a serious finding but I guess something that I definitely want to look into is, I guess getting at the expansion of detention centers and the role of private prison companies in that process and how the state sort of mediates that versus a county jail too. Yeah, private prison company and how does that show up in sort of different states and the different policies that they’ve interacted with.

[HIDETAKA HIROTA]

Thank you so much. I think unfortunately, our time’s up. It’s now 5:30, and so I as a moderator, I have to close the session. But thank you for coming and please join me in thanking the panelists.

(applause)

(upbeat music)