Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason

Author:Paul Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

They call you Alien

They were hungry, they were fierce, and they had hoped to find a home. And they found only hatred.

Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Phoenix, Arizona. It’s a world of pink and green: the tent awnings are olive drab army-issue, ‘from the Korean War’, says the prison guard proudly. Pink is the colour of the inmates’ socks, towels, pillowcases and underpants: it’s been chosen to humiliate them. Their overalls are, of course, striped black and white. Their skin, in the ICE wing, is usually a shade of brown.

This is Arizona’s notorious Tent City jail. The ICE wing is where those arrested for migration crimes are segregated: about 100 men out of 500 in the jail. They live in the tents twenty-four hours a day, the side-awnings open to the elements. As they crunch across the gravel in the harsh sunlight to fetch water, they sling their towels around their necks: the guard yells at them if they try to cover their heads. On the day I was there the temperature reached 114 degrees Fahrenheit, but it’s been known to hit 122.

In heat like this you mostly sleep; numerous young men are stretched out on the close-packed bunk beds. Others read: there is a high level of literacy in Tent City, and a low level of menace and craziness compared to other jails. That is because most of these men are not hardened criminals: their crime is being Mexican.

In May 2010, the state of Arizona passed a law called SB 1070. This required migrants to present proof of their legal status on demand: if stopped for speeding, if questioned at work, if questioned as a witness to a grocery-store heist, if noticed existing by a bored cop. It’s a crime if you cannot prove you are American.

That’s a problem: officially there are 11 million undocumented migrants in America. Unofficially, it could be as high as 20 million. In any case, around a million live in Phoenix, Arizona. You can see them hanging out for work on the corners of the car parks at big hardware stores; their hands wash the linen at hotels and make the burritos and the tacos in fast-food joints.

Migrant children already had poverty, dislocation and the language issue to contend with (Arizona declared itself an English-language-only state in 1986). Now they have something else: the skin-crawling fear that if your mother goes to the corner store she will not come back. Leticia Ramírez, mother of three and an activist in the migrant group Puente, tells me:

We are living in a state of fear. We can’t even go to the store—can’t even go out to the park, the zoo, the mall—because the kids fear the police might stop their parents. So we just stay home. They say: ‘If you go out, you may not come back.’ One family bought three months of groceries so they don’t have to leave the home.

To enforce SB 1070 and the other laws that criminalize Hispanic migrants, Phoenix has Sheriff Joe Arpaio. And Sheriff Joe has Tent City, and boy, is Joe keen for the media to see Tent City.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.