Racial Baggage by Sylvia Zamora;

Author:Sylvia Zamora;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

• CHAPTER 4 •

Settling In

Illegality and the U.S. Color Line

CARLA AND I MET in her home. At the time of the interview, she was in her late fifties and had been living in the Wattsneighborhood of South L.A. for twenty-two years. Her husband, Juan, had been an aspiring musician when he migrated to the U.S. He lived in California for several years and bought their home before sending for her and their three kids in Mexico City. Watts was what they could afford, but violent crime was a common occurrence when they first came, at the height of the crack epidemic. Carla recalled:

There used to be lots of shootings, and we always had to get down on the floor. If you came home at 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., you had to make sure your car headlights were off so you wouldn’t shine a light on anyone who might be hiding [from enemy gangs]. Sometimes they’d point a gun at you and tell you to turn off your porch light. It was very dangerous, very dangerous in those times.

The family of five was one of two Latino families on an all-Black street at that time. They had not experienced such violence in Mexico.

Carla’s story is reminiscent of those María Rendón (2019) documents in her study of immigrant incorporation in Los Angeles’s inner-city communities. Violence and fear in L.A. during the 1980s and 1990s reinforced negative stereotypes of Black communities as hotbeds of drug use and violence carried over from Mexico.

Carla said things have changed:

What you see now is nothing compared to before. Some people are scared to even walk down the street, but thank God I’m not afraid. Sometimes you see crowds of, like, fifty Blacks out front, but I like it because they know that I live here and they watch out for me. If someone they don’t recognize comes by, they let me know right away. They call me “mama.” I’ve lived on this block since I got here [from Mexico], and I have my little store [in a back room of the house] where I sell candy and everything [to neighborhood kids]. They have a lot of affection for me, and I do too because I’ve known them since they were kids. So I’m not afraid, but most of the new [Latinos on the block] are really scared of them.

Carla sees herself as a proud Watts resident who has earned her status as an old-timer on the block. She has built long-lasting relationships with her Black neighbors and was the first person from the Latino community to join her local neighborhood watch.

Carla’s greatest source of unhappiness seems to be her concerns about her eldest daughter’s legal status. Carla and Juan have naturalized, and their two younger children have as well. But for reasons Carla did not explain, their daughter Cindy has been unable to, and not for lack of trying. Carla said sadly:

[Cindy] has been here over twenty years, and they haven’t given her papers. . . . I feel bad for her, poor thing.

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