From Cortez to Governor Brewer: Arizona's SB1070 Was 500 Years in the Making

If one catastrophe is as consistent in its unfolding as BP's spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s the state of Arizona. By now, we’ve gone from the anti-immigrant SB1070 to the anti-Ethnic Studies HB2281, to talks about withholding citizenship from U.S.-born children whose parents are undocumented, to a request for predator drones to secure the border. Besides the SciFi-like, made-for-PBS-special nature of it all, I’m also impressed by how the conversation has managed to find term after term that tries strenuously to suggest that the whole affair is somehow race-neutral.

Frankly, I don’t think a brown person being stopped cares if it’s for “reasonable suspicion” or “racial profiling.” Regardless of the stated reason, it will not be the blonde and blue-eyed who will be stopped. When lawmakers say anti-immigrant, they really mean anti-Mexican.

As my father prepares to fly to El Paso in a few weeks, he is dreading a flight change in Phoenix. Every morning he looks for his passport, making sure he knows where it is at all times. Although he's a U.S. citizen, the fear of being targeted surpasses the fact that he knows he has documentation.

I'm not sharing his story to play at oppression Olympics. Nor do I mean to imply that there aren’t blonde and blue-eyed Mexicans. But when it comes to profiling — I mean, “suspicion” — we all know whom we’re talking about. After all, as an anti-Mexican law, SB1070 is not the first assault on Mexicans in this land. Seen in its proper historical context, SB1070 is a descendant of the genocidal occupation of the early 1500s, of President Polk’s invasion of the mid-1800s, of segregated, unequal Mexican Schools of the early 1900s and of California’s Proposition 187 of the mid-1990s. By signing SB1070 into law, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is placing herself in the company of such anti-Mexican instigators of violence as Hernán Cortez, James K. Polk and Pete Wilson — to name just a few.

Exacerbating this law's significance is the fact that this September 16 marks the 200-year anniversary of Mexican independence. And while this date does not mark the genesis of our existence as a people (any more than the birth of the first mestizo does), it does mark a moment in our long history of resisting the occupation of — and our displacement from — the land we have always called home. For we as Mexicans are not descendants of indigenous peoples; we are indigenous people.

The real injustice of SB1070 isn't just that it targets Mexicans in a state with a historic relationship to the nation-state of México. It's that we have slept under these skies, eaten from these grounds and quenched our thirst from these waters since before the time of manufactured borders. SB1070 is more than an attack on people from geographically and politically defined countries — it's an attack on the ancient, contemporary, physical and spiritual presence of indigenous peoples of this continent. To quote a longstanding Chicana/o saying: "We did not cross the border, the border crossed us."

Photo Credit: mattlocks923